Realism Materialism Art introduces a wide range

of new realist and materialist philosophies and

examines their influence within the arts. This
dynamic collection of texts and images breaks
realism and materialism out of their philosophical
frames and opens them to broader cultural and
social concerns.

Eds. C. Cox J. Jaskey S. Malik

ISBN 978-3-95679-126-0
 Realism
Materialism
Art
 Realism Materialism Art
Eds. C. Cox J. Jaskey S. Malik

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

Sternberg Press
 Coole: From Within the Midst of Things

Ladyman: Things Aren't What They Used to Be

Diederichsen: Is Marxism a Correlationism?

Grosz: Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom

Groys: Entering the Flow

Laruelle/ Maoilearca: Artistic Experiments with Philosophy DeLanda/Cox: Possibility Spaces

Poole: The Idiot Paradigm

Malik: Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art

Shaviro: Non-Correlational Thought Speculation

Matter

Lee: Unnatural Participations

Brassier/Malik: Reason Is Inconsolable & Non-Conciliatory Thacker: Pessimism and Realism

Harman/Cox/Jaskey: Art & OOObjecthood

Cox: Sonic Thought

Grant: Suprematist Ontology & the Ultra Deep Field Problem

Object
Scale Schuppli: Law and Disorder

Horgan/Potrc: Blobjectivism & Art

Wark: Absolute Spectacle

Paglen: Geographies of Time

Canini: Real Noise Acts

Representation
Concept

Srnicek: Computational Infrastructures and Aesthetics

Weir: Thick Dia-chronic Crash

Garcia: In Defense of Representation

Kolozova: Concepts that Surrender to Materiality

Negarestani: Synechistic Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

Ritchie: The Temptation of the Diagram

Szepanski: -non-music-non-stop-

Ribas: What Is it that Makes Todays Realism so Different, so Appealing?

Beech: Concept Without Difference

Avanessian: Speculative Poetics

Parisi: Automated Architecture Meillassoux: Metaphysics & Extro-Science Fiction

Ayache: Technology of the Future

 Contents

11 Preface
Tom Eccles
15 Introduction
Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik

Matter
35 Things Arent What They Used to Be:
On the Immateriality of Matter and the Reality of Relations
James Ladyman
41 From Within the Midst of Things: New Sensibility, New Alchemy, and
the Renewal of Critical Theory
Diana Coole
47 Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom
Elizabeth Grosz
61 Is Marxism a Correlationism?
Diedrich Diederichsen
71 Entering the Flow
Boris Groys
87 Possibility Spaces
Manuel DeLanda in Conversation with Christoph Cox

Object
97 Art and OOObjecthood
Graham Harman in Conversation with Christoph Cox and Jenny Jaskey
123 Sonic Thought
Christoph Cox
131 Unnatural Participations
Nathan Lee
137 Law and Disorder
Susan Schuppli
145 Blobjectivism and Art
Terry Horgan and Matja Potrc
151 Absolute Spectacle
McKenzie Wark
 Concept Speculation
163 Pessimism and Realism 345 What Is It That Makes Todays Realism So Different, So Appealing?
Eugene Thacker Joo Ribas
173 Making Non-Standard Thoughts: An Introduction to Franois Laruelle 351 Speculative PoeticsPreliminary Reflections
John Maoilearca Armen Avanessian
177 Artistic Experiments with Philosophy 363 Automated Architecture: Speculative Reason in the Age of the Algorithm
Franois Laruelle in Conversation with John Maoilearca Luciana Parisi
185 Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art 371 Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction
Suhail Malik Quentin Meillassoux
193 Non-Correlational Thought 387 Technology of the Future
Steven Shaviro Elie Ayache
205 The Idiot Paradigm
Matthew Poole 395 List of Figures
213 Reason Is Inconsolable and Non-Conciliatory Jenny Jaskey and Alicia Ritson
Ray Brassier in conversation with Suhail Malik
231 Suprematist Ontology and the Ultra Deep Field Problem: 400 Image Credits
Operations of the Concept 401 Contributor Biographies
Iain Hamilton Grant 405 Colophon

Representation
245 In Defense of Representation
Tristan Garcia
253 Concepts That Surrender to Materiality and to the Real
Katerina Kolozova
263 The Temptation of the Diagram
Matthew Ritchie
283 -non-music-non-stop-
Achim Szepanski
289 Concept without Difference: The Promise of the Generic
Amanda Beech

Scale
301 Geographies of Time (The Last Pictures)
Trevor Paglen
307 Computational Infrastructures and Aesthetics
Nick Srnicek
319 Real Noise Acts
Mikko Canini
325 Thick Dia-Chronic Crash. Incision into Delay
Andy Weir
333 Synechistic Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
Reza Negarestani
 Preface
Tom Eccles

Edited by Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik, Realism Materialism
Art (RMA) grew out of discussions within the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard
College. With a broad focus on exhibition and artistic practices since the 1960s
to the present day, CCS Bard has, since its inception in 1990, sought to locate the
visual arts in the broader context of contemporary culture and, as such, the
masters course offered at Bard has always engendered a distinct interest in theoret-
ical concerns that many may feel unusual, if not downright inappropriate. As the
editors note in their introduction, realism and materialism challenge many of
these now prevalent assumptions of cultural practice and theoretical inquiry and
it was out of the need to question the dominance of post-structuralist, psychoana-
lytic, and Marxist theories that constitute these assumptions, and which continue
to form the basis of much of the theoretical and critical elements of advanced art
education, from which this current project was born. This current publication
demonstrates the pertinence and vitality of this inquiry and its applications, and
we hope that RMA will serve a broad set of academic and non-academic interests.
The volume provides a key source in, and guide to, the most innovative and
exciting realist and materialist projects taking place today. To that end, RMA
features new material from leading figures in Speculative Realism and mate-
rialism, and puts these in dialogue with the inventive work of emerging, unfa-
miliar, and unexpected practitioners and researchers from many areas of intel-
lectual, artistic, and scientific enquiry and practice. Particularly important to
the ambitions of this volume are the prospective intersections of these research
areas: as the editors of this volume note in their introduction, For all the
gathering interest in the possibilities opened up by the relationships between
realism, materialism, and art, there is to date a dearth of reflection and argu-
ment on their reciprocal salience. RMA looks to rectify this situation, acting as
a sourcebook of recent critical developments across disciplines, taking up the
renewed interest in realism and materialism from art, philosophy, culture, and
theory, while also providing both an introduction to this demanding and fast-
moving set of debates and practices, as well as a unique convergence between
its diverse approaches and disciplines. The collection of new essays, interviews,
and discussions extends the current debate on materialism and realism beyond
the prevalent strands of Speculative Realism and object-oriented philos-
ophy by linking these innovative philosophical approaches to recent work in
feminist-materialist theorizations of gender and affect, political theory, network
art, science, finance, and literature. This uniquely diverse combination looks

11
 PREFACE TOM ECCLES

to break realism and materialism out of its narrow theoretical frame, opening it has proved an invaluable resource to CCS Bard over the years. And finally, my
out into broader cultural and social terms, drawing contributions from across thanks to designer Zak Kyes and the Zak Group in London who never fail to
diverse fields of inquiry that demonstrate the breadth and challenge of new provide an inspired response to the raw material presented.
materialist and realist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms
of practice.
The editors have organized the contributions to the book in a quasi-
encyclopedic format, allotting the contributions to five primary categories with
historical and practical significance in art, art history, philosophy, and theory.
These categories are: matter, object, concept, representation, scale, speculation.
These categories were selected because they are primary to current materialist
and realist thinking. They also serve to relay the philosophical arguments that
have for the most part inspired the renewed interest in these traditions, with
canonical terms familiar to audiences and readers in art and art theory. As well
as acting as common identification markers for the reader, categorizing the oth-
erwise diverse contributions with the familiar and well-worn markers chosen by
the editors has a two-fold purpose: on the one hand, the diverse contributions
in any one category push current philosophical, scientific, artistic, and theoret-
ical research into dialogue with one another in unexpected and inventive ways;
on the other hand, these familiar if not canonical categories are themselves
challenged and reworked by the diverse entries thus reshaping the conventional
sense of the categories themselves. In this way the book has the ambitious aim
to make a contribution to the development of art, theory, art history, and philo-
sophy itself.
I would like to thank the editors first and foremost for their inspired list of
invited contributors and their dedicated efforts to bring this challenging project
to fruition. Both Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik have reshaped the theoret-
ical and philosophical courses at the Center for Curatorial Studies, some of
the material from this book having already contributing to a CCS course ded-
icated to Speculative Realism in 2013, while Jenny Jaskey, who graduated from
CCS Bard in 2012, has developed her research outside academia through exhibi-
tions and public programs in New York City. RMA provides a clear example of
how an institute, its faculty, students, and alumni with a shared research focus
can extend their research and discussions far beyond the particularities of any
given course.
I am also grateful to my former colleague Johanna Burton who initiated
a series of readers at the CCS Bard in 2011 and to the current director of the
graduate program, Paul ONeill, who has reinvigorated the conditions for curato-
rial research at Bard. Our publications for the past several years have been made
possible by the extraordinary efforts of Jaime Baird, who singlehandedly oversaw
these complex projects with dedicated enthusiasm. For RMA, Molly Whalen has
provided a truly impressive service in carefully editing and proofing a series of
challenging texts. Orit Gat steered the early evolution of this publication and

12 13
 Introduction
Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik

Realism and materialism have become important watchwords in intellectual and

cultural discourse today. Despite their differences, these philosophical stances
propose that thought can think outside itself, that reality can be known without its
being shaped by and for human comprehension. This position sharply contrasts
with the philosophical and cultural view dominant over the last half century,
a view that affirms the indispensability of interpretation, discourse, textuality,
signification, ideology, and power. Diverse as they are, the theoretical pro-
grams that constitute this latter orthodoxy (notably phenomenology, hermeneu-
tics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis) maintain that our
apprehension of the natural and social worlds is either constituted or mediated
by a discursive field or a cognitive subject, and that nothingor nothing mean-
ingfulexists outside of discourse or its socially-organized construction. In short,
this orthodoxy has been staunchly anti-realist. Todays realism and materialism
explicitly challenge many of these now prevalent assumptions of cultural practice
and theoretical inquiry.
Realism Materialism Art (RMA) presents a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly
changing set of ideas, practices, and challenges proposed by contemporary realisms
and materialisms, reflecting their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture,
theory, and science, among other fields. Further, RMA strives to expand the hori-
zons and terms of engagement with realism and materialism beyond the primarily
philosophical context in which their recent developments have taken place, often
under the title Speculative Realism (SR). While it is SR that has most stridently
challenged critical orthodoxies (even if, as discussed later in this introduction, the
positions convened under the SR banner are often discordant and form no unified
movement), RMA purposefully looks to extend the purview of realist and materialist
thought by presenting recent developments in a number of distinct and heteroge-
neous practices and disciplines.
Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the con-
tributions to RMA demonstrate the breadth and challenge of realist and materialist
approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice. This pluridis-
ciplinarity is typical of the third term in our title: art. RMA affirms, as art now does,
that there is no privileged area, thematic, or discipline in the investigation or reach
of realism and materialism: not philosophy, not science, not even art itself. Art is
then not just a field transfigured by realism and materialism; it is also a method for
convening and extending what they are taken to be and do when extended beyond
philosophical argument.

15
 INTRODUCTION
A short history of some of arts intersections with recent realisms and mate-
rialists is presented below. However, for all the gathering interest in the possibilities
opened up by the relationships between realism, materialism, and art, there is to
date a dearth of reflection and argument on their reciprocal salience. RMA looks to
provide a corrective to this situation. Featuring new contributions from a number
of established figures in contemporary variants of realist and materialist theory,
these ideas are situated in relation to the inventive work of established and emerging
practitioners and researchers in art as well as from other areas of active inquiry on
the consequences and effects of realism and materialism. Because many of these
contributions assume familiarity with the key claims of the resurgent realisms and
materialisms, rehearsing their core arguments and motivations here may help pro-
vide orientation through them.
I With the term correlationism Meillassoux not only reveals an important
In various ways, the currently dominant modes of contemporary critical theory
perhaps most strikingly post-structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis
insist on the absence, infinite deferral, or fiction of what Jacques Derrida called the
transcendental signified, that is, a fundamental reality that could arrest or ground
the proliferation of discourse, signification, and interpretation. Jacques Lacan,
for example, maintained that there is no such thing as a prediscursive reality
because every reality is founded by a discourseor, even more strongly, that it
is the world of words that creates the world of things. In a similar vein, Michel
Foucault argued that there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all
everything is already interpretation. [] There is never, if you like, an interpretandum
which is not already interpretans. Derridas notorious claim there is nothing out-
side of the text offers another expression of this idea, as does Roland Barthess
remark that, apropos the domain of discourse, there is nothing beneath. As
Slavoj iek, the most prominent current heir to this tradition, concludes:
The pre-synthetic Real is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroac-
tively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered.1
These positions are all variants of what, in his influential book After Finitude,
Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism. By correlation, Meillassoux writes,
1 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique, 19531954, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 66; Lacan, The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 32; Lacan, The
Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in crits, trans. Bruce Fink (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 229; Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, in Aesthetics, Method,
and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, vol. 2, ed. James Faubion (New York: New
Press, 1998), 275; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158; Roland Barthes, The Death of the
Author, in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 147; and
Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 33.
16
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term consid-
ered apart from the other. [] Correlationism consists in disqualifying the
claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity
independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist
that we never grasp an object in itself, in isolation from its relation to the
subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp
a subject that would not always already be related to an object.2
For the correlationist the world is only ever the world for thought or the experience
of a subject. The existence of things in themselves, independent of their relation-
ship to the thinking or experiencing subject, is either bracketed as inaccessible or
dismissed as a fiction.
commonality among the otherwise disparate theoretical and philosophical programs
of the twentieth century already mentioned (as well as hermeneutics, Wittgensteinian
philosophy, pragmatism, analytic anti-realism, existentialism, etc.); he also reveals
this ideas deep roots in the history of philosophy. According to Meillassoux,
correlationism is the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant.3 Indeed,
Immanuel Kants Copernican Revolution consisted in arguing that, contrary to the
ordinary view that thought conforms to the objects it apprehends, objects conform
to our thought.4 For Kant, the apprehension of reality is always mediated by a set of
cognitive structures shared by all human beings. Hence, what we call the world
is always the world for-us. The object of thought is only ever the object for-thought
and not the object as it exists in-itself. Kant insists that things-in-themselves must
exist in order to provide the content for thought. Yet he also insists that such things-
in-themselves can only be posits of thought or faith, not items of knowledge.5
Kants successors insisted that the notion of an unknowable thing-in-itself
is contradictory and superfluous. On the one hand, Kant claimed that the thing-
in-itself is unknowable, beyond the limit of human knowledge; yet, on the other
hand, he nonetheless seemed to know enough about it to posit its existence and
thus to transcend the limit he had declared impassable. Responding to this con-
tradiction, G. W. F. Hegel, Kants most prominent successor, sought to show
that there is no genuine division between the world-as-it-appears-to-us and the
2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2009), 5.
3 Ibid. In A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2007), Lee Braver gives a detailed account of this prevalence of correlationism
(which Braver calls by the more standard philosophical term anti-realism) from Kant, Hegel,
and Nietzsche through Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.
4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), BxviBxviii, 11011.
5 Ibid., Bxxvi and Bxxx, 115, 117.
17
 INTRODUCTION
world-as-it-is-in-itself, no division between subject and object, mind and world.
Instead, the world or reality is mind-like, imbued with mind or spirit.6 Thus Hegel
absolutized the correlation, as Meillassoux puts it, asserting that the absolute (what
truly and fundamentally is) does not reside in some thing-in-itself existing beyond the
bounds of our thought but is the very correlation between thinking and being.7
These two philosophical movesthe skeptical Kantian move according to
which the real is fundamentally inaccessible, and the idealist Hegelian move according
to which the real is fundamentally mental or spiritualare maintained in more recent
European philosophy and critical theory that otherwise seeks to move beyond the
Kantian configuration. Where Kant took the categories of thought to be universal and
necessary, a fundamental feature of all human cognition, postwar European thought
often relativized and historicized this position, maintaining that there exist multiple
and irreducible ways of apprehending the world that are relative to historical periods,
cultures, or subject positions. And where Kant cast his theory in terms of structures
of cognition, postwar thought externalized this view, casting it in terms of discourse,
discursive regimes, or ideology, taken to be linguistic and extra-linguistic structures
and practices that determine the limits of understanding and behavior. Despite these
significant and telling departures from Kant, postwar thought nonetheless reproduced
the structure of his position, maintaining that the real is accessible only as mediated
by discourse orthe more Hegelian positionconstituted by it.
* Deleuzes collaborative writings with Flix Guattari were a primary source for
Within this intellectual context, realismthe view that the world is fundamentally
independent of the human mind and discourse and that it can be known in its inde-
pendencewas dismissed as naive or futile.8 However, the past decade has witnessed
the resurgence of realism and materialism among philosophers trained in European
and Anglo-American correlationist or anti-realist thought.
The recent affirmation of realism was enabled by a new interest in two vet-
eran French philosophers who at the turn of the millennium were scarcely known
in the Anglophone world: Alain Badiou and Franois Laruelle, both born in 1937.
Though Badiou maintains a Lacanian conception of the Real as the unthought or
impossible of any given situation, what sets him apart from other philosophers of
his generation is that he dismisses the politics of difference, asserts the primacy of
mathematics, and offers a theory of universal truth. This opened the door for other
internal challenges to post-structuralist orthodoxy. Laruelles philosophy of rad-
ical immanence is more directly a realism. For him, the Real (or the One) is all
6 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
7 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 37, 51ff.
8 A caution: Kant is, in some sense, a realist insofar as he holds that things-in-themselves or noumena exist
independently of the human mind. However, he brackets the thing-in-itself as unknowable, maintaining
that knowledge and experience deal exclusively with phenomena, that is, things as they appear to us. In
the sense presented in the main text here, realism is the view that mind-independence of the world is not
just a mental posit but also something describable by philosophy, science, and other disciplines.
18
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
that exists; there is only one plane of existence, a plane that nothing transcends.
It is what we are and that in which we are always already immersed. The attempts
by philosophy and conceptual thought to get to the real, to capture and represent
it, always necessarily fail because they are always already a part of the Real and thus
cannot project themselves outside of the Real in order to capture its totality. As
Laruelle puts it in an exchange with Derrida that clearly confounds and exasperates
the latter: We start from the One, we dont arrive at it. [] You have to start from the
real, otherwise youll never get to it. Who wants the real? Philosophy. And because
it wants the real, it never gets it.9 Philosophy merely produces a transcendental
hallucination of the Real construed in its own image.10 By contrast, Laruelles own
practice of non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy does not attempt to
represent the real but to think alongside or according to the Real, the latter being
the cause of thought and that to which thought belongs as a material part.
One of the very few prominent philosophers to endorse Laruelles project was
Gilles Deleuze, an important predecessor for several strands of recent realism and
materialism. From the 1960s into the 1990s, Deleuze was strongly associated with
post-structuralism; yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, Deleuze always con-
sidered himself a pure metaphysician, drawing from contemporary science and
mathematics to inform his philosophy and disparaging the linguistic turn charac-
teristic of post-structuralism. For Deleuze, language is but one example of a broader
notion of expression, itself a feature of all natural entities.11
Nick Lands realist characterization of capitalism as constitutively lying beyond human
interests.12 Lands writings from the 1990s propose that humansas organisms, minds,
bodies, and societies (especially the state form)constrain the expansive and prolif-
erating energies of matter, machine systems, and codes. Land affirms that these limits
on material expression, as well as those of historical forms of natural and social
organizationincluding capitalism itselfare to be abolished by technological and
capitalist advances into non-human conditions, a machinic deterritorialization
9 Jacques Derrida and Franois Laruelle, Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of
Philosophy, trans. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay, in The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by Franois
Laruelle, ed. Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gujevic (New York: Telos Press, 2012), 9091. See also
Franois Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco
Gangle (London: Continuum, 2010), 152ff.
10 Franois Laruelle, A Summary of Non-Philosophy, trans. Ray Brassier, in The Non-Philosophy Project, 26.
11 For Deleuzes remarks on Laruelle, see Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy?,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 220n5. Deleuzes self-
description as a metaphysician can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Responses to a Series of
Questions, Collapse 3 (2007): 42; and in Negotiations: 19721990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 8889.
12 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987). Lands writings are gathered in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings
19872007, ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011).
19
 INTRODUCTION
accelerated by the increasing ubiquity of cybernetic systems, and in particular the then-
nascent emergence of the web as cyberspace. With Sadie Plant, Land set up in 1995
the short-lived but influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), associated
with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where Land was
based. CCRU quickly became a hub for cultural practitioners and cyber-theorists in
the UK speculating on the transformations (about to be) wrought by the web, as well
as a generation of philosophers interested in anti- or post-humanist materialism and
capitalism, several of whom have contributed to the resurgence of realism and mate-
rialism in other terms in the latter half of the 2000s.13
* real is indeed accessible but through reason, science, and mathematics. Empirical
For all of these precedents, the realist turn was however most fully catalyzed by the
publication in 2006 (and translation in 2009) of Meillassouxs After Finitude. In April
2007, Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant con-
vened at Goldsmiths, London, for a conference titled Speculative Realism, a term
that has stuck as the name of a new philosophical movement.14 The four philosophers
were united by their critique of correlationism and its attendant anthropocentrism,
their disinterest in the linguistic turn characteristic of so much twentieth-century
philosophy and cultural theory, and their commitment to a robust realism. Yet
these commonalities obscure significant differences that have only become more
pronounced since the Goldsmiths conference.
Harman accepts Kants claim that we have no access to things-in-themselves
but extends this beyond the human-world relationship to all entities and all relation-
ships. For Harman, all things distort, caricature, or inadequately translate the other
things they encounter, leaving the things-in-themselves (what Harman calls the real
objects) to withdraw from any access. When fire burns cotton, for example,
it makes contact only with the flammability of this material. Presumably fire
does not interact at all with the cottons odor or color, which are relevant
only to creatures equipped with organs of sense. [] The being of fire with-
draws from the flames, even if it is consumed and destroyed. Cotton-being
is concealed not only from phenomenologists and textile workers but from
all entities that come into contact with it. In other words, the withdrawal
of objects is not some cognitive trauma that afflicts only humans and a few
smart animals, but expresses the permanent inadequacy of any relation at all.15
13 Simon Reynolds gives a detailed account of CCRU at energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.
com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html. CCRUs own idiomatic account can
be found at www.ccru.net/identity.htm.
14 The proceedings of the event were later published as Speculative Realism in Collapse 3
(November 2007): 307449. A detailed account of the genesis of the Goldsmiths workshop and
Speculative Realism more generally can be found in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux:
Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 7780.
15 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011), 44.
20
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
Extending the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Martin
Heidegger, Harman argues that the world is fundamentally composed of objects:
substantial, unified, and autonomous entities that are not simply collections of
features, attributes, traits, pieces, or relations. Objects need not be physical (Harry
Potter is as much an object as Hugo Chavez), natural (a plastic cup is as much
an object as a maple tree), simple (armies and corporations are as much objects
as individual human bodies), or indestructible. But every object has two faces:
a sensual face that can be encountered by other objects and a real face that
withdraws from all relations.
Meillassoux and Brassier oppose Harmans skeptical realism, arguing that the
science produces statements about the nature of the world as it was prior to the exis-
tence of human thought, human being, and even life itselffor example, that the Earth
formed 4.56 billion years ago. Such ancestral statements, Meillassoux argues, pose
a dilemma for the correlationist, who must either accept that they describe the world
prior to and independent of the human-world correlation, and must then give up cor-
relationism, or make the scientifically dubious and, Meillassoux shows, philosophi-
cally inconsistent claim that such statements are merely retroactive fictions generated
by present consciousness about a past that is itself a construct of the correlation.16
Meillassoux argues that while the correlationist solution is wrong, correla-
tionism cannot be simply dismissed since it is nonetheless rationally consistent.
Through a subtle and complex immanent critique, he shows that the most consistent
form of correlationism (the version held, for example, by structuralist and post-
structuralist philosophers) is necessarily committed to the idea that any correlation
is contingent and thus that this contingency is not internal to the correlation but
external to it, absolute, a feature of the world itself.17 Pushing this idea to its logical
conclusion, Meillassoux argues that the world in itself is radically contingent, marked
by arbitrary and unpredictable change, a hyper-Chaos wherein there is no reason
for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able
not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.18
Brassier in turn draws on philosophical and scientific thought in a more
naturalistic vein to exacerbate the disenchantment of the world characteristic
of Enlightenment rationality. Brassier sees contemporary neuroscience, for example,
as continuing the trajectory of Copernicus, Darwin, and Hutton, whose scientific dis-
coveries undermined human narcissism, revealing the Earth to be one planet among
many orbiting around an insignificant star, showing Homo sapiens to be kin to all
16 Meillassoux, Ancestrality, in After Finitude, 127. As the arch-correlationist philosopher Nelson
Goodman put it in an earlier debate, we make something older than we are, the stars, for
example, by making a space and time that contains those stars. (On Starmaking, originally
published in Synthese 45 no. 2 (October 1980): 213; reprinted in Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism,
and Irrealism, ed. Peter J. McCormick [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], 145).
17 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5060.
18 Ibid., 60.
21
 INTRODUCTION
other living beings in a biological world devoid of hierarchy, and demonstrating that
human beings occupy a mere millisecond of deep time.19 Yet, perhaps paradoxically,
these blows to human narcissism are, for Brassier, testaments to the power of reason:
The disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process
whereby the Enlightenment shattered the great chain of being and defaced
the book of the world is a necessary consequence of the coruscating
potency of reason and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery,
rather than a calamitous diminishment. [] [It] deserves to be celebrated
as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a diminishing
impoverishment.20
Modern scientific thought sweeps away our folk-psychological and correlationist
philosophical notions, revealing to us the world as it exists in itself beyond the
human. Nihilism, Brassier writes, is
the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-
independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism,
is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the values and meanings
which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.21
Echoing Meillassoux but distinct from him in the appeal to naturalism, Brassier
contends that science, thought, and reason have the power to transport us beyond
the correlation, to a world devoid of human being and life itself. As he elegantly
puts it: Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed,
they can and have been pitted against the latter.22
In an effort to elaborate how thought can think outside itself, how reason can
think nature as a whole, Brassier has more recently turned toward idealist philosophers
such as Plato, Kant, and Hegel, whose thought he sees as affirming the autonomy of
the conceptual, the irreducibility of reason to the natural and material processes that
incarnate it.23 A kindred position is articulated by Iain Hamilton Grant, whose work
develops themes in F. W. J. Schellings philosophy of nature. Whereas, traditionally,
19 Brassier approvingly draws on the materialist accounts of consciousness given by Thomas
Metzinger as well as Paul and Patricia Churchland. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment
and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Darwins rejection of hierarchy and
progress in the history of life is documented by Stephen Jay Gould in Full House: The Spread of
Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), which also discusses various
scientific blows to human narcissism.
20 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ray Brassier, The View From Nowhere, in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture, 8, no. 2
(Summer 2011). See also Brassier, Prometheanism and Its Critics, in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist
Reader, ed. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014), 467487.
22
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
idealism has been opposed to realism and materialism, both Grant and Brassier aim
to show that these positions can be drawn together to forge a materialist idealism
or idealist materialism. Grant points out that idealism is not anti-realist but, pre-
cisely, a realism with regard to the existence of ideas.24 Exploring philosophies of
nature from Schelling through Deleuze, Grant aims to show not only that idealism
is compatible with naturalism but also that the former has to be pursued through
the latter. Schelling, for example, offers a natural history of mind that in Grants
reading reveals how mind is a product of nature.25
*
Despite the attention given to the philosophers and ideas identified with SR,
other variants of realist and materialist inquiry have also developed in recent
years. Feminism, notably, has traditionally allied itself with materialism insofar as
it has attended to the concrete material circumstances of womens bodies, lives,
andsometimes in conjunction with Marxismconditions of labor. Yet, feminists
have also tended to be suspicious of claims to scientific and metaphysical truth,
out of concern that such supposedly neutral claims are in actuality informed by
an unexamined masculinist bias. The feminist theorists that have played the most
prominent role in art discourseLuce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and
Donna Haraway, for exampleinsist on the social and symbolic construction not
only of gender but of knowledge and truth, maintaining that epistemological and
ontological claims are always embodied and gendered, never neutral. Moreover,
the lack of concern with gender and feminism on the part of many new materialist
and realist philosophers has made feminists wary of their claims and positions.
A number of feminists have however taken up materialist and realist arguments
and strategies. Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti draw on Deleuze to link feminism
with a materialist philosophy of nature that provokes a rethinking of political agency
and liberation.26 Likewise, many feminist theorists have turned from questions of
language and representation toward the capacity of material bodies to affect and be
affected by one another.27 This concern unsettles the divide between human beings
and nonhuman animals, interest in which has become prevalent in feminist theory and
artistic practice alike. Materialist and realist feminists have also taken up Haraways
24 See Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy
(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011), 19.
25 Dunham et al., Idealism, 132. See also Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling
(London: Continuum, 2006).
26 See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham , NC:
Duke University Press, 2011). See also Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of
Becoming (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002) and The Posthuman (Oxford: Polity Press, 2013).
27 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham , NC: Duke University
Press, 2010); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham ,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010) focuses on feminist-inflected materialist accounts of political theory.
23
 INTRODUCTION
initiative to establish a countermodel to both norms of scientific investigation and
feminist suspicions about technology and science, drawing on the realism of science
to extend post-structuralist feminism beyond the constraints imposed by its emphasis
on discursive and social construction and, as with Grosz and Braidotti, to rethink
embodiment on a realist and/or materialist footing.28 One striking strand in this
research is the revisioning of psychoanalysiswhich played a key role in the femi-
nism of the 1970s through the 1990sby developments in neuroscience. Elizabeth
A. Wilson recasts feminist concerns about the psychobiological reductionism of
gender and sexualitycaptured by the slogan Biology Is Not Destinyin light
of discoveries in connectionist neurobiology concerning the transformative effects
of lived experiences on the material organization of the human cortical-nerve sys-
tem.29 Catherine Malabou also allies the experiential transformation of neural struc-
tures and their chemistry with a commitment to feminism through the concept of
plasticity drawn from Hegels dialectical philosophy of mind (via Derrida). Like
Grant, Malabou attempts to ground thought in a natural history of the mind that
would explain the transition from a purely biological entity to a mental entity.30
On this basis Malabou presents a critique of the symbolic and narrative concerns of
psychoanalysis, which, she notes, cannot adequately respond to neurodegenerative
disorders such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers. Today, she concludes, we must and forces or mere bundles of qualities.33 Laruelles realism rejects materialism in the
acknowledge that the power of the linguistic-graphic scheme is diminishing and that
it has entered a twilight for some time already. It now seems that plasticity is slowly
but surely establishing itself as the paradigmatic figure of organization in general.31
Though he does not endorse the term plasticity in particular, Manuel
DeLanda no less advocates for science and artificial cognitive systems as advancing a
contemporary philosophy of nature of the sort developed by Deleuze, whom he reads
as a staunch realist. Informed by dynamical systems theory, differential geometry,
28 See Stacy Alaimo, Michael Hames-Garcia, and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment,
and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Karen Barad, Meeting the
Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007) and Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (Spring 2003); and
Myra Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009). In The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010), Susan Hekman presents a feminist realism which, while not directly
focusing on science as the point of convergence, also proposes that the mutually constituting
effects of matter and discourse breach the constraints of orthodox post-structuralism.
29 Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004) and Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (London: Routledge, 1998).
30 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 8182.
31 Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans.
Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 59. For Malabous neuroscientific
critique of psychoanalysis, see The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) and, with Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional
Intelligence: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
24
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
group theory, and evolutionary biology, DeLanda vindicates Deleuzes rejection of
the hylomorphic model, in which entities arise through the imposition of form
on inert matter, in favor of a conception of nature as intrinsically self-organizing.
Eschewing any notion of fixed essences (natural kinds, species, archetypes), entities
emerge at all scales and levels of complexity as historical contingencies manifesting
various capacities and tendencies (which Deleuze calls affects and singularities)
inherent in matter itself.32
*
The clarification of important and serious divergences in the respective terminologies
and ambitions of the core arguments of current realisms and materialisms throws
light on the broader issues at stake in them. In general terms, and by way of sum-
marizing the above positions, materialists (who hold that all that exists is matter,
material forces, and physical processes) tend to be realists (who hold that reality
is fully mind-independent), but the reverse need not hold (since what is real need
not be materially manifest, symbolic meaning being a leading example).
Harman rejects materialism, seeing it as the chief enemy of his object-oriented
realism insofar as materialism views objects as either reducible to smaller components
name of matter, arguing that materialism remains a philosophical theory of matter
that conceives matter in its own philosophical self-image rather than encountering
it in its own right.34 On the other, more materialist, hand, Meillassoux eschews
the term Speculative Realism in favor of speculative materialism in order
to distance himself from naive realism and ordinary conceptions of reality.35
Brassier is also committed to the materialist naturalism of the sciences rather than
a broadly conceived realism, just as materialist feminism is committed to reviewing
embodiment on the basis of its scientific accounts. Furthermore, while the term
idealism (the view that reality is fundamentally mental or mind-like) generally
remains a slur within realist and materialist contexts, describing a position kindred
to the correlationism they oppose, Grant and Brassier each affirm a kind of idealism
as integral to their respective realist undertakings; DeLanda, in contrast, is a mate-
rialist who rejects all idealism, instead endorsing a scientific realism that affirms the
ability of science to describe a mind-independent world.
32 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005) and Deleuze:
History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010).
33 Graham Harman, Realism without Materialism, SubStance 40, no. 2 (2011): 60; I Am Also
of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed, Society and Space 28, no. 5 (2010): 77290;
and The Quadruple Object, 1316.
34 Franois Laruelle, The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, trans. Ray Brassier,
The Non-Philosophy Project, 15969; and Ray Brassier, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism
in the Name of Matter (Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 2001), available at www.cinestatic.com/
trans-mat/brassier/alientheory.pdf.
35 Quentin Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, trans. Robin Mackay, Spike 35 (Spring 2013).
25
 INTRODUCTION
II
For the last generation and a half, critical art practices and theories have taken
up post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist challenges to conventions
of originality, authorship, and identity. In this paradigm, art is construed as always
caught up in webs of discourse and interpretation without origin, end, or ground.
Epistemologically, in both its theoretical and practical dimensions, contemporary art
has tended to reject naive conceptions of representation and signification that con-
strue images and signs as picturing or designating a pre-given world. Ontologically, it
rejects essentialism, that is, the construal of the world as manifesting fixed conceptual
or material essences to which images and signs would refer. In contrast to the fixity
and inflexibility of essentialism, contemporary art aims to account for and foster
the contingency of meaning, the multiplicity of interpretation, and the possibility
of change: signs are tracked, interpretation encouraged, representations mobilized
through associative networks that give them meaningnetworks that are always in
flux, thus ensuring that meaning is never fixed or stable. In sum, contemporary art
practice, criticism, and theory maintain that experience is always necessarily medi-
ated by the symbolic field.
These approaches have been culturally effective; but the freedom they offer comes
at the cost of an epistemological and ontological insularity. Nature and/or matter are
taken to be merely a social construction; science is but a historical and cultural dis-
course having no priority over other discourses; and truth is always only a problematic
concept, at best the measure of a claims coherence relative to other accepted claims
or simply a term applied to claims that are currently uncontested. It is precisely these
assumptions and conventions that are directly and explicitly challenged by the resurgent
interest in realism and materialism. What is not at all apparent at this point is what
traction that challenge will have on contemporary art, nor what of its current artistic,
institutional, and critical orthodoxies will be effectively transformed. While Meillassoux
and Brassier have collaborated with sound and noise artists, and Harman has asserted
the centrality of aesthetics to philosophy, these philosophies have in general had very
little to say about art and cultural practices.36
36 Meillassouxs conception of hyper-chaos inspired Florian Heckers CD Speculative Solution (Editions
Mego, 2011), to which Meillassoux contributed an essay (reprinted in this volume). This collaboration
was further developed in Urbanomic Document #1, a discussion between Meillassoux, Hecker,
and Robin Mackay, available at www.urbanomic.com/Documents/Documents-1.pdf. Ray Brassier
has recorded with noise musicians and improvisers such as Mattin, Jean-Luc Guionnet, and Seijiro
Murayama. He also wrote the essay Genre Is Obsolete, in Noise and Capitalism, ed. Mattin and
Anthony Iles (Donostia-S. Sebasti, Spain: Arteleku Audiolab, 2009), 6171. Available at blogs.
arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf; and contributed to two other essays on noise: Metal
Machine Theory (with Mattin), Revue & Corrige 86 (December 2010), available at www.mattin.org/
METAL_MACHINE_THEORY.html; and Idioms and Idiots (with Mattin, Guionnet, and
Seijiro), Revue & Corrige 93 (September 2012), available at www.mattin.org/recordings/IDIOMS_
AND_IDIOTS.html). Harmans remarks on aesthetics appear in Vicarious Causation, Collapse 2
(March 2007): 205; and Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human, Naked Punch
09 (SummerFall 2007): 2130, available at www.nakedpunch.com/articles/147. Harman and
Brassier each elaborate on their respective earlier remarks in the interviews included in this volume.
26
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
Their ideas have, however, attracted a great deal of attention from artists and
curators. One of the first presentations by a public institution of SR in relation to
contemporary art was The Real Thing at Tate Britain in 2010, an exhibition and
panel discussion curated by philosopher and publisher Robin Mackay. Its premise
was to explore a human-indifferent universe, including works that dealt with themes
of death, depopulation, and linguistic disorientation.37 The project was part of
Mackays independent venture Urbanomic, a publishing house and arts organization
that has played a decisive role in advancing realist and materialist contentions within
and outside of philosophy, particularly through the journal Collapse: Philosophical
Research and Development, which published the proceedings of the Goldsmiths con-
ference.38 In collaboration with Sequence Press, a publisher housed in Miguel Abreu
Gallery in New York, Mackay has also played a leading role in presenting these ideas
and practices to the Anglophone world through his translation and publication of
key texts by Laruelle and Meillassoux, as well as Reza Negarastanis writing on art.
Though Mackay and others have championed the more staunchly ratio-
nalist versions of speculative thought associated with Brassier and Meillassoux, the
emphasis in contemporary art has in general been on object-oriented philosophy
as initiated by Harman and developed by writers such as Levi Bryant and Timothy
Morton, whose frequent talks in art institutions have popularized their ideas among
nonspecialist audiences.39 A chief attraction of object-oriented philosophy for the
art field is that it reconsiders the art-friendly term object. Moreover, many of
the curatorial and artistic responses to Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) have
focused on its ontological flattening of the traditional hierarchy of humans over
nonhumans and decentering of the human subject, proposing that all entities distort
relata in equal measure. Such claims accord well with modern and contemporary
arts long-standing interest in the limitations of human perceptual and linguistic
37 The Real Thing was part of Tate Britains monthly Late at Tate series, so the exhibition was a
temporary intervention into the museums collection. No catalogue was published, but an
overview of the program is available at www.urbanomic.com/event-uf12-details.php. Brian
Dillons review of the evening appears in The Real Thing, The Wire 321 (November 2010): 74.
Other projects that have taken the extinction of humanity or the deep time of cosmic archeology
as their organizing claims are Cosmophobia (2012), curated by Tom Trevatt, Berlin, and
Suicide Narcissus (2013), curated by Hamza Walker, Chicago.
38 For an early review of the journal, see Jon Roffe, Review Article: Robin Mackay (Ed.), Collapse:
Philosophical Research and Development, in Parrhesia 4 (2008), 7980. Available at
www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia04/parrhesia04_roffe.pdf.
39 Early conferences dedicated to the topic of Speculative Realism within the art field, which have almost
exclusively focused on object-oriented philosophy, include: Object-Oriented Thinking at the Royal
Academy in London, July 2011; OOO III: The Third Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium, Vera
List Center for Art and Politics, New York, September 2011; Ungrounding the Object at Treignac
Projet, Le Centre international dart et du paysage de lle de Vassivire, in Limousin, September 2012.
War Against the Sun, the second conference organized by the Treignac Projet, which took place
in London in March 2013, hewed closer to a materialist set of concerns. Robert Jacksons article The
Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks: Michael Fried, Object Oriented Ontology and Aesthetic
Absorption, in Speculations 2 (May 2011) investigates the congruence of OOO with a modernist
program in visual art. Available at www.speculations.squarespace.com/speculations-2.
27
 INTRODUCTION
conditions of understanding, as they have also (sometimes contradictorily) advo-
cated for a relative independence and internal logic for the artwork in its material
and formal dimensions.
To date the most prominent project inspired by object-oriented thinking is
the latest iteration of the leading exhibition platform in transnational contemporary
art, Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012. Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev likened
the show to an organism whose program offered a holistic and non-logocentric
vision, whose associative structure insisted upon a more balanced relationship
with all the non-human makers with whom we share the planet and our bodies.40
Many projects drew on ecological themes and the political agency of objects, with
texts by Harman, Haraway, Braidotti, and Karen Barad included in the exhibition
catalogue. Although many of its installations addressed scientific knowledge claims,
the education arm of Documenta 13, called Maybe, hoped to [indicate] the
impossibility of reducing artand any other complex form of knowledgeto a single
explanation, question, subject matter, or paradigm, showing how art and artistic
research often avoid any form of stable meaning.41
These familiar post-structuralist truisms about the indeterminacy and con-
tingency of meaning have little to do with the way empirical science is taken up by
naturalists such as Brassier or materialists like DeLanda. For them, scientific knowl-
edge eliminates unknowns and offers a corrective to philosophical relativisms. In
this latter vein, In the Holocene, an exhibition organized by curator Joo Ribas at
MIT List Visual Art Center in 2012, presented art as a form of experimental inquiry
working in parallel to natural science.42 The show included artworks dealing with
questions of entropy, consciousness, perception, and deep time, proposing that, while
different from the work of scientists, these artistic outcomes engaged similar ques-
tions and could thus expand upon sciences speculative potential rather than merely
respond to its insights. Whether the normative and natural constraints that accom-
pany scientific hypothesis and reasoning have a corollary in the art fieldand if so,
what these constraints might beis a question that the exhibition left unaddressed.
Another palpable influence on contemporary art at large and the
Documenta 13 project in particular is the sociologist Bruno Latour, and espe-
cially his cross-disciplinary curatorial projects, among them Iconoclash (2002)
and Making Things Public (2005), both organized with Peter Weibel at ZKM,
Karlsruhe. In keeping with Latours deconstruction of the modern boundaries
between culture and nature, these exhibitions subverted the primacy of art objects,
generating an assemblage of scientific and cultural artifacts that create a mutually
40 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, The Dance Was Very Frenetic, Lively, Rattling, Clanging, Rolling,
Contorted, and Lasted for a Long Time, dOCUMENTA (13) The Book of Books, Catalog 1/3
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 34.
41 The Maybe Education and Public Programs of dOCUMENTA (13), available at
www.d13.documenta.de/#/programs/.
42 In the Holocene, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2014. Published in conjunction with the 2012
exhibition of the same name; see also listart.mit.edu/node/937#.UuFXE_Yo62x.
28
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
translating and networked exhibition environment. Before the introduction of SR,
Latours actor-network theory, along with related thing theorists such as anthro-
pologist Arjun Appadurai and visual studies proponent Bill Brown, found an early
audience in art circles, insofar as each spoke of objects in quasi-anthropological
terms, giving them social lives, desires, and agency.43 In this vein, and even though
they draw on the precepts of postmodernist cultural theory, a number of recent
projects paralleling the emergence of SR have focused on the agency of objects.
Drawing heavily on Latours book We Have Never Been Modern, Anselm Frankes
Animism (20102012) drew parallels between an animistic worldview comprised
of enchanted objects and Latours notion of objects as actants, difference-making
agents with significant effects on human sociality.44 In a similar vein, Ghosts in
the Machine (2012), curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari
at the New Museum in New York, explored technologys anthropomorphic dimen-
sion; and Mark Leckeys UK touring exhibition The Universal Addressability of
Dumb Things (2013) examined how digital interfaces are changing the way that
humans perceive objects, enlivening them and making them seem progressively
more human.45 These projects have been associated with OOO, each attributing a
kind of agency to objects, even reinscribing quasi-human characteristics onto non-
human things, and also in some cases delimiting the expanded notion of object
proposed by OOO to material things.46 As such, however, they have unwittingly
and ironically reversed OOO, extending correlationism to specifically material and
otherwise inert objects.
More generally, realist and materialist ideas have generated new emphases,
thematics, and claims for both artworks and exhibitions. Some terms associated with
these new subjects include (but are not limited to): ancestrality, techno-animism,
dark ecology, cosmology, de-anthropocentrism, animality, hyperstition, and affect.
And while curators and artists seem to be asking new and important questions
about the relationship between subjects and objects (in their limited or expanded
sense), or focusing their attention on the aesthetics of non-humans, there has been
43 Both Brown and Appadurai edited acclaimed publications on things as objects of critical
inquiry. See Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 122;
Arjun Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value, in The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
44 Animism had several distinct iterations: at Extra City and MuHKA, Antwerp (2010); Kunsthalle
Bern and Generali Foundation, Vienna (2011); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2012); and
e-flux, New York (2012).
45 Materials related to Mark Leckeys exhibition appear in The Universal Addressabilty of Dumb Things
(London: Hayward Publishing, 2013) and on the website www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find
/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/hayward-touring/future/the-universal-addressability-of-dumb-
things. The New Museum exhibition Ghost in the Machine was accompanied by the catalogue
Ghost in the Machine, ed. Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari (New York: Skira Rizzoli,
2012) and the website www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/ghosts-in-the-machine.
46 See also Speculations on Anonymous Materials (2013), curated by Susanne Pfeffer in Kassel,
which considered a number of post-Internet practices in light of the processual nature of image
creation and visual reflexivity across networks.
29
 INTRODUCTION
far less attention given to the dilemma implicit in the term art itself, whose post-
Duchampian legacy has focused on the way that signification shifts within linguistic
and cultural framing.
That is, if realism and materialism are to follow through on their claims to
radically reorganize modern epistemological and ontological categories (including
epistemology and ontology themselves), whether it be toward the emphatic ratio-
nalism of naturalist idealists or toward a materialist position seeking an origin for
aesthetics in inhuman forces, we should anticipate not only new themes for art prac-
tices, exhibitions, and cultural production, but also starkly different ways of making,
perceiving, thinking, and distributing them. What is left relatively unexaminedand
presents a much greater problem for current orthodoxies of cultural and artistic
productionis the systemic and methodological challenge that a thoroughgoing
realism and/or materialism presents to the way that exhibitions or artworks claim
to produce meaning in their prevailing paradigms. At this point in time it remains
to be seen how artists, curators, and other cultural producers will take up realist or
materialist demands in distinction to the concerns and claims mentioned above.
Questions here include: Will developments in science lead to new norms or stan-
dards for artistic judgment? Can art be anything more than a mere metaphor or
analogue for science? Can art redress issues of spectatorship in a world indifferent
to the human? And how are authorship and representation to change when one
acknowledges the material origins of human thought and the material forces at
work within an artists process?
III
There is then no uniform or particularly consistent account for the current con-
ditions, ambitions, and frameworks of realism, materialism, and art: the fracture
lines between Object-Oriented Ontology, rationalistic naturalism, and materi-
alism lead to distinct questions with disjunctive implications. RMA reflects this
incongruity as well as the still unresolved set of relations these methods have to
one another, looking not to settle these arguments but, on the contrary, to advance
the contesting and unsettling of these proto-doctrines in both their theoretical and
cultural-practical development.
RMA aims, first, to catch key moments in the current discussion of realism
and materialism, predominantly in relation to art but also in relation to other fields;
second, to expand the terms of engagement of realism, materialism, and art; and,
third, to affirm the contention that no thematic or discipline has a privilege in realist
or materialist investigations. On this basis RMA seeks to contribute to the recon-
struction of the disciplines in which it would be conventionally located: philosophy
and art. Rather than the frequent direct (mis)identification of art with theoretically
led realist-materialist contentions on the basis of their mutual incomprehension,
RMA elaborates and extends both sides by substantializing their intersection.
30
CHRISTOPH COX, JENNY JASKEY, AND SUHAIL MALIK
This ambition is not only a thematic concern for RMA but also one of struc-
tural organization: the essays and images in the book are proximate to one another
as in a snapshot or collage, in order to generate new intersections, convergences,
divergences, and switching points among them. With this snapshot method, RMA
does not look to provide a coherent panoramic vision that would underwrite a new
philosophy of art, nor to propose an art that confirms an established philosophical
stance, nor even to suggest that art escapes philosophical determination. Instead, its
contribution is a common and mutual one for both art and the salient philosophies
of realism and materialism, emphasizing the incongruent if not conflicting status
of their currently emerging practices and ideas. To that endand in addition to the
various connections that may be drawn between any subset of the essays, images,
or themes in RMAthe essays and images have been distributed into six significant
categories relating to the history and practice of art, art history, and art theory:
matter, object, concept, representation, scale, and speculation. These familiar
categories act as identification markers for the reader across the otherwise diverse
contributions, and they have a further twofold aim: on the one hand, in their stipu-
lated proximity to one another in any one category, the contributions put pressure
on current philosophical, scientific, artistic, and theoretical research mobilizing
these major terms;47 on the other hand, these familiar if not canonical categories
are themselves challenged and reworked by the diverse contributions gathered under
them, thus reshaping the conventional sense of the categories themselves. The major
categories also serve a useful didactic purpose: each is sequenced so as to initiate
the reader into key issues in current debates by offering entry points. These are fol-
lowed by contributions that require greater background knowledge of the issues at
stake or terms of debate. While the order of the categories charts a broadly idealist
or pseudo-evolutionary trajectory, proceeding from a material base to the expansion
of thought beyond itself, this is only a dramatic conceit, set up precisely in order
to formulate and stage their contestation by the individual contributions as by the
global ambitions of realism and materialism in their current iterations.
47 Matthew Ritchies diagrams on the inside covers of this volume present counter-orderings for the
essays in RMA, both within the primary categories we propose and within an entirely different set
of categories. Each organization puts a different pressure on the thematic terms.
31
Matter
 Things Arent What They Used to Be:
On the Immateriality of Matter
and the Reality of Relations
James Ladyman

There are many varieties of realism in philosophy, but they have in common the
idea that the world is fundamentally independent of our beliefs and desires about
it. Realists oppose idealist philosophies that give the mind a role in making reality.
Of course, there are mental and/or social constructs, for example, the meanings
of these words, but realists maintain that in large part the way things are is not
determined by what we think or say about them. For example, even if everyone
believed to the contrary, it would still be true that the earth is roughly spherical,
that it rotates causing the passage of day and night, and that the changing seasons
are due to its being tilted on its axis at 23.5 degrees as it orbits the sun.
Materialism is the positive account of what the world is like that usually
substantiates the abstract idea of objectivity with which realism is defined above.
According to materialism, material objects like the earth and the sun exist and
have their motions in space and properties like their masses and shapes; the same
chemical elements are found everywhere; and these features of the world are the
basis for the existence of everything else. However, materialism has evolved to the
extent that many sympathetic to it now call themselves physicalists, and many
also accept the existence of much that is immaterial, though they take it that it is
somehow emergent from and dependent on the physical. Physics is the ultimate
science of matter, and its development has transformed our concept of matter, and
has also given us accounts of it that are both incomplete and far removed from our
concept of everyday material objects. Space and even time have acquired a quasi-
physical status. There are many open questions about the extent and nature of the
cosmos. The materialism of the ancients and early modern philosophers is no
longer plausible.
Materialism began as an imaginative vision about the nature of reality and
the true natures and properties of the things we see around us. Where others spec-
ulated that the world was ultimately composed of water or fire or some combina-
tion of elements, the ancient Greek atomists proposed that everything we observe,
including life itself, is nothing more than matter in motion, composed of indivisible
material atoms. According to the atomists, the latter do not have many of the qual-
ities that everyday objects seem to have in our experience; the sweetness of honey,
for example, does not really inhere in its atoms, but rather is the sensation they

Matter 35
 THINGS ARENT WHAT THEY USED TO BE
produce in us. This particular way of distinguishing appearance from reality was
taken up by the corpuscularian philosophers of the seventeenth century (Boyle,
Locke, Gassendi, and so on), who also thought that familiar features of the world
we experience, notably colors, do not belong to things themselves but only to our
perception of them. They were not only materialists, but also mechanists who sug-
gested that the universe is like a clockwork machine; while the appearances may be
of a hand moving around a face and perhaps bells ringing and figures moving as a
consequence, in fact all the moving parts are responding only to the movement of
their neighbors, and the only real causation is action by contact. They developed a
picture of things according to which their real properties were limited to those of
the extension in space, configuration, shape, and movement of the particles that
composed them.
That these are properties amenable to geometrical description facilitated the
application of mathematics to science as never before. The theories of physics and
the mathematical techniques that were developed along with them have given us
extensive predictive and explanatory success. The same basic theories of mechanics
described terrestrial and extraterrestrial motions, and the same theories of chemical
structure described rocks, cells, and comets. However, science seems to disenchant
nature to a degree that moves many to reject the scientific image of the world. How
could thinking, feeling, and acting beings consist in nothing more than the move-
ment of small material parts due to action by contact? What room is there in the
clockwork universe for the things that matter to us?
However, what some regard as disenchantment is to others a morally and
politically important repudiation of belief systems that allegedly bind, enthrall,
and intoxicate people, distracting them from addressing the true causes of their
woes. Materialists have often been concerned with exorcising the supernatural and
defending a positive picture. Since its origins in pre-Socratic philosophy, mate-
rialism has had a negative and critical component involving the repudiation of
supernatural and immaterial entities, a consequent disdain for superstition, and a
mission to liberate people from its control over their lives: Lucretius in his poetic
elaboration of the philosophy of Epicurus (the Greek atomist who held that the
mechanics obeyed by atoms involves a fundamental element of chance) says so
powerful is religion at persuading to evil. The purpose of his account of the Nature
of Things was therefore practical. Likewise, Thomas Hobbes was condemned as
an atheist on account of his view that matter is the only substance. The claim
that the only substance that exists is material substance is the usual definition of
materialism. Substance is that which is not dependent on anything else for its
existence. Material was explicitly defined by Descartes to mean extended in
space. Although we clearly have experience of apparently nonmaterial things,
most obviously the phenomena of consciousness, the materialist claims that a full
description of all the material things that exist, and their properties, relations, and
dynamics will be sufficient to account for everything else.
36 Matter
JAMES LADYMAN
Ironically, it was the success of the science it did so much to inspire that under-
mined materialism. Materialism was made obsolete by developments in the area that
materialists most admired (and for which they believed they were providing philo-
sophical foundations), physics. First of all we must note that materialism and mech-
anism were never universally accepted by natural philosophers. Indeed, notoriously,
Newtons founding theory of modern mathematical physics from 1687 posited the
universal gravitational force acting between all bodies instantaneously at a distance
though diminishing in its power with distance. In the eighteenth century Charles-
Augustin de Coulomb added the electrostatic forces between charged particles to the
gravitational force. By the nineteenth century it was known that there must be exotic
forms of substance such as the ether to account for the phenomena of light, elec-
tricity, and magnetism. Nonetheless, the hope remained that all of physics, and ulti-
mately all of science, could be reduced to the properties of material particles moving
around, perhaps with the addition of some kind of material field-like entity, being
continuous and everywhere. The success of the kinetic theory of gases, according to
which pressure, heat, and temperature were the manifestations of atomic motions
and collisions, gave hope to materialists; but the discovery of radioactivity and the
rise of quantum theory soon led to the radical transformation of our understanding
of the nature of the atoms themselves. Far from being the indivisible building blocks
of antiquity, they turned out to be compound entities whose behavior and properties
were beyond visualization. Matter, in the sense of extended stuff that takes up space
like the familiar solid objects we see around us, is according to physics not ultimately
solid at all but mostly empty space. Matter is composed of atoms that are in turn
composed of a nucleus and orbiting electrons. If an atom were the size of a football
pitch, the nucleus would be the size of the center spot and the orbiting electrons on
the touchline much smaller than that. Those electrons and other subatomic particles
are regarded as point particles, further undermining the relevance and legitimacy of
the notion of material things extended in space.
Meanwhile, relativity physics takes as its objects space and time, which can
hardly be considered as material things in the sense of classical materialism. From the
perspective of the early twenty-first century, it seems quite possible that, as entities
existing independent of the existence of anything else, space and time will not hold
a place in fundamental physics. Since material substances are supposed to be those
substances that exist in space, the usual definitions of materialism and material
thing have become irrelevant for the task of describing fundamental reality. The
right theory of quantum gravity remains out of our grasp but the most popular
research program is the theory of eleven dimensional superstrings, the vibrations
of which give rise to particle-like behavior. We have come a very long way from the
physics of res extensae (extended things).
It seems that the kind of materialism defended by the ancient Greek atom-
ists and their successors in early modern natural philosophy is not viable. However,
much of the spirit of materialism lives on in physicalism. Materialism offers a
Matter 37
 THINGS ARENT WHAT THEY USED TO BE
positive metaphysical picture, but it has negative content too, namely, the denial
of the existence of mental or spiritual substance. Furthermore, something of its pos-
itive content, namely, the idea that the chemical and biological ultimately depend
on the properties of matter, is also retained in physicalism. There are two obvious
approaches to the articulation and defense of the latter. The first responds to the
obsolescence of the previous definition of material things by defining a physical
thing as a thing that is posited by physics. Thus physicalism is taken to assert that
what exists is precisely what physics says exists (plus those things that are regarded
as aggregates of things posited by physics such as everyday objects and other com-
pound entities posited by the different sciences). Unfortunately, this approach faces
the apparent problem of being either trivial or false. It is (almost certainly) false if
it refers to existing physics for its ontology, since it can safely be assumed that pres-
ent-day physics will be superseded by a more advanced physics. On the other hand,
it is trivial if it defines the physical as that which will be posited by a future, com-
pleted fundamental physics, since by definition physics is the science that must be
capable in principle of accounting for all natural phenomena. If it were necessary
to posit souls or ectoplasm to account for some phenomenon, then their behavior
would be in the scope of physics, making it empty to say that all that exists is the
physical. The second approach seeks to define the physical with reference to actual
physicsbut that means using the resources of common sense or some other form
of intuition, neither of which seems likely to give us the last word on the nature of
physical reality. Since physics is currently unfinished, and since, in the past, quite
radical innovations in ontology have been necessary for the progress of physics, the
prospects are not good for this second approach either.
Instead, physicalism is best characterized as a hypothesis about what it will
take for physics to progress, according to which it will never be necessary to intro-
duce new entities, laws, or processes into physics solely to account for biological
or mental phenomena. At one time, it was thought it might be necessary to posit
special chemical forces to account for chemical bonds, and vital forces to account
for life. However, it was shown that chemical bonds could be understood in terms of
electrostatic forces between charged particles, and that the processes that underlie
life, such as cellular metabolism, can be related to chemical and physical processes.
Physicalists need not commit to strong forms of reductionism about these matters.
It may be the case that chemical bonds cannot be derived from fundamental physics
without further assumptions, but there are many cases where quantum mechanics
makes well-confirmed predictions about atoms and their chemical behavior. The
same is true of genetics in relation to molecular biology and many other examples.
We have no reason to believe that emergent phenomena, from biochemical reactions
to social behavior, require special kinds of physical processes. Complexity science
shows us how self-organizing and hierarchical order can arise spontaneously in
large networks of components even though the nature of the components and their
interactions gives no hint of it.
38 Matter
JAMES LADYMAN
Science has developed to the extent that it now gives us ontology at many
levels. Within the physical sciences we have a rough hierarchy from the solids and
fluids of geology, through the molecular structure of chemical kinds, the atoms and
their orbiting electrons, the subatomic realm of particles and fundamental forces,
to quantum fields, superstrings, and beyond. The biological and behavioral sci-
ences are much more complex but similarly offer layers of entities from proteins to
social groups. What makes all these entities count as physical? We certainly cannot
straightforwardly identify them with the collections of entities described by physics.
Their place in the unified scientific account of reality is based on the shared system
of units, the conservation of energy, the gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear
forces, and the basic classification of the elements expressed in the periodic table.
In science we have integration and not always reduction. However, there remains an
asymmetric relationship between physics and the special sciences: all special science
objects are such that their behavior is consistent with physics and can be understood
without violations of basic physical laws. The objects of the special sciences and
all the objects in current physics exist only at particular restricted scales of space
and time. For example, there are no tables at the atomic scale of distance or at the
geological scale of time; and there are no atoms at the scale of quarks or at the cos-
mological scale of time.
The atomists of old could respond to this situation by regarding emergent
entities as possessed of a less than full-blooded reality. They might be necessary for
the purposes of our cognition and representation of the world, but the true reality
is the atoms and their motions and collisions in the void. However, we now know
that atoms are not fundamental. The kinds of entities that are posited at the sub-
atomic scale are exotic in the extreme; but more importantly we have no reason to
believe that there is a fundamental level consisting of the one true set of ultimate
individual objects. If we remain agnostic about whether the latter exists, we have
no reason to regard scale-relative emergent domains as less real because everything
we know is like that. What then does it mean to say that all these things exist? In
Every Thing Must Go, Don Ross and I developed Daniel Dennetts idea that to be
is to be a real pattern.1 When we are doing microphysics we do not have to keep
track of everyday physical objects because doing so would be of no predictive or
explanatory value. The scales of distance, time, and energy make tables irrele-
vant. However, anybody faced with the task of keeping track of material objects in
everyday circumstances would be very foolish to insist on thinking in terms of table
parts other than drawers, legs, and tabletops. To describe a room only speaking
of atoms, without mentioning the furniture, would be to miss out on the fact that
there are correlations in the positions of some of the atoms that result from their
being part of, say, a table. In that sense the table is a pattern in the information
1 See James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); and Daniel Dennett, Real Patterns, Journal of Philosophy 88 (January
1991): 2751.
Matter 39
 THINGS ARENT WHAT THEY USED TO BE
about its parts more than it is a particular set of material particles (for any partic-
ular particle can be left out and the table is left unchanged), and it is certainly not
a single extended piece of matter.
What all genuine entities have in common is that they are real patterns in
the phenomena that emerge at their characteristic length and time scales, in the
sense that any attempt to describe the world at that scale that did not refer to them
would contain redundant information and miss out on simple causal relationships,
statements, and laws that predict and explain phenomena. The distinctive ontolo-
gies of the sciences arise because we live in a universe that is rich enough to have
various emergent regimes of (partial) order.
What was once a revolutionary thought may, centuries later, become
a commonplace fact barely deserving of mention to an educated person. We can
now see the rotation of the Earth from space; we have similarly confirmed that the
world is millions of years old, that people have common ancestors with apes, and
that much of what we see around us has a true nature that is very different from
the way we might perceive it on the basis of culture, intuition, and our conscious
experience. Children grow up taking the existence of the virtual world for granted.
However, it is important to remember that, for that virtual world to exist, somewhere
there is a physical machine subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Our brains can
only function at a very specific range of temperatures, and computers have to be
powered somehow. Yet it may be less misleading to say that the world is made of
mathematics or information than that it is made of matter, because fundamental
physics describes particles and fields that are nothing like the way matter appears
and is conceived by us. The scientific image of the world is one from which math-
ematical representation is ineliminable. This applies no less to the special sciences
than to physics. The different sciences are highly integrated and unified. Materialism
and realism apt for the twenty-first century should be expressed in terms of the
objectivity of real patterns.
40 Matter
From Within the Midst of Things:
New Sensibility, New Alchemy,
and the Renewal of Critical Theory
Diana Coole
A key feature of the new materialism is its insistence on the recalcitrance and
vitality of matter and thus on its role in constraining and engendering the ways it is
understood and handled. Matter is recognized as having its own forces of resilience,
resistance, and productivity.1 New materialists are accordingly critical of tenden-
cies to abstraction or formalism in mainstream scholarship. In political theory or
sociology, for example, this is played out respectively in shifts away from analytical
and normative approaches or from reifications promulgated by structural analysis,
formal modeling, and classificatory schemes. If greater attention is being paid to
the empirical details of emergent processes, this is not in the name of positivism
but rather a way of discerning myriad unpredictable ways in which matter forges
provisional molar assemblages. The role played here by thinkers such as Michel
Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Pierre Bourdieu shows how more realist approaches
undertaken in genealogy, actor-network theory, or phenomenology are being seized
upon to breathe life into the study of social phenomena.
In the visual arts, this may correspond with moves against Conceptualism
inasmuch as its language- and text-based approach is renounced. Many artists and
designers are returning to matter to explore immanent, elusive, and reclusive, prop-
erties of materials, working with chemical or biophysical qualities in response to
degrading or emergent forms and their provocative invitations. Deleuze and Guattari
write that, for example, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper
to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists
everywhere but is ordinarily hidden. Thus, in their account the relation between
metallurgy and alchemy reposes [] on the immanent power of corporeality in all
matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it.2 For new alchemists, such
as those at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, new materialism means giving matter
This essay was written during a research fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to which
Id like to express sincere gratitude.
1 See for example Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, eds., Political Matter. Technoscience, Democracy,
and Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
2 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 411.
Matter 41
 FROM WITHIN THE MIDST OF THINGS
its due.3 It engenders fascination with strange, brute, magnificent materials whose
properties guide work that relies on scant formal or intellectual preconceptions
but remains open to the provocations of emergent materialities and their innate
qualities in a journey of shared participation that is active/passive: a reciprocal,
irreducible process of becoming, where bodies and other materials are conjoined
in a shared artistry.
While matter is constantly being reconstructed, it is also recognized as making
its own suggestions in the way it frustrates or inspires. However, even this formulation
may suggest too dialectical a schema. When it invites greater attention to the ways
matter matters, new materialism is acknowledging that matter materializes itself
through and with embodied humans because they are irremediably part of, not apart
from, this material world. It accordingly summons us to plunge into the material realm,
to appreciate that we live in the midst of things, in order to engage with immanent
structures of materialization that are simultaneously familiar and alien, necessary for
our survival yet threatened by the strength of our desire. Whether the field is ethical
conduct, aesthetic practice, or critical theory, what is implied here is nothing less
than a reorientation toward the material or natural domain in a way that is distinctive
from modernitys prevailing will to dominate nature through knowledge and action.
Disavowing the domination of nature represents an additional polemical
score. Here, new materialists oppose the following: A utilitarian tendency, lucidly
expounded by Heidegger, to regard the material realm as meaningless stuff that lies
ready-to-hand for manipulation and imposition according to human purposes; a
Cartesian philosophy that presents subjects and objects, or consciousness and bodies,
as ontologically heterogeneous, as well as its scientific development in mechanical
physics for which matter is dead, inert material available for technological modifica-
tion. Equally, it opposes philosophies that reduce material alterity to an unknowable
thing-in-itself or strive to appropriate matter through conceptualizing, quantifying,
and classifying it. So, too, theories that define matter as determinist or determined
are rejected, especially inasmuch as matter is claimed to follow strict laws of cau-
sality or linear development. In this mixture of idealist and traditionally materialist
philosophies, scientific theories, and cultural orientations, new materialist critics see
a common thread in which the complexity, contingency, and generativity of matter
is denied in order to regulate it, as well as an unwarranted separation and privileging
of human reason as a controlling agency.
This challenge accordingly summons a countervailing ontology. Important
philosophical influences here include ancient atomism, the ontological monism
of Spinoza, the vitalist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and phenomenological
approaches to corporeality by thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Their work
3 I am grateful to the directors and students at the new cx center for interdisciplinary studies at the
Munich Academy of Fine Arts for discussions about their work as new alchemists with an affinity
with the new materialism. See www.adbk.de/en/cx-centrum-fuer-interdisziplinaere-studien
/archiv-jahresthemen.html.
42 Matter
DIANA COOLE
is associated with marginalized positions within the canon that are now being exca-
vated and combined in novel ways. Equally significant are new scientific conceptions
of matter, ranging from complexity and chaos theory, on the one hand, to unprec-
edented ways of understanding and manipulating matter in theoretical physics or
molecular biology on the other.
The ontology espoused by new materialism, which might be regarded as its
signature contribution, attracts labels such as materialist vitalism or generative
immanence. Such terms are indicative of an insistence that matter enjoys its own
capacities for self-transformation, rather than awaiting the imposition of form or
meaning by an external, transcendent agent (such as God or Man). In this sense
it is secular and post-humanist. Yet by stressing the embodied, affective nature of
humans, their affinities with animals, their imbrication with ecological systems,
their enduring reliance on technological prostheses, their creative abilities to appre-
ciate and improvise on natural forms, it does not eliminate human agency entirely.
Rather, new materialism relocates humans by emphasizing their own materiality and
through exploring their dependence on fragile or robust material systems and entities
on which they leave more or less indelible traces. New materialist ways of thinking
accordingly challenge traditional distinctions between the human and nonhuman,
as well as classical hierarchies that describe a descending scale from God, through
human, animal, and vegetable, to minerals and the inorganic. Instead, a singular
yet variegated upsurge of materialization is countenanced. In summary, this is
a philosophy of becoming rather than being: one that emphasizes materialization
as a dynamic process (wherein matter matters itself ) rather than a state.
It is worth saying a little more about this choreography because it ascribes
some distinctive rhythms and qualities to materialization. Matter is regarded here as
lively and constitutive. In emerging, it produces more or less enduring constellations;
but since its course is neither linear nor predictable, it is inimical to conceptions
of progress. Instability and volatility, flows and mobility, contingency and chance,
are more typically invoked. Swerves and swarms, cracks and folds, virtuality and
events, displace an older materialist discourse of cause and effect, determinism, or
teleology. The internal, or immanent, generativity associated with materialization
thus arises from matters being understood not as solid, self-identical objectivity
but as inherently relational in the sense that it is the shifting relations between or
within entities that endow matter with innate capacities for self-transformation.
This allows materialitywhether in macro-level assemblages such as the biosphere
or micro-level entities in which genes and cells co-existto be ascribed agential
capacity in the sense that materialization generates structure or patterns; it parti-
tions the sensible and engenders provisional forms in ways that precede and exceed
linguistic or cognitive capacities.
Such ideas are captured by references to a flat ontology and distributed agency.
There is nonetheless some disagreement here as to just how widely distributed
agentic capacities are. Do they, as thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett
Matter 43
 FROM WITHIN THE MIDST OF THINGS
argue, include even inorganic entities, as actants or thing-power whose efficacy
affects human/nonhuman systems? Or, alternatively, should the extension of agency
merely refer to corporeal or organic capacities that extend beyond human bodies
but which remain limited to beings capable of reacting reflexively and creatively to
their material milieu? In either case, the definition and privileging of the human,
especially regarding the uniqueness of humans rational and linguistic skills, are
being questioned in some fundamental ways.
It is important to stress that new materialist thinking is not merely a philo-
sophical adventure. Many of its exponents recognize its ontological claims as
a prelude to radical change in ethical-political life. In discussing this aspect, it
is helpful to see new materialism tracking a distinction that marks contempo-
rary political philosophy in its continental guises. This takes one direction when
themes such as generativity and vitality are regarded as invitations to practice an
affirmative ethos in which creativity, innovation, and the event inspire a more open
and respectful attitude toward nature/things alongside queer, self-transformative
practices that defy rigid classification or inertia. The other direction is more neg-
ative, critical, in taking up the wager to plunge into the midst of things in order
to analyze sub-optimal, perhaps catastrophic, ways of treating matter and thus
to identify leverage points for political action that are deemed essential for flour-
ishing, if not for survival itself.
From the former, ethical perspective, new materialist ontology suggests a cel-
ebration of matters generative capacities, thus offering new sources of inspiration
through engaging with nonhuman forms. A combination of joyful restraint coupled
with Nietzschean exuberance suggests a new sensibility or ethos: a transformed
mode of being-in-the-world, one that escapes the limitations of conventional poli-
tics, power struggles, and runaway material consumption in pursuit of novel ways of
being, subjectivity, affect, performance, embodiment, and artistry that are also more
ecologically sensitive. In particular, such an ethos suggests perceiving and performing
nature, bodies, and things differently. It is reminiscent of counter-cultural ideals that
surfaced during the late 1960s, in which, for example, Herbert Marcuse invoked a new
sensibility aligned with the pacification of nature and a more sensuous, erotic, aes-
thetic mode of being that was complemented by limits-to-growth environmentalism.
Among current new materialists, it is exemplified by the re-enchanted attitude toward
vibrant matter that Bennett exhorts when she summons the cultivation of patient,
sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human
body, which she associates with a countercultural kind of perceiving that engen-
ders a more ecological sensibility.4
This new sensibility might be understood as bringing affective ballast to social
change. Yet its practitioners inevitably find themselves confronting relatively intrac-
table structures of power and everyday practices that reproduce prevailing values
4 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xiv, 10.
44 Matter
DIANA COOLE
and behavior to congeal and ossify material systems. Such is the weary insight of the
second dimension of renewed materialism, whose exponents maintain that a robust
understanding and critique of existing systems is required as a complementary task
to ethical reinvention. In this guise, the new materialism assumes an altogether more
mundane form inasmuch as it focuses on unprecedented ways in which matter is
actually being transformed to alter everyday experiences and life chances in fun-
damental ways. This, then, is the sense in which new materialists are renewing the
project of a critical theory, through an approach that might be defined as a critical
or capacious materialism.5
Its proponents are attentive, inter alia, to pervasive forms of biopower that
modify behavior at the level of everyday bodily habits and routines; to developments
within political economy (such as intensified commodification of the commons
or the invention of new consumer durables and production technologies); to the
effects of population growth and other unprecedented demographic changes; to
innovations in biomedicine that break bodies down into treatable, tradable parts;
to digital technologies in which the distinction between human and artificial intel-
ligence becomes difficult to ascertain; to changes to the geological fabric of the
planet associated with the Anthropocene. While some of these developments are
regarded positively as new opportunities for preserving and enhancing life, more
typically it is the threats they pose to material (co-)existence that are being explored.
In this critical aspect a renewed materialism is thus returning to an analysis of
material systemssuch as political economy, demography, biopower, and the envi-
ronmentin order to explore the material milieu bodies inhabit and to appreciate
its contribution to limiting or inspiring discursive constructs. Linguistic tropes,
like scripts or texts, accordingly yield to a language of complexity and ecologies,
systems, structures, and assemblages. While critical investigations of political
economy and the protean effects of global capitalism inevitably provoke memories
of Marxism, a capacious historical materialism is a considerably more complex,
wide-ranging undertaking congruent with twenty-first-century conditions. In par-
ticular, political economy is situated relative to larger and smaller systems with
which it interacts. On the one hand, this means taking heed of manifold concrete
details in everyday (co-)existence as a way to understand how power structures
establish and maintain themselves at the micro, especially embodied, level where
needs, capacities, and desires are negotiated and instantiated. On the other, the
broader eco- and biosystems with which intimate and social life connect through
dense networks are accorded greater attention as planetary systems manifest
increasing symptoms of degradation.
5 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Introducing the New Materialisms, in New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Coole and Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),
143, esp. 2634; Diana Coole, Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism:
Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences, Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (March 2013): 45169.
Matter 45
 FROM WITHIN THE MIDST OF THINGS
This analysis proceeds in a holistic manner that is faithful to the dense rela-
tionality and complex becomings described by new materialist ontology. It recognizes
that because materialization occurs simultaneously on multiple levels and between
numerous interconnected systems, critical analysis must also be multi-modal in its
approach. In recognizing the complexity, contingency, and mobility of material-
ization, it is, therefore, obliged similarly to trace the complicated flows and intri-
cate reversals of matter as it passes through and transfigures different biophysical
levels. From this perspective global capitalism may be the most significant conduit
or switching point. Still, the challenge is to identify the ways matter shuttles back
and forth between distant ecosystems and the embodied routines of the quotidian
where biopower operates through increasingly pervasive and sophisticated forms
of governmentality. In other words, while none of these levels is privileged as ulti-
mately determining, tracking the relays, delays, and circuits through which matter
passes as it is transformed, degraded, or constructed is crucial for understanding
the material situation at any point in time. Here the social and natural sciences
are enmeshed in ways redolent of the entwining of social and ecological systems,
or of the human and nonhuman.
In conclusion, new materialism is a response to a resumed, pluralistic interest
in matter that is receptive to criticisms of older materialisms developed by post-
structuralists in particular, but also alert both to the efficacy of matter in shaping
or constraining systems of meaning and discourse and to novel ways in which mate-
riality is being negotiated and changed by the unparalleled scale of human inter-
vention and innovation. It embraces more realist methodologies than those of the
linguistic or conceptual turn; it adumbrates an ontology of contingent, even aleatory,
becoming; it invites ethical and artistic reorientation toward nature and materials,
and it renews the project of a critical theory, albeit in ways that take into account
the unprecedented ways that matter is being transformed, its dynamic flows, and its
imbrication with structures of power that normalize certain material practices. By
locating embodied humans in the midst of things, new materialists are provoking
novel ways to understand and engage with the dense material world of which our
species is an irreducible part.
46 Matter
Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom
Elizabeth Grosz
Concepts of autonomy, agency, and freedomthe central terms by which subjectivity has
been understood in the twentieth century and beyondhave been central to feminist pol-
itics since its theoretical re-eruption in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. While these
concepts are continually evoked in feminist theory, however, they have been rarely
defined, explained, or analyzed. Instead they have functioned as a kind of mantra
of liberation, a given ideal, not only for a politics directed purely to feminist questions
but to any politics directed to class, race, or national and ethnic struggles. I propose
in this essay to provide an opening up of these terms that are so commonly used to
define subjectivity or identity, a problematization of their common usage in feminist
and other political discourses, and their recasting in the terms of a philosophical
tradition, which is rarely used by feminists but which may dynamize and make such
concepts ontological conditions rather than moral ideals.
Instead of turning to those philosophical traditions in which the questions
of freedom and autonomy are irremediably tied to the functioning and deprivatory
power of the (oppressive or dominant) otherthat is, the tradition of dialectical
phenomenology that dates from Hegel, through Marxism, and influences and inflects
existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, which in turn have so heavily
influenced most contemporary forms of feminist thought regarding the subjectI want
to turn to a more archaic tradition but also a more modernist one that feminists have
tended to avoid: the philosophy of life, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of
nature, initiated to some extent by the pre-Socratics, but fully elaborated primarily
in the nineteenth century through the texts of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and
flourishing well into the earliest decades of the twentieth century.
In elaborating the centrality of matter to any understanding of subjectivity
or consciousness as free or autonomous, we need to look outside the traditions of
thought that have considered subjectivity as the realm of agency and freedom only
through the attainment of reason, rights, and recognition: that is, only through the
operation of forcessocial, cultural, or identificatoryoutside the subject. Thus,
instead of linking the question of freedom to the concept of emancipation or to some
understanding of liberation from, or removal of, an oppressive or unfair form of con-
straint or limitation, as is most common in feminist and other anti-oppressive strug-
gles and discourses, I develop a concept of life, bare life, where freedom is conceived
not only or primarily as the elimination of constraint or coercion but more positively
This essay appears in longer form in my book, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life,
Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 5973.
Matter 47
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
as the condition of, or capacity for, action in life. In doing so, I hope to elaborate
and explain my understanding of freedom, agency, and autonomy not in terms of a
concept of freedom from, where freedom is conceived negatively, as the elimination
of constraint, but in terms of a freedom to, a positive understanding of freedom as
the capacity for action. I do not believe that this is a depoliticization of the concept
but rather its reframing in a different context that may provide it with other, different
political affiliations and associations and a different understanding of subjectivity.
Is feminist theory best served through its traditional focus on womens attain-
ment of a freedom from patriarchal, racist, colonialist, and heteronormative con-
straint? Or by exploring what the femaleor feministsubject is and is capable of
making and doing? It is this broad and overarching questionone of the impon-
derable dilemmas facing contemporary politics well beyond feminismthat is at
stake here in exploring the subjects freedom through its immersion in materiality.
I have no intention of presenting a critique of the notion of freedom from,
for it clearly has a certain political relevance;1 but its relevance should not be over-
stated, and if freedom remains tied to only this negative concept of liberty, it remains
tied to the options or alternatives provided by the present and its prevailing (and
admittedly limiting) forces, instead of accessing and opening up the present to the
invention of the new. In other words, a freedom from, while arguably necessary
for understanding concepts like subjectivity, agency, and autonomy, is not sufficient:
at best it addresses and attempts to redress wrongs of the past without providing any
positive direction for action in the future. It entails that once the subject has had
restraints and inhibitions, the negative limitations, to freedom removed, a natural or
given autonomy is somehow preserved. If external interference can be minimized,
the subject can be (or rather become) itself, can be left to itself and as itself, can
enact its given freedom. Freedom is attained through rights, laws, and rules that
minimize negative interference rather than affirm positive actions.
I want to focus on the tradition of freedom to, which has tended to be
neglected in feminist and other radical political struggles, though it may make
more explicit and clear what is at stake in feminist notions of subjectivity, agency,
and autonomy. But rather than turning to Nietzsche and Foucault to articulate this
network of connections (as I have done elsewhere)2for they are the most obvious
1 It is perfectly obvious that a freedom to create, to make, or to produce is a luxury that can be
attained only with a certain level of the absence of constraint. However, even in the most extreme
cases of slavery and in situations of political or natural catastrophe of the kinds globally experienced
in recent years, there is always a small space for innovation and not simply reaction. What remains
remarkable about genocidal struggles, the horrors of long-term incarceration, concentration camps,
prisoner of war camps, and the prospects of long-term social coexistence in situations of natural and
social catastrophe is the inventiveness of the activities of the constrainedthe flourishing of minor
and hidden arts and literature, technologies and instruments, networks of communication, and the
transmission of information. What is most striking about the extreme situations of constraint, those
which require a freedom from, is that they do not eliminate a freedom to but only complicate it.
2 In The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
and Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
48 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
and explicit proponents of a positive conception of freedom, freedom as the ability
to act and in acting to make oneself even as one is made by external forces
I will look at the work of someone more or less entirely neglected in feminist and
much of postmodern literature, Henri Bergson, whose understanding of freedom is
remarkably subtle and complex and may provide new ways of understanding both the
openness of subjectivity and politics as well as their integration and cohesion with
their respective pasts or history.3 I believe that Bergson may help us to articulate an
understanding of subjectivity, agency, and freedom that is more consonant with a
feminism of difference than with an egalitarian feminism, which more clearly finds
its support in various projects centered around the struggles for rights and recog-
nition. Bergson might help to rethink how subjectivity and freedom are always and
only enacted within and through the materiality that life and the nonliving share,
a materiality not adequately addressed in alternative traditions that have until now
remained so influential in feminist thought.
Bergson and Freedom
Bergsons understanding of freedom and its links to subjectivity is initially artic-
ulated in his first major publication, Time and Free Will (1889), which not only
outlines his conceptions of duration and space (which will become the center-
piece of his analyses in Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907))
but also embeds his work in the traditional metaphysical opposition between
free will and determinism, an ancient debate still articulating itself with great
insistence, ironically, even within contemporary feminism. His understanding
of freedom, as with his notions of perception, life, and intuition, lies outside
and beyond the traditional binary distinctions that characterize so much of
Western thought.
Bergson argues that in traditional debates regarding free will and deter-
minism, both sides share a number of problematic commitments: both presume
the separation or discontinuity of the subject from the range of available options
or alternatives and from the subjects own ongoing self-identity; a fundamental
continuity between present causes and future effects (whether causes are regarded
as internal to the subject or as external tends to define the positions of the deter-
minist and the libertarian respectively); and an atomistic separation or logical
division between cause and effect. In other words, as in all oppositional or
dichotomized divisions, both sides of the free will/determinism debate are prob-
lematic and share founding assumptions that enable them to regard themselves
3 There have been some, a few, feminist texts on Bergson. See, in particular, Dorothea Olkowski,
The End of Phenomenology: Bergsons Interval in Irigaray, Hypatia 15, no. 3 (Summer 2000):
7391; and Rebecca Hill, Interval, Sexual Difference? Hypatia 23, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 11931.
Matter 49
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
as opposites.4 As with all oppositional structures, we need to find something that
articulates what both views, in spite of their contradictions, share in common and
what exceeds their terms and functions outside their constraints.
For the hard-core determinist, if one had an adequately detailed knowledge
of antecedent events, that is, causes, one could predict with absolute certainty
what their effects would be, whether these causes are material and external, or
psychical and internal. In its most recent incarnations, determinism has affirmed
that causes may lodge themselves within the living organism, as effects of an en
masse conditioning of the body and its behavior, or as a consequence of the more
microscopic molecular movements and structure of the brain or the even more
miniscule chromosomal structure of each cell. (Recent discourses on the gay brain5
the gay gene or the construction of queer through too close a contamination by
queer lifestyles are merely contemporary versions of this ancient debate.) What lies
behind each variation of this position is the belief that, if one could know the brain
structure or genetic or behavioral patterns intimately enough, one could predict
future behavior, whether criminal, sexual, or cultural.
On the other side is the libertarian or free will position which asserts that even
if determinism regulates the material order, in the realm of the human subject, there
is an inherent unpredictability of effects from given causes. Given a variety of options
or alternatives, it is unpredictable which one will be chosen: it is an open or free act.
Freedom is understood, on the anti-determinist position, as the performance of an
act that could have been done otherwise, even under the same exact conditions. Both
libertarians and determinists share the belief that the subject is the same subject,
the same entity, before and after the alternatives have been posed and one chosen;
the subject, even after choosing a particular course, could review that course and
either would make the same choice again in precisely the same way (the determinist
position) or could make a different choice, even in the same circumstances (the
libertarian position). For both, the choice of one of the options does not annihilate the
existence of the others but leaves them intact, capable of being chosen (or not) again.
Bergsons position on the question of freedom is more complex than either the
determinist or the libertarian view. For him, it is not so much that subjects are free
or not free; rather, it is acts that, in expressing a consonance (or not) with their agent,
are free (or automatized), have (or lack) the qualitative character of free acts. An act
4 At bottom, Bergson argues, both the libertarian and the determinist are committed to a tautology,
in fact to complementary tautologies: The argument of the determinists assumes this puerile
form: The act, once performed, is performed, and [] their opponents reply: The act, before
being performed, was not yet performed. In other words, the question of freedom remains after
this discussion exactly where it was to begin with; nor must we be surprised at it, since freedom
must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this
act to what it is not or to what it might have been. Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 182.
5 See Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996).
50 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
is free to the extent that the self alone will have been the author of it, and [] it will
express the whole of the self.6 Bergsons position is both alluringly and nostalgically
metaphysical and strikingly simple: free acts are those that spring from the subject
alone (and not from any psychical state of the subject or any manipulated behavior
around the subject); they not only originate in or through a subject, they express
all of that subject. In other words, they are integral to who or what the subject is.
In this understanding, the question whether the subject would or would not make
the same choice again is ill posed: such a situation is unrealistic and impossible. The
precise circumstances cannot be repeated, at the very least, because the subject is not the
same: the subject has inevitably changed, grown older, been affected by earlier decisions,
is aware of the previous choice, and so on. If the subject were absolutely identical in the
replaying of a particular choice, neither the determinists nor the libertarians position
would be affirmed. All one could say is that the subject is the self-same subject. Yet even
in the case of an example favored by the deterministthe subject under hypnosisthere
is a measure of freedom insofar as the act performed through suggestion must still be
rationalized, integrated in the agents life history, given a history, qualitatively inserted
into all the agents other acts in order to be performed or undertaken.7
With even the most constrained and manipulated of circumstances, when one
persons will is imposed on anothers without his or her conscious awareness, Bergson
argues that there must nevertheless be a retrospective cohesion between the subjects
current act and the previous chain of connections that prepared for and made it
possible. Even in this case, it is only retroactively, after the act is completed, that we
can discern or mark the distinction between a cause and an effect, for in psychical life
there cannot be the logical separation of cause from effect that characterizes material
objects in their external relations to each other. What characterizes psychical life,
Bergson insists, is not the capacity to lay parts (in this case, psychical states) side
by side, for this accomplishes a certain spatial ordering that is not possible for, or
lived by, the living being, but the inherent immersion and coherence of a being in
time. Psychical states are not like objects, for they have no parts, cannot be directly
compared, and admit of no magnitude or degree.
Psychical states have three relevant characteristics: (a) they are always
qualitative, and thus incapable of measurement without the imposition of an external
grid (this already makes psychical determinism an incoherent positionif causes
cannot be measured and precisely calculated, then even if determinism is in principle
6 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 16566.
7 For it is by no means the case that all conscious states blend with one another as raindrops with
the water of a lake. The self, in so far as it has to do with a homogeneous space, develops on a
kind of surface, and on this surface independent growths may form and float. Thus a suggestion
received in the hypnotic state is not incorporated in the mass of conscious states, but, endowed
with a life of its own, it will usurp the whole personality when its time comes. A violent anger
roused by some accidental circumstance, a hereditary vice suddenly emerged from the obscure
depths of the organism to the surface of consciousness, will act almost like a hypnotic
suggestion. Ibid, 66.
Matter 51
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
correct, ironically it remains unable to attain its most explicit goal: prediction);8
(b) they function not through distinction, opposition, categories, or identities but
through fusion or interpenetration,9 through an immersion or permeation that
generates a continuity between states or processes and makes their juxtaposition
impossible (this is the basis of Bergsons critique of associationism);10 and (c) they
emerge or can be understood only in duration rather than through the conventional
modes of spatialization that generally regulate thought, especially scientific or
instrumental thought, that is to say, any mode of analysis or division into parts. Parts,
elements, and states are discernible only as spatial categories or terms. While these
attributes or divisions may be imposed on the continuity of life and consciousness,
they do not arise from them, for life is as much becoming as it is being; it is durational
as much as it is spatial, though we are less able to see or comprehend the durational
flux than the mappable geometries of spatial organization.
For Bergson, then, at least in his earlier works, free acts erupt from the subject
insofar as they express the whole of that subject even when they are unexpected
and unprepared for: We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality,
when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one
sometimes finds between the artist and his work.11 Acts are free insofar as they
express and resemble the subject, not insofar as the subject is always the same, an
essence, an identity, but insofar as the subject is transformed by and engaged through
its acts, becomes through its acts:
Those who ask whether we are free to alter our character lay themselves
open to [this] objection. Certainly our character is altering imperceptibly
every day, and our freedom would suffer if these new acquisitions were
grafted on to our self and not blended with it. But, as soon as this blending
takes place, it must be admitted that the change which has supervened
in our character belongs to us, that we have appropriated it.12
Bergsons point is that free acts come from or even through us (it is not clear if it
matters where the impetus of the act originateswhat matters is how it is retro-
actively integrated into the subjects history and continuity). More significantly, if
this subject from which acts spring is never the same, never self-identical, always
8 The causes here, unique in their kind, are part of the effect, have come into existence with it
and are determined by it as much as they determine it. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur
Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998), 164.
9 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 163.
10 In proportion as we dig below the surface and get to the real self, do its states of consciousness
cease to stand in juxtaposition and begin to permeate and melt into one another, and each to
be tinged with the colouring of the others. Thus each of us has his own way of loving and hating;
and this love or hatred reflects his whole personality. Ibid., 164.
11 Ibid., 172.
12 Ibid.
52 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
and imperceptibly becoming other than what it once was and is now, then free acts,
having been undertaken, are those which transform us, which we can incorporate
into our becomings in the very process of their changing us. Free acts are those which
both express us and which transform us, which express our transforming.
What both the determinists and the libertarians misunderstand is the very
notion of possibility: the determinist assumes that there is only one possible act that
can occur from given conditions or antecedents for any given subject, whereas the
libertarian assumes that there could be several different acts that could ensue from
given conditions or antecedents. Given two possible outcomes, X and Y (and fixing
the antecedent conditions), the determinist assumes that only one was ever in fact
possible; in contrast the libertarian assumes that both were equally possible. Neither
understands that the two options were never of equal value because neither exists in
itself as an abstract possibility. If we follow Bergsons famous distinction between the
possible and the virtual the possible is at best the retrospective projection of a real that
wishes to conceive itself as eternally, always, possible but which becomes actual only
through an unpredictable labor and effort of differentiation, an epigenesis that exceeds
its preconditions.13 It is only after a work of art, a concept, formula, or act exists, is
real, and has had some actuality that we can say that it must have been possible, that it
was one of the available options. Its possibility can be gleaned only from its actuality,
for the possible never prefigures the real, it simply accompanies it as its post facto
shadow. So although we can posit that X and Y are equally possible (or not equally
possible), it is only after one of them has been actualized or chosen that we can see the
path of reasons, causes, or explanations that made it desirable.14 Only after one of the
options has been chosen can we see that the unchosen option is not preserved there
in its possibility but entirely dissolves, becoming simply a reminiscence or projection.
Bergson has provided an understanding of freedom that is not fundamentally
linked to the question of choice, to the operations of alternatives, to the selection
of options outside the subject and independently available to him or her. It is not a
freedom of selection, of consumption, a freedom linked to the acquisition of objects,
but a freedom of action that is above all connected to an active self, an embodied being,
a being who acts in a world of other beings and objects. Acts, having been undertaken,
transform their agent so that the paths that the agent took to the act are no longer avail-
able to him or her except abstractly or in reconstruction. Indeed, there are no paths to
any possible action (that is why an action remains possible but not real) until the action
is acted, and then the path exists only in reconstruction, not in actuality. The path can
13 See Bergson, The Possible and the Real, in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Addison
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).
14 As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind into the
indefinite past; thus it finds that it has from all time been possible, but it is at this precise moment
that it begins to have been always possible, and that is why I said that its possibility, which
does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared. The possible is
therefore the mirage of the present in the past. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 119.
Matter 53
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
be drawn only after the movement is completed. Once the act is performed, we can
divide, analyze, assess, and treat as necessary what in the process of its performance
remains undivided, unanalyzable, surprising, and utterly contingent. The act, once
performed, once actualized, is different from the indeterminacy of its performance.
Moreover, Bergsons understanding of freedom dissolves the intimate connection
between freedom and the subjects internal constitution or pregiven right. Freedom is
not a quality or property of the human subject, as implied within the phenomenolog-
ical tradition, but can only characterize a process, an action, a movement that has no
particular qualities. Freedom has no given content; it cannot be defined. Any positive
definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism.15 This is in part because
it is not an attribute, quality, or capacity that exists independent of its exercise. It is
not that subjects are or are not free; rather, actions, those undertaken by living beings,
may sometimes express such freedom. Freedom is a matter of degree and character-
izes only those acts in which one acts with all of ones being, and in the process those
acts become capable of transforming that being. It is rare that our actions express with
such intimate intensity the uniqueness of our situation and our own position within
it.16 But it is at these moments that freedom at its most intense is expressed.
Freedom is thus the exception rather than the rule in the sense that it can func-
tion only through the autonomy of the living being against a background of routin-
ized or habituated activity. It is only insofar as most of everyday life is accommodated
through automatism, by a kind of reflex or habit, that free acts have their energetic
and aesthetico-moral force and their effects on their author or agent. Associationism
and determinism have their relevance in conscious life: they provide an explanation of
the automatized substrate of daily behavior that provides a probabilistic guarantee of
accomplished action. It is only against this assumed or taken-for-granted background
economy of details that free acts may erupt.17 In place of either a rigid determinism
or the pointless and undirected openness of libertarianism, Bergson poses indeter-
minacy as the defining characteristic of life and the condition for freedom: It is at
the great and solemn crisis, decisive in our reputation with others, and yet more with
ourself, that we choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this
absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes.18
15 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 220.
16 It is the whole soul, in fact, which gives rise to the free decision: and the act will be so much
the freer the more the dynamic series with which it is connected tends to be the fundamental
self. Thus understood, free acts are exceptional, even on the part of those who are most given
to controlling and reasoning out what they do. Ibid., 167.
17 It is to this these acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant, that the
associationist theory is applicable. They are, taken all together, the substratum of our free activity,
and with respect to this activity they play the same part as our organic functions in relation to
the whole of our conscious life. Moreover we will grant to determinism that we often resign our
freedom in more serious circumstances, and that, by sluggishness or indolence, we allow this
same local process to run its course when our whole personality ought, so to speak, to vibrate.
Ibid., 169.
18 Ibid., 170.
54 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
Freedom and Materiality
In his later works, Bergson focuses less on freedom as the exclusive attribute of a self,
concentrated on only the one, conscious side of the distinction between the organic
and the inorganic, as he did in his earlier Time and Free Will, and more on the rela-
tions between the organic and the inorganic, the internal constitution of freedom
through its encounters with the resistance of matter.19 If freedom is located in acts
rather than in subjects, then the capacity to act and the effectivity of action is to
a large extent structured by the ability to harness and utilize matter for ones own
purposes and interests. Freedom is not a transcendent quality inherent in subjects
but is inherent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including
other forms of life.
As the correlate of life itself, whose accompaniment is consciousness in
a more or less dormant or active state, freedom is not a transcendental property
of the human but an immanent and sometimes latent capacity in life in all its
complexity. Life is consciousness, though not always an active consciousness.
Consciousness is the projection onto materiality of the possibility of a choice, a
decision whose outcome is not given in advance, which is to say, a mode of sim-
plifying or skeletalizing matter so that it affords us materials on and with which
to act.20 It is linked to the capacity for choice, for freedom. It is not tied to the
emergence of reason, to the capacity for reflection, or to some inherent quality of
the human. Life in its evolutionary forms expresses various degrees of freedom,
correlated with the extent and range of consciousness, which is itself correlated
with the various possibilities of action. The torpor or unconsciousness that char-
acterizes most plant life makes the concept of freedom largely irrelevant or oper-
ational only at its most minimal level insofar as choice or action is not generally
available to vegetal existence.21
Yet the most elementary forms of mobile life, animal existence from the pro-
tozoa upward, exhibit a kind of incipient freedom in some of their most significant
actions. The capacity for choiceeven if reduced to the choice of when and
where to contract or expand, when and what to eat, and so forthexpresses both
19 Most notably in Matter and Memory; The Creative Mind; Mind-Energy, and Creative Evolution.
20 Theoretically, then, everything living must be conscious. In principle, consciousness is
co-extensive with life. Bergson, Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1921), 8.
21 Even in the vegetable world, where the organism is generally fixed to the soil, the faculty of
movement is dormant rather than absent: it awakens when it can be of use. [] It appears to me
therefore extremely likely that consciousness, originally immanent in all that lives, is dormant
where there is no longer spontaneous movement. Ibid., 1011.
Matter 55
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
the particularity of each species and the specificity of individuals within them.22 Each
species, Bergson suggests, has the consciousness precisely appropriate to the range of
actions available to it: each species, and here Bergson anticipates the work of some
of the theoretical biologists to follow,23 has a world opened up to it within which its
organs have, through natural selection, the capacity to extract for it what it needs
for its ongoing existence. Each animal species, whether regulated by instinct as are
the social insects or by intelligence as occurs in gradations through the vertebrates,
has a world in which it can act, in which it requires a certain consciousness and in
which there is for it a fringe of freedom, a zone of indetermination that elevates
it above mere automated responses to given stimuli.
It is this zone of indetermination that for Bergson characterizes both the
freedom representative of life and the capacity for being otherwise that life can
bestow on (elements or factors of ) material organization. Indetermination is the
true principle of life, the condition for the open-ended action of living beings,
the ways in which living bodies are mobilized for action that cannot be specified in
advance.24 The degrees of indetermination are the degrees of freedom. Living bodies
act not simply or mainly through deliberation or conscious decision but through
indetermination, through the capacity they bring to the material world and objects
to make them useful for life in ways that cannot be specified in advance.25
Indetermination spreads from the living to the nonliving through the virtu-
ality that the living brings to the inorganic, the potential for the inorganic to be
otherwise, to lend itself to incorporation, transformation, and energetic protraction
in the life and activities of species and individuals: At the root of life there is an
effort to engraft on to the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of
indetermination.26 Life opens the universe to becoming more than it is.
22 The amoeba when in the presence of a substance which can be made food, pushes out towards
it filaments able to seize and enfold foreign bodies. These pseudopodia are real organs and therefore
mechanisms; but they are only temporary organs created for the particular purpose, and it seems
they still show the rudiments of a choice. From top to bottom, therefore, of the scale of animal
life we see being exercised, though the form is ever vaguer as we descend, the faculty of choice,
that is, the responding to a definite stimulus of movements more or less unforeseen. Ibid., 910.
23 See in particular Jakob von Uexkll, Theoretical Biology, trans. D. L. Mackinnon (London: Kegan Paul,
1926); Uexkll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. ODell (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Raymond Ruyer, No-finalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1952); and Gilbert Simondon, The Genesis of the Individual, trans. Mark Cohen and
Sanford Kwinter, in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1993).
24 Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 31.
25 Matter is inertia, geometry, necessity. But with life there appears free, predictable, movement.
The living being chooses or tends to choose. Its role is to create. In a world where everything
else is determined, a zone of indetermination surrounds it. To create the future requires prepara-
tory action in the present, to prepare what will be is to utilize what has been; life therefore is
employed from its start in conserving the past and anticipating the future in a duration in which
past, present and future tread one on another, forming an indivisible continuity. Such memory,
such anticipation, are consciousness itself. This is why, in right if not in fact, consciousness is
coextensive with life. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 13.
26 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 114.
56 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
But equally, Bergson argues, matter as a whole, the material universe, must
contain within itself the very conditions for the indeterminacy of the life which it
generated. Those mixtures or compounds may yield memory, history, and the past
and make them linger, press on, and remain relevant to the present and future.
Matter must contain as its most latent principle, its most virtual recess, the same
indeterminacy that life returns to it. This is the common point of binary terms
(matter and memory, extension and consciousness, space and duration) and that
which exceeds themthe fundamental interimplications of mind and matter, of life
and the inorganic, as well as their origins in the indeterminacy of the universe itself,
the point of their endosmosis, where matter expands into life and life contracts into
matter in pure duration. Life, and its growing complications through the evolutionary
elaboration, generates a reservoir of indetermination27 that it returns to the inor-
ganic universe to expand it and make it amenable to, and the resource for, life in its
multiple becomings; and matter in turn, while providing the resources and objects
of living activity, is also the internal condition of freedom as well as its external limit
or constraint. [The evolution of life] is at the mercy of the materiality which it has
had to assume. It is what each of us may experience in himself. Our freedom, in the
very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle
it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism.28
Materiality tends to determination; it gives itself up to calculation, precision,
and spatialization. But at the same time, it is also the field in and through which free
acts are generated through the encounter of life with matter and the capacity of each
to yield to the other its forms and forces, both its inertia and its dynamism. Matter,
inorganic matter, is both the contracting condition of determination and the dilating
expression of indetermination, and these two possibilities characterize both matter
in its inorganic forms and those organized material bodies that are living. Immersed
in matter and an eruption from it, life is the continuous negotiation with matter
that creates the conditions for its own expansion and the opening up of matter to
its own virtualities: [Life] was to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an
instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism,
and to use the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which
this very determinism had spread.29
As isolatable systems, fixed entities, objects with extrinsic relations to each
other, the material universe is the very source of regularity, predictability, and deter-
mination that enables a perceiving being to perform habitual actions with a measure
of some guarantee of efficacy. Yet as an interconnected whole, the universe itself
exhibits hesitation, uncertainty, and the openness to evolutionary emergence, that is,
the very indetermination that characterizes life. At its most contracted, the material
universe is regular, reborn at each moment, fully actual, and in the present. But at its
27 Ibid., 126.
28 Ibid., 127.
29 Ibid., 130.
Matter 57
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
most expansive, it is part of the flow of pure duration, carrying along the past with
the present, the virtual with the actual, and enabling them to give way to a future
they do not contain. The universe has this expansive possibility, the possibility of
being otherwise not because life recognizes it as such but because life can exist only
because of the simultaneity of the past with the present that matter affords it.30
Feminism and Freedom
Feminists have long assumed that, as a coercive form of constraint, it is patriarchy
and patriarchal power relations that have limited womens freedom by not making
available to women the full range of options for action that it affords men. And it is
certainly true that the range of choices available to women as a group is smaller
and more restricted than that available to men as a group. But the question of
freedom for women, or for any oppressed social group, is never simply a question
of expanding the range of available options so much as it is about transforming the
quality and activity of the subjects who choose and who make themselves through
how and what they do. Freedom is not so much linked to choice (a selection from
pregiven options or commodities) as it is to autonomy, and autonomy is linked to
the ability to make (or refuse to make) activities (including language and systems of
representation and value) ones own, that is, to integrate the activities one under-
takes into ones history, ones becoming.
Bergson has elucidated a concept of freedom that links it not to choice but to
innovation and invention. Freedom pertains to the realm of actions, processes, and
events that are not contained within, or predictable from, the present; it is that which
emerges, surprises, and cannot be entirely anticipated in advance. It is not a state
one is in or a quality that one has, but it resides in the activities one undertakes that
transform oneself and (a part of ) the world. It is not a property or right bestowed on,
or removed from, individuals by others, but a capacity or potentiality to act both in
accordance with ones past as well as out of character, in a manner that surprises.
Freedom is thus not primarily a capacity of mind but of body: it is linked to the bodys
capacity for movement, and thus its multiple possibilities of action. Freedom is not
an accomplishment granted by the grace or goodwill of the other but is attained only
through the struggle with matter, the struggle of bodies to become more than they are,
a struggle that occurs not only on the level of the individual but also of the species.
30 This is precisely what life isfreedom inserting itself into necessity, turning it to its profit. Life
would be an impossibility were the determinism of matter so absolute as to admit no relaxation.
Suppose, however, that at particular points matter shows a certain elasticity, then and there will be
opportunity for consciousness to install itself. It will have to humble itself at first; yet, once installed,
it will dilate, it will spread from its point of entry and not rest till it has conquered the whole, for
time is at its disposal and the slightest quantity of indetermination, by continually adding to itself,
will make up as much freedom as you like. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 1314.
58 Matter
ELIZABETH GROSZ
Freedom is the consequence of indetermination, the very indetermination that
characterizes both consciousness and perception. It is this indeterminationthe
discriminations of the real based on perception, the discriminations of interest that
consciousness performs on material objects, including other bodiesthat liberates
life from the immediacy and givenness of objects but also from the immediacy and
givenness of the past. Life is not the coincidence of the present with its past, its
history; it is also the forward thrust of a direction whose path is clear only in ret-
rospect. Indetermination liberates life from the constraints of the present. Life is
the protraction of the past into the present, the suffusing of matter with memory,
which is the capacity to contract matter into what is useful for future action and to
make matter function differently in the future than in the past. The spark of indeter-
mination that made life possible spreads through matter by means of the activities
that life performs on matter. As a result, the world itself comes to vibrate with its
possibilities for being otherwise.
So what does Bergsonism, or the philosophy of life, offer to feminist theory
over and above the liberal and Marxist, empiricist, or phenomenological conceptions
of freedom? If we rely on a conception of freedom that is linked to the controlling
power of the other, the socially dominant others, whether a class, a sex, a race, or
groups and individualsa view which all these conceptions in some way sharewe
abandon in advance the concept of autonomy. If freedom is that which is bestowed
on us by others, it cannot be lodged in autonomy, in the individuals inner cohesion
and historical continuity: it comes from outside, from rights granted to us rather
than capacities inherent in us. Freedom becomes transcendental rather than imma-
nent, other-oriented rather than autonomous, linked to being rather than to doing.
Such an understanding of freedom, at least from the point of view of a philosophy
of life, is reactive, secondary, peripheral, outside of life instead of being seen as the
very (inalienable) condition of life. Freedom is a question of degree rather than an
absolute right. It is attained rather than bestowed, and it functions through activity
rather than waiting passively for its moment. Being gay or straight, for example, is not
a question of choice (of options already given in their independent neutralitymen
or women as sexual objects, or masculine or feminine as modes of identification)
but an expression of who one is and what one enjoys doing, of ones being. It is an
expression of freedom without necessarily constraining itself to options already laid
out. Gayness (or straightness) is neither produced from causeswhether physio-
logical, genetic, neurological, or sociologicalnor is it the consequence of a free
choice among equally appealing given alternatives. It is the enactment of a freedom
that can refuse to constrain sexuality and sexual partners to any given function,
purpose, or activity, and that makes sexuality an open invention even as it carries
the burden of biological, cultural, and individual construction.
The problem of feminism is not the problem of womens lack of freedom, or
simply the constraints that patriarchal power relations impose on women and their
identities. If women are not, in some sense, free, feminism could not be possible. The
Matter 59
 FEMINISM, MATERIALISM, AND FREEDOM
problem, rather, is how to expand the variety of activities, including the activities of
knowledge-production, so that women and men may be able to act differently and
open up activities to new interests, perspectives, and frameworks hitherto not ade-
quately explored or invented. The problem is not how to give women more adequate
recognition (who is it that women require recognition from?), more rights, or more
of a voice, but how to enable more action, more making and doing, more difference.
That is, the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only how to give women
a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but how to enable
women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.
60 Matter
Is Marxism a Correlationism?
Diedrich Diederichsen
In this essay I deal with three complexes that I often discuss in other contexts as well:
questions of the visual arts, of fashion and diagnosis of the present, and of philos-
ophy, especially aesthetics and legitimating discourses that play an important role
in the visual arts. In the debates surrounding art and politics on the one hand, and
art and economy on the other, I feel it is important to adopt a vantage point com-
bining the two sets of problems; and to identify in the economic situation of artists
in general (and visual artists in particular) a hard and material web of reasons and
resistances that might explain what is political about contemporary artistic practice
in the sense of the politics of its economy, and how that relates to what makes up
that artistic practice economically. Specific living and working conditions are one
example, a highly specific type of self-exploitation, but also a highly specific new
production apparatus that harnesses leisure activity, audience mobilization, and
self-realization reflexes as economic resources.
Recently, two motifs have appeared that are already familiar from (or at least
preformed in) other discursive fields. Common to both discourses is what the
Austrian art journal Springerin has termed antihumanism, while others call it post-
humanism. What do they have to do with contemporary art, and why in the world
would I want to link them to Marxism?
Bruno Latours sociology, which is fairly well-known by now, can be described
as a continuation and escalation of constructivist positions. If constructivist theo-
ries take aspects of the world that are regarded as nature and disenchant them by
showing that they are man-made and hence criticizable and changeable, Latour
disenchants the humanist certainty of this distinction itself. He shows that man-
made phenomena are partially made or coproduced by things or other nonhuman
actorsor actants, as he also calls themarguing for the abandonment of a subject-
oriented, anthropocentric perspective on the construction of the social, which,
however, he continues to view as constructed.1 Unfortunately, in doing so he some-
times sacrifices the option of critique, which in earlier forms of constructivism was
still a plausible option, since those writers saw the world as partially constructed
This essay is loosely based on a paper given as part of the lecture series Power of Materials/
Politics of Materiality at the cx center for interdisciplinary studies, Academy of Fine Arts,
Munich. An expanded version appears in a volume based on that lecture series, Macht des Materials
Politik der Materialitt, ed. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014).
1 See, for example, Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Matter 61
 IS MARXISM A CORRELATIONISM?
by discourses like critique. At the same time, he gains a retraction of the somewhat
flippant sense, which constructivisms so frequently involve, that the world is at
humanitys disposal.
Unlike Latour, who as a historian of science originally based his reflections on
concrete laboratory situations, Quentin Meillassoux argues in strictly philosophical
terms and sets great store by doing so. His aim is to eradicate a fundamental flaw
of all philosophy since Kant: the distinction between a knowable world for con-
sciousness and a world of things in themselves that the philosophical consciousness
holds at a distance and whose discussion it denounces as a metaphysical holdover
deserving no further attention.2 Meillassoux calls this position and all philosophies
that share it correlationism, because they are only interested in the world in terms
of the co-reality of human consciousness, not for its own sake. In this context, my
point of departure, particularly with regard to a diagnosis of the present, could not
be further removed from the anti-correlationist position. The diagnostician of the
present is an even more extreme correlationist, because he or she not only posits
the relevance of the world for a/the consciousness of every question or problem but
its relevance for a decidedly transitory, especially fleeting consciousness of fashion.
It is paradoxical, then, that precisely my conviction that a thing that is in fashion
can never lack dignity altogether, that it must always have a certain minimal rele-
vance, should move me to engage with a discourse that wishes to banish from the
question of truth not only fashion but every other specific, historical, and otherwise
relativizing perspective of an interested consciousness as well.
Meillassoux takes modern measuring methods for dating fossils and the
technique of radiotelescopy as his starting points. With these, he argues, a sphere
becomes accessible in which the consciousness of those for whom the world other-
wise exclusively exists was not even present yet. Nevertheless, for this world, which
could not yet be differentiated into a world for consciousness and one in itself, accu-
rate data can be gathered regarding the earth, the solar system, and distant quasar
clusters. Meillassoux refers to objects from this timeformer things in themselves,
as it wereas arche-fossils. It was recently reported that around the year 1200
CEas we know from the annual rings of very old cedar treesmassive gamma-ray
bursts probably caused by the collision of two black holes struck our solar system,
including Earth. At the time, however, people were busy with the death of Richard
the Lionheart and the formation of guilds or, in the so-called Orient, with the firing
of tiles and decorative art forms. They did not have the necessary measuring instru-
ments, modern methods of scientific inquiry, or other forms of curiosity that would
have tipped them off to the relevance of gamma-ray bursts, so they simply missed
the gamma-ray burst entirely. It was one of the things in themselves that completely
escaped their consciousness. Today, however, former things in themselves like these
2 See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude : An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008).
62 Matter
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
have become measurable and datable; consequently, things in themselves do not
absolutely elude measurability and hence cognition in general. Of course, it might
be objected that the very design and specificity of measuring instruments are them-
selves correlational, but the Meillassoux school treats the arche-fossils and their
proven existence less as an epistemological argument against epistemology and for
ontology than as an indication of the correlational inconsistency of epistemology
and thus as an argument for an ontological reality that, for Meillassoux as for his
teacher, Alain Badiou, is accessible through mathematics.
The end point of Meillassouxs argument is the claim that the laws of nature
themselves are not necessary but ratheras was previously only the case for scien-
tific hypotheses about nature and the human formulation of its lawsnecessarily
contingent and that they only apply as long as they apply. Indeed, for Meillassoux the
only necessity is the contingency of the laws of nature. He rejects the three Kantian
options that Badiou sums up in his preface to Meillassouxs book After Finitude as
dogmatism, skepticism, and critique, instead holding out the prospect of a kind
of fundamental critiquealthough he doesnt call it thatthat embarks on the
adventure of cognizing a world in which everything could be otherwise, in which
people, for example, could rise from the dead. Meillassoux has been working for
years on a project entitled Linexistence divine, mythologized by his followers, in which
he seeks to show that the unprovoked arising of things such as cognition, suffering,
or pleasure is a rational concept and that more such outrageous things are therefore
likely to arise in the future.
These are the voyages of the Starship Philosophy. Its mission: to boldly go
where no man has gone before This, roughly speaking, was my first reaction upon
reading a manuscript by Meillassoux and finding out in what circles he is read and
admired. I was also reminded of something I said in philosophy class in my junior
year of high school, when during a group discussion of Kant, I objected that on
LSD the thing in itself could be cognitively accessed. Now, this comparison with
my teenage self is unfair, of course. Meillassoux takes great pains to back up his
philosophical sensationalism with undeniably brilliant arguments that are naturally
speculativethats the idea, after all. In the interest of fairness, even a diagnostician
of the present should avoid the temptation to categorize Meillassouxs philosophy
purely on the basis of its success and of the intellectual and spiritual needs of the
young men who are so excited about itand not just in keeping with the maxim
that one should always make ones opponents case as strong as possible. Assuming
he actually turns out to be an opponent: I am not interested in arguing with him
on his own terrainthat of metaphysical speculationnor in joining his all too
facile opponents in denouncing him as an escapist and an author of philosophical
adventure fiction.
I do wonder, however, why people who come predominantly from the Left
should respond with such enthusiasm to a philosophy that seems to reject the
central tenet of left-wing thought, the historicity of human societies, as doubly
Matter 63
 IS MARXISM A CORRELATIONISM?
anthropocentrically limitedas a purely human and therefore subjective knowledge
of a purely human activitybut which meticulously avoids the elephant in the room:
How does it feel about politics? From time to time, there are isolated answers, for
example, that metaphysics, which is after all what this school claims to be practicing,
can have nothing to do with politics and that political engagement and metaphys-
ical speculation are independent pursuits that must not be conflated. The attempts
to translate into political practice the dialogues with political philosophers such as
Slavoj iek and Badiou that Meillassoux does conduct and has conducted in the
past never progress beyond the identification of highly philosophical differences.
Badiou and iek, for example, argue (with or against Hegel) for the contingency
of necessity, whereas Meillassoux believes in the necessity of contingency. The
art world, which pays close attention to all this, is used to taking its political cues
from authors such as Badiou and iek, and their numerous comments on current
affairs. Presenting themselves as public intellectuals, the two philosophers revel in
the opportunity to connect their views on global politics and current events, wom-
ens rights, movies, and the Middle East (views that, in ieks case, are constantly
changing, while in Badious case they have been stubbornly the same for millions
of years) with their ideas on Hegel and thus to relieve their philosophy of a bit of its
abstractness. In Meillassouxs case, such bridges are impossible: after all, his term
for the world in thing-in-itself mode or the beyond of the correlational world is le
Grand Dehors (the Great Outdoors). Constructions like this are attractive and pop-
ular not just with a philosophy that is in search of a mission beyond administering
the conceptual status quo or offering support to aesthetic and cultural-studies proj-
ects. It is also appealing to artists who come not from the hegemonic visual arts but
from its fringes, where irony is less mandatory and where elegant detachment and
jaded theoretical sophistication are on the decline, where grand gestures, pathos,
and above all an often nebulous romanticism rise up from dark drones and jagged
Black Metal sounds.
Object-oriented philosophies, however, present another side, one based more
on Latour. In Graham Harman, object-oriented philosophy has found a mediator
between itself and more hard-core Speculative Realism; in Levi Bryant, a canny
diplomatic disseminator of the movement who Americanizes it and makes it less
dogmatic. Both Harman and Bryant draw their supporters less (or at least not exclu-
sively) from philosophical and artistic circles but also, emphatically, from a new,
deromanticized but politically radicalized ecological milieu. Evidently, speaking of
nonhuman things gives philosophical grounds for rejecting the priority of the human
or subjective standpoint because it is contradictory, illogical, or disproportionate
(that is, inconsistent with reality), but also finds conflict-based, not to say political
grounds, rooted in clashing interests, for straightening out and dusting off ontolo-
gies and metaphysics. There are grounds, as it were, in the secondary attributes of
things that make it necessary to change the way we think about the primary ones.
Marxismeven beyond The German Ideologymight well have something to say
64 Matter
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
about the relationship between politics and ontology that cannot simply be reduced
to its correlationism. Oversimplifying slightly, one might say that such political
grounds are better received and more often cited in the United States, especially
among ecological leftists, whereas the adventurous philosophical grounds seem
to make an impression on communities in France, Great Britain, and the global
art world, which have long been influenced by and excited about Deleuze, in large
part because, at least in the imaginations of most readers, it is not so outrageous to
go from geological times, which were already a point of departure for Deleuze and
Guattari, to the arche-fossils.
At this point, I would like to make another suggestion that may help unite
various strands I have broached here, namely, Speculative Realism and Object-
Oriented Ontology, the political past of most of the authors, the political agenda
of most of the readers, and finally, the role of the visual arts. My jumping-off point
is a consideration I have presented elsewhere on the role of labor in the creation of
value in the visual arts. Normally, reflections like these are dismissed on the grounds
that in the visual arts one is dealing with special objects whose value derives from
their singularity. Singularity here is understood in various ways: as pieces that are
absolutely rare, meaning, unique; as pieces that are incomparable within a system
of value and evaluation; or with reference to the inexplicable judgments of incom-
parable (collecting, curating, museum-going) subjects. I have sought to show that
all kinds of artworks, including the value assigned to them, its discursive presence,
and its function in regimes of attention, can be derived from the highly developed
collaboration of highly (formally and informally) qualified and dramatically under-
paid individualsand that their value drops wherever these forms of collaboration
are less well developed and engage with each other more sluggishly, less precisely,
where there is no nexus of hipsterdom, collectors money, intellectuals expertise,
and attractiveness technology at work. Moreover, I have tried to demonstrate
that the classical labor theory of value (as corrected by Marx from a value-critical
perspective) can be applied to this collaboration. When the time required for educa-
tion, including the often necessary hours of informal education in clubs and bars, is
incorporated into the calculation of an average socially necessary labor time, a very
plausible relationship turns up between production level and quality, labor time,
and value, generating ways to speak about exploitation and surplus value in the art
market with greater precision.
In the present context, however, what is important about these ideas is a by-
product of them. It turns out that one can abstract even further from the Marxian
theory of surplus value and its application to the art market and the production of
artistic objects and services, that the theory of exploitation it delineates can be framed
even more generally for production and being produced per se, for the interaction
with matter and material. This can be done by formulating a theory of surplus value
like the one I have just described, which reflects the interplay of formal and informal,
material and immaterial labor, as a theory of input/objectification and output for
Matter 65
 IS MARXISM A CORRELATIONISM?
purposes of exchange.3 Many minds, connections, beautiful physical attributes, fur-
nishings and elements of interior design, address list managers, artists bodies, art-
historical memes, quanta of knowledge, and trays of white wine invisibly contribute
in myriad ways to the production not of artworks but of valuable artworks, of objects
from which value can be output or extracted. Exchange value. The point of all such
abstraction from the theory of surplus value, however, must be that such output is
not fair and proportionate: it isnt the case that all the brain power, the incense and
inspiration, the perfumed scent of gallery openings are retrievable when I purchase an
artwork. Rather, what is retrievable is an exchange valuewhose quantity, however,
has something to do with the magnitude of the invested quantum of incense and per-
fumes, because that quantum defines an average range within which the price varies.
There are other objectification/output constructions that distort what is
invested in ways other than capitalist value creation. Indexical recording media like
audiotapes and film actually make it possible to output something that can be rec-
ognized as what was invested. To the extent that the input is mediatized, the output
resembles it (in ways specific to the medium employed). Mediatization is a different
form of disproportionality from value creation. There are others as well, or others
are conceivable. What they all have in common is the fact that they take periods of
time that a material in the broadest sense has spent together with a processing activity in
the broadest sense and transform them into an object that is socially defined by the
fact that it can be grasped without any inherent temporality, that it is crystalline and
yields a meaning, that it can be exchanged, played, or eaten. The common feature
of all these transformations is the fact that they produce disproportionalities, incon-
gruities; their transformations are curses, metamorphoses, not phased developments
that grow out of one another, like the evolutions that characterize production before
it is commercialized, but leaps, as Marx says at one point as well. The appearance
of diseases, wear and tear, and symptoms of use are further rewarding examples
that could be studied within the framework of this model. In so doing, it would be
important to conceptualize the transformation as value-neutral, to grasp the dispro-
portionality technically and to evaluate it in specific local instances, in order to avoid
either naturalizing exploitation or absolutizing proportionality.
With this in mind, however, it is possible to imagine another stage, beyond
commercialization and mediatization (which usually takes place for the sake of
commercialization, albeit according to the business model of reproduction, which
is largely destined for extinction in a digital culture industry). In this stage, there is
neither media nor a goal of transformation such as value, recording, or symptom
and hence no distinction between material and its processors, but simply two
substances that rub against each other because gravity and other co-actants cause
them to do so, with oil, gas, or marble produced in the end. All that we usually
3 See, for example, Diedrich Diederichsen, On (Surplus) Value in Art, trans. James Gussen (Rotterdam
and Berlin: Witte de With / Sternberg Press, 2008); and Diederichsen, People of Intensity, People of
Power: The Nietzsche Economy, trans. Gerrit Jackson, e-flux, no. 19 (October 2010).
66 Matter
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
know about this process as lay people is that it took an outrageously long time
before the friction or the gravity-induced pressure that some land mass applied to
some organic stratum yielded something BP could commercialize. The subsequent
output or extraction of energy from the oil or other raw material produced in this
way stands in grotesque disproportion to the telluric eons it took for the resources
thus exploited to come into being. This disproportion is a central topic of all eco-
logical economies. If the term exploitation is used here in all innocence and
without any ethical overtones, and it was used this way before the exploitation of
man by man became an object of condemnation, then perhaps one can argue along
the following lines: the temporal asymmetry between input and output, between
process and crystalline value or exchange value, might be seen as the basis for a
more fundamental materialist theory of exploitation that would encompass ecology
without reducing economy to a mere episode of natural history.
One of the Marxian-inspired positions that speak about ontology and pol-
itics is Alfred Sohn-Rethels discovery that Kantian epistemology is an effect of
capitalist real abstraction, that there is a relationship between the division of the
world into knowable and unknowable parts and the distinction between manual
and intellectual labor.4 Is the object-oriented, ecological reconstruction of reality,
of what lies beyond the reach of consciousness as something that is only provi-
sionally beyond its reach but with which we are still very much connected and may
even one day reach, is this reconstruction, understood in this way, an attempt to
reverse that division? And how is it supported by a notion of disproportionality
and asymmetry between production and retrieval time, between the processuality
of production and the form of retrieval?
In referring to this phenomenon as exploitation and presenting it as compa-
rable, by dint of its asymmetry, to mans exploitation of man, we are only doing
what every garden-variety ecologist already does. Except that to make condemnation
possibleindeed to allow for an ethical dimension of any kindthe ecologist must
introduce humanity as the victim, despite the fact that it is the latters egotism (or
capitalism as a version of it), which is actually the problem; it is humanitys fault.
Here, object-oriented philosophies and ontologies seem to offer a solution, in that
they seek to grant the object a right to speak (however that right might be exercised).
Ecuadors new constitution, in which local nature has constitutional status, is often
cited as an example. Otherwise, there are the many examples in the work of Latour
and his students, who almost insist that the activity of objects in their various conca-
tenations and assemblages be interpreted as speech, as the casting of a vote (Stimme).
By contrast, the criterion of asymmetry in the extraction of time makes it
easier to imagine a non-correlational theory of exploitation, at least on the horizon,
that would not be confined within the classical Western, humanistic framework of
4 See primarily his Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities, 1978).
Matter 67
 IS MARXISM A CORRELATIONISM? DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

the conceivability or imaginability of suffering, pleasure, good lives, and so on, but
would use noetic detours and crutches like the notion of ancestrality to conceptualize
disproportionalities even before any (necessarily perspectival) evaluation has taken
place. But is this merely a kind of cosmically inflated Marxism? Or does it enable
us to take up a strand of critical theory that, on the one hand, develops something
prefigured in Sohn-Rethels critique of Kant and, on the other, harks back to Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornos concept of instrumental reason, which can
also be read as a critique of correlationism?
Sohn-Rethel might be said to take the critique of correlationism off its ances-
tralist head and stand it on its historical feet by inscribing the absolutizing of a certain
a priori within the historical process of the development of the money economy.
From Meillassouxs side, one might object that it is not a critique of correlationism
when one simply replaces one datum of the history of consciousness with another.
It can only be a matter of historicization, one might counter, since ultimately the
critique of correlationism is a datum of history too, which relies on man-made aids
to thinking like the radio telescope and the identification of arche-fossils. It isnt
the man-made character of these techniques that is important, the Meillassouxians
might respond, but the fact that they are reliably able to communicate with the
reality unobserved by human beings.
At this point, I will leave Sohn-Rethel and Meillassoux alone and attempt
idea why anyone would bother with them, whereas Meillassouxs anti-correlationism
practically culminates in the assertion that such attributes not only exist but are
also philosophically accessible. Harman proposes a certain withdrawn-ness of
the primary attributes, but he continues to regard them as existing and ultimately
seeks philosophically to integrate them into an ontology of objects with his updated
version of Heideggers fourfold (Geviert): the quadruple object.5 All schools
agree on the violence instrumental reason does to objects by adapting, twisting, and
murdering them for the purposes of instrumental reasons users. The questions for
usand I will end with them hereare these: To what extent is instrumental reason
a violence directed against the primary attributes because it only sees the secondary
ones? To what extent is that violence a creation of correlationism or at least made
possible and justified by it? And to what extent is correlationism therefore a product
of that aspect of the Enlightenment (avoiding the word dialectic for diplomatic
reasons), which has also, in the final analysis, given us the capitalist mode of pro-
duction? Or is precisely this discovery of the contiguity of the Enlightenment and
capitalism, which was already hinted at by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, a historical datum,
an epiphenomenon of another economic and technological line of development and
therefore precisely not a datum of metaphysics?
Translated from the German by James Gussen

to explore the second question: Doesnt the critique of instrumental reason lead
to the critique of correlationism? Arent there many passages in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment that identify instrumental reason with the inability of human thought
to avoid becoming lodged within a perspectival and egotistical subjectivity? Isnt it,
at the very least, a small step from a critique that accuses reason of being subservient
to the problem-solving wishes of its owners to one that accuses it of only functioning
so long as it automatically regards the existence of what doesnt appear within its
horizon as worth ignoring?
The internal debate within the not-at-all homogeneous milieu of the object-
oriented and speculative thinkers is currently hashing out these questions, and
this too is above all due to Harmans negotiating and moderating efforts, which
tend to focus on the fine points of the classical philosophical problem of objects
primary and secondary attributes, their constants and variables, the essential and
the imputed. One can certainly complain that, in this as well as my other attempts
to translate the vocabulary and problems of one philosophical language into the
medium of another, I have unfairly left out the social or else that unfortunately the
social has not yet completely vanished (depending on ones position). There remains,
however, the desideratum of a political, non-esoteric, and non-technocratic philos-
ophy of ecology, which might justify these translation attempts.
For Harman, the primary attributes are a crucial point, because the possi-
bility of linking Speculative Realism and Latourian object-orientation effectively
depends on them. Latour says he doesnt care about primary attributes and has no 5 See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011).

68 Matter Matter 69
 Entering the Flow
Boris Groys

Traditionally, the main occupation of human culture has been the search for totality.
This search was dictated by the desire of human subjects to overcome their own par-
ticularity, to get rid of their specific points of view defined by their life forms,
and to find access to a general, universal worldview that would be valid everywhere
and at every time. This desire to transcend ones own particularity does not neces-
sarily originate in the ontological constitution of the subject itself. We know that the
particular is always subsumed, subjected to the whole. So the desire for totality is
simply the desire for freedom. And this desire again does not need to be interpreted
as being somehow inherent to human nature. We know historical examples of self-
liberation in the name of totality. So we are able to imitate these examplesas we
may imitate any other form of life.
Thus, we hear and read the myths that describe the emergence of the world,
its functioning, and its unavoidable end. In these myths we meet gods and demigods,
prophets and heroes. But we also read the philosophical and scientific treatises that
describe the world according to the principles of reason. In these texts we encounter
the transcendental subject, the unconscious, the absolute spirit, and many other
similar things. Now, all these narratives and discourses presuppose the ability of the
human mind to rise above the level of its material existence and gain access to God
or universal reasonto overcome its own finitude, its mortality. The access to the
totality is here the same as access to immortality.
However, during the period of modernity we got accustomed to the view
according to which human beings are incurably mortal, finite, and therefore ines-
capably determined by the specific material conditions of their existence. Humans
cannot escape these conditions even by flight of imagination because every such
flight always takes the reality of their existence as a starting point. In other words,
the materialist understanding of the world seems to deny human beings access to the
totality of the world that was secured to them by religious and philosophical tradi-
tion. According to this view we are merely able to improve the material conditions of
our existence, not overcome them. We can find a better position inside the whole of
the world, but not the central position that would allow us an overview of the totality
of the world. This understanding of materialism has certain cultural, economic,
and political implications that I wont pursue here. Rather, I would like to ask the
following question: Is this understanding correct, that is to say, truly materialist?
I would suggest that it is not. The materialist discourse, as it was initially
developed by Marx and Nietzsche, describes the world in permanent movement, in
fluxbe it the dynamics of productive forces or the Dionysian impulse. According

Matter 71
 ENTERING THE FLOW
to this materialist tradition, all things are finite but all of them are involved in the
infinite material flow. The materialist totality is then the totality of the flow. However,
the question is: Is it possible for a human being to enter the flow, to gain access to
its totality? On a certain very banal level the answer is, of course, yes: human beings
are things among other things in the world and thus subjected to the same universal
flow. They become ill, age, and die. So human bodies are always already in the flow.
The old-fashioned, metaphysical universality could be achieved only through very
special and complicated efforts. The materialist universality seems to be always
already there, achievable without any effort and without any price. Indeed, we need
not make any effort to be born and die and, generally, to go with the flow. Here the
materialist totality, the totality of the flow, is understood as a purely negative totality:
to reach this totality means simply to reject all attempts to escape into the fictive,
metaphysical, spiritual space beyond the material world and to abandon all dreams
of immortality, eternal truth, moral perfection, ideal beauty, and so forth.
However, even if human bodies are subjected to aging, death, and dissolution
in the flow of material processes, this does not mean that human persons are also
in flux. One can be born, live, and die under the same name, having the same citi-
zenship, the same CV, and the same website, in effect remaining the same person.
Our bodies are not the only material supports of our persons. From the moment
of our birth we are inscribed into certain social orderswithout our consent or
even knowledge of that fact. The material supports of our personality are the state
archives, medical records, passwords to certain Internet sites, etc. Of course, these
archives will also be destroyed by the material flow at some point in time. But this
destruction takes time that is non-commensurable with our lifetime. Our person-
ality survives our body, preventing our immediate access to the totality of the flow.
To destroy, or at least transform the archives that materially support our persons
during our lifetime, we need to initiate a revolution. The revolution is an artificial
acceleration of the world flow. It is an effect of impatience, an unwillingness to wait
until the existing order collapses by itself and liberates the personality. That is why
revolutionary practice is the only means by which the post-metaphysical, materi-
alist man can gain access to the totality of the flow. However, such a revolutionary
practice presupposes serious efforts on the side of the subject, requiring intelligence
and discipline comparable to those needed to achieve spiritual totality.
* in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of Necessity which consumes the whole
These revolutionary efforts of self-fluidization, understood as the dissolution of ones
own person, of ones own public image, are documented by modern and contempo-
rary art, just as the efforts of self-eternalization were documented by traditional art.
As specific material objects, artworks are perishable. But that cannot be said about
them as publicly accessible, visible forms. When its material support decays and
dissolves, the form of a particular artwork can be copied and placed on a different
material supportfor example, a digitized image accessible on the Internet. The
72 Matter
BORIS GROYS
history of art often demonstrates such substitutions of the old supports by new sup-
ports, including restoration and reconstruction efforts. Thus, as far as it is inscribed
in the archives of art history, an individual form of an artwork remains intact, notor
only marginallyaffected by the material flux. That means that to get access to the
flow, the form itself must be made fluid; it cannot become fluid by itself. And that is
the reason for the modern artistic revolutions. The fluidization of artistic form is the
means by which modern and contemporary art tries to achieve access to the totality
of the world. However, such fluidization does not come by itself; it requires additional
effort. I would like to discuss some examples of artistic practices of fluidization and
self-fluidization, and indicate some conditions and limitations of these practices.
Let us begin by a short consideration of Wagners notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Wagner introduced this notion in his programmatic treatise The Art-Work of the
Future, which he wrote in exile in Zurich after the end of the revolutionary uprisings
in Germany in 1848. In it, Wagner develops a project of an artwork (of the future)
that is heavily influenced by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. At the
beginning of the treatise Wagner states that the typical artist of his time is an egoist
completely isolated from the life of the people who practices his art for the luxury
of the rich, and that, in so doing, the typical artist exclusively follows the dictates
of fashion. The artist of the future must become radically different: He now can
only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself not to a love for
this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become
a communist, the unit all, the man God, the art-variety Art.1 Thus, becoming
Communist is possible only through self-renunciation, by self-dissolution in the
collective. Wagner writes: The last, completest renunciation (Entusserung) of his
personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can
only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death,
the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. The celebration
of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on.2 The individual must
die in order to establish the communist society. Admittedly, there remains a differ-
ence between the hero who sacrifices himself and the performer who makes this
sacrifice onstagethe Gesamtkunstwerk understood by Wagner as a music drama.
Nonetheless, Wagner insists that this difference is suspended, for the performer
not merely represents in the art-work the action of the fted hero, but repeats its
moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also,
individuality of his being.3 This repetition of the heros gesture by the performer
is effectuated by the dissolution of his or her particular artistic contribution to the
whole of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner characterizes the Gesamtkunstwerk in the
1 Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, in Richard Wagners Prose Works Vol. 1,
trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan, Paul, Trbner, and Co., 1895), 94.
2 Ibid., 199.
3 Ibid., 201.
Matter 73
 ENTERING THE FLOW
following way: The Great United Art-work, which must gather up each branch
of art to use it as a mean, and in some sense to undo it for the common aim of all.
Here not only does the individual dissolve itself in the social whole, but the indi-
vidual artistic positions and particular mediums lose their identities and dissolve
themselves into the materiality of the whole.
Nevertheless, according to Wagner, the performer of the role of the main hero
controls the whole staging of his self-demise, his descent into the material worlda
descent represented by the symbolic death of the hero on the stage. All other per-
formers and coworkers achieve their own artistic significance solely through partic-
ipation in this ritual of self-sacrifice performed by the hero. Wagner speaks of the
hero-performer as a dictator who mobilizes the collective of collaborators exclusively
with the goal of staging his own sacrifice in the name of this collective. After the
end of the sacrificial scene, the hero-performer is substituted by the next dictator.
In other words, the hero (and, accordingly, his performer) controls his self-sacrifice
from the beginning to the end. Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk shows us the descent
of the hero into the material flowbut not the flow itself. Communism remains a
remote ideal. Here the event of descent into the formless materiality of the world
becomes a forma form that can be repeated, restaged, reenacted.
In Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk the individual voice of a singer remains
identifiable, even if it is integrated into the whole of a music drama. Later Hugo
Ball dissolves the individual voice into the sound flow. Ball conceived the Cabaret
Voltaire in Zurich (where Wagner had written the Art-Work of the Future) as a
kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, inspired by Wassily Kandinsky and his abstract drama
Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound). Ball wrote about Kandinsky: He was concerned
with the regeneration of society through the union of all artistic mediums and forces.
[] It was inevitable that we should meet each other.4 In his diary Flight out of Time,
Ball writes (in the spring of 1916):
The human organ represents the soul, the individuality in its wanderings
with its demonic companions. The noises represent the backgroundthe
inarticulate, the disastrous, the decisive. [] In a typically compressed way
the poem shows the conflict of the vox humana (human voice) with a world
that threatens, ensnares, and destroys it, a world whose rhythm and noise
are ineluctable.5
About three months later (June 23, 1916), Ball writes that he has invented a new genre
of poems, Verse ohne Worte (poems without words) or Lautgedichte (sound poems).6
Sound poetry, as described by Ball, can be interpreted as the self-destruction of the
4 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 8.
5 Ibid., 57.
6 Ibid., 70.
74 Matter
BORIS GROYS
traditional poem, as an exposure of the downfall and disappearance of the indi-
vidual voice, the descent of the human form into the totality of material flow. Ball
describes the effect of the public reading of his first sound poem at the Cabaret
Voltaire in a following way: Then the lights went out, as I had ordered, and, bathed
in sweat, I was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop.7 The reading of his
sound poetry was experienced and described by Ball as an exhausting exposure of
the human voice to the demonic forces of noise. Ball wins this battle (becoming the
magical bishop), but only by radical exposure to these demonic forces, by allowing
them to reduce his own voice to pure noise, to senseless, purely material process.
The descent into material chaos is not presented here as a preliminary stage
that announces an impending return to the orderanalogous to the periods of revolu-
tionary chaos, social tumult, or carnival, as they were described for example by Roger
Caillois or Mikhail Bakhtin. To use the terminology from Walter Benjamins Critique
of Violence, the violence of the material flow is divine and not mythical violence
insofar as the destruction of the old order does not lead to the emergence of a new
order.8 But this divine violence is practiced here by an artist and not by God. The
Lautgedicht remains therefore merely a poemwith a beginning and an end, capable
of being copied and repeated. Here we have a documentation of a descent into the
flowbut not an access to the flow itself. The same can be said of the later attempts
of radical descent into the material chaosfluidization of the artistic form and cor-
responding self-fluidization. I mean here Guy Debords drive, the artistic practice
of Fluxus, or texts and filmssuch as Christoph Schlingensief s film workin
which the personality of the hero (or heroine) becomes decentered, deconstructed,
fluidized. All these texts and images show the limit that the artist necessarily reaches
as he stages the descent of an artistic form into the flow. At the end, only the doc-
umentation of the descent into the chaos and flow is produced; the image of the
flow itself remains elusive.
This limitation of a possible artistic access to the material flow was reflected on
by many artists, but I would like to use here as an example the art practice and writ-
ings of Kazimir Malevich. The Suprematist period of Malevichs art has its origin in
the opera Victory over the Sun (1913). It was staged through collaboration with the most
radical Russian avant-garde figures of the timethe poets Velimir Khlebnikov and
Aleksei Kruchenykh and the composer and artist Mikhail Matyushin. Malevich
authored the stage design. The opera was a Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian
sense of the word. It presented and celebrated the demise of the sunand with it
of the whole old cosmic order. Malevichs famous black square emerges for the first
time in the context of this operaas a part of its scenographyand symbolizes the
coming cosmic night, the hidden origin of all the material forces. In his writings,
7 Ibid., 71
8 See Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume
1: 19131926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 23652.
Matter 75
 ENTERING THE FLOW
Malevich often speaks about materialism as the ultimate horizon of his thinking
and art. Time and again he contends that art has to manifest the general fate of all
things, their common reality being disfiguration, dissolution, and disappearance into
the flow of material forces and uncontrollable material processes. According to this
view, Malevich continually tells the history of the new artfrom Czanne, Cubism,
and Futurism up to his own Suprematismas a history of the progressive disfigura-
tion and destruction of the traditional image as it was born in ancient Greece and
developed through Christian medieval art and the Renaissance. Thus, the question
arises: What can survive this work of permanent destruction?
Malevichs answer to this question is immediately plausible: the image of the
destruction of the image. The destruction cannot destroy its own image. Of course,
God can destroy the world without leaving a trace because God created the world
out of nothingness. But if God is dead, then an act of destruction without a visible
trace, without an image of destruction, becomes impossible. The death of God
means that no image can be infinitely stabilized; but it also means that no image
can be totally destroyed. For the first wave of the avant-garde and especially for
Malevich, the operation of destruction of the old artistic forms served precisely the
demonstration of the indestructibility of the material world. Every act of destruc-
tion leaves material traces. There is no fire without ashes, or, in other words, there
is no divine fire of total annihilation.
Malevich offers a good example of this attitude in his short but important
1919 text On the Museum. At that time the new Soviet government feared that
the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and
the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party
responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich pro-
tested against this pro-museum policy of Soviet power by calling on the state not to
intervene on behalf of the old art collections, because their destruction could open
the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote:
Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy one must not inter-
fere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life
that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder:
accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single
chemists shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that
they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy.
Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means: The aim (of this phar-
macy) will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and
all his arta mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than
actual representation (and take up less room).9
9 Kazimir Malevich, On the Museum, in Essays on Art 19151933, ed. Troels Anderson, trans. Xenia
Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (New York: George Wittenborn, 1971), 6872.
76 Matter
BORIS GROYS
Thus, Malevich proposes not to keep, not to save things that have to go but
to let them go without sentimentality and remorse. This radical acceptance of the
destructive work of time seems at first glance to be nihilistic. But, in fact, at the core
of this unsentimental attitude toward the art of the past lies a faith in the indestruc-
tible character of art as such. The avant-garde of the first wave let thingsincluding
the things of artgo away because it believed that something always remains, beyond
any human attempt of conservation. In this case the ashes remain, and can be also
treated as the artworks and put into the pharmacy that becomes here a new museum.
Black Square can be interpreted as the image of ashes, as the most perfect image
of destruction. But now the following question arises: Is Black Square the most perfect
image of the dark material chaos? If it is really so, then the Black Square is the final
point of any possible descent into the totality of the world flowthe perfect image of
this totality. However, then Black Square becomes a kind of true icon and the radical
avant-garde becomes a new church. The perfect chaos begins to look like a perfect
cosmos. Early enough, Malevich became aware of the dangers of such a claim of
supreme, even Suprematist perfectionand of striving toward perfection in general.
He was especially alarmed by the use of his Suprematist imagesand particularly
Black Squareby the artists of the post-revolutionary Russian Constructivism as a
foundation for the construction of a new order, of the new Communist world of
technical perfection and material production. And so Malevich began to compare the
Constructivist school, which transformed his Black Square from the image of material
chaos into an origin of the new world, with the Christian Church.
This comparison was famously drawn by Malevich in his treatise God is Not
Cast Down (1919).10 Here Malevich states that belief in the continuous perfecting of the
human condition through industrial progress is of the same order as the Christian belief
in the continuous perfecting of the human soul. Both Christianity and Communism
believe in the possibility of reaching the ultimate perfection, be it the Kingdom of God
or Communist utopia. Now, in this and later texts, Malevich begins to develop an
argument that can be characterized as a dialectics of imperfection. As I have already
said, Malevich defines both religion and modern technique (the factory, in his terms) as
striving for perfection: perfection of the individual soul in the case of religion, and per-
fection of the material world in the case of the factory. According to Malevich both proj-
ects cannot be realized because their realization would require an investment of infinite
time, energy, and effort from both the individual human being and mankind as a whole.
But humans are mortal. Their time and energy are finite. And this finitude of human
existence prevents humanity from achieving any kind of perfection, be it spiritual or
technical. As a mortal being, man is doomed to remain forever imperfect. But why is
this imperfection also a dialectical one? Because it is precisely this lack of timethe
lack of time to achieve perfectionthat opens to humanity the perspective of infinite
time. Less than perfect here means more than perfect because, if we were to have
10 Malevich, Essays on Art, 188222.
Matter 77
 ENTERING THE FLOW
enough time to become perfect, then the moment of achievement of this perfection
would be the last moment of our existence. We would have no further goal and no fur-
ther reason to exist. Thus, it is our failure to achieve perfection that opens an infinite
horizon of human and trans-human material existence. According to Malevich,
priests and engineers are incapable of opening this horizon because they cannot
abandon their pursuit of perfectioncannot relax, cannot accept imperfection and
failure as their true fate. However, artists can do that. They know that their bodies,
their vision, and their art are not and cannot be truly perfect and healthy. Rather,
they know themselves as being infected by the bacilli of change, illness, and death (as
Malevich describes it in his later text on the additional element in painting); and it is
precisely these bacilli that at the same time are the bacilli of art. The artists, according
to Malevich, should not immunize themselves against these bacilli but, to the con-
trary, should accept them, letting them destroy the old, traditional art patterns. For
Malevich art is a virus: it lives by continually changing its hosts and transforming itself
thorough time while still keeping its identity. That is why Malevich actually believes in
the trans-historical character of art. Art is material and materialist. And that means
that art can always survive the end of purely idealist, metaphysical, immaterial proj-
ects, be it the Kingdom of God or Communism. The movement of material forces
is non-teleological. As such it cannot reach its telos and come to an end.
In his later notes On the Concept of History (1940) in which he tried to
develop his own version of historical materialism, Benjamin famously evokes the
angel in Paul Klees Angelus Novus, carried by the wind of history but with his back
to the future, looking only toward the past.11 Benjamin describes the angel as seized
by terror as he sees all the promises of the future destroyed by the forces of history
and turned to ruins. But why is the angel surprised and terrorized by this view to
such an extent? Probably because, before turning his back to the future, he believed
in the possibility of a future realization of all the social, technical, and artistic proj-
ects. Malevich, however, is not an Angelus Novus. He is not shocked by what he
sees in the rearview window of his car. He expects from the future only destruction;
and so he is not surprised to see only ruins as this future comes. For Malevich there
is no difference between future and past. He sees ruins in every direction. Thus,
he remains relaxed and self-assurednever shocked, seized by terror or even sur-
prised. Malevichs theory of artas it was formulated in his polemics against the
Constructivistscan be read as an answer to the theory of divine violence described
by Benjamin. The artist accepts this infinite violence and appropriates it, allowing
himself be infected by it. And he lets this violence infect and destroy his own art,
making it ill. Malevich presents the history of art as a history of illness, of being
infected by the bacilli of divine violence that infiltrates and permanently destroys all
human orders. In our time Malevich is often accused of allowing his art to be infected
11 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4:
19381940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 389400.
78 Matter
BORIS GROYS
by the bacilli of figuration and even socialist realism during the Soviet period of
his artistic practice. The writings of the same time explain Malevichs ambiguous
attitude toward the social, political, and artistic developments of his time: he does
not invest them with any hope, any expectation of progress (this is also character-
istic of his reaction to film), but at the same time he accepts them as the necessary
illnesses of time and was ready to become infected, imperfect, transitory. In fact,
his Suprematist images are already imperfect, flowing, non-constructive, especially,
if we compare them to Mondrians paintings, for example.
Now it becomes clear that the descent into the material flow shares the fate
of the ascent into the contemplation of God or eternal ideas. Religious and philo-
sophical tradition demonstrates the repeated attempts to reach this contemplation,
but it never presents their results in a convincing form. All religious illuminations
and scientific evidence can be interpreted as products of our own imagination deter-
mined by the material conditions of our existence. But to the same degree and for
the same reason, we cannot assert any evidence of reaching the flow. In this sense
the material flow is as unreachable as eternal ideas. But at the same time we have
a collection of attempts to enter the flow. The documents of these attempts build
in their totality a kind of anti-archive similar to the pharmacy of ashes imagined
by Malevich. However, the anti-archive is also an archive. It demonstrates that the
material flow was never really entered, that the form never became really fluid. Now,
today, we are the heirs of these attempts to enter the flow, of these artistic revolu-
tionsand administrators of the archive of their traces that document their partial
successes and ultimate failure. What happened here is a certain return to order. That
does not mean the return to the normal, traditional imageas some postmodern
theoreticians and artists wanted itbut rather, the inscription of the avant-garde
revolutionary images into the archive as finite, solid, material documentations.
Today, the main place of archives of any kind is, of course, the Internet. The
Internet is often described in terms of a flowof information, data, etc. In fact, the
opposite is the case: the Internet is a reversal of the flow, the anti-flow, a means to
freeze, to stop the flow. In the times of modernity, the notion of the flowat least in
the context of image and text productionwas applied mainly to the flow of mass
reproduction and distribution of these texts and images. There is a famous descrip-
tion of this flow by Benjamin: the mechanical copies of certain historically inherited
originals or the copies that originally emerged as copies (photos, films, and so forth)
are siteless, deterritorialized, have no particular inscription in the historical time, and
therefore uncontrollably multiply themselves in the topologically indefinite media
space. Now, contemporary, digital reproduction is by no means siteless. Its circula-
tion is not topologically undetermined and it does not present itself in the form of
multiplicity. On the Internet, every data has an addressand, accordingly, a place.
This place is determined by the invisible genius locithe Internet address. The same
data with a different address is different data. Here the famous aura of originality
does not get lost in the process of circulation but, rather, becomes permanently
Matter 79
 ENTERING THE FLOW

substituted by other aurasby means of new Internet inscriptions. Thus, the cir-
culation of digital data on the Internet produces not copies but new originals. And
this circulation is perfectly traceable. Every movement from one address to another
address can beand isrecorded. The individual data never gets deterritorialized.
Moreover, every Internet image or text has not only its specific unique place but
also a unique time of appearance, and this moment of an individual appearance
is again traceable. It is not so much the digital image or text itself as the image or
text file, the digital data that remains identical through the process of its reproduc-
tion and distribution. But the image file is not an image. The image file is invisible.
The digital image is an effect of the visualization of the invisible image file, of the
invisible digital data. Accordingly, a digital image cannot be merely copied (as an
analogue, mechanically reproducible image can), but always only newly staged or
performed. Here, the image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as
it is generally known, is not identical to the piecethe score being not audible, but
silent. One can argue that digitalization turns the visual arts into performing arts.
And every new performance of the digital data can be and isas in the case of the
musical performancerecorded and archived on the Internet.

*
So the Internet presents us with a new material support for the artistic formand
also for a human personality. Here it is really important to remember the fact that
the Internet is a material thing and not an immaterial something. The Internet is a
sum of computers and other equipment, cables, and Wi-Fi. Its material support is
electricityand it does not work without a supply of electricity and power stations
that produce this supply. So the Internet is again a material archive that functions
between the material (in this case, electric) flow and the Platonic realm of pure
forms. Accordingly, the Internet provokes the attempts to bring it to flow. We know
the strategies of anonymity and pseudonymity that try to make the Internet fluidto
hide or dissimulate the personality of the user or so-called content provider behind
the produced data. But we also know the attempts (like the Singularity project, for
example) to use digitization as a way to a new concept of immortality (consisting in
rewriting the subject as a form [a soul] on a new medium). Now, the problem with
the material flow is again this: it is infinite and cannot be grasped by finite means.
And the Internet is perhaps big, but still finite. However, the collection of attempts
to reach the flow, even if these attempts were unsuccessful, has the privilege of being
truly material and finite because it consists of material documents. Also: this collec-
tion offers examples of overcoming ones own material identity that can be followed
by everyone. The search for material infinity can always be continued and joined by
others. We have here a connection with what can be called the universalist tradition.
And it is always possible to join this universalist tradition by bringing it into the flow,
by attempting to dissolve it. It is not necessary to really enter the flow. It is enough
to descend toward it and document this descent.

80 Matter
Fig. 1
 Fig. 3

Fig. 2
 Fig. 5

Fig. 4
 Possibility Spaces
Manuel DeLanda in Conversation with Christoph Cox

Christoph Cox: When realism was still a dirty word in continental

philosophy and cultural theory, you openly declared your commitment
to the position. What do you take realism to mean?

Manuel DeLanda: Realism refers to the belief that there is a world that exists
independently of our minds. It is about ontological commitments and implies
nothing about epistemology, ethics, or other areas of philosophy. It stands in
contrast not only with idealism, the belief that we create the world with our minds
(at least the knowable part of that world), but also with empiricism (or positivism),
which postulates that mind-independence is a property exclusively of what is
directly observable by humans. To illustrate this with a simple image: if a pow-
erful virus killed all of humanity tomorrow, a realist believes that ecosystems
and weather patterns, mountains and rivers, would still be there the day after
tomorrow, behaving pretty much in the way they behave today. But realists can
differ when it comes to specifying the contents of this mind-independent world.
The most influential realist philosopher of all time, Aristotle, believed that the
world contained not only individual entities, which are subject to corruption and
decay, but also species and genera, which are not. The latter he viewed as nonma-
terial essences that defined what individual entities were but that existed outside
of history, being eternal and invariant. My realism, like that of other materialists,
does not include essences as part of the mind-independent world, but only histor-
ically-determined entities, whether this history is cosmic, geological, biological,
or social. In addition, most materialists are not ontologically committed to any
transcendent entity, like gods or demons, heaven and hell. Only immanent entities,
those whose existence implies a material substratum, are legitimate inhabitants
of the world.

You argue that the philosophical and cultural left has largely abdicated
its long-standing commitment to materialism in favor of intellectual
approaches (for example, semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction,
and psychoanalysis) that are implicitly idealist.1 What is materialism
for you and what challenges does it pose to cultural and social theory today?

Conversation conducted by e-mail in September 2013.

1 See, for example, Manuel DeLanda, Materialism and Politics, in Deleuze: History and Science
(New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 2949.

Matter 87
 POSSIBILITY SPACES
Karl Marx himself was a realist philosopher, and certainly believed in the existence
of a material world and in impersonal forces shaping human history. He was, of
course, highly influential in the development of most social sciences in the twen-
tieth century, which means that many intellectuals in the humanities remain com-
mitted to some of his ideas, using words like capitalism or commodification
as if they were unproblematic. Because of this lingering commitment to Marxism,
these intellectuals think that they can be ontologically committed only to subjective
phenomena (as shaped by language) and still be materialists. Marx would be highly
embarrassed by them. Marxists in the first half of the century were acutely aware
of their differences with phenomenology (and were among the most vocal critics of
Heideggers ties to Nazism); but this incompatibility is entirely lost to contemporary
idealist intellectuals, who think they can mix and match ideas without any regard
to ontological commitments.
Gilles Deleuze has generally been considered a fellow traveler with other
post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Franois
Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray, several of whom were his good friends. You
read Deleuze very differently: as a scientifically and mathematically minded
realist philosopher. Why do you take him to be such an exemplary realist
and materialist?
Deleuze was close to Foucault and Lyotard, but not to Derrida, and certainly not
to Irigaray and her goofy notion of a masculinist epistemology. He wrote his
very first book on Hume, on the empiricist model of subjectivity, and with this
announced to everyone that he was not a Kantian, that he did not believe that sub-
jective experience is structured linguistically. This is crucial because acceptance
of the thesis of the linguisticality of experience leaves only one possible realist
position: essentialism. If the meaning of words determines what we perceive, then,
for the objects of perception to be mind-independent, meanings must capture their
essence. Thus, having rejected Kant, he was able to introduce scientific elements
into his thought (without the Kantian maneuver of the synthetic a priori). But
he does not accept science uncritically. He rejects the notion of an eternal and
immutable law of nature, which is a theological fossil, and suggests how to replace
it with a less transcendent, more immanent, concept: that of the structure of a
possibility space (or a virtual multiplicity). Now, Foucault seems to have accepted
this, since his own model of discourses is based on that notion, proposing a variety
of possibility spaces, like the space of possible objects of discourse, the space of
possible subjective stances, and so on. On the other hand, it is hard to tell just
exactly what Foucault thought about science because he only wrote about fields
like psychiatry, clinical medicine, grammar, economics, criminology, the study
of human sexuality, and so on. These fields may very well be mere discourses,
and are directly tied to the power of certain organizations (asylums, hospitals,
88 Matter
MANUEL DELANDA IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX
prisons); but physics, chemistry, and biology are certainly not. We will probably
never know what Foucault thought about the latter three fields and, hence, how
he viewed Deleuzes handling of them.
You often draw from mathematical fields such as differential geometry
and group theory. But what is the status of mathematics itself within
a materialist philosophy? How does one construct a materialist theory
of mathematics? Arent mathematical entities fundamentally ideal?
A materialist theory of mathematics begins by noting that most mathematical oper-
ations (from addition and multiplication to differentiation and integration) are algo-
rithmic: they are well-defined mechanical procedures. In other words, they are just as
material as software is. But there is more to math than that, in particular, to the math
applied in science. Here the mystery is why mathematical models work at all, why the
behavior of an equation can mimic the behavior of a laboratory phenomenon. The
transcendent answer is: the equation captures an immutable law. The immanent answer
is: the space of possible solutions to the equation overlaps with the space of possible
states for the phenomenon. This answer, of course, implies that one has developed
a realist account of the idea of the structure of a possibility space, an account that
philosophers since Bergson have tried to offer via the concept of the virtual. I have
given an extensive treatment of this notion, and proved its immanence (and hence
compatibility with materialism) in my book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.2 My
strategy there was to show that the concept of a virtual multiplicity (in all its different
variants) supplies the perfect tool to explain the genesis of form, in both the natural
and the social worlds. Every materialism needs a theory of the synthesis of form to
explain how the historical entities it postulates as mind-independent were generated
in the first place: the existence of solar systems, planets, ecosystems, animals and
plants, molecules and atoms, has to be explained by some historical process of syn-
thesis. Marx, of course, knew this, and adopted the Hegelian schema of the negation
of the negation as his model of synthesis. But a single a priori model cannot suffice.
A large variety of virtual multiplicities, on the other hand, coupled to material and
energetic processes of morphogenesis, can do a better job.
What about language? How does one construct a materialist theory of
language? Isnt language, too, ideal? Doesnt Deleuze suggest this with his
theory of sense?
Lets first clarify one point. A materialist can be ontologically committed to
mental entities (and their irreducibility to neurons) as much as anyone else.
As long as one believes in embodied minds whose existence is immanent to their
2 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002).
Matter 89
 POSSIBILITY SPACES
biological substratum, there is no problem. Moreover, when it comes to social
ontology, a materialist cannot use the phrase mind-independent to charac-
terize the ontological status of communities, institutional organizations, cities,
and other social entities. These are clearly not independent of our minds because
without minds there would be no community life, no organizational practices,
no urban processes, and so on. Thus, these social entities must be characterized
as existing independently of the content of our minds, that is, of our conceptions
of them: the dynamics of a community, organization, or city must be discovered
through rigorous empirical study; and our conceptions of them may turn out to
have been entirely wrong once all the evidence has been gathered. Thus, a mate-
rialist needs to believe in the existence of the contents of our minds, including
meanings. In Deleuzes theory of sense (developed in The Logic of Sense), he clearly
distinguishes sense from signification (the semantic content of words or
sentences), sense being more connected with significance (the capacity of
words or actions to make a difference).3 But Deleuzes position on language is
more clearly spelled out in the Postulates on Linguistics chapter of A Thousand
Plateaus, written with Flix Guattari.4
Now, if you view language as it began historically, that is, as oral language,
then its materiality is connected to the palate and the tongue, the lips and the
teeththe entire vocal apparatus needed to produce the patterned pulses of
air that make up its sounds. With the introduction of writing, this materiality
becomes more obvious: carvings on stone, ink on papyrus, or coded electric
pulses traveling the Internet. Then, given that populations of sounds or phys-
ical inscriptions are passed from one generation to another, and given that
this transmission is never perfect and includes variation, the entire population
can be assigned the capacity to evolve, just as genetic information can evolve.
In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, I provided a detailed account of this evo-
lution for few European languages, showing that when variation decreases (as
when the Roman Empire enforced the homogeneity of Latin) linguistic evolution
slows down, while when variation increases (when the Empire fell, and a multi-
plicity of Hispano-Romances, Italo-Romances, and Franco-Romances began to
diverge) it speeds up.5 This brings language within the purview of Information
Theory, which is not about ideal entities but about the physical coding of patterns
in a variety of media.
Another key ingredient in a materialist theory of language is to separate
meaning and reference. In the idealist tradition, you know what the referent of
a word is by consulting its meaning. But if you want to know if a piece of yellow
3 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles
Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
4 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 75110.
5 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 2000).
90 Matter
MANUEL DELANDA IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX
metal in your hand is gold (if it is the referent of the word gold) you do not
consult your dictionary, you pour a certain acid on the chunk of stuff and if it
melts it is gold, if not its fools gold. What this implies is that reference is linked
to nonlinguistic practices involving causal interventions in the world, and not just
mental semantic entities.
How does one construct a materialist account of thought? If such
a theory is an evolutionary one, isnt there an incompatibility between
an evolutionary epistemology and scientific realism, for the former
would guarantee only evolutionary survival and adaptation, not an
accurate account of reality in general.6
All that evolution could have done for the brain, in terms of increasing its cognitive
powers, is directly related to our hunter-gatherer lifestyles, since we spent hundreds
of thousands of years in that state. Agriculture and settled life, by contrast, is at
most ten thousand years old. So, clearly, evolution could not have equipped us to
think about mathematics, physics, or philosophy. The deep structure of reality has
been slowly discovered through a social epistemology involving entire communities
of practitioners, working over many generations. It is a kind of collective search of
possibility spaces, in which some of the abilities that we acquired evolutionarily
(many ways of intervening causally in the world) are present at the individual level,
but there is also an emergent collective effect that cannot be traced to biological
evolution. Besides, once one accepts that genes are not the only entity that can
evolve, that anything that is replicated with variation (from words to scientific instru-
ments) has this ability, there is no need to look to biology as the exclusive source of
cognitive capacities. I am currently working on a book on the history of chemistry,
to provide evidence that chemical knowledge was produced mostly through a social
or collective epistemology.
So you think that the structure of possibility spaces (and, in particular,
a collective exploration of such possibility spaces) can answer the question
of how human thoughtthe cognition of a particular organism, the evolu-
tion of which is contingently determinedcould transcend its contingent
particularity in order to capture the way the world really is (and not just the
way it is for this particular organism)?
Let me preface my answer with a few general remarks. First, in order for the
properties that characterize mind-independent entities not to be transcendent
(as in Aristotle) they must be viewed as emergent. An emergent property is a
6 For an elaboration of this point, see Ray Brassiers comments in Speculative Realism, Collapse 3
(November 2007): 31112.
Matter 91
 POSSIBILITY SPACES
property of a whole that arises from the interaction between its component parts.
If the parts cease to interact, the wholes properties cease to exist, hence they
are contingent on (and immanent to) those interactions. In addition, emergence
blocks reductionism: if the properties of a molecule cannot be reduced to those
of its component atoms, then chemistry cannot be reduced to physics. And for
similar reasons, biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, psychology to biology,
sociology to psychology, and so on. This already ensures that the world is open
ended, because we cant tell in advance what will emerge from future interactions.
Furthermore, in addition to properties, mind-independent entities are characterized
by their capacities to affect and be affected (what Deleuze calls affects). A knife
may be sharp (a property) but it also has the capacity to cut. The latter, though,
is relational, so it must be exercised with something that has the capacity to be
cut (cheese or bread, but not a solid block of titanium). This means that capac-
ities are even more open ended, since the pairs that interact cannot be listed in
advance: a knife has the capacity to kill when it interacts with a large organism,
that is, with an entity with the capacity to be killed. Hence, there is no such thing
as reality as it really is because reality changes, there are innovations, multiple
levels of emergence, and unpredictable capacities to affect and be affected. This
is why science has bifurcated into many autonomous fields, and why each field
(say, chemistry) has continued to bifurcate into inorganic, organic, physical, and
quantum chemistries.
Now, to return to your question. The reason why we need the concept of
a possibility space is precisely because of the difference between properties and
capacities. Both properties and capacities are real; but while properties are always
actual (the knife is either sharp or dull), capacities are only actual when they are
being exercised. Most of the time they are only potential (or virtual). So in order
to specify the kind of being they possess when not actually exercised, we need the
notion of virtuality. Something is virtual if it is real but not actual.
With respect to individual human beings and contingent evolution, the per-
ceptual and cognitive powers that evolution has equipped us with give us direct
access to a tiny portion of this open-ended world. We cant perceive beings that
are too small or too large, or becomings that are too slow or too fast. But we can
develop instrumentation (microscopes, telescopes, slow motion and stop-motion
films) that make those beings and becomings perceivable. We must also perform
causal interventions into these beings and becomings in order to discover what
their capacities are. In other words, we must intervene to actualize their virtual
capacities. And in the process of doing so, we generate new beings and becomings
that need separate study: the stuff that chemists research is substances and reac-
tions, but they produce thousands of new substances (and new potential reactions)
every year. They will never finish the job of finding out how chemical reality really
is. Objectivity is perfectly compatible with a knowledge that is partial, fallible,
and contingent.
92 Matter
MANUEL DELANDA IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX
Philosophers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have attacked
Deleuze for espousing vitalism.7 For these critics, vitalism is inherently
correlationist, humanist, or idealist, insofar as it construes nature in
the image of human beings, projecting life and perhaps even thought
(or, as Deleuze puts it, contemplation) onto inanimate nature. Is Deleuze
(and are you) a vitalist? And, if so, why isnt this vitalism problematic?
I do not believe that Deleuze espoused any kind of vitalism, at least not if we use
the word in the sense in which it was used in the nineteenth century, that is, as the
belief that there is special life force that sharply distinguishes the living from the
nonliving. Deleuze does use the word, but in relation to things like metals, which
is clearly not the same thing. As with many other things that he expresses in his dif-
ficult style, the exact point of speaking of a metallic vitalism is not immediately
clear; but it surely does not imply any kind of life force. Now, being a Humean about
subjectivity (that is, rejecting the linguisticality of experience) does allow him (as it
allowed Hume) to believe in a continuity between animal and human intelligence,
and therefore, to apply terms like contemplation to nonhuman entities without
any anthropomorphism. On the other hand, replacing the concept of an eternal
law with that of the structure of a possibility space, allows him to see that organic
and inorganic phenomena may share, in some cases, the same structure, the same
virtual multiplicity; and it is to these shared multiplicities that he refers to when he
uses vitalist terms. The hard philosophical work comes when, as a materialist, one
tries to tackle the question of the ontological status of these virtual multiplicities
that are shared by both living and non living entities: one has to make sure that the
dimension these multiplicities form (the plane of immanence) does not become
something transcendent. This is tough, but must be done, or else we are stuck with
the laws of nature, at least those of us who reject the silly slogan science is socially
constructed. In Intensive Science I tried to lay the foundation for such an immanent
account but, no doubt, a lot of work remains to be done.
Graham Harman and other new realist philosophers argue that the world is
fundamentally composed of objects. Why is an ontology of objects problematic,
and why are assemblages better ontological candidates than objects?
I am not sure why Harman wants to stick to objects. I do not deny that objects exist
(assemblages are objects), it is just that a full realist ontology must possess objects and
events, with a process being a series of events. We need both beings and becomings,
7 See Quentin Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the
Meaningless Sign, trans. Robin Mackay, in Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity
Since Structuralism, ed. Armen Avenessian and Suhail Malik (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming);
and Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
196ff and 227ff.
Matter 93
 POSSIBILITY SPACES

even though one can argue that a being is just a slow becoming and, vice versa,
a becoming is just a fast being. Think of the Himalayas, the perfect example of a being
thats been there since humans came around. The object status of the Himalayas consists
Object
in being a folded piece of lithosphere, folded under the pressure created by the clash
of the tectonic plates on top of which India and Central Asia ride. But, as it happens,
this clash is still going on (very slowly); some parts of the Tibetan Plateau are still
rising a few millimeters a year, so they are still being folded. Hence, the Himalayas
are really a very slow becoming. Furthermore, if objects are characterized both by
emergent properties and capacities, then we need events to account for the interac-
tions between parts that give rise to properties, and for the exercise of their capacities.
Interacting, cutting, killing, and so on, are all events. All this comes into play when
defining the most important notion in a realist ontology: causality. For the idealist,
causality is a concept that is as fundamental to organize subjective experience as are
the notions of space and time; for the empiricist, causality is the humanly observed
constant conjunction between a cause and its effect; for the realist, finally, causality
is entirely independent of the observer, being a relation between objective events,
a relation in which one event produces another event. Hence, if you impoverish your
ontology by including only objects, you deprive yourself of the means to define cau-
sality as a productive relation.

94 Matter
 Art and OOObjecthood
Graham Harman
in Conversation with Christoph Cox and Jenny Jaskey

Christoph Cox/Jenny Jaskey: Your work has focused on ontology and epis-
temologyon the nature of objects and their access to one another. And
yet scattered throughout your books and essays are suggestions that art and
aesthetics have central roles to play in ontology and metaphysicsindeed
that aesthetics becomes first philosophy.1 Could you elaborate on this
intriguing claim?

Graham Harman: To answer the question, Ill first need to back up and explain my gen-
eral philosophical position. When all is said and done, the most important current of
twentieth-century philosophy was phenomenologyEdmund Husserls breakthrough
and Martin Heideggers ingenious reversal of it. Some readers will be surprised if I say
that the last truly great period in philosophy ran from approximately 1890 through 1930.
You can certainly speak of the golden years of Paris in the 1960s, and there are even
more recent figures worth admiring. Nonetheless, I dont think the star philosophers of
today have sufficiently assimilated or transformed the breakthroughs of the period Im
holding up as a model. In many cases todays thinkers go back even further, to German
Idealism, and in my opinion they do so in a manner that shows their failure to assimilate
what Husserl, Heidegger, Whitehead, and Bergson did to move philosophy to a new
level. Im perfectly responsive to the insights found in authors such as Lacan, Badiou,
Deleuze, and even Derrida (whose style I detest, but who also has something to say). But
Ive never been inspired with awe by any of them, simply because I think the 18901930
period provides us with a more important springboard to the philosophy of the future.
But neither do I worship this period either: Kant was an even more important shift in
philosophy than Heidegger. In many ways Heidegger still operates within the Kantian
horizon. To summarize, I think its very important to remain open to the latest thing,
but always remembering that the third- or fourth-latest thing might offer something
more. Having said all this, Ill work back toward your question by explaining what is
so fascinating about phenomenology, despite my frustration with Husserls idealism.
Empiricism mocked the notion of individual objects by treating apples, chairs, and
spoons not as individual things, but as bundles of qualities that habitually seem
Conversation conducted by e-mail in March and April 2012.

1 Graham Harman, Vicarious Causation, Collapse 2 (March 2007): 205. Cf. Aesthetics as First
Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human, Naked Punch 09 (SummerFall 2007): 2130. Also
available at www.nakedpunch.com/articles/147.

Object 97
 ART AND OOOBJECTHOOD
to go together. To speak of one object underlying a multitude of qualities is to speak
of a traditional substance, which John Locke sarcastically described as I know not
what. Even in the twenty-first century, the basic strategy of the cutting-edge intellec-
tual is to regard objects as gullible fetishes of the commonplace mind, and to replace
them with something supposedly more genuine. Often this takes the form of under-
mining objects, a strategy that points to a deeper stratum of tiny physical particles or
mathematical structures lying at the basis of everything. This is the basic maneuver of
scientistic philosophy, which wants to treat minds and everything else as by-products
of deeper neurophysiological processes. But sometimes objects are overmined as
well, or reduced in an upward direction. If someone tells us that all realism is naive
realism, that there is no deeply hidden reality lying behind language or power, that
there are no things but only events, that there is nothing hiding behind the curtain, that
the supposed identity of the transcendental signified is merely an ontotheological form
of self-presencein all these cases, individual objects have been undermined rather
than overmined. Usually the two strategies feed off one another in a manner that I call
duomining, but lets leave that point for another time.
In order to prevent the undermining of philosophy by the natural sciences,
Husserl called for a turn to the phenomena in consciousness. Scientific theories
about the outer world are all mediated rather than direct forms of access. What
is directly accessible to us are the phenomena before the mind. Instead of naively
accepting the chemical theory of fire, we can explore in stunning detail the various
shadowy layers of our perception of a fire. When Husserl says, to the things them-
selves, he is not talking about Kants hidden things-in-themselves, but about phe-
nomena present in the mind. Now, I dont support Husserls bracketing of reality,
but I do very much support his insistence that more is going on in the phenomenal
realm than the empiricist bundles of qualities.
The paradox of Husserl is as follows. On the one hand hes a clear overminer,
since he does not actually overcome the realism/idealism divide through the fact
that that consciousness is always already outside itself in a world, as his admirers
too often claim. Instead, hes a sheer idealist: intentionality refers to immanent
objectivity, as Franz Brentano already knew.
But if Husserl is an idealist, hes an object-oriented idealist. Contrary to the
empiricist tradition, Husserl by no means reduces objects to bundles of qualities,
since objects are what can have many different qualities at different times while
remaining the same object. I see a mailbox first from ten meters away and then
from seventy meters; I paint the mailbox blue today and yellow tomorrow without
destroying it; I hang streamers from the mailbox or damage it with hammer-blows.
In all these cases I still consider it to be the same mailbox, and since were only
dealing with the phenomenal realm here, its good enough that I consider it to be
the same. Thus there is an unexpected tension in the phenomenal zone between,
on the one hand, a relatively durable object that I acknowledge across time and, on
the other, its wildly shifting patina of qualities: adumbrations, Husserl calls them.
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And yet Husserl does leave us stranded on the phenomenal level. For him there
is nothing that cannot, in principle, be encountered by some observing conscious-
ness. And this is the point where the young Heidegger strikes against his teacher.
For Husserl, everything must be presentable to consciousness. But for Heidegger,
things are not primarily appearances in consciousness, which make up only a small
portion of our existence. While consciously reflecting on some photograph or geo-
metrical theorem, we take so many other things for grantedthe couch and floor
on which I sit, the grammatical structure of the language I use, the political stability
of the city which prevents me from fearing gangs and looters, the oxygen I breathe,
the bodily organs on which I rely. Heidegger notes that most of these things become
visible only when they malfunction. Insofar as tools function smoothly, they tend
to remain invisible. In this way, Heideggers theory gives us a permanent strife
between concealed equipment lying in the background of experience, and revealed,
visible equipment that is consciously accessible usually because it has failed us in
some way. This is his famous tool-analysis, one of the most popular passages in
his 1927 masterwork Being and Time, but already presented to his Freiburg students
as early as 1919.
In some ways, my entire intellectual career is based on an attempt to radi-
calize Heideggers tool-analysis and draw far-reaching consequences from it. The
lazy way to read Heideggers analysis is this: all conscious theory and perception
emerges from an unconscious layer of practical activity. But this doesnt work, for
the simple reason that theory and praxis both fail in precisely the same way. It is true
that my theories and perceptions fail to exhaust the full reality of, say, a chair. The
chair always has a deeper reality not exhausted by my knowledge of it. But its also
true that my sitting in the chair does not exhaust the reality of the chair, which has
other qualities that may be detectable by dogs or mosquitoes but never by humans.
To repeat, theory and praxis both fail to exhaust their objects. There is a reality of the
object lying deeper than all human theoretical, perceptual, or practical activity. For
this reason, we cannot say that Heidegger is a pragmatist. Instead, he is a realist
who believes in objects deeper than any type of contact they might have with us.
We cannot make direct contact with any object; we always translate or distort them.
But we can radicalize the tool-analysis even further once we see that objects
translate and distort each other as well. Translation and distortion are not the tragic local
by-products of full-blown sentient consciousness, but form the structure of all rela-
tions, including inanimate ones. And this is the key to my object-oriented philosophy:
the world is filled with countless objects that withdraw from their relations with one
another. Objects do interact and affect each other, but this can only happen indirectly.
This has major implications for human cognition. There are those who say
that the truth must always be stated in good plain English. What they mean is
that truth consists of accurate propositional statements about how the world is. But
perhaps you can already see why, from my philosophical standpoint, it is impos-
sible to make accurate propositional statements about the world. Not because there
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is no reality and everything is just truth-effects produced by diverse cultural contexts,
or some such rubbish from the universities of the 1980s. No, there is a reality, but
we simply arent able to access it directly, in the form of unequivocal accurate prop-
ositions. The world is made of objects, not propositions, and Whitehead saw quite
clearly that propositions only give highly abstract versions of what they describe.
(In fact, I hold that Socrates already saw this.)
We can already see this in everyday language, where innuendos, hints, meta-
phors, and strategic silences are often more powerful means of communication than
clear propositional statements. Instead of asking for clear language, philosophy
ought to demand vivid languageanalytic philosophy has thousands of clear writers
but very few good ones, precisely because theyve convinced themselves that lack
of clarity is the principal cause of bad writing. On the contrary: one of the greatest
causes of banality in intellectual life is surely premature clarity. In fact, I wish that
premature clarity would become a common phrase in intellectual critique.
At last I can turn to face your question even more directly: In what sense
is aesthetics first philosophy? Precisely in the sense that artworks are irreducible
to clear propositional claims. If you create a work of art that can be paraphrased,
then youve done a poor job at art and should have done something else instead,
like write a political treatise.
The other point of resemblance between aesthetics and philosophy is that
unlike natural science, philosophy and the arts dont really make incremental progress.
It is reasonable to say that todays standard model of particle physics is better than the
physics of 1280 AD, but you cant really say that todays poets are better than Milton,
that the art of the 2011 Venice Biennale was better than Giotto, or that Professor X
at University Y is a better philosopher than Thomas Aquinas. Some aspects of the
older classic works may be dated, of course, but they are still much better than most
of what is being done in our time or any other. Like the arts, philosophy does not
advance by way of a collective labor of micro-insights, but requires a total fullness and
ripeness of the creating personality. Analytic philosophy really gets this point wrong,
and in the end it spells doom for the entire school. I expect it to vanish without much
of a trace, for the simple reason that analytic philosophers are read primarily by each
other, as terrible a sign in the humanities as it is a good one in the natural sciences.
If never direct, what sort of access do we have to real objects? What
distinguishes these objects from a sort of generalized noumenon, a thing-
in-itself that is no longer, as in Kant, the necessary correlate of a human-
world relationship but is now generalized beyond the human to include
the relationship of every object (animal, vegetable, mineral, and so forth)
to every other?
Lets start by supposing that there was no difference at all between Kants nou-
mena and my real objects. Even in that case, a great deal would already have been
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accomplished simply by expanding the sphere of the noumenal. For Kant, the only
role of the noumenal is to haunt humans with an awareness of their finitude. We
cannot even speak of object-object relations for Kant, since the thing-in-itself need
not be plural: after all, unity and plurality are categories of the understanding
for Kant, and hence in Kants world we cannot say whether the thing-in-itself
is one or many.
There are two basic metaphysical claims made by Kant. The first is the finitude
of human being, and that is the feature reversed initially by the German Idealists,
and in our own time again by Slavoj iek and Quentin Meillassoux (whose book is
called After Finitude for a reason). For my part, I think Kantian finitude is not only
irreversible, but ought also to be expanded well beyond the human sphere. And that
is the second basic metaphysical claim of Kant, though it is never made quite as
explicit as the first: since the thing-in-itself can only be thought and never known,
philosophy must confine itself to discussing the human-world relation rather than
the relation between raindrops and wood in themselves.
Lets consider a counterfactual possibility in the history of philosophy.
Following Kant, the process beginning with Salomon Maimon and Karl Reinhold
tried to radicalize Kant by eliminating the things-in-themselves as a hypocritical
contradiction. But what if we had kept the things-in-themselves and eliminated
instead the privilege of the human-world relation over all others? This wouldnt have
been entirely lacking in historical motivationthanks to Christian Wolff, German
academic philosophy was already awash in the Leibnizian way of looking at things.
Since the name Fichte means spruce, I once jokingly used another tree
name, Tannenbaum, for the nonexistent German philosopher who might have
replaced Johann Gottlieb Fichte and sent post-Kantian philosophy on a very dif-
ferent course. In response, Michael Austin in Newfoundland claimed that F. W. J.
Schelling already did everything that I could have hoped for from Tannenbaum,
but I dont think Austin is right about this. Schelling doesnt deal enough with
object-object relations to count as the true Tannenbaum. For Schelling its still about
nature and spirit, which is yet another version of the two familiar poles of human-
world correlationism. Why should spirit, mind, the subject, or the human make up
a full half of metaphysics? Science forever reminds us how tiny we are, how we are
just one isolated species in a vast cosmos. Certainly we are interested in humans
for the obvious reasons that we are humans ourselves, but why give this self-obses-
sion a full half of philosophy? Imagine a three-year-old boy narcissistically splitting
the world into two kinds of people: himself and all others. Thats essentially what
Descartes does when he makes cognition one of just two finite substances (physical
substance being the other).
To summarize in a way that answers your question more directly, there are
perhaps two differences between my real objects and the Kantian noumena: my real
objects are known to be plural (since plurality in the sensual world cannot be gener-
ated by a unified lump in the real world), and the relations between my real objects
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are on the same footing as human-world relations, whereas for Kant the latter is all
we can know about. For Kant, we cannot really deduce anything at all about the
collision of two inanimate rocks in distant space, nor can we even know whether
they are there as real plural things. For me, you can deduce as much about them as
you can about the ontology of the human distortion of such inanimate collisions
through observation.
How might artistic authorship be complicated by an object-oriented
approach?
My reaction here is mixed. On the one hand, Im all in favor of the death of the
author. Once youve created something, it exceeds you and is irreducible to whatever
hopes and intentions you may have had for it. Consider children as perhaps the most
obvious case. Parents have much to do with both the heredity and environment of
their child, yet the child exceeds the various causal influences of the parents, and
surprises those parents on a regular basis. The same is true of all the works and
deeds of human life. It would be stupid to explain an artwork entirely in terms of
its creator. All good works guide and astonish their creator, resist their creators
intentions, pull their creator in new directions, or are even flat-out misunderstood
by their creator. A work has a certain autonomy from the one who made it, even
before that person is dead. This needs to be qualified by saying that the author is
never entirely absent from the work. Im a passionate reader of biographies, and you
can learn a great deal about works from knowing something about the lives of their
authors. But the work is not an appendage to the life, and only some biographical
factors will leave traces in the work, not all.
On the other hand, I want to defend individual authorship from those who
simply want to replace it with a cultural authorshipas if Shakespeares plays were
produced by the Elizabethan Era as a whole rather than by William Shakespeare
the person. Here once more, the autonomy of the work is lostthis time in favor
of an overpowering social context. In my opinion this is even worse than individual
authorship, since at least if we focus on Shakespeare as an individual we remain a
bit closer to the individual character of the work. The death of the author must be
supplemented by the death of the culture.
Im well aware that it sounds old-fashioned to speak of artworks as having any
sort of autonomy. The current fashion, in philosophy as in the arts, is to dissolve
everything into a sociopolitical stew from which nothing is allowed to escape. Leftist
politics has replaced Christianity as a moralistic voice in the cultural world. But
philosophy and the arts are not here to save the world; they have a function both
larger and smaller than that.
Let me address a loosely related point. In February 2012 I gave a keynote
lecture at the transmediale festival in Berlin. During this lecture I praised Marshall
McLuhan, and there was no negative reaction from those Berliners who might
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prefer their own Friedrich Kittler to McLuhan. I also praised Heidegger, and even
though this meant praising a notorious Nazi in a city haunted by the ghosts of 1933,
no one reacted negatively. But I then praised Clement Greenberg (who was even
quite a Leftist, dont forget!) and the reaction was rather differenta long, loud hiss
sounded from somewhere in the third row, and then the most aggressive question
after the lecture was from someone else who demanded to know what was so good
about Greenberg.
Well, I think its quite obvious whats good about Greenberghes an incisive
critic, and also one of the great literary stylists of the twentieth century. And yet, so
deep is the hatred of him that there was also an angry reaction from an artist when
I spoke highly of Greenberg on Facebook! Why this visceral unanimity of distaste
across an entire profession? Its an indication that the arts at present are still too
much a reaction to the sort of high modernism Greenberg representswith its sup-
posed formalism, supposed elitism, and actual refusal to let artworks bleed into
their surroundings. Greenberg is the repressed bad conscience of contemporary
art. He was wrong about plenty of things, of course. I believe he was time-bound in
his commitment to the flat picture surface (as Michael Fried eventually conceded),
but he was quite right to demand a certain autonomy for art from its socio-political
context, and also right to insist that questions of quality will always be paramount.
Not all art is equally significant, just as not all philosophy is equally significant. And
theres a fairly obvious reason for this, which is that eventually everyone dies, and
fashion moves on, and some works in every field dig deeply enough that they can
survive the death of the environment that created them while others do not. Major
work is an escape pod jettisoned free of a crashing spaceship. None of us will be
here a century from now, but a small number of our works will be. Which ones?
Thats the question that critics are supposed to fight about, and Greenberg always
took frank positions on that question, which we ought to appreciate. So what if he
was wrong sometimes? Everybody is. You dont become an important thinker by
making the fewest possible number of mistakes (thats how teachers pets are made,
not thinkers) but by discovering the most incisive possible truths.
Quality is the right sense of elitism, and we can and do argue about what
constitutes quality, but I see no good reason to claim that it doesnt exist. Of
course there is also the wrong sense of elitism: the snobbery of the happen-to-be-
socially-elite who listened to mediocre classical music in the 1950s while missing
Charlie Parker, or who judge philosophers by what university department employs
them rather than by what they think and write. Great work is often somewhere
different from where the social elite is looking for it, but that doesnt mean that all
bebop was at Parkers level, or that every kazoo player is Charlie Parker. Elitism is
built into the structure of reality itself: not all food is equally clean and tasty, we
dont fall in love with everyone we meet, and not all cultural products are equally
good. It might often be difficult to reach consensus about these matters, but thats
a separate issue.
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But back to the main point of your question: how an object-oriented approach
might complicate our consideration of artworks. It certainly requires that we shift
our focus to the works and away from both the individuals and the societies that
produced themunless we can show that certain features of the authors and the
social contexts were somehow inscribed in the work itself.
Ultimately, an object-oriented strategy also requires that we treat works
as deeper than all their specific details. Phenomenology taught us that a chair is
something different from the sum total of chair-qualities that we currently perceive.
And a work of art or literature can remain the same work even if certain superficial
changes are made to it. These works are not bundles of qualities any more than
a chair is. One task of an object-oriented art and literary criticism, I think, would
be to imagine counterfactual cases in which certain features of any given work were
altered: How would the work be affected by each change, if at all? What if we add
or subtract this or that feature to a work by Raphael or de Kooning, or Wuthering
Heights? What would be the effect on the work? This question puts the artwork not
only beyond its author, but even beyond its own present configuration. On a practical
level, computers will enable us to explore these counterfactual situations with ease.
A basic yet very crucial aspect of art is its framein the general sense
of the term. Art of the past several decades (Conceptual art, institutional
critique, and so forth) has increasingly pointed to this perimeter function,
showing us how contextual factors, including arts modes of production
and distribution, contribute to its meaning (such that often the frame of
the work becomes incorporated into the art itself ). Im wondering where,
among the constellation of things inhabiting an object-oriented world,
art begins and ends for you. Does art have a frame (ontological bound-
aries)? Are those boundaries necessarily rooted in human perception?
There are maybe two ways to look at the frame of a thing. The usual way is the one
to which you refer, in which the frame is the excluded but important context of an
object, with the frequent implication that an object is always entangled in that which
supposedly lies outside it, so that all supposed autonomy is just a traditionalistic
sham. In philosophy, Jacques Derrida became the man of the hour because for him
the object vanishes into diffrance, always drawn beyond itself in dissemination rather
than burrowing deeper into itself in the supposedly naive classical manner. In the
arts, as you indicate, attention was shifted away from unified and durable physical
products to street performances, to the theatrical staging of transient works left to
rot if not actively shredded or incinerated, or to provocative gestures establishing that
just about anything could be an artwork if framed properly. And then the ultimate
trump card, in both philosophy and the arts, became politics. The political came to
be treated as the most all-encompassing frame for everything, and to believe other-
wise was to be nothing more than a simpleton or dupe hypnotized by the naive first
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appearance of things. The isolated object was trumped by a context lying outside
that object. Context was king, and it will still be king for a few years longer, I think.
But as I see it, the opposite is true. The supposedly isolated physical object
that we encounter is not isolated at all, since, after all, we are encountering it. It
already belongs in a relational context with me, the perceiver. In short, this suppos-
edly isolated object is always already over-contextualized through its relation to me,
and hence it is overkill to seek even more context by going outside that object to find
an ever broader framing mechanism that ultimately includes the gallery system, or
capitalism, or some other even more massive context. The real movement should
occur in the opposite directiontoward a decontextualization of the thing. And that
does not mean a naked physical thing sitting before our eyes, but a thing that is
deeper than what any eyes can grasp of it. In this sense, the frame of the thing
is not what lies just over the horizon, as Derrida believed in philosophy. The real
frame is what lies in the thing, deeper than any possible direct access to it, so that
the thing can only be approached obliquely. And this is why McLuhan is ultimately
a more important figure than Derrida.
Why so?
The first point is that McLuhan has a concept of reality, which is completely lacking
in Derrida. Suddenly its become fashionable to call Derrida a realist (Michael
Marders book is simply the most annoyingly written and argued of this genre).2 But
as far as I can tell, all such works are merely attempts to defang the word realism
so that it no longer lies outside Derridas writings as a potentially dangerous, unas-
similated enemy. In other words, none of these Derrida-as-realist books seem to be
saying what we would legitimately expect them to say: Derrideans up until now
have completely missed the point of his philosophy. In this book I shall attempt a
daring inversion of the traditional reading of Derrida and show that Derrida must,
contrary to all appearances, be read as a firm believer in a world independent of
human access. Instead, this new genre of books seems to be pretty much ratifying
the mainstream interpretation of Derrida, while simply denying that the word
realism poses a threat. Instead of reversing the usual interpretation of Derrida,
they do nothing more (from what Ive seen so far) than reverse the usual meaning of
realism. It would be like arguing that Marx was a conservative, then giving a rather
orthodox interpretation of Marx and simply trying to redefine the word conserva-
tive so that it now fits what Marx was already doing.
This is an intellectually dishonest maneuver, because Derrida is by no means
a realist in the traditional sense or any other feasible sense of the world. The whole
point of Of Grammatology, for instance, is to show that any idea of a transcendental
2 Michael Marder, The Event of the Thing : Derridas Post-Deconstructive Realism (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2011)
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signified outside the play of signifiers would be a bad ontotheology of presence. For
Heidegger, something real that is withdrawn from access is absent rather than present.
For Derrida it is quite differentif there were a real autonomous entity withdrawn
from human access, Derrida would still call this presence, since it would be a kind
of self-presence of identity even if it were entirely absent from the human gaze. This is
a major point of difference between Derrida and Heidegger, and it happens to occur
at precisely the point where Heidegger veers toward a bit of realism.
Derrida never follows Heidegger there. His diffrance is not a withdrawal
in Heideggers sense. Look again at the essay White Mythology.3 What bothers
Derrida in that piece is not only that Aristotle thinks that words have an original lit-
eral meaning, but the fact that Aristotle thinks that things have an original univocal
being. I would agree with Levi Bryant that Derrida does not reduce things to their
context. Everything always escapes its context for Derrida. But unlike for Heidegger,
that escape does not occur through some sort of dark subterranean withdrawal of
objects behind their presence (as for me, Heidegger, and Xavier Zubri). Instead,
Derridas diffrance is a horizontal gliding that always leads us outside the present
context toward other possible contexts, not toward the identity of an autonomous
being outside all contexts.
This antirealism is the first bad thing about Derrida. The second is that he
writes only about books, never about things. This is another frequent complaint
about Derrida that Derrideans pretend to ridicule, though they have no grounds
for doing so. The fact is, Derrida is simply unable to write about any bona fide
objects. Hes always writing about various mentions of objects by Joyce, Mallarm,
Anatole France, or whomever. Derrideans often become brash and combative
when this point is raised, but I have yet to see good examples of Derrida talking
about actual, full-blown objects. On this point simply compare Derrideans with
Latourians. Derrideans often focus their energy on discovering clever puns for their
titles, putting as many words as possible in parentheses, and interpreting literary
works. By contrast, Latourians go out and study volcanoes, steamships, apricots,
and other such entities. That tells you everything you need to know about the dif-
ference, and thus I was fairly stunned to see one prominent bloggers off-the-cuff
complaint that Derrida already knew everything that Bruno Latour knows. For
that is not the case. I think what happened is that people over-invested in Derrida
just as his sun was beginning to set, and they resent the fact that they now look a
bit old-fashioned. So were now seeing some revisionism in an attempt to recoup
some Derrida investment costs. I dont think hes a charlatan or any such thing;
that would be an absurd exaggeration. What I do think about Derrida is that hes
an overly mannered post-phenomenological figure who is no longer well-placed
for leadership given the direction that continental philosophy is beginning to
takea more frankly realist direction.
3 In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
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The third unfortunate feature of Derrida is his writing style, which I find
atrocious. He is wordy, distracting, and far too interested in enveloping the reader
in the folds of his own cleverness. Normally a good writer should disappear behind
the writing, yet Derrida disappears behind his writing less than any other successful
philosopher I can think of.
You asked why I find McLuhan to be a more important figure. First, unlike
Derrida, McLuhan has a genuine sense of the real: the background conditions of
any medium have a deeper effect on us than any play of content on the surface.
This links McLuhan more closely with the Heideggerian legacy than Derrida links
with it (more and more, I see Derrida as a Husserlian rather than a Heideggerian).
Second, unlike Derrida, McLuhan is able to talk about a wide range of entities.
His media laws work for any human artifact, as he and his son Eric tend to put
it. But this already begins to point to the limitations of McLuhan, since any theory
focused on the human realm in this manner will not be enough to do the job in our
emerging post-Kantian landscape.
As for the question of annoying writing styles, I dont find McLuhans style
annoying, though I can see why some people do. Admittedly, it can be overly flippant
and is often deliberately filled with riddles that dont always have a significant payoff.
In the late work, Marshall and Eric McLuhan develop their tetrad, or four-
fold law of media. I think this is one of the most important results of the humanities
in the twentieth century, even though McLuhans fans havent often joined me in this
verdict. By contrast, what is Derridas most durable insight? The pharmakon inter-
ests me more than anything else, but Derrida completely fails to link this idea to its
obvious kinship with Aristotelian substance, which can sustain opposite qualities at
different times. Why does Derrida fail to make this link? Its because of his obvious
bias against realism, a fact obscured by the recent word games of Marder and others.
According to your conception of allure, art functions by severing a thing
from its qualities in such a way that the sensual qualities presented
in the work of art point or allude to a real object that nevertheless
fundamentally withdraws from our (and any) experience or relation.
This aesthetic position may seem firmly representationalist (in an almost
Platonist or Kantian sense). While you certainly dont claim that works
of art can or do straightforwardly represent or imitate real objects, your
aesthetic position nonetheless maintains the key feature of any theory
of representation: a two-tiered structure in which one term or tier is
subordinate to the other, which serves as its content and to which it refers.
On your view, the work of art has no independent standing but is onto-
logically subordinate to an underlying (real) object to which it (always
inadequately) refers, points, or alludes. In constructing this aesthetic
theory, you draw on a number of twentieth-century philosophers, notably
Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Zubiri, Jos Ortega y Gasset, Max Black,
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and Emmanuel Levinas. Yet its hard to see how the aesthetics of allure
could account for major developments in twentieth-century artabstract
painting, sound poetry, and structuralist film, for examplethat challenge
the very structure of representation and assert the ontological indepen-
dence of the work of art; or artistic programs in which aesthetic interest has
nothing to do with representation, reference, or allusion, like Minimalism,
Conceptualism, institutional critique, and relational aesthetics. Finally, how
could the aesthetics of allure provide any account of music, which lacks the
two-tier structure necessary for representation, reference, or allusion?
There seem to be three main issues at play in this question: representationalism,
the two-tiered structure, and my reaction to recent forms of art that seem to escape
these categories. So, Ill answer in three stages.
First, despite what you say, Im a non-representational realist who is not at all
in favor of representation. There are two reasons for this, and you already conceded
one of them in your question when you admitted that I certainly dont claim that
works of art can or do straightforwardly represent or imitate real objects. Please
note that this is no small step on my part, since most realisms in philosophy have
not only maintained the existence of a real world outside the human mind, but have
also asserted that the human mind should attempt to copy that world. I view this
as utterly impossible, since no form of knowledge or perception can ever model the
world. An infinite number of true statements about a tree would never turn into a
tree, and hence we are left with obliquity and allusion as a way of referring to the
thing. This is what Socrates already meant with the word philosophia, which seems
to be of Pythagorean origin. Only the gods have wisdom. Humans are capable of
nothing better than the love of wisdom: we do not have direct access to reality in itself.
The second piece of evidence that Im not in favor of representationalism
is that I definitely do not say that artworks allude to a real object that they are
attempting to mimic. What I say instead is that artworks produce their own real
objects, rather than imitating preexistent ones. In Guerrilla Metaphysics I spend some
time with Blacks rather dull metaphor man is a wolf. In my account of Black, what
you end up with is a rather inscrutable human being surrounded by wolf-qualities that
it both attracts and repels. But were talking about a wolfish human that is produced
by the metaphor, not a preexistent objective human in the real world that is accurately
modeled by wolf-qualities. In the latter case you wouldnt have a metaphor; youd
just have a boring if accurate description of something. I say this because in some
parts of your question it seems like you think Im championing art as a mirror of
nature, and thats not the case.
Second, we are led to the question of a two-tiered model of the world. Lets start
by observing that I dont have a two-tiered model, but an infinitely-tiered model. Its
not just that human perception of a horse is a translation of the real horse, but also
that the real horse is a translation of its body parts (which are not fully exhausted by
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being elements in a horse), and these body parts are translations of tissues, which
are translations of cells, and so forth. So from the outset your question overlooks
what is most innovative about my position. Namely, two-tiered models always revolve
around the difference between an objective realm and a counterposed realm of
human experience or knowledge that possesses the uniquely godlike power to project
its fantasies onto hard reality. By contrast, my model makes every relation a form of
translation that does not fully exhaust that which it translates. In that sense, human
experience is shown to belong to the same class of phenomena as causal relation
and part-whole relations; theres nothing special about human representation at all
(for this reason it is wrong to compare my position to Kants).
You also worry that the reference to a reality beyond direct access amounts to
a form of subordination of the immediate sensual sphere to an objective reality
outside it. But in what sense is there subordination? Is a gold molecule subordi-
nate to the atoms of which it is composed? Well, it needs those atoms in order to
exist, but it would be equally accurate to say that the atoms are subordinate to
the larger molecule in turn, the larger thing that contains them. When Czanne
paints Mont Sainte-Victoire, are his paintings really subordinate to an objective
physical mountain? I think it would be closer to the truth to say that Czanne sub-
ordinates the mountain to his magnificent series of paintings, since the mountain
is world famous only because of Czanne. We arent speaking here of an original
and its deficient copy (and thus it is wrong to compare my position to Platos), but
of object and translation. Martin Luthers New Testament in German is no more
subordinate to the Greek original than the reverse.
I reject the idea that its somehow liberating to explode the notion of reality
and turn everything into appearance, process, flux, relation, interactivity. What may
be more useful is to say that liberation from reality is an idea once but no longer
liberating. We no longer live in the time of Nietzsche, when it was a bold maneuver
to launch assaults on reality-in-itself; now there are ten million people repeating
the same purported revolution, the same triumphalistic fait accompli.The valid
anti-representationalist critique must not turn into an anti-realist critique. There is
a reality outside the mind for the same reason that there are facts about me that are
not relevant to the United States, and features of atoms not relevant to a molecule.
Lets now move to the question of whether certain contemporary arts escape
the model I defend. It seems to me that much of this question rests on the false
assumption that I view art as imitative. In other words, you seem to be saying that
since music doesnt really copy any original, and since abstract art doesnt depict
recognizable entities, that my theory is therefore incorrect in these cases. However,
Ive never defended the idea of art as an imitation of normal everyday entities.
Artworks produce real objects rather than limping along behind them and trying
to produce a copy.
Music is actually not a good counter-example against object-oriented philo-
sophy, since music is absolutely full of objects. Melodies and phrases occur with
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regularity and are recognizable as the same things even when transposed into dif-
ferent keys or modes. Rhythms recur as familiar objects through all sorts of shifting
melodies. To say nothing of Wagnerian leitmotifs.
As for abstract art, the case against object-oriented philosophy here is equally
poor. Is a painting by Pollock just a series of sensual pixels not grouped into any larger
patterns? This seems obviously false. There may be no houses, mountains, biblical
heroes, or mallard ducks in a Pollock, but there are various bulbous nodules and spin-
ning filaments, and these are objects because each of them could have been modified
by Pollock within certain limits without changing their basic effect on the painting.
Minimalism? Its packed full with objects. Nor do I agree that allusion
is missing here. Minimalism may claim to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get oper-
ation, but its really not. Take a plain white block. You cant see all sides of the block
at once, but they are certainly there; the block is more than any given experience
of the block. This is a basic point of Husserls phenomenology, but the white block
isnt just an object of phenomenology. Those bare, minimal features allude to some
inner nucleus that animates all the ascetic features that surround it. And that nucleus
doesnt preexist the work, which proves that nothing is being represented or imitated.
What, then, is the relationship between the artistic object and (a) the real
object that withdraws from all relation, and (b) the sensuous object of our
experience?
Our normal experience is of sensual objects bound to their sensual qualities, to such
an extent that the former are often confused with the latter. Until Husserl, I know of
no other philosopher who fully grasped that there is such a thing as sensual objects
(which he calls intentional objects) that can endure through countless permuta-
tions of shifting accidental detail on their surface (the Abschattungen or adumbra-
tions, the same apple seen from numerous angles and distances in many different
lighting conditions and moods).
There are four kinds of bonds between objects and qualities: sensual objects
are bonded with sensual qualities and real ones, while real objects are bonded with
sensual qualities and real ones. Each of these bonds can be tampered with, and
thats how change occurs in the world.4
Lets start with the bond between sensual objects and sensual qualities. We
interfere with this bond by treating the sensual object as simply a separate unit
that can generate all kinds of new sensual appearances endlessly. In The Quadruple
Object, I called this kind of interference confrontation. But that was always the least
satisfying of the four names, and I now call it simulation instead. We simulate a
thing when we reduce it to a set of rules for producing a potentially endless series
of new appearances. And this is also what some people think Husserls intentional
4 See Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011).
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GRAHAM HARMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX AND JENNY JASKEY
objects are about: rules of appearance lying behind the entire series of appear-
ances. But this is nonsense. The intentional/sensual object for Husserl is not just
an algorithm. Its a bona fide object, even if not a real one.
Lets now take this same sensual object and tamper with the bond it has with its
real qualities. Remember that for Husserl (and here he is right), once we strip away all
the adumbrations of the thing we are left with the eidos of the thing. To realize what
the real features are of an intentional apple or horse is what we call theory. In any
theoretical enterprise, we are trying to grasp the truly pivotal features of whatever
object our theory studies.
The bond between real objects and real qualities has traditionally been called
essence, and I call it that as well. To tamper with this bond, in my view, is what we
call causality. In causation, one thing has to borrow the qualities of another.
And finally we arrive at your question, though I will modify your phrase
artistic object to speak more generally about allure. Allure concerns all events
that entail a broken relationship between a real object and its sensual qualities, and
this includes Heideggers broken hammer and other experiences of surprise, along
with a number of other things.
In allure, the sensual qualities are stripped from a sensual object and assigned to
a real object. I used to think this was an absent real object, but increasingly I think the
qualities are assigned to me the observer, who is a real object on the scene rather than
a hidden one off in the distance. In other words, perhaps the metaphor only thinks it is
getting at the hidden object in the depths, while instead it is using sensual qualities, in
combination with me as a real object, to produce a new but perhaps analogous object.
This is not as weird as it sounds, since it really just amounts to a different interpretation
of the old classical term mimesis, or imitation. Though mimesis usually is taken to mean
producing a copy of a real world outside the mind, my philosophy suggests that this
will never be possible. But what if instead of producing a copy, mimesis meant that we
ourselves tried to become an object other than ourselves, as if intellectual life were simply
a giant school of method acting? This idea would probably find favor with anthropolo-
gists, and possibly even with Aristotelians, since Aristotle asserts that poets should be
mad and should rant aloud and behave in character while writing their playsmuch
as Marlon Brando is said to have shown up already in character when auditioning for
The Godfather. It is not just flippant if I say that, instead of the cold, clinical, antiseptic,
transcendent subject, the knower in any field is more like Brando doing Vito Corleone.
Do melodies, phrases, and Pollocks bulbous nodules become objects simply
by our calling them such? If so, arent we led back to a sort of correlationism
by which the world is cut up into objects by subjects? And, if melodies,
phrases, and bulbous nodules are objects, surely sentences are objects, too.
If so, it seems odd to criticize some (literal) sentences and praise other
(metaphorical) sentences for their translations/distortions of the real, when,
by your account, every object necessarily translates/distorts every other.
Object 111
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If simply calling things objects turned them into real objects, wed be dealing with
something much more radical than correlationismit would be full-blown idealism.
So of course I dont think that. As for sensual objects, yes, it is our experience that
generates them, but this is ontologically harmless. If a child starts dreaming up
fantastic cities and monsters, it is not inflationary to call these sensual objects,
it is simply doing justice to the situation. But objects are real or not real in their own
right, quite independently of who calls them real.
I would say that sentences are objects, yes. But even if all sentences are objects,
it does not follow that all sentences make other objects present to the same degree.
All ice cream is equally ice cream, but there is a huge difference in quality between
them, and the same holds for sentences.
Good sentences and bad sentences are both translations of the world. Literal
statements and metaphors are both translations of the world. It doesnt follow that
they do the same thing in all other respects. Metaphors disturb the relation between
objects and their qualities, while literal statements do not. Literal statements treat
objects as though they were bundles of qualities. But metaphorical statements
know that the object is something distinct from its sum total of qualities. And they
succeed in communicating this to us, though some do it better than others. Not all
metaphors are equal.
Could you clarify your conception of the relationship between so-called
literal language (claimed by its proponents to consist of clear and accu-
rate propositional statements about how the world is), metaphorical
language, and the reality that you say we simply arent able to access
directly, in the form of unequivocal accurate propositions? You criti-
cize literal language for claiming to offer a genuine correspondence with
reality. What, then, is (ontologically, epistemologically) preferable about
metaphorical language? Does the latter give us better, if indirect, access
to the real? Does it better capture the withdrawn nature of the real?
Or is it better because it makes no attempt at correspondence or represen-
tation at all? You say that its more vivid, more powerful. But what
makes it so? Is this due to its novelty? This latter view would seem akin
to that of the early Nietzsche, for whom language (always abstract and
always expressing a human relationship to the world) is not interested
in correspondence with the real, and for whom the metaphorical differs
from the literal solely due to its novelty and sensuous power.5 By what
criteria do we determine whether one object offers a better or worse
translation of another?
5 See Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, in Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsches Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1979).
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GRAHAM HARMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX AND JENNY JASKEY
What makes metaphor more vivid than literal language, I would say, is that it seems
to create the thing before our eyes rather than simply describing it accurately from
the outside. If metaphor disturbs the relation between an object and its qualities,
it also transfers those qualities to a new object, and thus we actually are seeing an
object created before our eyes. It is different if I say: A pen is like a pencil. Here
the exact similarity in qualities is too great, and so I tend to focus on those qualities
alone. We can move toward an intermediate case, such as that of apt comparisons.
For instance: Krakow is like Prague, but quite a bit smaller. Here too we are atten-
tive to the shared similarities of both cities (which are fairly numerous), but theres
also a more striking metaphorical feel to the comparison, since we are tacitly asked
to think of a Czech Krakow or a Polish Prague, and hence there is something mildly
vivid about the similarity.
As another example, consider this sentence: Nashville is the capital
of Tennessee, and Jackson is the capital of Mississippi. Here we have a literal
statement of the sort that is taught to American schoolchildren. But now replace the
word Jackson and you have the following striking adage: Nashville is the capital
of Tennessee, and Memphis is the capital of Mississippi. Memphis, of course, is
literally located in Tennessee rather than Mississippi, but Memphis is the capital
of Mississippi rings all the truer for its literal falsity. It captures both the geo-
graphical proximity of Memphis to its neighboring state and the cultural resonance
between the two places. But if we say instead: Nashville is the capital of Tennessee,
and Rio de Janeiro is the capital of Mississippi, this might hit home in various
Dadaist or smart-alecky circles, but the transfer of Mississippi qualities to Rio de
Janeiro fails to brings us along with it, whereas it doesnt fail for Memphisat least
not if you know Mississippi and Memphis a bit. Such examples may work differ-
ently for some people than for others, but these are the sorts of things that people
justifiably bicker about, not the sorts of things that can be objectively percentiled
according to impersonal criteria. The criterion is always how vividly the qualities
fit with their new object. Too much fit (Jackson is the capital of Mississippi) and
you simply have a literal statement. Too little fit (Rio de Janeiro is the capital of
Mississippi) and you fail to carry most readers along with you. Vivid language lies
somewhere between the perfectly plausible and the perfectly implausible. By creating
a fit but an imperfect fit between object and qualities, metaphorical language both
makes objects present and gives us some information about them. Vivid language
ought to exaggerate and lie a bit, but not too much.
Heres another way to put it. The world is made of objects, but sensual
objects are too close to us and real objects are too far from us. Metaphorical lan-
guage cant perform the impossible magic of giving us direct contact with the real
(even a god cant do that). What it can do is generate new real objects before our
eyes. Why arent successful metaphors merely sensual objects? Because we ourselves
are implicated as a component in them, and we ourselves are real objects. Metaphor
breaks qualities free from objects, just as moons are occasionally torn away from
Object 113
 ART AND OOOBJECTHOOD
Saturn or Jupiter. And metaphor reassigns qualities to real objects, but to accessible
rather than inaccessible ones. And what is the only accessible real object in any
given situation? We ourselves. Not because we are capable of direct, untranslated
introspection (we arent; Im no less mysterious to myself than rain and billiard
balls are). But because we perform or execute ourselves at each moment, and in
metaphorical language we invite these qualities into our lives. We execute the
qualities of an orange just as a sensual orange was doing prior to its disintegration
via metaphor.
In the essay On Vicarious Causation, you write that the separation diate yes, given that I supposedly think everything can be an object. But for me
of a thing from its quality [the notion of allure thats key to your aesthetics]
is no longer a local phenomenon of human experience, but instead is
the root of all relations between real objects, including causal relations.
In other words, allure belongs to ontology as a whole, not to the special
metaphysics of animal perception. Relations between all real objects,
including mindless chunks of dirt, occur only by means of some form
of allusion. The impli-cation is that the notions of art and aesthetics
must be extended beyond the domain of the human, the animal, and
even the organic. What would such a generalized aesthetics look like?
It would look a lot like the world described in The Quadruple Object, though that
book had to be heavily compressed due to a word count limit.
The usual view is that causality and aesthetics are two completely separate
things. Causation occurs mechanically in an objective world of cold material slabs,
and aesthetics is a matter of freewheeling, arbitrary human projections. But most
observers have overlooked the remarkable similarities between causation and aes-
thetics as concerns their transformative power. There is also the fact that they either
happen or fail to happen, without much gradation between the two extremes. Either
the earthquake knocks the air conditioner out of your window onto the sidewalk or
it doesnt; either this sculpture affects me or it doesnt. You can say the same about
jokeseither you find them funny or you dont.
According to my model, art generates real objects and thereby shifts attention
below the surface of experience. By the same token, causation has to make contact
with objects below the surface on which things relate to one another. To come into
causal relation with a thing is not to come into contact with its surface, but with
something that has not yet exploded onto the surface.
I can never be a fire or a tree any more than I can be you, a plant, or a dog, so
obviously Im not proposing that we give first-person accounts of what the aesthetic
experience of an inanimate object is like. But we can start to work out the structure
of what the relation between objects is like. And Im saying that the aesthetic expe-
rience is much closer to that structure than is, say, the scientistic obsession with
clearly articulated explicit propositions about the world. (And I said scientistic,
114 Object
GRAHAM HARMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPH COX AND JENNY JASKEY
not scientific. I love the sciences. What I loathe are the self-appointed philosoph-
ical enforcers of the sciences, who lack the humility and the sense of wonder found
in the great scientists.)
Within your Speculative Realism, how would one distinguish between artistic
representation and material reality itself ? Certainly there is a difference,
but what is it? Are artworks just as real as everything else around us?
The second question is harder than it sounds. You might expect me to offer an imme-
the word real has a very specific meaning. My theory is often falsely summarized
as the belief that everything is real. Wikipedia said that for many months, and
wrongly so. My entire theory is based on the difference between real and sensual
objects. The tree, dog, candle, and mountain that I experience are not real objects
at all, just better or worse translations of other things that may be real. For me these
are nothing other than what Husserl calls intentional objects, though I call them
sensual objects instead. A real object is not dependent on the one who experiences
it, while a sensual object is dependent. If I fall asleep or die, the city of Cairo con-
tinues to exist, but my perception of Cairo disappears.
The question is whether an artwork continues to be an artwork when no one
is looking at it. My instinct is to say absolutely not, that its reality is generated not
only by the presence of an observer, but even an observer who is capable of under-
standing it. You cant just have noisy, distracted five-year-olds running through the
gallery, but need someone with a bit of taste to be present. But then Tristan Garcia,
the emerging French philosopher, recently made the case in his book Forme et objet
that the artwork continues to signify even when no one is looking at it.6 And maybe
hes right, but I cant decide yet. As for the first part of your question, Im not sure
that this is a bigger issue for aesthetics than it is for any other sort of human expe-
rience. In fact no kind of human experience is the same thing as material reality
itself, because experience is always a translation.
There is no such thing as direct access to anything, and its quite easy to grasp
this point if you think about it for a minute. An infinite amount of knowledge about a
tree would not itself be a tree. I challenge any of todays leading advocates of absolute
knowledge (such as my colleague Quentin Meillassoux, a marvelous philosopher) to
explain that difference. Theyd have to come up with some sort of theory about how
my knowledge of the tree shares the same form or structure as the tree itself, but that
the tree itself inheres in physical matter. And youll see that its already a fairly lame
outcome when theories of absolute knowledge have to rely on such a traditional and
undetermined concept of matter to explain the difference between a thing and
knowledge of that thing.
6 Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, trans. Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
Object 115
 ART AND OOOBJECTHOOD

So I would say that art generates realities, yes, but Im inclined to say that
someone has to be there as an ingredient in the reality. Does this threaten my idea
that causation itself has to have an aesthetic structure? Not at all, because causal
agents also have to be present for causation to happen. To say that artworks exist
while no one is observing them seems to be the equivalent of saying that gunpowder
is exploding even when no fire or spark is present.

Why, in order to be art objects, do such objects require attentive human

observers? Why human? And why attentive?

With human I was simply trying to make a concession. Quite often these days Im
treated (by iek and even by Meillassoux) as a wild panpsychist who wantonly ret-
rojects purely human attributes into rocks and bottle caps.7 So, by saying human
I simply wanted to avoid the impression of having too inflationary a vision of the art
world. Aesthetics is everywhere, even in inanimate causation; this follows directly
from my ontology. But not all aesthetics is necessarily art. Here we are dealing with
what is surely a much narrower realm, though one whose boundaries I find difficult
to draw. Yet it seems clear that even if a horsefly landing on the Winged Victory of
Samothrace is having an aesthetic experience (in my expanded ontological sense
of the term), by no means will it be experiencing that famously mutilated statue
as an artwork.
The word attentive is an even more harmless concession on my part. Unlike
Garcia in Forme et objet, I dont think that artworks are artworks even when no one is
experiencing them. A spectator is a real component of the artwork, just as an engine
is a real component of a car or Paris is a real component of France. It is possible to
stumble into a gallery in a drunken stupor and utterly miss some unknown (or even
known) masterpiece, because you arent doing the needed work, or arent paying
attention. Stated differently, attentive is simply a placeholder term for a fuller
theory of how the spectator serves as part of the artwork, while human is a place-
holder pending a fuller theory of cognitive gradations in the animal kingdom.
No philosophy is ever finished, and it is often necessary simply to mark out avenues
where we hope to work in the coming years orGod willingweeks.

7 Slavoj iek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(London: Verso, 2012), 640.

116 Object
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
 Sonic Thought
Christoph Cox

Philosophical aesthetics suffers from a peculiar arrogance toward its object of inquiry,
an arrogance that the non-philosopher Franois Laruelle calls the principle of
sufficient philosophy.1 With this clumsy phrase, Laruelle names the pretension of
philosophy to elevate itself above any object or discourse so as to offer a philosophy
of it: a philosophy of science, of art, of music, and so forth. For millennia, philosophy
has conceived itself as the queen of the sciences, claiming the ability to reveal
what its object cannot reveal about itself: the essence, nature, or fundamental reality
of that object. Philosophy thus dominates its object, subjecting it to philosophical
rule. Convinced that its object is fundamentally ignorant about itself, philosophy
is little concerned with what that object has to say on its own behalf.
How might one challenge this domination, allow the object to speak, put
it on equal footing with philosophical thinking, permit it to generate concepts rather
than solely to be subject to them? In the case of music and sound, what would it
mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound? How can sound alter or
inflect philosophy? What concepts and forms of thought can sound itself generate?
My aim here is to track some of the ways that philosophy has or could be inflected
by sound to produce not a philosophy of sound or music but a sonic philosophy.

Sonic Ontology

Sonic philosophy begins not from music as a set of cultural objects but from the
deeper experience of sound as flux, event, and effect. Arthur Schopenhauer and
Friedrich Nietzsche are exemplary figures here, for both present not a metaphysics
of music but a musical metaphysics. For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music
directly figures the world as it is in itself, the primary forces and movements that
drive all natural change, tension, creation, and destruction. In a passage celebrated
by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer writes: Music [] expresses the metaphysical to every-
thing physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomena. [] It gives the
innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things.2 Nietzsche famously
An earlier version of this essay appears in Artpulse, 2013 (www.artpulsemagazine.com/sonic-
philosophy).
1 See, for example, Franois Laruelle, A Summary of Non-Philosophy, in The Non-Philosophy Project,
ed. Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos Press, 2012), 25ff. In the context of aesthetics,
see Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), 3ff.
2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York:
Dover, 1969), 26263, quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, 16.

Object 123
 SONIC THOUGHT
argued that the relationship of music to images and objects is that of becoming
to being, a virtual flux to the relatively stable actual entities it discharges.3 That is,
music and sound present us with an ontology that unsettles our ordinary conception
of things. In philosophy, ontology is the subdiscipline that investigates being, deter-
mining what there is or what sorts of things exist. We ordinarily operate with an
ontology that begins and ends with what J. L. Austin wryly called moderate-sized
specimens of dry goods, the objects of our everyday experience: apples, chairs,
trees, cars, and so forth.4 This ordinary ontology extends to include larger objects
such as mountains or stars, and can accept scientific objects such as subatomic par-
ticles, provided that they are taken to be tiny versions of ordinary thingsstable,
solid, and durable, though very small. Indeed, when we speak of matter, we tend
to think solely of solid matter. Few would take liquids, gases, or plasmaswater, air,
or fire, for exampleas paradigms of matter.
This ordinary ontology privileges the senses of sight and touch; or rather, the
senses of sight and touch determine this everyday ontology. The invisible, intangible,
and ephemeral objects (so to speak) of smell, taste, and hearing seem to have only a
shadowy existence relative to the standard of the ordinary solid object, whose pres-
ence is guaranteed by eyes and fingers, and enshrined in common sense, which
names an entrenched hierarchy of the senses rather than some common agreement
among them. But surely sounds, odors, and tastes exist, and surely they are as
material as sticks and stones. Sounds, to take the example that concerns me here,
set eardrums aquiver, rattle walls, and shatter wine glasses. Indeed, sound is omni-
present and inescapable. Lacking earlids, we are forever and inescapably bathed in
sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not immersed in a world of visible objects.
An attention to sound, then, will provoke us to modify our everyday ontology and
our common sense conception of matter. Sound lends credence to a very different
sort of ontology and materialism, a conception of being and matter that can account
for objecthood better than an ontology of objects can account for sounds.
Sonic Flux
Music has always posed an ontological problem, for (unlike the score or the recording
that attempt to capture it) it is intangible and evanescent but nonetheless powerfully
physical. This ontological problem is compounded by sound art, which, from its very
inception in the late 1960s, challenged the ontology of objects and, in particular, the
modernist work of art. Though clearly an outgrowth of the Cagean tradition in experi-
mental music, sound art emerged within the milieu of Post-Minimalist practices in the
3 See Friedrich Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy, 5, 6, 8. For more about Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche on music and sound, see Christoph Cox, Beyond Representation and Signification:
Toward a Sonic Materialism, Journal of Visual Culture , vol. 10, no. 2 (August 2011): 14561.
4 J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 8.
124 Object
CHRISTOPH COX
visual arts fostered by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Michael Asher,
and others whose emphasis on process, multisensory experience, and immersion defied
the autonomy, medium-specificity, and purely visual or optical conception of art char-
acteristic of high modernism, most famously articulated by Clement Greenberg.5 Post-
Minimalisms challenge to these features of modernism opened two different paths
for artistic practice. Art could pursue the dematerialization of the art object6 by
way of the concept, the idea, language, and discourse; or it could pursue an expanded
conception of matter extending beyond the limited domain of ordinary, middle-sized,
visual and tactile objects (paintings and sculptures, for example), a notion of matter
understood as a profusion of energetic fluxes. While a few artists saw these two paths
as parallel rather than divergent, Conceptual art tended to follow the first path, sound
art the second. In so doing, Conceptualism was bolstered by a set of latently idealist
theoretical programs insistent that our access to the real is fundamentally discursive,
thus dismissing any notion of nondiscursive perception, materiality, or reality.
During the 1970s and 80s, these critical programs came to dominate the
visual and literary arts, offering powerful, sophisticated, and effective analyses of
images and texts. By contrast, the provocation posed by sound art was not extensively
pursued philosophically or theoretically. As a result, sound art was left without a
robust theoretical basis or mode of apprehension and was thus relegated to a minor
status, at best an adjunct to music, at worst a naive or retrograde incursion into the
visual arts. Thus, while Conceptual art became a dominant concern for art histo-
rians and critics and a pervasive influence on the art of the past half-century, sound
art remained (until recently) a neglected and underground mode of art-making that
attracted very little critical or art historical analysis. It is no coincidence that the
emergence of powerful realist and materialist philosophies since the late 1990s has
been paralleled by a renewed interest in sound.
Sound arts greatest forefather, John Cage, invited us to think of sound and
music not as bounded by musical works but in deeply realist and materialist terms
as an anonymous flux that precedes and exceeds human contributions to it. This
conception of sound courses through the history of sound art, from Max Neuhauss
Times Square, La Monte Youngs Dream House, and Alvin Luciers Music on a Long
Thin Wire to Christina Kubischs Electrical Walks, Francisco Lpezs trilogy of the
Americas, and the work of contemporary soundscape artists such as Chris Watson,
Jana Winderen, and Toshiya Tsunoda. If we accept this Cagean conception, sound
constitutes one flux among many, joining the profusion of flows catalogued by
Manuel DeLanda in his magnificent book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, which
conceives all of nature and culture as a collection of flowsflows of lava, genes,
5 Notably in Modernist Painting, in Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a
Vengeance, 19571969, ed. John OBrian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), but also in
Sculpture in Our Time, in the same volume.
6 See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973).
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 SONIC THOUGHT
bodies, language, money, information, and so onthat are solidified and liquefied,
captured, and released by way of various processes that are isomorphic across these
various domains.7 Yet, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche pointed out, the sonic flux is
not just one flow among many; it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and
forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world.
Sonic Events
Sound, then, affirms an ontology of flux in which objects are merely temporary concre-
tions of fluid processes. This flux ontology replaces objects with events, an idea nicely
demonstrated in Casey OCallaghans book Sounds, which provides another exemplary
instance of sonic philosophy.8 Sounds are intangible, ephemeral, and invisible; but,
OCallaghan shows, they are nonetheless real and mind-independent. Sounds persist in
time and survive changes to their properties and qualities. Thus, they cant be treated
as secondary qualities (such as colors or tastes) that are relative to their observers; nor
are they the properties of their sources, which cause or generate them but nonetheless
remain distinct and separate. In short, sounds are not tied to objects or minds but
are independently existing entities. This is exactly what Pierre Schaeffer (the father
of musique concrte and one of the progenitors of sound art) aimed to show in his
analysis of the objet sonore: the sonorous object considered independently of its source,
an entity to which audio recording draws attention but that ordinary experience also
routinely encounters.9 For Schaeffer, the sonorous object has a peculiar existence dis-
tinct from the instrument that produces it, the medium in or on which it exists, and
the mind of the listener. Sounds are not qualities of objects or subjects; rather, they
are ontological particulars and individuals. Yet Schaeffers language of the sonorous
object misses the mark. For sounds are peculiarly temporal and durational, tied to
the qualities they exhibit over time. If sounds are particulars or individuals, then they
are so not as static objects but as temporal events.10
Sound Effects
This ontology of events is unsettling for it proposes that happenings, becomings,
and changes exist independently of the subjects and objects that produce or undergo
them. To put it another way, it gives priority to the verb, which is no longer con-
ceived as subordinate to the noun. This is exactly the view proposed by that sonic
7 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
8 Casey OCallaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
9 Pierre Schaeffer, Acousmatics, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and
Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 7681.
10 See OCallaghan, Sounds, 11, 2627, 5771.
126 Object
CHRISTOPH COX
philosopher Nietzsche, who argues that there is no being behind doing, effecting,
becoming; the doer is only a fiction added to the deedthe deed is everything.11 Or
as Henri Bergson put it: There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things
which change: change has no need of a support.12 And if sonic philosophy liberates the
deed from the doer, becoming from being, the verb from the noun, it also liberates
the effect from the cause. This ontology of the causeless effect is richly developed
by Gilles Deleuze, who, inspired by the Stoics, distinguishes between two kinds of
entities.13 In the first place, there exist bodies that have various qualities, that act and
are acted upon, and that inhabit states of affairs in the world. Yet, in addition to
bodies, there exist incorporeal events or effects that are caused by bodies but differ in
nature from them. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze asks us to think the ontology of the verb
as distinct from that of the noun (bodies) and adjective (qualities): the verb as a pure
becoming independent of a subject. Such becomings are best captured by verbs in
the infinitive (to cut, to eat, to redden), which have no subject and are bound
to no particular context.14 They simply describe various powers of alteration in the
world, powers of becoming that are variously instantiated.
As continuously varying fluxes that are separable from their causes and main-
tain their own independent existence, sounds exemplify this ontology of events and
becomings, and do so in two senses. In the first place, sounds are not punctual or
static objects but temporal, durational flows. In this they accord with an empirical
account of events and becomings as processes and alterations. Yet, beyond this empir-
ical sense, sounds are also events and becomings in another sense: a pure, incor-
poreal, or ideal sense. We saw that sounds are not only events but effects,
results of bodily causes that are nonetheless distinct from those causes and that
have an independent existence of their own. But sounds are effects in another sense
as well, in the sense in which scientists speak of the Kelvin effect, the butterfly
effect, or the Zeeman effect.15 Such descriptions refer to recurrent patterns of
possibility, diffuse multiplicities that nevertheless have a coherence or consistency.
The isolation or individuation of such effects is very different than that of a thing,
substance, subject, or person. Deleuze calls them haecceities, which names a mode
of individuation characteristic of events: a wind (the mistral or sirocco, for example),
a river, a climate, an hour of the day, a mood.16 Effects of this sort arise historically
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, 13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 481.
12 Henri Bergson, The Perception of Change, in The Creative Mind (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 122
(emphasis in the original).
13 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), 4ff; Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987), 6366; A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 86ff; and What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 21, 1267, 156ff.
14 See Logic of Sense, 18285.
15 See Logic of Sense, 7, 70, 18182.
16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 261; cf. Dialogues, 92ff, 15152.
Object 127
 SONIC THOUGHT
(hence their frequent attribution to the scientist who isolated them) but are recur-
rent, forming relative invariants that are irreducible to their empirical instances.
This notion of effect, independent of cause, has a broad and important set
of usages in the world of audio. Musicians use the term to refer to the distinctive
timbral and textural modulations (reverb, fuzz, echo, flange, distortion, and so
forth) produced by electronic signal processing devices known as effects units.
Sound researchers Jean-Franois Augoyard and Henry Torgue have adopted this list
of effects and expanded it beyond the domain of music to generate a catalogue
of eighty-two sonic effects [effets sonores] that characterize everyday urban sound-
scapes: attraction, blurring, chain, dilation, fade, etc. Though inspired by Schaeffer,
Augoyard and Torgue abandon Schaeffers object in favor of Deleuzes effect in
an effort to describe the soundscape not as field of discrete entities but as a flux of
haecceities, recurrent but transitory auditory modalities and intensities.17 An even
more extravagant expansion of the notion and number of auditory effects can be
found in the archives of sound effects employed by the radio and film industries
since the 1920s. Ontologically and aesthetically, the sound effect is a peculiar
entity. Generally anonymous, unattributed to an author or composer, these sounds
are produced for incorporation into radio plays, films, TV shows, and video games.
Yet they float free of these concrete instances, constituting a general reserve used
in very different productions and contexts. Though they are attached to particular
objects and situations in the image tracks of films to provide a convincing auditory
complement, they are very often generated from sources and events that have little
to do with the objects or situations that receive them. (Sheets of metal produce the
sound of thunder; frozen romaine lettuce generates the sound of broken bones; and
so on.) Moreover, sound effects are often combined with one another to generate
new sound effects that diverge further from their components.
These ontological and aesthetic peculiarities of sound effects have been explored
by a number of artists. Working with commercial sound effects libraries, the duo
Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh present these effects in their virtual state, as detached
sound files indexed by titles that are at once singular and generic (Amphibian Morph
4 From Rock to Flesh, Metal Squeal Huge 2.R, Power Buzz, invisible .R). The
sounds themselves likewise manifest this combination of the singular and the generic.
Though generated by particular sources and causes, they are capable of signifying and
functioning more broadly. Full Metal Jackets (2005), for example, is a sound sculpture
composed of thirty-two small speakers scattered down a thirty-foot wall. A computer
draws randomly from an archive of 500 sound files documenting falling bullet shell
casings, and sends them to the speakers via eight different channels. At the base of
the wall and facing it, a monitor lists in real time the file names, which carefully detail
17 Jean-Franois Augoyard and Henry Torgue, eds., Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans.
Andra McCartney and David Paquette (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). On
Deleuzes notions of event and effect, see pp. 10, 154n16. Deleuze briefly discusses sound effects
as instances of incorporeal events in Logic of Sense, 7, 70, 18182.
128 Object
CHRISTOPH COX
the type of casings and the material surfaces on which they fall. Yet, sonically, the
installation is remarkably tranquil and nonviolent, like a spare, aleatory percussion
composition or a cascade of rain. Ones attention is drawn to the timbral and textural
differences between the sounds rather than to their real-world or cinematic causal
referents.18 Kubick and Walshs sculpture To Make the Sound of Fire (2007) similarly
highlights the disjunction between source, sound, and function.19 Consisting of a
plexiglass box containing a few sheets of crumpled wax paper (used by foley artists
to generate the sound of fire), the silent piece invites viewers to imagine the sound
such a material might make, and to compare it with their silent mental conjurings of
the sound of fire. The infinitive title highlights the role of this and all sound effects
as haecceities or singularities, elements or processes to be drawn into proximity with
others in the incarnation of actual cinematic entities and events.
Kubicks recent project Hum Minus Human (2012) elegantly brings together
several features of the sonic ontology Ive been describing.20 A single-channel
video, the project presents a nearly randomized sub-catalogue of drones
collected by searching through a commercial sound effects archive using the key-
word hum and subtracting those results that turn up human sounds. The
piece freely combines the sounds of nature, culture, and industrylight trans-
formers and cicadas, arc welders and bumble bees (etymological source of the
word drone in English)that form the sonic backdrop of our lives. In one sense,
the minus human in the title simply describes a search function. But it has
a broader significance as well, attuning us to that Cagean, Nietzschean,
Schopenhauerian sonic flux that precedes and exceeds human being. This non-
human conception of the sonic fluxand the ontology of events and effects it
affirmsis strange. It unsettles our ordinary ways of speaking, sensing,
and conceiving. A philosophical aesthetics that approaches sound and music with
a conceptual apparatus already in place will reject it or be deaf to it. Yet, sonic
philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schaeffer, Cage, OCallaghan,
and Kubick and Walsh do philosophy otherwise: beginning from a fascination with
sound, they follow it where it leads, encountering a strange world in which bodies
are dissolved into flows, objects are the residues of events, and effects are unmoored
from their causes to float independently as virtual powers and capacities. To think in
this way is to refuse the idealist enterprise that consists in imposing philosophical
concepts onto the real, subordinating the real to a set of formal syntheses taken to
be ontologically distinct from it. Instead, sonic thought follows the flows of matter
and energy that constitute the real, producing concepts that are themselves instances
of the syntheses by which the real articulates itself, as independent from the pre-
tensions of philosophy as it is from those of non-philosophy.
18 The project is documented at www.doublearchive.com/projects/full_metal_jackets.php.
19 See www.doublearchive.com/projects/make_sound_of_fire.php.
20 An excerpt can be found at www.socalledsound.com/projects.
Object 129
 Unnatural Participations
Nathan Lee

The Problem of Pleasure

In his famous critique of the institutionalization of sexuality, Michel Foucault argues

that the forces at work in the construction and regulation of the body should be under-
stood not as a matter of boundaries enforced or superseded, but rather as perpetual
spirals of power and pleasure.1 If there are, all too obviously, those who command by
saying no to wayward or unreproductive sexualities, Foucault redirects our attention
to the secret animating yes that affirms the pleasure felt in using such power.
Yet pleasure, as it turned out, has proven a less than seductive object of cri-
tique. The vast theoretical literature on biopolitics inaugurated by Foucault has
applied itself to an endless variety of problematics, and yet this discourse of power
has largely remained just that: an analytic of power, of control, of the regulatory
no, with far less attention paid to the nature, function, and co-determining role
of pleasure. This curious blind spot in post-Foucauldian critique is the subject of
a recent essay by Tim Dean titled The Biopolitics of Pleasure.2 Dean attempts
to unknot the elusive concept of pleasure and account for its marginalization in
contemporary thought. Power stripped of pleasure tends to isolate its position and
externalize its effects, whereas the immanent model proposed by Foucault allows
no easy demarcation between, say, sovereign power and homo sacer.3 Missing from
the dominant biopolitical critiques of power, Dean claims, is an account of the
microphysics of its functioning at the corporeal level.4 He returns to the figure of
the spiral, suggesting that Foucault may have had the double helix of DNA in mind
as his model. Thus aligned to the discourse of molecular biology, Foucaults spiral
may, according to Dean, shift the terms of critique toward a radical immanentism
accounting for what Foucault elsewhere called the subindividual microphysics of
power and pleasure. A biological perspective on biopolitics would reframe the scale
of analysis and recast the problems of control and relationality within a domain of
subindividual multiplicity.

1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage
Books, 1978), 45.
2 Tim Dean, The Biopolitics of Pleasure, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer 2012):
47796.
3 One might venture that Agambens sovereignbare life relation caricatures that of Hegels
master-slave, were it not for the fact that the former hardly qualifies as a power relation
in Foucaults terms, owing to the extreme centrifugation that deprives one half of the couple
of any leeway whatsoever. Ibid., 491.
4 Ibid., 492.

130 Object Object 131

 UNNATURAL PARTICIPATIONS
Theres nothing novel about this vantage point. Biologists have long understood
the human body as a vast, ever-mutating colony of microbial agents whose agendas
may or may not coincide withor even determineour own. A good case can be
made for our nonexistence as entities, Lewis Thomas observed as long ago as 1974.
We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of
our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied.5 How pleasure might be brought to
bear on this indwelling swarm is a far less settled matter and one that reemerges as a
critical question given the advent of a sexual practice whose intense devotion to plea-
sure is organized around the transmission and affirmation of a microbe: the HIV virus.
Infection as Filiation
In his 1993 essay The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous, Gregg Bordowitz fantasizes
about barebacking with Charles Ludlam, the founder of the legendary Ridiculous
Theatrical Company:
In my fantasy, I want Ludlum to fuck me without a condom. Id receive
his cure as gift. Searching for a model, I wish for a legacythe love and
approval of a father. I want to achieve his stature. In my fantasy, Ludlams
greatness can be passed on to me through his semen. A condom would
thwart this transference. This is a fantasy about immortality; that some-
thing exists greater than ourselves, shared between us.6
Bordowitz doesnt use the word barebacking because he couldnt: the term entered
the lexicon a few years after the writing of his essay.7 Barebacking is a notoriously mul-
tivalent term that falls into two general applications. In the widest sense, it describes
any instance of anal sex without the use of condoms, whether calculated and deliberate
(between monogamous partners with the same HIV status, for example) or spontaneous
and circumstantial (the situational slip). Another, more specialized use is devoted to
a subculture for whom the abandonment of condoms is linked to a self-conscious explo-
rationand celebrationof what it means to exchange HIV through sex. Barebacking,
in this more specific and radical sense, has developed its own rituals and language,
5 Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 34. For
a recent popular account of current microbial research and the challenges it poses to concepts
of agency and subjecthood, see Michael Pollan, Some of My Best Friends Are Germs, New York
Times, May 15, 2013.
6 Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 19862003, ed. James Meyer
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 47.
7 Barebacking emerged more or less simultaneously with the advent of antiretroviral drug therapies
in the mid-late 1990s and thus designates a historically specific practice; people fucked without
condoms before HIV/AIDS, but no one barebacked. For a concise overview on the origins of
barebacking, see Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures
(New York: Haworth Press, 1998), 1217.
132 Object
NATHAN LEE
social networks and structures of assembly, fantasies and identifications. And while
barebacking in general has been met with an outpouring of discussion in the popular
press, as well as a growing corpus of attention from the social sciences, it is this more
limited, subcultural usage that has produced a vigorous body of theoretical critique.
More than some dubious, marginal kink, barebacking poses crucial problems of
bodies and intimacy, relationality and ethics, genealogy and futurity, fantasy and iden-
tity. This new twist on the spirals of power and pleasure has received its most insightful
analysis by Dean in Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking,
a book that questions what happens when we self-consciously open our bodies to
nonhuman life. For Dean, sexual adventure opens a space for other forms of cultural
or political adventure; and it is the distinction of bareback subculture to organize
an arena of invention that involves experiments in how to do things with viruses.8
One of Deans most striking examples is the concept of viral kinship: an
embrace of viral transmission as the mechanism for transindividual connectivity.
Bareback breeding reconceives infection not as contamination by a destructive
foreign agent, he argues, but as an inscriptionan unlimited intimacyof genea-
logical power. The peopling warned of in safer sex discoursebe careful when you
sleep with someone, for you are sleeping with everyone they have ever slept withis
reconceived as a positive value. Affirming HIV transmission as a technique for sus-
taining relations to the past inverts the perspective on barebacking as a disavowal of
history. Barebacking, for those who lived through the AIDS crisis, may be practiced
neither in ignorance nor as a dismissal of the battles won by their fallen brothers,
but precisely as a way to maintain affective ties with them. (Dean goes so far as to
herald barebacking as the next logical step in the enterprise of gay promiscuity.9)
Likewise, for those who inherited the AIDS crisis as an historical event, barebacking
cannot be dismissed as (nor excused from) ignorant self-interest. Just as Bordowitz
dreamed of being inhabited, and enriched, by Ludlams semen, viral kinship can be
deployed as a vehicle for transgenerational solidarity. What would it mean, Dean
wonders, for a young gay man to trace his virus back to Michel Foucault?
Micro(meta)physics
Provocative as such ideas are in their revaluation of sex and HIV, Deans theo-
rization of barebacking remains bound to a model of thought predicated on the
desiring subject. If, as he writes, the peculiarity of bareback sex resides in its
deliberate involvement of a pathogenic parasite, his critique nevertheless largely
conceptualizes this involvement as a one-way relation.10 The corporeal critiquea
8 Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009), 47.
9 Ibid., 5.
10 Ibid., 94.
Object 133
 UNNATURAL PARTICIPATIONS
microphysics of bareback power and pleasurewould proceed from the proposi-
tion that the things we can do with a virus are tied up with the things a virus can do
to us. What are these weird little bundles of molecules capable of doing? What are
their involvements, affects, and modes of relationality?
Such questions are founded on a primary indeterminacy. Viruses trouble our
criteria, unsettle our classificatory systems: biology has reached no consensus as
to whether they constitute a life form at all.11 Like all living beings, viruses contain
genetic material in the form of RNA. They reproduce, they evolve. Yet they lack
fundamental categories of the organic such as cell structure, and their reproduc-
tive power is parasitic rather than sexual, dependent entirely on union with a host.
Entering into relations with so liminal a being as HIV calls for, if not a definitive
classification, at least some clarity about how it operates.
A single HIV virion contains two strands of RNA bound by a shell of viral
protein. This viral RNA is in turn enclosed by a layer of fatty molecules called lipids.
Seventy-two copies of a protein called Env protrude from this viral envelope, with each
Env consisting of three glycoproteins (gp120) attached to a stem of three other gly-
coproteins (gp41). On entering the body, HIV virions come into proximity with T-cells
either in the bloodstream or lymphatic tissues. The trio of glycoprotein 120 molecules
protruding from the viral envelope engage a structure of glycoproteins called CD4s,
with which they form a perfect match. This docking of HIV to T-cell is compelled
by the polar or nonpolar charges carried by all molecules: the molecular key of the
HIV virus is drawn to, and perfectly fits, the molecular lock of the T-cell.12
Figure 1. HIV Virion (Image by US National Institute of Health, redrawn by
Carl Henderson CC BY 4.0)
11 For an overview of this matter, see Luis P. Villareal, Are Viruses Alive?, Scientific American 291,
no. 6 (December 2004): 100105.
12 This primitive biochemical mechanism is commonly described as the capacity of HIV to look
for and attack its desired object, the T-cells. The anthropomorphic character of such language
has been the object of longstanding critique in HIV/AIDS discourse. For a classic analysis of the
linguistic construction of AIDS, see Paula A. Treichler, Aids, Homophobia, and Biomedical
Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification, in Aids: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas
Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). On the militarized tenor of HIV/AIDS discourse, see
Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
134 Object
NATHAN LEE
Such charges operate throughout molecular biology, and are determined by the
electrostatic forces of chemical bonding. Chemical charge, in turn, is linked to the
play of strong and weak forces at the atomic and subatomic level. Scaling these
forces down to their epistemological vanishing point brings us to the positionless
indeterminacies of quantum mechanicswhich is to say, the domain of onto-
logical speculation.
Unnatural Participations
Immunologist John Dwyer has remarked that the evolutionary changes distin-
guishing the ancestor of the AIDS virus found in monkeys from the human virus we
call HIV would seem to have been planned by some viral architect who knew his
immunology, so clever are the design changes incorporated.13 If Dwyers analogy
indulges in the familiar anthropomorphic metaphorswith intimations of intelli-
gent design no less!he is quick to follow with another that points us back in the
direction of impersonal processes: And yet in biological terms these apparently
deserved triumphs are more like those of a man who, having no idea of a safes
combination, sits patiently twiddling the dials at random until suddenly he gets it
right and the safe door swings open.14
The moment an HIV virion first encountered a human T-cell was not an
event predetermined by either of their histories, but rather a co-becoming that
cut horizontally across their fields of being. This is what Deleuze and Guattari
have named unnatural participations: the open-ended potential of bodies at any
scalefrom a single HIV virion to a bareback orgyto connect, commingle, and
inaugurate the New.
How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is
without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the unity
of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it, but it is discussed
only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity,
peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands,
human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemic, battlefields, and
catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual
union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again very time,
gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are
the true nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.15
13 John M. Dwyer, The Body at War: The Miracle of the Immune System (New York: New American
Library, 1989), 130.
14 Ibid, 130.
15 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 241.
Object 135
 UNNATURAL PARTICIPATIONS

Unnatural participation, thus conceptualized, reframes the question of viral kinship Law and Disorder
on the plane of immanence and depersonalizes Bordowitzs desire for something
Susan Schuppli
greater than ourselves, shared between us. Within the microphysics/metaphysics
of barebacking, pleasure in the Foucauldian sense is what officiates these nuptials.
It could be said to operate something like the will in Nietzsches doctrine of the
will to power: an impersonal, universal striving as the motor of becoming. Pleasure
JUDGE: Do you think this tape has been doctored in any way or does it
would then link up with radical affirmation, the absolute Yes to existence advocated
represent what you saw at the scene?
by Nietzsche so that existence can be transformed, revalued, overcome.
It is certainly striking that Paul Morris, founder of the notorious porn studio
Among the more than 90 million court records that comprise the archives of the
Treasure Island Media and the most articulate polemicist from within bareback cul-
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are two video-
ture, describes the practice in a manner that sounds like pure Nietzsche. Confronting
tapes shot by Liri Loshi (and Sefedin Thaqi) in the aftermath of the massacres at
head-on the monstrous implications of affirming viral transmission, Morris heralds
Izbica and Padalishte, Kosovo, in March 1999. These tapes form part of its material
barebacking as radical irresponsibility, devoted only to the perpetuation of a subcul-
evidence archive and were entered as exhibits during the trials of Slobodan Miloevic
tural ethos with little regard for anything else, including life itself.
and Milan Milutinovic. The following excerpts from the open court session on
October 26, 2006, capture a sense of the discussion as it unfolded with respect not
The everyday identity evanesces and the individual becomes an agent
only to the veracity of the images recorded on one of the tapes, but also regarding
through which a darker, more fragile tradition is enabled to continue.
its material integrity and the custodial handling of the videotape prior to its admit-
Irresponsibility to the everyday persona and to the general culture is nec-
tance into the legal archive of the ICTY.1
essary for allegiance to the sexual subculture, and this allegiance takes the
gay male directly to the hot and central point where what is at stake isnt
Q. Mr. Loshi, are the images we just saw also part of the video you filmed
the survival of the individual, but the survival of the practices and patterns
that day?
which are the discoveries and properties of the subculture.16
A. Yes.
Q. And could you describe to us what was taking place there in that part of
Have we reached becoming-imperceptible, the cosmic formula, per Deleuze and
the video.
Guattari, of all becomings?17 Or has one persona (the self-perpetuating neoliberal
A. What we saw here is a burial where we buried all thethese bodies that
subject) merely been replaced by another (the self-indulgent libertine)? If bareback
were found in those places that I was just describing before, and also all
subculture constitutes the next logical step in the enterprise of gay male promiscuity,
other victims in Izbica that were found in some other different spots were
that scarcely ensures the valueethical or ontologicalof its discoveries. That it does
brought here.
constitute a discovery calls for a new image of thought, one that asks what it means
JUDGE. And you say in that statement under oath: I recorded this
to form a rhizome with our viruses.
videotape myself on March 31 1999, and this original exhibit has been in
my constructive possession from the time of filming until now. Now, we
already know, thanks to the testimony that you gave in our subsequent
statements as well as here today, that in fact this statement you made under
oath is not true and accurate because Mr. Thaqi is the one who recorded
the video. Now, is it also the case that the second part of this statement,
that is to say that you had the original tape in your constructive possession
at all times before delivery to the Prosecutor, that statement is not accurate
and in fact is false. Isnt that correct?
16 Paul Morris, No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn. Paper presented at the World 1 The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is a United Nations court
Pornography Conference, Los Angeles, California, August 8, 1998. Cited in Dean, Unlimited of law established in The Hague in May 1993 to prosecute war crimes committed during the Balkan
Intimacy, 57. wars of the 1990s. The first international war crimes tribunal since Nuremburg and Tokyo, it has
17 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 279. charged over 160 people; thirty of these trials are still in various stages of completion.

136 Object Object 137

 LAW AND DISORDER
A. No. This is correct, but I believe this is a misunderstanding. Because
what I waswhat I said there or what I was trying to explain there, and
I didI believe I did so, was that just after the taping was done by Sefedin
Thaqi inafter a few days, I believe this was April 3 or 4, I cant remember
it now, we transferred the whole filming from his tape to VHS tape, which
I had it all the time in my possession. But that tape I couldnt bring with
myself to Albania because I found it very dangerous to take it with myself.
Q. Now, with respect to Mr. Thaqis tape, am I correct that this tape was
at one point in time stolen by some thieves?
A. Yes. At the time where I was looking for this tape, his own camera was
stolen, I believe not because of the tape but becausethe tape was stolen
because of camera. The thieves didnt even know what was in. And then
with the help of Shaban Dragaj I get a hold of this tape again.
While the testimony of eyewitnesses has, since the late nineteenth century, been aided
by photographs and other visual materials such as drawings and models, court pro-
ceedings are increasingly shaped by a forensic account of events in which materially
encoded truths are narrated by experts. Forensic blood work, such as comparative
DNA analysis, offers an exemplary marker of this shift in juridical culture.2 Yet in
order for a material object or an entity derived from a computational database to
bear witness legally, given that it cant swear to tell the truth, it must move through
a sequence of bureaucratic stages that address its relevant features or structurally
recompose it. The extended legal debates around the videos shot by Loshi expose the
degree to which the tension between what is captured on tape as visual information
and what is captured on tape as incidental inscriptions starts to play an increasingly
significant role in the narration and production of the law.3
Video frame-grabs from Liri Loshi and Sefedin Thaqis footage shot in the aftermath of the Izbica
Massacre, Kosovo, March 28, 1999. [Source: ICTY Case No. IT-05-87: Milutinovic.]
2 These ideas draw on the collective work of forensic architecture, a European Research Council
project led by Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths, University of London. The project undertakes
research that maps, images, and models sites of violence within the framework of international
humanitarian law, producing spatial evidence in support of legal investigations that address
violations of human rights. See www.forensic-architecture.org.
3 ICTY, Transcript 061026IT (The Hague: ICTY, 2010). Full Transcript available at www.icty.org.
138 Object
SUSAN SCHUPPLI
Appearing initially as erratic magnetic interference, the damaged materiality of exhibit
P232, otherwise known as the Izbica massacre tape, eventually migrates into the image-
field, as the mute horror of dead bodies slowly coalesces to reveal itself to the camera/
viewer. The material violations evidenced in the dense overlay of defects caused by the
repeated copying and over-coding of the tape immediately alerts us to the material
violations of the body-proper that will soon emerge out of the depths of the image.
In cinema such frenzied distortion in the visual field has come to signal immanent
danger and threat, as the stability of a world organized as a coherent picture falls apart
and is consumed by violence. The massacre video cannot, of course, be compared to
the narrative constructions of cinema, given its status as documentary evidence of
a crime. But the impoverished condition of the tape, with its material degradations
and destabilized image-field, are disturbingly resonant with chilling effect, reminding
us of the political program that sought to eradicate difference through ethnic cleansing.
Literary critic Shoshana Felman has argued that the difficulty of producing
an intelligible narrative in the face of historical trauma characterizes the true act of
bearing witness. Drawing upon the filmed documentation of the Eichmann Trial, in
which a witness, Yehiel De-Nur, or K. Zetnik, fainted while attempting to testify, she
asks under what circumstances and in what ways the withdrawal of the legal con-
ventions of speech can constitute a form of legal testimony in its own right.4 When
recounting his own experiences of Auschwitz, Primo Levi likens his memory traces to
the machinic operations of a tape recorder, which can rewind and play back history:
I still have a visual and acoustic memory of the experience that I cannot explain. [...]
Sentences in languages I do not know have remained etched in my memory, like on
a magnetic tape.5 K. Zetniks memory erased the trauma of the camp, whereas Levis
recorded it. In both cases the capacity to bear witness occurs not through acts of spoken
testimony but through technologies of inscription: the fainting body, the mnemonic
operations that rewind and playback like a tape recorder. Likewise, rather than reducing
their capacity to stand convincingly before the tribunals of history as witnesses to a
crime, the degraded quality of both of Loshis videotapes enhances their capacity for
testimony, insofar as the epistemic dimensions of an image-regime typically called upon
to account for historical violence through explicative narration is refused. Instead, their
material defects saturate the tapes with a different kind of information, producing a
form of ontological reckoning that doesnt require the supplementary intervention of
a human witness endowed with the task of extracting meaning from errant electrons or
executed bodies. Forcing wholeness and clarity from the massacre videotapes erratic
image-data would, in my mind, violate the events anew, whereas allowing the tapes to
disarticulate their material strata registers the radical incomprehensibility of what has
4 Shoshana Felman, A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law, in
The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 13151.
5 Primo Levi, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 27.
Object 139
 LAW AND DISORDER
taken place. Their relevance is located not exclusively in what they can tell us about the
historic events to which they gesture as technical witnesses, but also in their struggle
to meet the courts demand for coherent accounts of history.
Writing about Francis Bacons paintings, Gilles Deleuze contends that photo-
graphs cannot produce an intensity of sensation, or rather cannot produce differences
within sensation in that, unlike painting, they do not activate the body and provide
different ways of seeing. Rather, they are merely a recording and a resemblance of what
we see.6 Painting, says Deleuze, requires the cooperation of the artists hand, which
is always in a relationship of imbalance with the eye. What the eye sees can never be
registered absolutely by the hand: something different always emerges from within
the depths of paint. I contend that many of the media artifacts presented during the
legal proceedings of the ICTY emphatically register this imbalance at the level of
the machinic. Sensation emerges equally out of the technical reorganization of the
image-event as it does out its mimetic regime: the tapes defective materiality forcing
an intensification of affect that supplements and at times even supersedes the horror
and despair captured on video. A different stratum of knowledge about these events of
crisisknowledge that arises out of processingis impelled into presence, activating
the sensorial domain of testimony at the moment that the plane of resemblance (the
appearance of things) gives way to the furtive emissions of the ontological substratum.
At these moments of intensified image-compression, a new material witness might
be said to emerge from within the depths of magnetic particles or pixels.7
Video frame-grabs from Liri Loshis footage shot in the aftermath of the Padalishte Massacre, Kosovo,
March 26, 1999. [Source: ICTY Case No. IT-02-54: Miloevic.]
While the visceral defects of Loshis massacre videos do bear sensate and even
symbolic witness to acts of palpable violence, their material degradation raised
serious legal questions regarding chain of custody and the credibility of Loshi
himself as a material witness. Under cross-examination, Loshi admitted that the
6 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon and the Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London:
Continuum, 2004), 49.
7 The concept of the material witness is elaborated in my forthcoming book, Material Witness:
Forensic Media and the Production of Evidence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).
140 Object
SUSAN SCHUPPLI
camera containing the crucial Izbica tape (IT-05-87) was stolen and later recovered
in Albania along with the video. Loshis admission corroborates the damaged state
of the tape, which in addition to drop-out shows signs of extensive image-loss,
indicating that it was reprocessed by incorrect video codecs. Moreover, the pres-
ence of rolling scan lines and yellow streaks suggests that at one point the video
was copied by filming directly from a television screen. These are all factors that
point toward the tapes ongoing transformation as it traveled between Kosovo,
Albania, and The Hague.
At every juncture in these administrative circuits, the media object is imprinted
by and modified through these processes, such that a kind of violence is done to the
object akin to the subjective processes of forgetting and lying that characterize the
human witness. Because we have become so preoccupied with narrating the singu-
larity of the object, we tend to render transparent the very means by which we are
able produce such biographies, namely, the discursive uptake of the object within
different epistemic frameworks. Matter, in effect, only becomes a material witness
when the complex histories entangled within objects are unfolded, translated, and
transformed into legible formats that can be offered up for public consideration
and debate. Conventions that enable public forums to confer legitimacy upon the
speech acts of objects, and agreed-upon standards that permit material evidence to
stand up to the scrutiny of evaluative and adjudicative epistemological frameworks
need to be continually queried and tested. Yet without this dimension of public
discourse, media artifacts cannot fully attain the status of the witness; rather, they
remain virtual, carrying their archives of encrypted data into the future as mere
latent potential.
When materials, including computational objects, are subject to external pro-
cesses that bring about their structural reordering, they produce what philosopher
Isabelle Stengers has called an informed material, in the sense that their internal
composition becomes progressively enriched by information.8 The forensic analysis
of media is concerned not directly with representational matters, but with matter
as captured by different forms of technology and processed by different kinds of
legal or quasi-legal apparatuses. Politics likewise enters into the field of media not
simply at the level of representationthe content displayed in an imagebut at the
structural level of its acquisition, processing, and transmission of information. In
the case of digital media, this politicization takes place at each processional junc-
ture: when pure data is captured by sensors, transformed into binary code, assigned
pixel values, algorithmically adjusted, composited to produce a digital image, saved
in a standardized file format, and transmitted to recombine with other circuits
of technical and social assembly. This is what I would call the micro-politics of
8 See Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry (London: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 206. See also Andrew Barry, Materialist Politics: Metallurgy, in Political
Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 90.
Object 141
 LAW AND DISORDER
processing: all the points of contact between the various networks of information
transfer, translation, and transmission that are also points of potential transforma-
tion and that allow difference, and thus politics, to enter. If the objects capacity to
bear witness is achieved by explicating its passage through various stages of admin-
istrative processing, its political dimensions are rendered visible when we attend to
the precise ways in which certain kinds of information combine and recombine at
these nodal points to produce new aesthetic, technical, and legal configurations.
Digital media, like all digital information, exists first as binary code and
requires several stages of processing before it can recompose itself into a compre-
hensible image or sound. In order for digital materials to have any legal traction as
evidence, they require approved procedures that guarantee the security of data and
standardize their processing from code to pixels. Given this predicament, should the
stability and integrity of information transfer be held accountable to an originary
event, or does the very condition of post-processing render its role as a material
witness suspect at best? This is especially pertinent to media materials coming out of
conflict zones that are often produced and/or secured under challenging conditions.
Several other cases in ICTY that relied upon corroborating video testimony were
thrown into doubt when expert witnesses could prove that the evidence in question
had been spliced and reedited, thus nullifying its apparent truth claims.9
Expert witness testifying in 2010 to the authenticity of videos IC00820 and IC00821, depicting
the destruction of the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993. [Source: ICTY Case No.
IT-04-74-T.]
While the Internet has dramatically increased the reach of citizen journalism, much
uploaded content is edited and captioned, thus highlighting its postproduction, which
the court regards as an impoverishment of its evidentiary capacity. Nonetheless, these
are often the only source materials that prosecutors have at their disposal to sup-
port a legal claim. With the advent of digital processing, the integrity of metadata
becomes an even more urgent legal issue as the potential for subterfuge sinks below
the threshold of human perception. Disputes around accusations of genocide and
war crimes are thus archived by media materials whose status is in contention, not
only at the level of representation (the information contained within the frame) but
9 See for example, ICTY, Prosecutors Observations Regarding Expert Report on the Authenticity
of Videotapes IC00820 and IC00821 (The Hague: ICTY, 2010); and ICTY, Prosecutors
Observations Regarding Expert Report on the Authenticity of Videotapes IC00820 and IC00821
(The Hague: ICTY, 2010).
142 Object
SUSAN SCHUPPLI
especially at the level of metadata, where informational inconsistencies can imme-
diately raise legal doubts. Consequently, the international forums that adjudicate
these materials must archive media in its original acquired state, regardless of how
damaged it may be, in order to maintain its relative integrity. When presented in
court, however, such materials are often duplicated and altered in order to be played
properly. This was indeed the case with several audio files that were unintelligible in
their raw state. Corrected copies sit alongside their original versions in the archives
of the ICTY. In another case of audio manipulation, the sound of shelling was
replaced with a birdsong when the video was presented in court for a second time
in a different trial, once again raising doubts as to the authenticity of the video.10
What emerges from an examination of these audiovisual materials is the extent
to which the court itself becomes a processing machine that works over the mate-
rials that enter its legal infrastructure and, in so doing, not only transforms them
but also inscribes its legal protocols, producing signifying traces that can be read
and narrated alongside the official biography of the object.
JUDGE: Well, thank you for assisting us.
WITNESS: Youre welcome. [The witness withdrew]
JUDGE: Whats to happen now?
A. I have the unenviable task to announce, Your Honour, that we have run
out of witnesses for this week.11
10 ICTY, Gotovina et al. (IT-06-90) Operation Storm, ICTY transcript 080408ED (The Hague:
ICTY, 2008) 94546. See also ICTY exhibit 014: ACE 80901R0000320056.
11 Excerpted from ICTY, Transcript 061026IT (The Hague: ICTY, 2010), 5322408.
Object 143
 Blobjectivism and Art
Terry Horgan and Matja Potrc

Austere realism is the view that the correct ontology does not include numerous
putative entities posited in everyday thought and discourse, entities such as cats,
trees, chairs, and mountains. Naive common sense initially supposes that the cor-
rect ontology does include such items. But after it gets into reflective mode, deep
doubts about the existence of these entities tend to arise. The cats composition
changes as it grows from that kitten to a grown-up animal. At what point does
it become an adult cat? There seems to be no determinate answer to this ques-
tionwhich means that the attribute being an adult cat is vague in its spatiotem-
poral boundaries. At what point after it dies and is cremated does this dead cat
cease to exist altogether? Again there seems to be no determinate answerwhich
means that the attributes being a dead cat and being a cat are also vague in their spa-
tiotemporal boundaries. And as it eats and drinks, it is even harder to determine
which are the exact ingredients that are literally parts of the cat (as opposed to
merely being contained within its body). Is that molecule of water, or this other
atom that was there in the food, literally a part of the cat? So the cat seems to be
a vague entity with respect to its synchronic composition. Similar considerations
reveal that virtually all the putative entities posited in everyday thought and dis-
courseand most that are posited in science too (cells, tectonic plates, galaxies,
and so forth)are vague with respect to boundaries and composition.
Deep doubts arise about the real existence of putative vague entities and
attributes when one ponders the infamous sorites paradox, which always looms
when vagueness is present. Sorites reasoning leads, via a sequence of individ-
ually unobjectionable-seeming inferential steps, to an absurd conclusion. For
instance, consider Mount Triglav in Slovenia. Imagine a pin inserted on its
top, and a second pin inserted a centimeter away from the first one, and a third
pin a centimeter away from the second, and so on in a single direction straight
down to the bottom of the plain of Ljubljana. Now there arises the following
reasoning: if the first pin is on the mountain, then the second one must be
on it as well; and if the second one is on the mountain, then third one must
be too; and so on, so that the pin at the bottom of the valley must be on the
mountain toowhich is absurd. When such sorites reasoning is carefully and
unflinchingly pondered, the conclusion reached by reflective common sense is
that ontological vagueness is impossibleand hence that the right ontology
cannot include cats, mountains, or any of the other vague entities that are
posited in everyday thought and discourse (and in much scientific thought/
discourse too). Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for vague properties that are posited

Object 145
 BLOBJECTIVISM AND ART
in everyday and scientific thought/discoursefor example, properties such
as being a cat or being a galaxy.1
A species of austere realism, blobjectivism,
recognizes just one material object: the cosmos.
Although austere realism as a generic position excludes all putative vague objects
and vague properties from the right ontology, some versions of austere realism can
embrace an ontology that includes a multiplicity of non-vague material objects
such as cat candidates that are perfectly precise in all respects such as spatio-
temporal boundaries and synchronic composition. However, we advocate and
defend blobjectivisma species of austere realism affirming that the correct ontology
includes one and only one material object: the entire cosmos (the blobject). The
blobject is not homogeneous, but instead has enormous spatiotemporal structural
complexity and variability. Nevertheless, this structural complexity and variability
is not a matter of relations among material objects in the right ontology that are
proper parts of the blobject, since the blobject has no proper parts. Rather, the
complexity and variability arise by virtue of the fact that numerous (ontologi-
cally non-vague) properties are instantiated by the entire blobject in (non-vague)
spatiotemporally local manners of instantiation.
One can get an intuitive feel for blobjectivism by envisioning a mass of Jell-O
that is nonhomogeneous in various ways: partially jiggling in one specific spatiotem-
porally local manner while otherwise remaining still, partially congealing in another
spatiotemporally local manner while otherwise remaining uncongealed, being par-
tially one color in a specific spatiotemporally local way while otherwise being some
other color, and so forth. (Think of the Jell-O as literally partless; and think of the
just-mentioned properties as instantiated not by parts of the Jell-O but rather by
the whole Jell-O-mass, albeit in (non-vague) spatiotemporally local manners of
instantiation.) The principal theoretical virtue of blobjectivism, in comparison to
other potential versions of austere realism, is that blobjectivism is ontologically
more parsimonious.
1 Sorites reasoning introduces vagueness of language and thought as the tension between individualistic
(modus ponens transfer of the same truth value between neighbors) and collectivistic sequences
(the truth value changes at the end as opposed to the start of the sequence). For elaboration of the
contention that the sorites paradox reveals a form of logical incoherence inherent to vagueness,
and the corollary that ontological vagueness is impossible, see Terry Horgan and Matja Potrc, Austere
Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), sections
2.32.4; and Terry Horgan and Matja Potrc, Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence, Facta one material object, viz, the blobject.
Philosophica 2, no. 2: 24970. We also argue there that the various proposals in the philosophical
literature for blocking sorites reasoningfor example, by resorting to some version of nonclassical
logicdo not eliminate the logical incoherence inherent to vagueness but instead only quarantine
it and render it benign. The two texts mentioned in this note also contain additional arguments in
support of austere realism generically, and in support of blobjectivism specifically.
146 Object
TERRY HORGAN AND MATJA POTRC
Truth is normally a relation of indirect correspondence
between language or thought and the blobject.
In everyday thought and discourse, and in most scientific discourse, too, it is common
to posit a multiplicity of objects many of which are vague in various respects (for
example, in composition and in spatiotemporal boundaries), and it is also common
to apply vague predicates to these posited objects (meaning, predicates such as
is tall, is intelligent, or is red). So when one is thinking or speaking as one
ordinarily does, it seems just crazy to say that there are no such entities as cats or
mountains, and it seems even crazier to say that the only material object that exists
is the blobject. So isnt austere realism a crazy view, and isnt the blobjectivist ver-
sion of austere realism even crazier? No, and the reason why not is that austere
realism includes (in addition to its ontological claims) semantic claims that smoothly
accommodate the positing practices of everyday thought/discourse and scientific
thought/discourse.2
The key is austere realisms account of truth. Although truth is a matter of cor-
respondence between language/thought and the world, in most contexts of thought
and discourse the operative form of correspondence is indirect. Consider, for example,
the statement Slovenia belongs to the European Union. Although this statement
is certainly true, its truth does not require that the right ontology include entities
answering to the name Slovenia or to the referring-expression the European
Union. Rather, naive common sense would say that the statements truth is a
matter of behavior by a lot of human beings, behavior that is coordinated in various
complex ways; thus, although the statements truth does depend on the world, this
dependence is indirect because it does not consist in there being ultimately existing
entities e1 and e2 in the correct ontology such that e1 is the referent of Slovenia, e2
is the referent of the European Union, and e1 bears the relation membership to e2.
Refined common sense, aware of the considerations that motivate embracing both
austere realism and blobjectivism, extends the notion of indirect correspondence to
virtually all everyday and scientific thought/discourse. What makes true any statement
that posits putative entities other than the blobject is the blobjects instantiating, in
various spatiotemporally local manners, various (non-vague) properties; this is indi-
rect correspondence, because the right ontology does not include real entities that
answer to the statements item-positing apparatus. Contexts of thought/discourse
in which the operative form of truth is direct correspondencecontexts where one
is inquiring about the denizens of the right ontologyare rare indeed, even in science.
Nonetheless, within such a context the following statement is true: There exists only
2 We spell out the parsimony argument in chapter 7 of Austere Realism.
Object 147
 BLOBJECTIVISM AND ART TERRY HORGAN AND MATJA POTRC

Perception, judgment, and public language typically are governed
by normatively tight semantic standards, whereas artistic judgment is not.
Thought and discourse are virtually always governed by contextually operative
semantic standards; ontologically, these are normative properties, instantiated
spatiotemporally locally by the blobject. Much thought and discourse is governed
by contextually operative semantic normative standards that are tight, in this
sense: these standards combine with how things are with the blobject to jointly
determine the truth or falsity of a given thought or statement. (The truth or fal-
sity of The cat is on the mat depends only on how things are locally with the
blobject plus the semantic standards governing the cat, the mat, and is on.)
Likewise, much perceptual experience has representational content governed by
tight indirect-correspondence semantic standardsstandards that then get trans-
ferred to perception-based judgments and to statements expressing those judg-
ments. (Thus, the veridicality or non-veridicality of a visual experience as of the
cat on the mat depends only on how things are locally with the blobject plus the
indirect-correspondence semantic standards governing the pertinent aspects of
the experience itselfthe cat aspect, the mat aspect, and the on-relation aspect.)
Some kinds of judgment, however, are governed by semantic standards that are
not tight, but instead leave semantic slack that gets taken up by the first-person
sensibility of the person making the judgment. Humor judgments are a case in
point: when one person judges funny a joke that another person judges not funny,
the contextually operative semantic standards do not themselves combine with
how the world is to fix semantic correctness (that is, truth). Rather, each per-
sons judgment is partially expressive of that persons own response to the joke.
Likewise, when the one person judges that the statement That joke is funny is
true, whereas the other person judges that it is false, each persons truth/falsity
judgment is expressive of that persons own response to the jokethereby taking
up the semantic slack in the contextually operative semantic standards governing
humor-discourse.3
Art, we take it, builds upon semantic slack. The phenomenological character
of ones own aesthetic experience vis--vis a given artwork, however different that
phenomenology might be in comparison to the aesthetic experiences of others
vis--vis that same artwork, figures constitutively as a factor determining the truth
or falsity of ones own aesthetic judgment. For instance, concerning a given art-
workfor example, an abstract paintingone person can correctly judge true
the statement The painting is interesting, whereas another person can correctly
judge this statement false. The contextually operative semantic standards governing
interesting, together with how the world is, leave semantic slackwhich gets
taken up by the aesthetic response of the person making the aesthetic judgment
and the associated truth/falsity judgment. (Typically, an artwork that confronts an
experiencer demands that the experiencer make an aesthetic judgment about itif
only of the form This does nothing for methereby situating both artwork and
experiencer within a novel perspective on each other and the world.) Ontologically,
ones aesthetic experience consists of the blobject itselfthe only concrete entity
in the correct ontologyinstantiating a specific aesthetic-phenomenology-property
in a specific, spatiotemporally local, first-personish manner. Semantically, this
property-instantiation makes correct ones own affirmation that ones aesthetic
judgment is true.

3 For elaboration of the tight/non-tight distinction, within the general framework of contextual
semantics, see for instance Terry Horgan, Contextual Semantics and Metaphysical Realism:
Truth as Indirect Correspondence, in The Nature of Truth : Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, ed.
Michael P. Lynch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 6795; Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons,
Cognitivist Expressivism, in Metaethics After Moore, ed. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 255298; Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons,
Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!, in Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7398;
and Horgan and Potrc, Austere Realism, 5.7.5. As explained in Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!,
invoking the tight/non-tight distinction does not constitute embracing relativism, because
judgments that take up semantic slack via ones own responsesboth first-order judgments and
truth-falsity judgmentsare construed as categorical in content rather than relativistic in
content. See also Horgan and Potrc, Epistemological Skepticism, Semantic Blindness, and
Competence-Based Performance Errors, Acta Analytica 28 (March 2013): 16177.

148 Object Object 149

 Absolute Spectacle
McKenzie Wark

no fear of decay.
A null slumbering
among objects, nothing
Brian Kim Stefans, Speculative Realism

The Fetish of the Nonhuman Thing

Its a zircon, the oldest rock in the world, about 4.4 billion years old. This particular
planet is 4.5 or maybe 4.6 billion years old; so the oldest rock, a little bit of zircon,
goes back a ways. Its from the Hadean Eon, named after Hades, because, from any
human point of view, or from the point of view of any kind of life, it was rather hot
and unpleasant. Or so it is generally thought.
When geochemists Mark Harrison and Bruce Watson studied this little zircon,
they found some strange things. Its a crystal and grew as crystals do, and, as it did,
embedded in itself other atoms of whatever happened to be aroundin this case,
titanium. More titanium ends up in zircons when it is hotter than when it is cooler.
So, by counting titanium concentrations, its possible to know how hot it was when
the rock was formed.
What Watson and Harrison found is that this zircon crystallized at around 680
degrees Celsius, which means that it formed in the presence of water. As Watson
explains: Any rock heated in the presence of waterany rock, at any time, in any
circumstancewill begin to melt at between 650 and 700 degrees. This is the only
terrestrial process that occurs so predictably.1
I am not a geochemist, so I will have to take Watsons word for that. For me,
two things stand out from this story. The first is that it is possible to have knowledge
of something happening billions of years before there were people. That little zircon
is a lovely example of what Quentin Meillassoux calls the arche-fossil, a piece of
evidence of a world that has nothing to do with our species-being.2
But theres one other thing of interest, to me if not to Meillassoux. It is the
question of what makes it possible to have knowledge of the arche-fossil. I can think
about the arche-fossil. I can write about the arche-fossil. But neither thought nor
language is all that central to its existence. Lets also bracket off from its existence

1 Quoted in Robert Krulwich, The Oldest Rock in the World Tells Us a Story, NPR, January 11, 2013,
www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/10/169047159/the-oldest-rock-in-the-world-tells-us-a-story.
2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008).

Object 151
 ABSOLUTE SPECTACLE
the fact that there is a science called geochemistry, existing in departments of uni-
versities, communicating through peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences.
In a sense thats just the thinking and the language part of a knowledge of the arche-
fossil understood sociologically. Rather, I want to draw attention to two things that
make it exist, one of which is important to Meillassoux, and one that escapes his
concern but is important to me.
The one important to Meillassoux is mathematics: the zircon arche-fossil as
a mathematizable description of the universe. From the Big Bang to the formation
of its galaxies, its planets, and even its tiny rocks, the universe can be described
mathematically, and as such, can exist outside of thought or language. It can exist
outside of the knowing subject who thinks or writes noso long as one takes math-
ematics itself to be real.
The perspective on the arche-fossil that concerns me, though, is an appa-
ratus that combines labor and technology, by which a mathematical description of
a cosmic process, even a geochemical one, is tested. The zircon mentioned above
has been subjected to two such tests. At least one scientific procedure dates the
fossil, and another measures the amount of titanium that crystallizes in it. One
can imagine a mathematical description of the world as something nonhuman, as
existing without a human subject. The technical work of producing knowledge out
of the arche-fossil also in a sense dispenses with the human, resting as it does on an
apparatus, an assemblage of labor and machine. This dependency on an apparatus
I will call the inhuman. It is, as we shall see, not quite the same thing as the non-
human qualities of mathematical description.
Once one starts looking into the technical part, one finds oneself in a world
of company websites for hardcore geek machinery. Let me just mention the com-
pany Cameca, which among other products makes Electron Probe Analyzers for
Materials and Geoscience:
The SXFive comes equipped with a versatile electron gun compatible with
W and LaB6. The beam current is continuously regulated, achieving a
stability of 0.3% per 12 hours, thus enabling reliable long-term quantitative
analyses. The beam intensity is accurately measured thanks to an annular
Faraday cup and electrostatic deflection. The high voltage system operates
at up to 30 kV for elements with high atomic number.3
I really have no idea what any of that means. Of all the websites on these things
I found, I chose this one, because Cameca got its start producing movie projectors
3 See www.cameca.com/instruments-for-research/sxfive.aspx. See also Early Earth, a special issue
of Elements: An International Magazine of Mineralogy, Geochemistry, and Petrology, vol. 2, no. 4 (August
2006). Scientific writing also regularly brackets off the specifics of the apparatus, but one can
discover its presence in a journal such as this via advertising, for machines by Rigaku, Australian
Scientific Instruments, the wonderfully named Rockware, and Comeca, among others.
152 Object
MCKENZIE WARK
that could project sound films at the dawn of the talkies. It then diversified into
scientific instruments, but came back into the human-to-human media business
briefly in the sixties with the famous Scopitone movie jukebox.4
The movies, as we know from Dziga Vertov, replace human vision with the
kino-eye.5 The movies show to human vision something that is already inhuman. The
scientific instrument extends the range of perception even further, creating forms of
inhuman perception across all sorts of scales and temporalities. Among other things,
such instruments can perceive and measure arche-fossils, things that are completely
alien to human sensory bandwidth and memory. Machine perception alienates the
human from the human, by being the inhuman register of the nonhuman.
By ignoring machine vision, the media of the inhuman, we are left with a stark
choice. On the one hand we have human thought and language, to which we might
add human perception. It is a rather finite and bounded domain. On the other, we
have the nonhuman domain of mathematics. Lets assume just for the moment that
mathematics really can touch the absolute and is not limited to the human. Then,
as Meillassoux wants to do, one could take the arche-fossil as a kind of emblem of
the existence of an absolute beyond even the nonhuman accessible to mathematics.
Yet between the mathematics of the absolute and the finitude of the human,
there is something else, something Meillassoux does not really even mention: the
apparatus. It is neither human nor nonhuman, and it exists in a liminal, undecid-
able inhuman space. The apparatus requires human labor, but it is not reducible to
the intersubjective realm of scientific discourse. It includes also the machine, which
perceives and measures far beyond the realm of the human, registering the existence
of a great outdoors without touching the absolute.
With this question of the apparatus back in the picture, as it were, it is possible
to ask whether, when we claim that mathematics touches the absolute, it touches
the absolute of a world that is real. Meillassoux approaches this by reviving the
distinction between primary and secondary properties. The secondary properties
of any thing are its sensible ones. I see and feel the object; but is this really what
matters about the object? And is this perhaps just the object as it appears to my
senses? On the other hand, its primary qualities, its mathematical essence, exist
independently of appearances. Or so Meillassoux, building on Locke and Descartes,
would want to propose.
At this juncture, one could argue, as J. M. Bernstein does, that there is some-
thing fundamental to modernity about this split, about this sequestering of sec-
ondary qualities.6 There is perhaps something inhuman about modernity, about its
production of a whole apparatus for apprehending and transforming things, in which
4 Jean-Charles Scagnetti, Laventure scopitone 19571983: Histoire des prcurseurs du vidoclip
(Paris: Editions Autrement, 2010).
5 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans.
Kevin OBrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
6 J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adornos Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Object 153
 ABSOLUTE SPECTACLE
secondary qualities play little part. For Bernstein, after Adorno, the realm of the
secondary quality is the realm of art. Art redeems what is sensed from calculation.
One could argue that theres something of a sleight of hand involved in the idea
of primary qualities. In Meillassouxs version, they exist intrinsically in the thing, and
are comprehended in mathematical form. Primary qualities can thus be held to be real
in a philosophical sense. But they are not real in a scientific sense unless they can also
be measured. The measurement of primary qualities requires an apparatus, of machines
and labor, via which the primary qualities can be accounted for in terms intelligible as
secondary qualities, as a numerical readout or a graph that can be seen, for example.
Indeed, one might say that for primary qualities to be real in a scientific sense requires
the primary quality to be made legible as a secondary quality via a tertiary quality. The
tertiary quality of a thing is how the apparatus perceives it. It is an inhuman percep-
tion that makes the nonhuman primary quality legible via human secondary qualities.
What makes it possible for Meillassoux to loose a speculative philosophy from
the constraints of a phenomenological one is the absence of a third kind of thought,
which for the moment I will leave unnamed. Its preoccupation is not the absolute
nor is it consciousness, it is the apparatus, that neither nonhuman nor human thing,
the inhuman media between them.
One thing I am trying to avoid here is a retreat from the great outdoors, the
remarkable fact of the arche-fossil and all it represents, back into a phenomenology,
for which we cannot represent the in itself without it becoming the for us.7 in freeing the arche-fossil from the correlationist circle while ignoring the appa-
On the other hand, while I admire the elegance with which Meillassoux deploys the
absolute to open up a speculative philosophy of the real, I want to argue that such a
project can only be a contemplative realism, and thus an aesthetic one. As such, it falls
short of a certain project that for philosophy might be its last good calling.
Key to Meillassouxs argument is the attack on what he calls correlationism,
defined thus: Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible
to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one anoth-
er.8 While there may be stand-ins for subject and objectthought and being, for
examplecorrelationist thought proceeds in a circle.
Consciousness and its language certainly transcend themselves towards the
world, but there is a world only insofar as a consciousness transcends itself
towards it. Consequently, this space of exteriority is merely the space of
what faces us, of what exists only as a correlate of our own existence.9
The result is a cloistered thought, in which the arche-fossil is no longer a nonhuman
object of real wonder. Also gone is the absolute that so fascinated thinkers before
Kant. Meillassouxs project is to revive precritical philosophy, but in a speculative
7 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 4.
8 Ibid., 5.
9 Ibid., 7.
154 Object
MCKENZIE WARK
rather than a dogmatic vein. The ancestral rock is his avatar of an absolute world.
But theres a problem here. What constructs the knowledge of the rock as truly
ancestral, as predating any human world, of pointing back, even to the origins of
the universe itself ? Namely: an isotope whose rate of radioactive decay we know.10
Well, how do we know it? Through the apparatus.
Obviously, it is not part of our remit to appraise the reliability of the techniques
employed in order to formulate such statements11 Obviously? There is a slippage
here. I doubtless know even less than Meillassoux about the science of geochemistry.
It would not be my place to assess the reliability of a Cameca SXFive or any other
apparatus. I am pretty sure that is not even the apparatus involved in this particular
case. But I do take it as part of theorys remit to think the apparatus in general.
What we can say about the apparatus in general is that there are no statements
to be made about the ancestral that do not pass through its inhuman capacities to
perceive and measure tertiary qualities. There is no correlation, but not because
the object can be thought independently of the subject. Rather because the object
is produced via something else to which the subject, consciousness, languagecall
it what you likeis secondary. Or in short, in this other view, both primary and
secondary qualities are products of tertiary ones.
So yes, we can agree that the ancestral witness is illegitimate from the view-
point of strict correlationism.12 And so much the worse for correlationism. But
ratus, Meillassoux opens onto a great outdoors of a singularly philosophical kind.
Appearances to the contrary, it is not the great outdoors of science. Science can
think a time anterior to givenness and indifferent to it; but Meillassoux can only
contemplate that time aesthetically or mathematicallyin any case as a result of
an apparatus that remains unthought. It may turn out not to be the only way that
Meillassoux exempts philosophy from a certain kind of engagement.
Correlationism has at least one virtue for Meillassoux. It wards thought away
from dogmatism. Precritical philosophies offered all kinds of metaphysical abso-
lutes. Critical thought holds itself accountable to a mapping of its own limits. But
thought armed against dogmatism opened itself to another vice, what Meillassoux
calls fanaticism. Correlationism put a stop to philosophical means of speaking
of the absolute, but not mystical ones, which install themselves again as spokes-
models for what is on the other side of the thing as it appears to consciousness
the thing-in-itself.13 In so limiting what it says of the great outdoors, critical thought
only enables certain kinds of mystical thinking.
10 Ibid., 10 (emphasis added).
11 Ibid. (emphasis added).
12 Ibid., 11.
13 For a contemporary mode in which this line of thought might be reanimated, see for example Eugene
Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror and Philosophy Vol. 1 (Alresford,: Zero Books, 2011).
Object 155
 ABSOLUTE SPECTACLE
Meillassoux writes: Against dogmatism, it is important that we uphold
the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence
of various fanticisms, it is important that we rediscover in thought a modicum of
absolutenessenough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who
would present themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some reve-
lation.14 For those who want a monist, secular, or materialist thought, theres
merit in this argument. But in shutting the door to revelation, Meillassoux might
actually open it to another kind of divinity, and another kind of trusteeone
that plays dice.
Sheering away from correlationism, and its insistence on the self-monitoring
subjects centrality in constructing the thought of the object, Meillassoux heads in
the other direction, to the object thought outside of correlation. Here, he applies
more than a modicum of the absolute. For him, if the arche-fossil stands for the
ancestral, and is thinkable, then the absolute is thinkable. But again theres a slip-
page here, from the arche-fossil as it appears to science to what Meillassoux wants
to make of it. The arche-fossil is a thing from beyond human time, but the absolute
need not enter into it. Knowledge of the arche-fossil is a product of an apparatus. It
may come from 4.4 billion years ago, as in my example, or even from the beginnings
of the universe, but it is a measurable thing.
Meillassoux asks: How then is thought to carve a path towards the outside
for itself ?15 Like most philosophers, he does not take the road of the apparatus.16
Instead, he wants a rationalism of the absolute that is not dogmatic. On the one
hand, this rationalism must extract itself from the correlationist circle, and, on the
other, it must not run aground on what he calls facticity, or thoughts inability to dis-
cover why what is, is. In other words, how can the absolute exist outside of thought
or language? And yet, why this world and not some other?
There is a path already marked out here that might escape at least from the first
of these constraints, the first metaphysical counter-offensive against Kantian tran-
scendentalism.17 It is the now little-known school of empirio-criticism attributed
to Ernst Mach and others.18 From it descends the tertiary position from which
I am approaching Meillassoux, a position that is even less well known today but
was certainly known in French philosophical schools a generation ago. Its name
is empiriomonism, and its central exponent is Alexander Bogdanov.19
14 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 49 (emphasis added).
15 Ibid., 51.
16 On the allergy philosophy has for the apparatus, or techn, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time,
1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
17 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 51.
18 For a critical assessment, see John T. Blackmore, Ernst Mach: His Life, Work, and Influence,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
19 Alexander Bogdanov, La science, lart et la classe ouvrire, trans. Blanche Grinbaum (Paris: Franois
Maspero, 1977) (published in the Thorie series, directed by Louis Althusser).
156 Object
MCKENZIE WARK
As Meillassoux presents it, the original move of this school is to turn the
correlation itself into an absolute. It begins with an acknowledgement of the
Kantian constraint, that the thing-itself is not knowable except by some dogma
or other. But there is something knowable in-itselfthe correlation itself: They
converted radical ignorance into knowledge of a being finally unveiled in its true
absoluteness.20
I would quarrel here with this use of the term absolute, as I think it is not
necessary at all to think of Mach, and still less Bogdanov, as making the correlation
into an absolute. But it is the case that, in Mach, sensation and, in Bogdanov, what
I am calling the apparatus replaces the dualist correlation with a monist concept
that also restrains itself from making claims in advance about the real beyond the
practice of the apparatus, and yet does not hold consciousness or language to be
an external self-monitoring observer that might contemplate with disinterest what
the apparatus produces in the labor of knowing the world.
In any case, for Meillassoux, such an approach passes the first test, avoiding
the correlation, but fails a second one: facticity. For him, thought does not expe-
rience its limits in facticity, but rather its truth. Meillassoux founds his specula-
tive, nondogmatic philosophy the same way Mach and Bogdanov did: by making
a virtue of necessity. In the former case, this necessity was thinking past the
problem of correlation; in the latter, it is thinking past the problem of facticity.
In an original move, Meillassoux makes the absence of reason the ultimate
property of facticity. There is no reason for anything to be or persist. All that is, is
contingent. Meillassoux writes: Everything could actually collapse: from trees to
stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws, and this not by virtue
of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the
absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from
perishing.21
Contingency here means how things persist or perish. Meillassoux revives the
absolute in the form of contingency itself, but not in a dogmatic way. It is not that
contingency is the new dogmatic answer to the problem of facticity. Rather, facticity
is neither necessity nor contingency, but rather our non-knowledge of when one or
the other applies. Even contingency is contingent.
Here comes the fun part: he goes on to argue, and rather convincingly, that
correlationism presupposed the absoluteness of contingency. For thought to appre-
hend the thing without a dogmatic metaphysics behind it is to embrace the possi-
bility, even if only for a moment, of its absolute contingency. Thus, the absoluteness
of contingency must at least be thinkable for there to be a correlationism that dis-
pels the illusion of a dogmatic absolute. According to Meillassoux, This absence
of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity.22
20 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52.
21 Ibid., 53.
22 Ibid. (emphasis in original).
Object 157
 ABSOLUTE SPECTACLE
The Nothingness that Speaks French
Lets take stock:
First, there is certainly value in breaking out of correlationism. One of correlation-
isms limits is that it is not able to think contemporary science without expelling
from it precisely that about which thought really should wonder, such as the ances-
tral evidence of a nonhuman world. But there is a problem with the thing on which
Meillassoux wants to posit a new absolute. The nonhuman, mathematizable qualities
of a thing could be thought as being outside of the subject and thus outside of the
correlatonist circle, but only at the price of excluding also the question of detection
and measurement, which I am here calling the tertiary qualities of inhuman percep-
tion that properly belong to the apparatus.
Second, Meillassoux acknowledges two paths out of correlation, one of which
is (in my terms) via the apparatus, by thinking that inhuman machinery of per-
ception and measurement, and the labor by which it comes to us, of Harrison and
Watson and so many others. This we might call the empirical exit from correlation.
But Meillassoux takes the rationalist exit instead. It rests on taking facticity to be
as real a problem as correlation, and answering that problem in an original way:
there is no reason why what is, is. And better: theres no way of knowing why some
of what appears is contingent and some not. This in turn is a tool for prizing open
correlation, which in Meillassouxs argument has to entertain the possibility of a
contingent world in order not to think it dogmatically, even if it settles instead for
the cloistered world of the correlationist circle. Lets conclude, as we started, with
a particular example of an arche-fossil, if of a rather different kind, one perhaps
not as glorious as the zircon, or even as identifiable as a thing. Lets consider not
cosmology, but climate science, which gives us evidence of a very pertinent kind of
collapse. Climate science tells us of past events, such as the climate of the Hadean
eon, but also of a future one, the imminent climate of the Anthropocene epoch.
Climate science abstracts from the fetishism of particular, contingent actions
on a certain localized scale, that of the biosphere, to show us also a future event
that has already occurred. The already transpired rise ofamong other gases
atmospheric carbon has already raised global temperatures in the future. Climate
science raises the alarm about an event that unfolds in slow motion all around us,
but beyond the scale and memory of human thought or perception. It too is a thing
that in its full wonder is outside the correlationist circle.
Climate science knows nothing of the absolute. It depends on an apparatus.
Indeed, one of the leading histories of it is called A Vast Machine.23 It has three
elements: predicting the weather, modeling the climate, and the physics of how
both weather and climate work. It took many decades to bring all three together.
Gathering timely weather data from disparate locations and altitudes takes a huge,
23 See Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global
Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
158 Object
MCKENZIE WARK
global infrastructure. Computing that data with an accurate model of the physics
involved takes a vast amount of computational power. Both data communication
and computation friction impeded the study of climate until the late twentieth cen-
tury. At the base of our contemporary knowledge of climate and climate change is
the evolution, from system to network to webs, of a global climate knowledge infra-
structure, requiring coordinated global labors.
Climate science is our Napoleon at Jena, not the world spirit on horseback,
but the biospheric totality via COMSAT. If there is a shortlist of things calling us
to a timely rather than a hesitant thought, then surely it is on that list. But philos-
ophy has turned away from such things. It grew bored with the double binds of the
subject; but rather than lift its gaze toward this world, it conjured up anotherthe
world of the absolute object. This contemplative realism provides a window through
which to observe the beauty of a world that actually is collapsing, and the solace
of knowing that the world will go on, even if the human does not. Philosophy has
found a spectacle outside of history once again, while the sirens go off all around
us, calling us to put out fires both conceptual and real.
This is why I choose to begin again, but elsewhere, with Mach and Bogdanov,
and a quite other path out of the correlationist circle, toward the inhuman beyond
phenomenology but falling short of the nonhuman and intimations of the abso-
lute. This other theoryin its engagement with the apparatusmight not even
be philosophy. Yet it may have a few modest merits. It begins and ends with that
mingling of labor and technology that characterizes the times. It hews close to the
problems that such an apparatus detects as the problems of the momentsuch
as climate change. It makes no claim to be the trustee of a portal between this
world and another. It makes no claim that either it, or its subject, is a rare event.
It seeks only to equip everyday life with the tools for its own sustenance and elab-
oration. It has no interest in rendering the contemplative spectacle absolute and
eternal. It has an interest only in dispensing with the spectacle entirely. In this
it does not hesitate.
Object 159
Concept
 Pessimism and Realism
Eugene Thacker

Here ... everything is by design. In the history of philosophy, there is no single, agreed-
upon definition of realism. Depending on what one thinks about philosophy, this
is an occasion for concern or for laughter. And yet nearly every philosophy relies
on some realist claim, a claim to be able finally and definitively to articulate the
way things areno matter how strange or counter-intuitive such claims may seem.
In fact, it could be argued that the criterion of realism in philosophy today is pre-
cisely how counterintuitive and weird the claims are for the real. But inevitably
disagreements arise, schools are formed, weighty academic tomes are published,
and academic tribalism abounds.
In many philosophies, what is at stake is a claim about the real, though no two
claims are alike. Historians of philosophy usually resolve this by simply enumerating
the realisms promoted by various philosophers, one following the next in a neat,
sequential progression: Platonic realism (the world I see before me and the world
of abstract forms); Aristotelian realism (the abstract forms as inseparable from the
world I see before me); Hegelian realism (the world in itself as commensurate with
the structure of thought); Whiteheadian realism (process, becoming, and change as
primary; substances, objects, and things as secondary); and so on. Another approach is
to brand the types of realism in a transhistorical manner, across historical epochs and
individual thinkers: a naive realism (in which appearance and reality are the same);
an epistemological realism (reality is distinct from appearance and resides in abstract
universals; philosophys goal is to interrogate not appearances but the universals); and
an ontological realism (that which exists is real, even if not actual).
But in such lists and tables we are obliged to mention another kind of realism,
for which we must thank Kant, and which he would undoubtedly call a critical
realism, a realism that doesnt presume that the realwhether tangible or not
can be adequately known. It is almost an agnostic realism, though in saying this we
have already begun, according to Kant, to depart from the domain of philosophy
proper. Kant brings us the most modern realism that is at the same time indelibly
premodern (dare we say, mystical).

*
What You See Is What You Get. Simplifying to the extreme, we might offer the fol-
lowing: philosophical realism is predicated on two related but distinct approaches.
The first is the what you see is what you get approach, the attempt to under-
stand something without subjective bias, without idealism, without distortion. The
second is the just the facts approach, or the attempt to understand something

Concept 163
 PESSIMISM AND REALISM EUGENE THACKER

as it is without reliance on speculation, hypotheses, guesswork, or hoping for the a Being and Event, without acknowledging the placation of a Critique of Pure Reason,
best. In a way, the second approach follows from the first. In the first, what appears or the delusions of a Phenomenology of Spirit? Surely every philosopher feels, deep
to be a value-neutral acceptance of the way things are relies to a great degree on down, that if we could have figured it out by now, we would have done so long ago. All
the experience of a cognizing subjectand subjective experience is, as we know, that has changed is that we publish more books, not better books. Perhaps this is why
not the most reliable of measures for realism. What you see is what you get, yes, Heidegger, Whitehead, and others left their books unfinished, why Schopenhauer
but what I get is not necessarily what you get, and vice-versa. One then moves to kept on adding material to The World as Will and Representation, why Wittgenstein
the second approach, attempting, as it were, to bypass the perennially problematic retired early, and why Nietzsche and Cioran never bothered in the first placeas
area of experience without totally jettisoning the domain of empirical sense data. if they each awoke from their own dogmatic hangovers, and realized, too late, the
What is real is what can be verified, measured, analyzed, articulated as an object futility of the realist impulse. Or, perhaps they understood that one begins philos-
of study. One parses out experience into an elaborate architectonics of cognitive ophy the moment one abandons it.
functions (sensibility, understanding, reason); or one brackets the world in its
appearing to us as an object of study; or one prioritizes becoming over being, the *
continuous over the discrete, process over product; or one makes a turn away from A Very, Very, Very Short History of Philosophy. Philosophical realism in the West is built
reality in itself toward language, logic, and signs; or one enlists the descriptive rigor upon three pillars, pillars that are shaky, full of fractures, and mottled with peeling
of mathematical set theory and its capacity for managing parts and the whole. The paint (like a dcollage). The first pillar, a classical one, is that of Plato. With Plato
approaches vary, but the upshot is that what is real is indisputable, apart from we are introduced to a two-world view, a world of the here-and-now and a world
our desires, hopes, and wish-fulfillments. But this too runs into problems, in that beyond; a world that is immediately given and a world that is far off or at least
someone is always doing the measuring. A decision has been made about the sort of inaccessible. While innumerable commentaries have been written about this or that
logical game we will play today; and the criteria for verification are at best moving aspect of Platos allegory of the cave, its basic message is quite clear: theres got
targets. The apotheosis of this scientific realism is tautologythe real is real. to be more. What is simply given is fine, but its not enough, cannot be enough.
Besides, one persons reality is anothers fantasy, regardless ofor indeed because No, theres got to be more. Perhaps another world lies above or beyond this one,
ofhow finely it is measured. perhaps its coextensive with it and we just dont realize it; but there has to be more.
No doubt Plato learned this from the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers. Air-
* dropped into a world one has neither created nor asked for, the self gazes about,
There is a pessimism built into all attempts at a philosophy of realism. Philosophys perhaps bewildered, horrified, or fascinated, and asks the primordial philosophical
desperate push to attain the real is matched only its inability to do so. Realizing question: Is this it? Answering this question means parceling out the world that
this, one rescinds realism, but not reason. A new problem arises, a problem specific is questioned, a self that is questioning, and a problematic relation between them.
to pessimismwhat then to do with thought? For Plato, as we know, this was not it, and beyond every particular chair or book or
jellyfish was an abstract, perfected form of chairness, bookness, jellyfishness. And,
* while Plato has been overturned many times in philosophy, the intuition of the two
There is no philosophy of pessimism, only the reverse. worlds remains, though it often goes under different names, each of which stands
in for this basic relationship between the world as given and another world, perhaps
* more fundamental, that is not given: the One, Logos, God, noumena, the Absolute,
A realist claim is not always a claim about the real. Spirit, Will-to-Power, Being, duration, process, difference, the One.
The second pillar, a modern one, is that of Descartes. If Plato gives us the intu-
* ition of the two worlds, then Descartes gives us the means of traveling between them.
All claims about the real are realistbut not necessarily realistic. Descartess celebrated, by now clich, phrase Cogito ergo sum is more than an affirma-
tion of the self-conscious, reasoning, human subject. It is the assertion of a sufficient
* and necessary link between thought and the world. More specifically, it is the assertion of
What baffles me is how unwise philosophers often areespecially those philosophers a consonance between human thought and the two worlds, one of which is immediately
most attentive to the challenges of systematic philosophy. How can one honestly given, and the other of which is not apparent and which must be mediated in some
undertake a project like Being and Time, a Process and Reality, a Difference and Repetition, way. Descartes even goes so far as to suggest that the way to get to the world beyond

164 Concept Concept 165

 PESSIMISM AND REALISM
is through the world here-and-now. The Meditations makes this clear in its narrative
arc. One has simply to sit down next to a fire with a warm sweater, maybe a cup of
coffee, and think. In fact, the Meditations is a performative text in which Descartes-the-
character shows us how to get from the world here-and-now to the world beyond. But
there are many bumps along the road, and bit by bit the world here-and-now becomes
more and more unreliable, more and more like a nebulous, spectral world beyond,
full of animatronic puppets, ghosts in the machine, and trickster-demons. The secret
that everyone knows about the Meditations is that, once Descartes starts down the path
of skepticism, there is no good reason to stop, ever. God (the philosophers God, the
God of Descartes, Leibniz, and yes, of Spinoza too) comes in to save the day, but
we dont really buy it. A deus ex machina if ever there was one. Of course, the irony
of the Meditations is that one has come full circle: the philosopher has traveled into
the beyond in order to discover the self, the world beyond looks a lot like the world
here-and-now, and one has simply arrived where one had begun.
The third pillar is that of Kant. Admittedly, Kant is a boring writer (though better
than Hegel, who is simply a bad writer). But what Kant did for philosophy is something
that has been a mixed blessinghe gave philosophy a job description. Certainly, phi-
losophers had had jobs prior to Kants time; but they were either beholden to religious
institutions (you can teach Aristotles logic, but stay away from biology) or they
functioned in a transient zone prior to the disciplinary divisions of the humanities and
the sciences (take Descartesphilosopher, mathematician, and amateur anatomist).
Kants critical philosophy is widely known for its delimiting effects vis--vis philosophy.
It says what philosophy is not. Yes, debate the existence of God all you like, and for
as long as you like, but you will never reach a philosophically adequate answer, and
philosophers shouldnt be bothering with this anywaythat is the job of the priests.
It is also a sobering up for philosophy as a privileged, human endeavor; it says what
philosophy cannot donotably, it cannot ever fully bridge the gap between the domain
of phenomena (the world as it appears to us) and the noumena (the world in itself,
apart from our experience of it). Kants critical philosophy is remarkable because it
harbors within itself a contradiction: it is a grand, shimmering, systematic philosophy,
a sort of cathedral of philosophy that argues for philosophys humility, even poverty.
But even Kants conciliatory gesture has a happy ending, for while we may
not know the world in itself, we can know how we know, and we can study how the
world appears to us, and maybejust maybeby doing this we can at least mini-
mally infer that there is something more out there, making an impression on us,
in whatever inevitably distorted way we may intuit it.
From a certain vantage point, the history of Western philosophy looks like
a somewhat panicky, feverish attempt to cover up the suspicion that there may not be
more. Every excited, anxious assertion of theres got to be more covers up a more
disappointing, more morose this is it.
All of this leaves out a possible fourth pillarthat of Nietzschewho excitedly
asserts this is it! And so realism returns to its pessimistic roots.
166 Concept
EUGENE THACKER
*
The pessimist is a logician with an aptitude for disappointment.
*
Depressive Realism. Pessimism and realism seem to be two very different ways of
thinking. Realism implies a certain neutrality, seeing things the way they are, apart
from self-interest or the interest of others, a neutralization of value that always seems
to end in the vaguely streetwise tautology of it is what it is. Pessimism, by contrast,
is often regarded as a bad attitude more than a philosophical position. It is always
opposed to optimism, if not logically then affectively. If pessimists are enthusiastic
about anything, it is about pessimus, the worst, resplendent in every possible out-
come, glimmering around every corner, an ecstasy of the worst that is shrouded by
a grimace or curmudgeonly grunt. Realism is often employed by necessityone is
never a realist just for fun. As a philosophical position, the necessity of realism is
usually elicited by something non-philosophicalpolitics, science, or just getting
things done. Pessimism is a luxury: one must have spare time to complain, to moan
and groan and write lyrical poetry about suffering, all of which helps no one and
in fact makes things worse.
That said, there is a connection between pessimism and realism. One example
comes not from philosophy but from psychology. Depressive realism is the official-
sounding name that has been given to the proposition that a pessimistic outlook
gives one a healthier and more realistic grasp of ones life and the world in which
one lives. Pessimistsso the argument goesare freed from the locus of control
fallacy; they do not believe that they are in total control of their actions and their des-
tiny. Pessimists are also less likely to presume that bad things always happen to other
people (the optimism bias). As a result, pessimists hold no illusions about their
own superiority over other people. They hold no high hopes, great expectations, or
illusions of grandeur. They live and act, for now, for the time being, and if things
dont work out, well, what did you expect?
The jury still seems to be out on whether this is a viable psychological theory
or simply an attempt to view depression optimistically. Contemporary philosophers
seem to have caught the bug, putting out pop-philosophy books that, in their almost
absurd earnestness, begin to sound like self-help.1 However, at the broadest level
one that exceeds psychologymight we add that the pessimist holds no illusions,
not just about ones own individual being, but about the superiority or relevance of
all human beings? Indeed, of all beingsof Being itself ? If this is a realism, then
it is a realism that extends into antihumanisma sort of species-wide depression.
1 See Roger Scrutons The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), Alain de Bottons The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 2001),
and yes, even John Grays Straw Dogs : Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2007).
Concept 167
 PESSIMISM AND REALISM
* objective claim about the world as such, with the caveat that the world as such
Black Bile. Every stumbling thought of purgation a halo of bones. The laughter of
ash and dust. Caverns. Cold celestial limbs. An echoless desert of winged diagrams.
* the so-called Speculative Realist philosophies, which argue for a philosophically
Born in the Ruins of Philosophy. At any given moment in time, the pillars of philo-
sophy are nearly indistinguishable from ruins. They may still stand, but they serve
less as functional architecture and more like tourist attractions. As ruins, they are
filled with cracks and fissures, but no one really is to blame, except of course the
philosophers. And the demolition of philosophy is always carried out by philosophy
itself (for who else cares enough to examine so thoroughly every niche of the ruins
in order to spackle them over?). Historians of philosophy are the clean-up crew.
In the meantime, those loiterers known as anti-philosophers keep hanging around,
sometimes hidden in their nearby caves, sometimes just sitting about like lumps of
syllogistic clay. They are skeptics, cynics, nihilists, pessimists. They refuse to live
within the ruins, in the shadow of the pillars, but they also havent left the site for
better weather or tolerable coffee. The way they think sounds philosophicalskep-
ticism, nihilism, pessimismterms that seem to denote methods, schools, traditions.
But they also know that everything built up must collapse again, and this intuition
is evident within their very wordsthe all-too-convincing self-doubt of Pascal, the
funereal spite of Schopenhauer, the stark transmissions of Cioran
But there is still a philosophical question embedded in their aphorisms, frag-
ments, and missives against humanity. With skepticism, one must always answer
the question, Where does doubt stop? Every philosopher finds their own stop-
ping point: doubt stops at God, doubt stops at self-consciousness, doubt stops at
logical consistency, and so on. Of course, for some, doubt doesnt stop, and so the
skeptic overlaps with the nihilist. With pessimism, the question is different: How
many nos make a yes? Every philosopher negates something in the world or Realism, analytic philosophy is a form of asceticism. It could never allow itself to be
about the worlda presumption, an article of faith, what passes as common sense.
But this negation always paves the way for a further affirmation, a claim about how
things really are. As with skepticism, there is also the possibility of a no that never
leads to a yes, a no that must, as a consequence, devolve upon and devour itself,
leading to paradox and contradiction. The outcome is suicide (the modern version),
self-abnegation (the mystical, premodern version), or tragedy (the classical version).
Weve forgotten the postmodern versionfarce, slapstick, gallows humor.
* is ultimately dismissed because it commits that most unforgiveable of philosophical
Pessimism has an ambiguous status in the history of philosophy. Though pessimists
often make truth claims, no one really seeks out the pessimist. In fact, theyre usu-
ally the person no one wants to heargrumbling, grumpy, and complaining. Some
philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, argue for a shift from a moral pessimism
168 Concept
EUGENE THACKER
(a subjective attitude about a state of affairs) to a metaphysical pessimism (an
is generally indifferent and not worth the trouble). After almost a century of the
more level-headed philosophies of language, logic, and politics, are there signs that
the angst-ridden and analytic impulses of pessimism are back? A variant of this are
realist understanding of the world apart from and indifferent to the perspective
of the thinking human subject and the interest groups he or she represents. Now,
while Speculative Realist thinkers never make any claims for their philosophies as
pessimistic (in either the moral or metaphysical sense), a glance at the history of
philosophy suggests that Speculative Realism may be viewed as an extension of pes-
simism, for only thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Pascal, and Cioran would suggest to
us in the calm language of philosophy that the world is indifferent to usand that
this realization is dark. But Speculative Realism, for all its cautious evocations
of speculative thought, of a poetics of stoic objects, or of a mathematically-sublime
chaos, still retains one foot staunchly, anxiously rooted in analytic philosophy and
science. Speculative Realism is analytic philosophy in continental clothing. And
a principle of sufficient reason is the talisman for entering the self-fashioned, erudite
halls of Speculative Realism.
But the limit of such philosophical movements is the limit that pessimism has
long ago identifiedthat of the world-without-us, and the impossibility of thinking
this except as a limit. In a sense, Speculative Realism doesnt go far enough in its stoic
and heroic quest for the absolute. It cannot. To question the principle of sufficient
mathematics or the principle of sufficient logic is to forego philosophy itself; and
one has invested too much in philosophy to simply cash out and walk away. And so
the game continues. And so we have the familiar signposts of a philosophical anti-
traditionskepticism, pessimism, nihilismnow under the banner of science
and its almost juridical mania for proving what goes without saying. For Speculative
depressed, for instancenever allow itself to become a depressive realism.
*
Schopenhauer: The definition of the absolute is: that point at which it has been
convenient for us to stand still and stop.2 I.e., art?
*
Toward a Philosophy of Futility. While it often has a quasi-philosophical status, pessimism
errorsit mistakes the subjective for the objective. But the acknowledgement of this
2 Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains 4, ed. Arthur Hbscher, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford:
Berg, 1990), 112.
Concept 169
 PESSIMISM AND REALISM
error is already embedded within pessimism. This is the reason why Schopenhauers
The World as Will and Representation only looks like a work of systematic philosophy.
Really, by the books final sections, the whole has given way to crumbling ruins and
furtive appeals to Buddhist nothingness. He shouldve known better. Nevertheless,
every pessimistic thinker understands at some level the pessimism inherent in the
philosophical enterprise. The challenge of any philosophy is to account for itself in
the claims it makes (especially those claims deemed realist). And this challenge
is abetted by another one, which is, in turn, to account for its own horizon, its own
limits, what it cannot say, know, or think.
This is why there is no analytic pessimism in philosophy, only a metaphys-
ical poetics of finitude and angst. No one has ever claimed a scientific status for
pessimismthat is, almost no one. An exception is the late nineteenth-century
American author Edgar Saltus, who, near the end of his book The Philosophy of
Disenchantment is curiously optimistic about what he calls a scientific pessimism
of the future. But Saltuss scientific pessimism is as much about a mystical revela-
tion of limits as it is about logical rigor and verifiable claims. Eduard von Hartmann,
disciple of Schopenhauer, takes a different route. In his massive, unwieldy The
Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann attempts to wed Schopenhauers pessimism
with the biology and physics of his day. The entirety of the first part of his work
contains detailed descriptions of scientific experiments involving the decapitation
of animalsas if to suggest a stark allegory between science and philosophy. But
all that science teaches Hartmann is that the human species is at best an accident
that has had the misfortune of thinking itself a necessity. As accidentally as we have
come into being, so must we accidentally move out of being. But whether this be all
at once or slowly and gradually, Hartmann does not say. Then there is Nietzsche, the
defiant convalescent, who rails as much against science as he does religion, telling us
that we have not gone far enough in our pessimism, not yet attained a pessimism
of strength. And yet, as he jibes, what we need now is a chemistry of the moral,
religious, aesthetic representations and sensations, likewise of all those stimuli that
we experience within ourselves amid the wholesale and retail transactions of cul-
ture and society, indeed even in solitude. But that is not all. Given this, Nietzsche
asks, What if this chemistry were to reach the conclusion that in this area too, the
most magnificent colors have been extracted from base, even despised materials?3
All of this would seem to require a distinct branch of philosophy dedicated
to studying the inherent futility of all attempts to philosophize. Perhaps pessimism
has a future after all. One imagines universities with undergraduate courses in
Voluntary Extinction (with a lab section); erudite, curmudgeonly professors with
titles like Schopenhauer Chair in the Study of the Worst; the publication of mas-
sive Germanic tomes of systematic philosophy entitled The Philosophy of Futility. But
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (I), trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), 1516.
170 Concept
EUGENE THACKER
if such a branch of philosophy existed, it would have to be distinct from the typical
application of logic to philosophy, which would simply provide an elaborate descrip-
tion of philosophys failure in terms of contradiction, sublimating failure as success
(thereby turning failure into farce). It would also have to be distinct from metaphi-
losophy, which is still committed to the capacity of philosophy to know everything
(including philosophy, from which it conveniently excludes itself when necessary).
Finally, it would have to be distinct from antiphilosophy, which typically evades the
failure by moving sideways into adjacent fields such as fiction, poetry, or memoir.
In this context, pessimism would have to be taken less as a subjective attitude
about philosophy, and more about the structure of futility inherent to philosophy.
But such a proposition is ultimately, for the pessimist, tedious and pedantic.
As a philosophy, pessimism is always half-hearted, ready to give up or abandon a
line of thought at the slightest inclination. Pessimismspeaking (as it feels obliged
to do) in its deep, resounding, philosophical tonessays that all philosophies must
fail, no matter what methods they deploy or from which tradition they may stem.
All philosophies must fail because their truth claims must by necessity be partial,
contingent, and grounded in some basis that cannot itself be directly questioned.
Moreover, philosophys claims are contingent because its authority relies on prop-
ositions, those peculiar, hallucinatory uses of a language of effective rigorprop-
ositions in language, with the aid of bounded concepts, through the structure of
logical argumentation, all framed by the basic relation of intentionality and the
self-world relation. The result is that pessimism is often relegated to the dungeons
or the attics of philosophy. It is forced to witness or to wait for its own failure, in a
series of infinite resignations: no philosophy can say anything about everything
no philosophy can say everything about anything
Concept 171
 Making Non-Standard Thoughts:
An Introduction to Franois Laruelle
John Maoilearca

Franois Laruelles concept of non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy

is said to expand the definition of what counts as philosophical thought. However,
this gesture goes beyond merely relativizing thought within a neoliberal pluralism
that is actually indifferent to philosophy (all opinions are valid) or anarchizing
science as part of a methodology where anything goes. Rather, the flat thought
Laruelle strives for is democratic because it is materialized in different ways,
some of them scientific (biology, fractal geometry, quantum physics), some of
them aesthetic (cinema, photography, performance), with other models (erotic,
mystical, animal) possible. What might look like relativism is always an expan-
sion, an inclusivity of thought. The non-standard philosophy of photography, for
instance, is not simply the generation of new thoughts (about subjectivity, light,
the flash, and so forth) through an unorthodox source, but the materialization
of thought through a photography of philosophy. Such an art of philosophy acts
as a non-philosophical practice, especially in terms of the materiality of photo-
graphic performance as it involves posture, exposure, definition, and resolution.
These are not mere metaphors, but models invoked to mutate what counts as
philosophical practice.
In Artistic Experiments with Philosophy, my interview with Laruelle in
this volume, two words stand out: failure and sample. In one form or another
failure occurs six times; sample occurs once. Though used in passing (they are
not part of the current non-philosophical lexicon), they are highly pertinent, both
to each other and to Laruelles project as it relates to art practices. It is notable that
the interview begins with a reference to another recent interview with Laruelle,
and the relationship discussed there between the general project of non-philosophy
and his more experimental or artistic texts. There, he recounted his ambition
to treat philosophy as a material, and thus also as a materialitywithout preoc-
cupying oneself with the aims of philosophy, of its dignity, of its quasi-theological
ends, of philosophical virtues, wisdom etc. He then added: What interests me
is philosophy as the material for an art, at the limit, an art.1 Furthermore, it is
not difficult to show that it is not just Laruelles experimental texts that aim for
this art, but that all his works partake in this experiment in as much as they each

1 Robin Mackay, Introduction: Laruelle Undivided, in Franois Laruelle, From Experiments in

Non-Standard Thought, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2012), 29.

Concept 173
 AN INTRODUCTION TO FRANOIS LARUELLE
attempt to demonstrate a new posture or orientation regarding what philosophy
isboth as a material, and how it can be reviewed using other practices, such as
photography (as outlined in The Concept of Non-Photography and Photo-Fiction, a Non-
Standard Aesthetics). His problem, as he puts it, is that of the re-orientation of
thought.2 Hence, if Laruelles approach offers us something new, it is not because it
is a new set of ideas about reality (or the Real) that must supersede others thoughts
because theirs are now to be seen as failures (or wrong, less productive, creative,
rigorous, coherent, ethical, emancipative), and his as a success (or right, more pro-
ductive, creative, rigorous, and so forth). It is, rather, that he is trying to convey a
new posture, orientation, or vision (in-One, that is, in absolute immanence) of
all thoughts as equal (philosophical or non-philosophical), and equally belonging
to the Real. If his approach is seen as a new set of ideas, as new representations of
the Real, then it does indeed fail in a pointless gesture, a zero-sum game.3 If seen
as postures or art-oriented stances, however, it goes beyond success and failure:
it is itself a sample from the Real.
Indeed, the concept of orientation also has something to do with the decisions
made in philosophy (decisions being the structural invariants of philosophyits
essenceaccording to Laruelle), given that the meaning of decision is with-
drawal or cut-off (from decaederede for off and caedere, cut). As Laruelle
put it in a previous interview with me, Marjorie Gracieuse, and Anthony Paul Smith:
To philosophise on X is to withdraw from X; to take an essential distance from the
term for which we will posit other terms.4 Yet nothing is withdrawn from or out-
side the Real, not even the thought of being withdrawn from it. It is all a matter of a
particular posture (distance) or orientation. Immanence, again. It is not the object
that withdraws from an increasingly distant thought (as Speculative Realism
would have it) but thought (philosophy) that distances itself in a withdrawal from
the Real (object).5
In place of seeing philosophy go to the Real (with its categories, its concepts,
its wisdom), from an outside, transcendent, position, we reorient ourselves to see
philosophy coming from inside the Realnot as its whole, the exemplary instance
or essence, but only as one part, a sample. We shift vectors, no longer going from
Philosophy to the Real but instead going from the Real to Philosophy. And
what follows from this shift? Absolute flatness: no first philosophiesbe they the
metaphysics of classical thought, or the ethics (Levinas) or aesthetics of the new
2 Ibid., 2.
3 Franois Laruelle, Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy, trans.
Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay, in The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by Franois Laruelle,
ed. Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic, (New York: Telos Press, 2011), 83.
4 Franois Laruelle, Is Thinking Democratic? Or, How to Introduce Theory into Democracy,
in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, ed. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, trans. Anthony
Paul Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 229.
5 See John Mullarkey, How to Behave Like a Non-Philosopher: Or, Speculative versus Revisionary
Metaphysics, Speculations 4 (June 2013): 10813.
174 Concept
JOHN MAOILEARCA
realists.6 That is why the non-philosophical orientation does not lead to philosophy
becoming an art in some reductive merger, or art becoming philosophy, as its mere
illustrator, but rather their standing as equals, both thinking equally, both samples of
the Real. No firstness at all. Thinking is everywhere. For standard philosophy, both
ontological and differential (from Parmenides through Heidegger to Derrida) this
will be unacceptable. In truth, the real philosophical horror for them is not that we
are not (yet) thinking, but that there has always been thinking. Given the view that
philosophy must have an essence (even if it be in difference) and so an exclusivity,
then what is (philosophically) unthinkable is that thinking might be found all about
us. Yet this is the monster, or philosophical clone, that Laruelle offers us.
And what of the connection between sample and failure in this respect?
A notable aspect of Laruelles style of writing is the lack of examples and citations
in his work. He explains this absence in the following interview in this way: I dont
talk about the great metaphysical poets like Donne, Hlderlin, and Mallarm who
have been the consistent prey of philosophical commentaries; my project is different.
Im not that kind of commentator and perhaps thats why Ive failed. The mention
of failure is connected to his lack of citation, as he then continues to explain:
Just as I cite very few other philosophers (except as floating markers in my
dream) and never cite myself at all, I do not cite applied work, much prefer-
ring a certain type of paraphrase that is a destruction of commentary (as in
Mystique non-philosophique lusage des contemporains). [] I try to do so in such
a way that I use just a strictly circumscribed piece or moment in my work.
What I write is a sample, not an example, of what I do when I think. To think
is to make, no? 7
Thinking is making, neither exemplary success nor inadequate failure. Thinking
is not of the Real, its ideal representation, but a material part or sample of it: we
think according to or alongside the Real. And making can also be thinking,
only of its own kind (rather than an illustration of one philosophical kind). A reori-
entation of philosophy into art-material, then, can be likened to Laruelles call in
Photo-Fiction (which has no examples of philosophical photography but merely
postures toward a photography of philosophy) to perform what he describes as the
6 For instance, see Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open
Humanities Press, 2013), 1920: I argue that causality is wholly an aesthetic phenomenon.
Aesthetic events are not limited to interactions between humans or between humans and painted
canvases or between humans and sentences in dramas. They happen when a saw bites into a fresh
piece of plywood. They happen when a worm oozes out of some wet soil. They happen when a
massive object emits gravity waves.The aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension. See also Graham
Harman, Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human, Naked Punch 09
(SummerFall 2007): 2130; and the interview with Harman on page 97 in this volume.
7 Artistic Experiments with Philosophy: Franois Laruelle in Conversation with John Maoilearca,
pp. 177 in this volume.
Concept 175
 AN INTRODUCTION TO FRANOIS LARUELLE
under-practice of philosophical language. Yet this attempt, he adds, to under-
understand it, is not to lower oneself as an individual, or at minimum, it is to think
in a more generic manner without exceptions.8
From the very start, then, Laruelles most recent experiment in a non-standard
philosophy of photography fights against positing any philosophical aesthetics
that would over-determine this or any art from withoutthe Principle of Sufficient
Photography or photo-centrism, as he calls it. Instead, he gestures us toward
a philosophy that is photographys own:9
I call this gesture of creation non-aesthetics or non-standard aesthetics,
its standard form being philosophical and photo-fiction being one of its
non-standard objects. [] This project seems absurd. It will no longer be
absurd if we accept changing our level of reference for defining the real.
Instead of treating the photo and the concept of the photo as two given and
describable physical, intellectual objects or representations, we treat them
as completely different than given objects closed in on themselves.10
The absurdity of his project is what will strike standard philosophical thinking:
it cannot abide not being allowed a transcendence over the (art) object, hence, it
takes quite an effort to render the photographic act immanent, to interiorize it, and
to render it real without external determinism or realism.11 And this new effort
is also a matter of reorientation and posture: what we must really consider as an
indivisible whole is the photographic posture, a conjugation of optical, perceptive,
and chemical properties that can only be fully understood as those entangled, non-
local properties of a generic matrix.12 A true flattening, equalizing or deauthorizing
must include philosophy itself as a sample of the Real, an experiment in thinking no
more or less than (but different from) photographic experiments: a failure to repre-
sent but an invention, or making, in the Real.
8 Franois Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burke and
Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), 62.
9 Ibid., 19.
10 Ibid., 1314, (emphasis mine).
11 Ibid., 52.
12 Ibid., 19.
176 Concept
Artistic Experiments with Philosophy
Franois Laruelle in Conversation with John Maoilearca
John Maoilearca: In your recent interview with Robin Mackay, when
asked about your experimental writings, you said that you had aimed
to use philosophy as the material for an art.1 How far has this exper-
iment also been pursued, if at all, in your own, more standard, non-
standard writings?
Franois Laruelle: I would like to use philosophy as a material (as one would use
space or color, as a materiality) for an art that would be of a piece with concep-
tual thought without making a new aesthetic or a new philosophy. The ambition of
creating a new genre is the deepest consistent core of all my undertakings. I have
always pursued two parallel and competing strands of work: first, the theoretical
work of elaborating rules that rise like the tip of an iceberg from the non-philosoph-
ical matrix, and also, secondarily, their quasi-poetic execution. At first this idea
was not absolutely clear and became confused with Nietzsches artists metaphys-
ics.2 Then there was a first realization of this effort in the experimental texts,
written in parallel with the rules issuing from my first formulations of non-philos-
ophy (Philosophy II and III) in something close to the form of a poem. Currently,
following the theoretical mutation of this matrix, I have started to reformulate the
rules on new foundations for a new effort to create this genre, in particular in recent
texts on art-fiction or photography. Its as though my entire theoretical oeuvre had
been conceived as an effort to establish the conditions for a new genre or had been
dedicated to one unique poem.
To what end? It is evident that the theoretical realization prevails over the prac-
tical realization. The ambition to create a new genre of writing and a poematics
[pomatique] of theory has probably failed; the project is currently on hold, though
I dont dare affirm that it is completely abandoned. There are echoes of it and
sometimes a type of formulation of it in my recent theoretical writingssuch are
the joys of writing.
I see this enterprise as a failure overall because, while I (usually) have fewer
doubts about my theoretical writings, I feel myself incapable of subjectively evaluating
Conversation conducted by e-mail, JanuaryMarch 2013.
1 Robin Mackay, Introduction: Laruelle Undivided, in Franois Laruelle, From Decision to Heresy:
Experiments in Non-Standard Thought (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2012), 29.
2 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at a Self-Criticism, in The Birth of Tragedy, 2, 5, 7.
Translators Note.
Concept 177
 ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS WITH PHILOSOPHY
the experimental writings. These experimental texts would be rejected by poets and
philosophers alike without something to tip the balance in their favor. This makes
it difficult to ascribe recognizable value to them. Objectively, my relations with art
have been a failure: the impossibility of being a musician-composer was an artistic
castration that has left scars and traces, in the same way that the renunciation of
politics has done for others (like Plato). I quite late and only partially accepted
this renunciation (after several efforts to abandon philosophy and reengage with
music) around the age of fifty when I had the feeling that I had used everything up
and couldnt hope to create again except in philosophy. Is it thus, by force, that one
becomes a philosopher?
How do you see the relationship between the two types of writing?
For now, and most likely forever, I have not succeeded in achieving a good unifica-
tion of philosophy and poetry in a new genre, even if certain effects of writing show
their intertwinement or entanglement. I dont talk about the great metaphysical
poets like Donne, Hlderlin, and Mallarm, who have been the consistent prey of
philosophical commentaries; my project is different. Im not that kind of commen-
tator and perhaps thats why Ive failed. Poetry and philosophy are whats left of
music and of a grand project of fusion, the provisional paradigm of which is opera,
maybe Wagnerian drama, that is now too metaphysical for our time. Who will write
an opera-fiction or a musical utopia? More than ever I am looking for the matrix
necessary for the fusion and the creation of what might be called a new particle of
thought. Basically I should take an interest in al-chemy in the same way I once said
that non-philosophy was an al-philosophy.
In the interview with Mackay, you also cite Henri Bergsons view that each
philosopher has only one idea that he or she restates indefinitely. What is the
one idea in your own work (if there is one)? How might it be recognized,
in various guises, across your works?
The one generative idea is without a doubt the one I just described. It has
been progressively intensified, and enriched in places; it has broadened
in the same way that a river gains breadth and maybe even begins to be a bit oce-
anic, but still it has stayed the same. In any case, this has been the thrust of my
elaboration of it. Dare I say, without provoking too much misunderstanding, that
non-philosophy is also a waking dream?
Could this idea also be an image, or some other kind of object, perhaps
even an aesthetic one? I am thinking, for instance, of Jean Renoirs state-
ment that each filmmaker only makes one film, and remakes it again and
again. Might there be a filmic idea within non-standard philosophy?
178 Concept
FRANOIS LARUELLE IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MAOILEARCA
I see only a system of waves, not even of stages, barely of phases. To use filmic lan-
guage, the sequencing [squenage] of non-philosophy, its dcoupage,3 seems to me less
urgent now that I see it from a distance and find in it the logic that comes with retro-
spect. Rivers contemplate their source all the way to the sea, carry it with them and
stay one with it, but the sea, as the Greeks discovered, is another matter altogether.
If non-philosophy does not offer us a new set of ideas to displace those of
philosophy, then what does it offer? Is its offering connected to your state-
ment that your problem is that of reorientation?
Indeed, the reorientation of thought after its absolution and then its Hegelian
(or other) disorientation seems to me to be demanded not by our finitude but by our
transfinitude. Finite beings that we are, we are ceaselessly traversed and transported
by affects and orientations rather than by objects. It is no longer a matter of being,
like the classical and modern philosopher, either a fish surrounded by infinite water
where we asphyxiate, or that fish washed up on the beach of the world, surrounded
by unbreathable air and doomed to another suffocation. To be able to lift your head
out of the water and breathe the air of the stars
Why are there no examples, or nearly none, in what appear to be your more
applied works, especially in your photographic studies? Is this intentional?
Just as I cite very few other philosophers (except as floating markers in my dream)
and never cite myself at all, I do not cite applied work, much preferring a certain
type of paraphrase that is a destruction of commentary.4 First of all, I have enough to
say myself without getting anyone else involved (hence my usage of the etcetera).
But most importantly, I have always fought fiercely against the famous examples,
concrete or abstract, pretty much the same war Ive led against the aesthetic. Rightly
or wrongly, and I admit that that it may be wrongly, if it is necessary to cite an aes-
thetician, I try to do so in such a way that I use just a strictly circumscribed piece or
moment in my work. What I write is a sample, not an example, of what I do when
I think. To think is to make, no?
Is there a hierarchy amongst the arts, either in terms of your own personal
preference or their significance or kinship to non-standard philosophical
practice?
3 In cinematic discourse, dcoupage refers to the shooting script, the breakdown of filmic narrative into
shots and sequences. More broadly, the term designates the underlying structure of a film. See Nol
Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3ff.
Translators Note.
4 Franois Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique lusage des contemporains (Paris: LHarmattan, 2007).
Translators Note.
Concept 179
 ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS WITH PHILOSOPHY
I have shared my obsessions and my fantasies (and my practical failures as well)
concerning my preference for music more than any other art and the poem above all
other forms of enunciation. I cannot stand novels, with their overlong passages, their
indulgence of details always rendered too explicitly. Theyre not dazzling and enigmatic
enough for my taste. Surrealism, along with Chinese poetry and a few other things, rep-
resents the ideal of concision and enigmatic brilliance. What I call the vision-in-One
is also this need of the spirit, naturally empty, to fill itself up with eternal emotions.
Is there any Real difference between non-photography and non-standard
philosophy? That is, in what way does non-photography escape from being
merely an example?
Its just the difference of materials (and of syntax, which is included in philosophical
and aesthetic materiality) that separates non-photography and non-standard phi-
losophy, though at the same time we must not forget that this difference is reflected
in the effect and the force of the non and of its expression. Non-philosophy is
univocal by its invariability for all arts and all thought, hence its formalism, but it is
constantly varied by its materials (including the syntaxes that belong to the material),
hence its material formalism, but certainly not its materialism.
Is there a difference between applied and non-applied non-standard
philosophy?
In a way, none, except as I just said, that of the material or the occasions (including
objects and syntaxes, that each in turn fall into material formalism). Non-standard
philosophy is an application of itself to the nearest non or to the nearest generic,
but it is precisely not an auto-application in the way that philosophy is in relation
to philosophies. All that comes from philosophy and from its power, the different
aesthetics for example, are replacements in a sequence of auto-modeling, a pro-
cession of philosophical models, while non-philosophy produces only hetero- or
non-modeling because it combines and superposes heterogeneous models.
You say, in Photo-Fiction, that you are working like an artist, that you are
creating a kind of installation.5 How would you compare and contrast art
practice and non-philosophical practice?
To work as an artist is not a matter of labeling oneself professionally, commercially,
and technologically as an artist. The true distinction derives from a plurality
of specific practical, technical, and theoretical differences that together create
a veritable generic difference between the artistic and the non-philosophical. The
5 See Franois Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk and
Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Press, 2012), 4, 11ff. Translators Note.
180 Concept
FRANOIS LARUELLE IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MAOILEARCA
artist experiments concretely with a defined model of activity, specifically distinct
from others. Art as a positive practice is an instrumentalized intention that works
within the limits of a type of material and techniques, and also within the limits
of potential imitation of other works in the same genre. Non-philosophy proceeds
completely otherwise, superposing three different models: 1) the empirical artistic
model that it takes as given or as reference material without necessarily practicing
it itself; 2) a philosophical model (the most general and invariant possible) that
interprets it; and finally 3) the scientific model of quantum superposition that allows
it to combine the two previous models in a matrix and to orient them generically.
If one judges it from a theoretical angle, the complexity of non-philosophy may
seem overall superior to that of an art, but the positive arts also have their secret
calculations or mathematics. It is precisely this compressed character of diverse
instances that comprises the secret or the unconscious (the transconscious?) of
art in general and that distinguishes art from technology. In art-fiction or non-
aesthetics, there are algebraic operations like idempotence and superposition that
assure compression (without concept, without end; see Kant)6 of the instances
at play and guarantee a certain mathematical rigor. For its part, the philosophical
function of the variable assures the taking-into-account of the aesthetic in the non-
aesthetic. As for the reference to a particular art, it roots non-aesthetics in artistic
experience in general rather than in scientific or religious experience. This complexity
gives non-philosophy the character of installation that enlarges that of oeuvre.
The oeuvre has an individual subject and a humanist context; the installation
demands, relative to the oeuvre, an expansion and an exteriorization of means. This
generic extension paradoxically has the effect of under-determining the nature of
the artist forced to abandon the lofty heights of philosophy and to confront instead
a heterogeneous materiality.
What might artists do with non-standard philosophy? How would someone
recognize a non-standard philosophical artwork (if they could)?
One does not recognize a work of art that might be in the non-standard spirit or
might have a stylistic affinity with non-standard philosophy: that would imply the
wish to found an aesthetic legitimacy for non-standard philosophy. One already
practices it as such, free to recognize in it a power and the effects of philosophical
meaning. That is to say, non-philosophy is only a work of non-standard art if it
openly takes for its base material an artistic activity as given and causes it to follow
the constraints appropriate to that material. It is the end of aesthetic objectivity and
the creation of a genre that must in all rigor be called non-aesthetic artor
even more strictly non-art. But all these formulae are obviously ambiguous and
can be taken up in a spirit of aesthetic objectivity that clouds their proper sense.
6 Specifically, see Immanuel Kants Critique of Judgment. Translators Note.
Concept 181
 ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS WITH PHILOSOPHY
Can one say that some artists, those not working under the authority of
standard philosophy, are therefore already practicing non-standard phi-
losophy, avant la lettre? And if so, what is added to their work by reading
Laruelle?
I dont believe that the notion of virtually non-standard art is pertinent or that
non-philosophy would serve to actualize it. Each particular art has its own revolu-
tionary tradition but that may not be be the case with non-philosophical art, which
gathers together several traditions and several possible revolutions. But I would prefer
to be prudent here and, in the face of the inventiveness and creativity of the arts, not
prohibit liberty. In fact, the model of art and of its liberty of material is something
that encouraged me in non-philosophy. But obviously I lean toward safeguarding
the notion of a non-aesthetic genre of art.
Is there a political dimension to art practiced under the aegis of
non-standard philosophy, one related, perhaps, to the defense of the
Human in your work?
From the point of view of non-philosophy, there is not a specifically political domain,
though perhaps a political dimension may be possible as a function of the occasional
material that one decides to treat that might be concerned with specific problems of
power. On the other hand, it can be called political in the last instance insofar as phi-
losophy is a constant variable of all phenomena and is a crowned power of domina-
tion. Philosophy is the eminently political variable of non-philosophy. Its a matter of
diminishing its spontaneous self-importance and not just that of its specifically political
domain. It is, if one can put it this way, a sub-political determination of philosophy
and an unconditional defense of humans insofar as they are generically definable.
Can you speculate on the future of non-standard philosophy? Is it inevi-
table that it enters into 6th, 7th, ... nth phases/waves? And if so, why?
A wave succeeds a wave, the desire to create n phases or waves is in itself infinite
but the brevity of the individual life is not the infinite unfurling of the sea!7 I have
thrown myself into a final wave, between the quantum and the cosmological opening,
always according to the same method of under-determination or subtraction, with
an aim to renovate the Anthropic Principle under a form of-the-last-instance, some-
thing I hope to be able to see through to completion without being sure that I can
do so. I have already let go of two once essential-seeming books, one on music and
one on Eros, dreams lost along the way.
7 Laruelles phrase le moutonnement infini de la mer alludes to a line from Paul Verlaines
poem Lchelonnnement des haies (1875). Translators Note.
182 Concept
FRANOIS LARUELLE IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MAOILEARCA
What would happen, both to non-standard philosophy and to standard
philosophy, were your work to enter into the philosophical canon?
I dont have many illusions about the explicit perseverance of this difference; the
philosophical canon has seen plenty of other accidents. Like everyone, I will at best
be assimilated by tradition, at worst marginalized by it (since it does have so many
possible margins at its service). What will remain of non-philosophy? A destining
[envoi/Geschick] as Heidegger would say? A mini-wave [vaguelette]? Or rather, as the
physicists say, a wavelet [ondelette]?
Would that be a sign of failure? Or would it only be an illusion that
non-standard philosophy had been assimilated?
An awareness of the possibility of theoretical failure has always been with me in
every way, quite aside from the fact that it has been carefully nurtured from the start
(and still is today) by critics and traditional academic philosophers. But not by phi-
losophers like Levinas, Derrida, or Deleuze, who have never reduced me to despair.
Or, more positively, might it mean that standard philosophy itself no
longer exists?
I dont think so. It continues under multiple modalities and its life force has been
embodied in a quasi-mythological institutional form far too long for it to really dis-
appear. Ive always suspected that, in the order of thought, it was the twin sister of
capitalism, and capitalism is not about to die; too many metamorphoses are still
possible for this couple. The famous death of philosophy alludes to a very narrow
conception. And I am too gnostic not to see in it an expression of the world or of evil.
Might the future of non-standard philosophy reside within art practice?
There is a certain affinity claimed with artistic practice. But since philosophy or
theology are implicated there, we must accept a higher level of theoretical com-
plexity and turn to scientific modelingwhich doesnt make non-standard thought
a type of activity or a genre of life superior (in the classical sense of the Greek
philosophy) to that of art.
A last word. They tell me I am an artist-without-art and a philosopher-without-
philosophy, that I take the pose of an artist without the practice, or a philosopher
without the doctrineand I would add that of a believer without a religion. This
criticism recognizes me by subtraction: I am exactly not one of the sincere liars that
the artist, the philosopher, and the believer are.
Translated from the French Molly Whalen
Concept 183
 Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art
Suhail Malik

What does an artwork mean for you? What sense do you make of it? In the paradigm
of contemporary art the answer is clear: its up to you. Constrained by the artworks
subject matter (insofar as you can determine it), its material organization and pre-
sentation (including online transience), and the information you can glean from
the press release, the artists interests, or what the art invokes, you respond to this
configuration of mild injunctions. Mild because the parameters are open enough,
loose enough, opaque enough for you to (have to) make your own way through the
artwork. It asks you a question, making an open-ended assertion without definitive
sense. You replyusually not to the artwork but, in the best case, with a shift in your
own system of ideas, values, even the very way you formulate your languages. You
are the center of the artwork. Or, as Juliane Rebentisch accurately remarks, since the
artwork is not just its material being but also the sense that it makes and the values
it inscribes, what is primary in contemporary artits condition and horizonis the
art experience that is the transformation of both the subjective viewer and the artwork:

Aesthetic experience is nothing that can be had by the subject. The term
experience refers to a process between subject and object that transforms
boththe object insofar as it is only in and through the dynamic of its
experience that it is brought to life as a work of art, and the subject insofar
as it takes on a self-reflective form, its own performativity.1

What Rebentisch captures and affirms very well here is that under the name aesthetic
experience contemporary art depends upon its receiving subject, the addressee of
the work, who is taken to constitute it rather than arrive as latecomer after its pro-
duction. Put colloquially, the art leaves space for the viewer, the viewer com-
pletes the work. Contemporary art is the art that forefronts aesthetic experience
in this sense. Historically, it corresponds to the work made from the late 1950s by
Allan Kaprow and others against the strictures of high modernism (crucial to which
was the retrospective affirmation of Marcel Duchamps readymades), gaining trac-
tion through the 1960s in other modes, notably with the combined, if sometimes

A version of this essay appears in Spike 37 (Fall 2013).

1 Juliane Rebentisch, Answers to Questionnaire on the Contemporary," October 130 (Fall 2009): 101.
See also, in English, 7 Negations: Against Aesthetics Affirmationism, in Aesthetics and
Contemporary Art, ed. Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011),
5164; and The Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson and Gerrit Jackson (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2012).

Concept 185
 REASON TO DESTROY CONTEMPORARY ART
mutually acrimonious, developments of Conceptual art and Minimalism as well as
early performance art, and attaining total spectrum dominance in the metropolitan
centers of the West since the mid-1980s and globally since the mid-late 1990s. The
centrality of aesthetic experience as the condition and horizon of art was abetted
by theoretical insights in deprioritizing authorial claims over meaning and privi-
leging instead interpretation and reception as the key moment of meaning making
(Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and, retrospectively, Mikhail Bakhtin were the key
early figures in this regard).
That a reality such as art can only be apprehended by the thinking or
consciousness of it such that it is necessarily accompanied by that thinking and
consciousness is the dependency or injunction that Quentin Meillassoux has influ-
entially called correlationism.2 The problem with correlationism is that all accounts
of reality are necessarily accounts of how reality is thought or known. Put the other
way, reality itself cannot be known in itself since it is always thought or appre-
hended by a consciousness. Thought never takes leave from itself, if only because
it thinks that departure and what is outside of it: what you know is always what
you know. The many difficult self-reflexive philosophical problems that follow in
establishing the possibility of a knowledge of the real for what it is independent
of thoughtthat is, realismwill be left aside here, as will a detailed account of
the various recent philosophies, gathered under the umbrella term Speculative
Realism (SR), which strive to break out of correlationism. What is more immediately
pressing here is that, in having a subject of aesthetic experience as its condition,
contemporary art is a correlationism.
To be clear: contemporary art as the aesthetic experience of sense- and
value-making, as the co-constitution of the art object and subject, assumes correla-
tionism and reproduces it, affirms it, in every moment of its open-ended experi-
ence. The artworks and the discursive formulation of contemporary artobjects,
events, performances, images, press releases, reviews, magazine essays, auction
cataloguesstylize and configure a correlationism in how art is to be taken by its
audience. Contemporary art appeals to its addressees to determine the art in their
own terms, including the disagreement between viewers that is the best ideal dem-
ocratic result. Artists have an interest in this or that; the artwork or exhibition
explores, plays with, interrogates, or shows a sensitivity about such and
such topic. No more definitive or precise an account can be permitted at the cost
of reducing viewers own capacities to make their call on the art. Abstractions serve
this expectation and prioritization of experience well. And, for all their considerable
differences, experience is the key category in theories central to contemporary art:
it sits on both sides of Michael Frieds split between absorption and theatricality;
it is the condition of Jacques Rancires aesthetic regime of art, whose political
2 See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008); and also Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, trans. Robin
Mackay, Spike 35 (Spring 2013).
186 Concept
SUHAIL MALIK
effects are the reorganization of experience; it is the term of the intractable that
can only be felt or sensed through its materiality (Jean-Franois Lyotard), or of the
singularities of affect that can be mobilized but not perceived or conceptualized
(Gilles Deleuze), or events that escape the consistency and logic of identification
in an inaesthetics (Alain Badiou). In their common flight from communicable
thought and conceptsometimes formulated as an anti-aestheticseach of these
philosophies repeats the insistence that the artwork remain bound to a field of (per-
haps unthinkable) subjective experience that it cannot reflect upon or rationalize
without distorting itself irrecuperably. An emphasis on materiality in art carries the
same desire of a primacy of sensory and spatiotemporal experience: matter is held
to be extraneous, uncontrolled, excessive, or processual, but in any case against or
to the side of form/concept/thought/intention; unctuous, residual matter or emer-
gent material organization escapes the control or command of the artists imposed
parameters on the artwork. How else to apprehend the chromatic bounciness of the
print, the light-sucking bleakness of the sculpture, the gloopy resilience of the paint
in relation to the figures presented in such material presentation? Supposing sensory
and finite experience as a condition and term of art, the artwork has an inarticu-
lable or excessive presence in front of which there can only be an articulationa
linguistic aftereffectthat necessarily misses or misapprehends it. That presence is
of a material order other to languages semantic and transferrable dimension. While
Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois proposed an art-historical mobilization of this
insistent meaninglessness under the Bataillean name of the informe,3 the insistence
on/of matter as arts snaring of experience persists today even through digital pro-
duction with the emphasis on glitches, noise, disruptions, and slickness, all of which
draw attention to what is produced and made manifest by the means of production
itself as much as by its manipulation by artists as human agents.
For all the anti-conceptuality and experiential primacy of these approaches,
and the paradoxical anti-philosophy of contemporary art as a post-conceptual
practice,4 they are in every case correlationist. As such, they are to be rejected by
any rigorous realism. (Such a realism, which claims to apprehend the real outside
of thought or the conditions of subjective experience, is not to be confused with
realism as a style or genre of art committed to accurate representations of preex-
isting reality, since such a genre already assumes representation as an interval from
a real elsewhere.) Aesthetically determined and organized, contemporary art has
nothing to offer non-correlational realism. Put the other way, a rigorous realism
3 See Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
4 For Peter Osborne contemporary art is post-Conceptual in that, consciously or not, art now
presumes the critical legacy of Conceptual art as a condition, including an indifference to medium-
specificity as granting certain ontological privileges. See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All
(London: Verso, 2013). Osborne claims that contemporary art is not an aesthetic art in any
philosophically significant sense of the term but rather only in its difference from the literality of the
everyday (p. 10). For Osborne, contemporary art is then an art without aesthetics. The present essay
argues, to the contrary, that contemporary art is the exemplar of the aesthetic constitution of art.
Concept 187
 REASON TO DESTROY CONTEMPORARY ART
can readily dispense with art as it now stands without loss or limitation. From yet
another angle, realisms provocation to art is the undoing of aesthetic experience
as a condition or term of art, even in the avowal of arts ineluctable materiality.
Which is to say that realism speculatively indicates the conditions for another art
than contemporary art.
But it is important in this regard to proceed with some caution in the dimension
of realism. For, as Documenta 13 amply demonstrated, mobilizing object-oriented
variants of SR within contemporary art is a trivial if not conservative undertaking:
the relation of objects amongst themselves, in which the human supposedly has no
particular privilege, fits very well with a formalist, perhaps proto-modernist notion of
art that privileges its objects and their compositioninternal and mutualover the
external eye and ear of an observing, knowing subject but that nonetheless calls upon
a distributed notion of subjectivity in which the human participates on a supposedly
equal footing. The artist or viewer can appear as a mediator in this relation but is
not necessary to it. Other versions of this logic include immersive art, networked art,
systems art, and so on. While the emphasis in object-oriented approaches on the
(non)relations between all objects themselves equally challenges the primacy of
the human subject as a prerequisite for their mutual (in)comprehension, an equality
between the art object and the human maker or addressee fits very well with any
number of clichs just exposed on the primacy, obduracy, or excess of matter and
object to human control. While revoking the primacy of interpretation it is nonethe-
less a generalized variant of the co-constitution of object and (sometimes) human
subject that is the aesthetic experience of contemporary art.5
Contrast this to the variant of SR whose apparently paradoxical claim is that
the real or absolute is apprehended without anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, or
noocentric distortion only by rational thought. The primary model here is science
(for Meillassoux, in the restricted form of mathematically organized science; for Ray
Brassier, in the general form of the explanatory power of the naturalistic technosci-
ences; for Franois Laruelle, as the intertwining of thought and the real, without a
decision in favor of the former); and the demand upon contemporary art is strictly
nontrivial: it removes subjective interpretation or experience as a condition or telos
of the artwork, and therewith collapses the entire edifice of the contemporary art
paradigm. While this need not be a direct concern for contemporary art, since
rationalist SR need have no bearing on art (and should in fact rightly disregard or
dismiss contemporary art as a lost cause), such a rationalism puts firmly destruc-
tive pressure on the current operating, artistic, intellectual, and ideological para-
digm of art, pressure that is much needed as contemporary art now all-too-happily
continues to recycle standard tropes of anti-foundationalist critique, ethical piety,
apolitical politicality, and cultural hegemonization. While contemporary art can
5 Graham Harman stresses aesthetics as first philosophy in On Vicarious Causation, Collapse 2
(March 2007): 187221. Harman also formulates this point in The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero
Books, 2011) as the resurrection of a pan-psychism of objects.
188 Concept
SUHAIL MALIK
be dismissed by a rationalist SR without consequence for the latter, bringing it to
bear on art nonetheless forces a series of demands and criteria for art in terms other
than those of contemporary art. The speculation it invites is what an art other than
contemporary art could be, not as a capricious flight of imagination or a frustrated
wish but by being rationally known.
We can begin that speculation at once: the critique of correlationism made by
rationalist SR is not the generalization of aesthetic experience but, to the contrary,
a demonstration that there can be a knowledge of what has never been experienced
(for Meillassoux, such is the arche-fossil or the God arriving tomorrow; for Brassier,
the death of the sun; for Iain Hamilton Grant, the natural, nonhuman concept). An
art responsive to this theoretically-led imperative would be indifferent to the experi-
ence of it, an art that does not presume or return to aesthetics, however minimal or
fecund such an aesthetics might be. The condition and horizon of such an art is not
that it be felt, appreciated in vague ways, or made-sense-of as contemporary art is,
affirming in each case the viewer in her or his sensitivities and capacity for judgment.
Indifferent to aesthetic experience, it is an art of rational knowledge. Knowledge
here means that if there is an experience to be had, it can not only be formulated
with a coherent logic and reasoned (even if its results are historically irrational),
but also that it is subject to the predictive and generative exercise of reason qua new
organizations of matter, thought, and experience.
There are precursors to such an art. Example: the reduction of aesthetics
and the indifference to fabrication or reception was instantiated at the moment of
moving from modern art to contemporary art with instruction pieces, in which
artists gave (usually typewritten) instructions for the fabrication of their work by
anonymous gallery workers. Such work has been described as an aesthetics of
administration,6 the instructions taking the form of managerial or bureaucratic
edicts, and have themselves been more recently subject to commodification and
aestheticization as they come to be traded as archived art-objects in their own right.
However, they also epitomize contemporary arts conventions insofar as the art
is taken to be completed not only with its construction as per the instructions,
butas advocated by several Fluxus artistscompleted by its addressee. Yet this
aestheticization of the instruction is not its operational logic, but the refusal of the
same. What such instructions suppose in their open reproducibility as instruction,
as much as in the art object whose construction or presentation it spells out, is
(i) the indifference of such art to any subject or meaning imposed upon it other
than the fact of its systemic fabrication, and (ii) that the artwork qua instruction
is indifferent to its own material conditions (it does not matter to this art if the
paper is lined or not, if the typeface is Courier or Times New Roman, even if the
object is fabricated or not, if anyone reads them or not, and so forth). As Robert
Morriss Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal from 1963 makes clear in declaring its
6 Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual Art 19621969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions, October 55 (Winter 1990): 10543.
Concept 189
 REASON TO DESTROY CONTEMPORARY ART SUHAIL MALIK

own material redundancy as well as that of the work that is its ostensible referent,
in stating the condition for the art that it itself is qua instruction piece,7 such art
is conceptually-systemically organized, immaterially determined, subjectively
indifferent, aesthetically redundant, rationally cogent. It need not be experienced.
Taking both of its dimensions together, instruction art acts as a paradigm for all
post-Conceptual art in that it lends itself to (always temporary, partial) comple-
tion in subjective experience yet, against this, it also need not be experienced at
all, but only known, in order to be art. This is conventionally a criticism of art, in
fear of art abdicating its singularity for systematicity. The series of reductive banal-
ities that Benjamin Buchloh attributes to Sol LeWitt as critic of high modernism
typify such a reaction:
[LeWitts] work now revealed that the modernist compulsion for empiri-
cist self-reflexiveness not only originated in the scientific positivism which
is the founding logic of capitalism (undergirding its industrial forms of
production just as much as its science and theory), but that, for an artistic
practice that internalized this positivism by insisting on a purely empiri-
cist approach to vision, there would be a final destiny. This destiny would
be to aspire to the condition of tautology.8
And it also aspires to what Buchloh might otherwise avow: the affirmation of singu-
larity in turn valorizing the uniqueness of its subjective appreciation. It is just this
latter condition and destination of art that SR can undo if it is effectively mobilized.9
This is but one, minimal, example of the demand rationalist SR places upon
art. That this injunction for reason against the primacy of experience as condition
or destination for art is itself a theoretically-philosophically derived demand does
not present a problem since it is itself rationally constituted. There is no need to
find artists, curators, and critics advancing rationalist SR art to justify, ground,
or lead the investigation. What is demanded, and what corrodes the interpretive
paradigm of contemporary art as well its concomitant soft heroism of artistic,
curatorial, or interpretive anti-systematicity, is art as a rational exercise that evis-
cerates all lingering experiential conditions. Concept, not feeling; rational and
formalized, not wanton and uncaptured; indifferent and impervious to you: such
is the binding force of reason directed to the real, a destruction of contemporary
art as an art of indeterminacy.

7 Morris: The undersigned, ROBERT MORRIS, being the maker of the metal construction entitled
LITANIES, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all
aesthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such
quality and content. Dated: November 15, 1963 [signed] Robert Morris. While the Statement is
taken art-historically to be a negating rejoinder to Philip Johnsons non-payment for Litanies (the piece
that is the statements immediate referent), theories supportive of contemporary art take it to be
either an instance of the broader negating of material-optical specificity and objectality in favor of
engagement with institutional and linguistic structures that is now a standard operation for
contemporary art (Buchloh, Ibid., 11718), or, concomitant to such a determination and no less
typical as a contemporary art procedure, as an ironic overdetermination of the artwork that
is its direct referent, exposing the Duchampian readymade as the common condition for both the
statement and the artwork itself (Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005]). In contradistinction to these aesthetically expansive accounts,
the Statement is here taken more emphatically to be a description of its own conditions as an artwork.
That is, Morriss Statement is at once performative and constative of itself, yet, in relation to Buchlohs
complaint against the scientistic positivism of conceptual arts empiricism quoted later in the
main text here, it is not tautological in that it is heterogeneously performative, constituting its own
terms of operation as art by virtue of its rational and didactic exemption of the art of Litanies from
its material external referent. This de-aestheticization was well-captured by Harold Rosenberg in
1970, though he identifies that movement or tendency with a return to primitivism in its rejection 9 And, with that, also undone are the first four of LeWitts Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969),
of artifice. See De-Aestheticization, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: which still serve as a systems program for contemporary art and its putative critical operation:
A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 22022. Rosenberg was not without cause in 1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. 2. They leap to conclusions that logic
this characterization, given the limitations of the art of the time and its broad identification of cannot reach. 3. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. 4. Illogical judgments lead to
Conceptualism with anti-formalism understood as anti-idealism and hence as pro-materialist. What new experience. (Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual Art, 106). If LeWitts fifth sentence irrational
is advocated here is, rather, the rationalism of the Statement, whereby its art takes place in its thoughts should be followed absolutely and logicallynonetheless serves to characterize
presentation, here or elsewhere, strictly equivalent to its presentation on the document signed by Meillassouxs startling philosophy well enough, any consilience anticipated here must attend to
Morris in person; that is, it is art by virtue of its literal rather than material synthesis. a more basic divergence: that for LeWitt such an irrationalism arises despite and against reason,
8 Buchloh, Conceptual Art, 115. while for Meillassoux it is occasioned by and on behalf of reason.

190 Concept Concept 191

 Non-Correlational Thought
Steven Shaviro

Speculative Realism calls upon us to escape from what Quentin Meillassoux

describes as the vicious circle of correlationism: The idea according to which we
only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never
to either term considered apart from the other.1 This formulation seems at first
to be symmetrical. Subject and object, or more generally thought and being, are
regarded by the correlationist as mutually co-constituting and codependent.
Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object in
itself, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary
to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be
related to an object.2 Described in this manner, the correlation would seem
to move indifferently in either direction, from thinking to being or from being
to thinking.
However, under closer examination, Meillassouxs formulation turns out not
to be symmetrical or reversible after all. Rather, the correlationist movement is dis-
symmetrical and unidirectional. When thought and being are correlated, thought is
always the active and relational term, the one that actually performs the correlation.
Thinking per se is correlational, insofar as it necessarily implies a relation-to-the-
world.3 Thought begins with a radical decision: the assertion of the essential
inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. Once this decision has been
made, it is already too late: all we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought,
never an entity subsisting by itself.4
Being, on the other hand, just is. This makes it the dumb and passive term
in Meillassouxs account. Meillassoux takes it for granted that things, in contrast
to thoughts, are able to stand alone. Things do not correlate on their own; they
merely suffer being apprehended byand thereby correlated tosome sort of
consciousness or subjectivity that seizes them from the outside. In itself, being
does not speak. Thus, thought always refers to being; but being, in and of itself,
remains indifferent to thought.
Since thought is in its essence correlational, Meillassoux says, we can only
escape correlationism by affirming the pure and simple death, with neither con-
sciousness nor life, without any subjectivity whatsoever, that is represented by the

1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Ibid., 36.

Concept 193
 NON-CORRELATIONAL THOUGHT
state of inorganic matter.5 We must reach a position, Meillassoux says, which
takes seriously the possibility that there is nothing living or willing in the inorganic
realm and for which absolute reality is an entity without thought. Beyond the
correlation, existence is totally a-subjective.6 In this way, Meillassoux presents
us with the classical pictureinherited from the scientific revolution of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and, even before that, from the ancient atomists
and Epicureansof a universe that is lifeless, mindless, and inert, and that operates
entirely mechanistically.7
Together with this, Meillassoux also empties the world of what Kant called
sensible intuition: that is to say, of everything that is experienced phenomenally,
and that is discovered through the body and the senses. Sensory qualities always
involve a relation, rather than a property inherent in the thing.8 This means that
they are inevitably correlational and epiphenomenal. Meillassoux therefore suggests
that we must reject anything having to do with phenomenality, with embodiment, and
with sensibility and affect. In contrast, he tells us that allbut onlythose aspects
of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully
conceived as properties of the object in itself. Everything belonging to perception
and sensationor for that matter to the bodymust be removed; we are left only
with those elements that are reducible to a formula or to digitization.9
When he thus radically separates thought and sensibility from bare matter
and describes the latter exclusively in mathematical terms, Meillassoux reinstates
an avowedly Cartesian dualism.10 He reaffirms the very condition that Alfred North
Whitehead diagnosed as the basic error of modern Western thought: the bifurca-
tion of nature.11 This is the schema according to which we radically separate sensory
experience from the physical actualities that generate that experience. We divide the
perceived redness and warmth of the fire, on the one hand, from the agitated mol-
ecules of carbon and oxygen, the radiant energy, and the various functionings of
the material body on the other.12 These two descriptions are taken to belong to entirely
different registers of existence. The first is phenomenal, while the second is scientific.
Once we have divided up the world in this manner, it matters little which side of the
bifurcation we favor. Phenomenology valorizes perceptual experience, while ignoring,
or failing to give an adequate account of the molecules and the photons. Reductionist
scientism, on the other hand, disparages phenomenal experience as merely a psychic
5 Quentin Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the
Meaningless Sign, trans. Robin Mackay, in Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity
since Structuralism, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
6 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 36, 38.
7 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 3637; Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition, 2.
8 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 2.
9 Ibid., 3.
10 Ibid., 13, 1113.
11 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004), 30, 2648.
12 Ibid., 32.
194 Concept
STEVEN SHAVIRO
addition, furnished by the perceiving mind, and not really present in the molecules
and the radiant energy which influence the mind toward that perception.13
In banishing the body and the senses from his account, Meillassoux takes up a
position on the scientistic, reductionist side of the bifurcation of nature. This is the
only way, he claims, to escape the presuppositions of correlationism. I want to suggest,
however, that the reason Meillassoux arrives at this position is, paradoxically, because
he isnt anti-correlationalist enough. The principal target of Meillassouxs polemic is
phenomenology, the legacy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. With its insis-
tence on the indissoluble tie between subject and object, or between the human act of
thinking and the world it thinks, phenomenology is the correlationist philosophy par
excellence. And yet, despite his opposition to phenomenology, Meillassoux still takes
for granted, and never questions, the phenomenological assumption that thought is
fundamentally and necessarily intentional. For phenomenology, every act of thinking
is directed to an object beyond itself. A mental state always points to something. This
remains the case regardless of whether that something is a thing that really exists
in the world, or whether it is fiction, or an abstraction, or a mental construction.
No matter the case, thought is always about something. It follows that thought is
intrinsically a relational activity, and indeed a correlational one. The decision that
inaugurates thought has ruled out any other possibility.
Because Meillassoux takes the intentionalist model of thought for granted,
he assumes that any non-correlationist ontology must dispense with thought alto-
gether. In other words, instead of questioning the overall bifurcation of nature, he
affirms one side of the dualism and rejects the other. And this is what leads to the
curious dissymmetry that I have already mentioned. When Meillassoux first defines
the correlation of thought and being, he says that both terms of the appropriation
are originarily constituted through their reciprocal relation.14 But he fails to follow
through on the implications of this reciprocity. He seeks to escape the correlationist
claim that we never grasp an object in itself, in isolation from its relation to the
subject. But he never tries to undermine the reciprocal claim, that we can never
grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object. Indeed, he
takes this claim entirely for grantedwhich is precisely why his self-proclaimed
materialism requires the elimination of any sensible mode of subjectivity.15
Meillassoux thus presents only a limited, one-sided escape from correlationism.
He explores the way that objects exist for themselves, rather than just being for us.
But he fails to consider how thought might also subsist on its own, without any need
to correlate things to itself. A more thoroughgoing anti-correlationism must also
explore the existence of non-correlational thought: that is to say, of a sort of thought
or consciousness, or sentience, or feeling, or phenomenal experiencethat is non-
phenomenological, insofar as it goes on without establishing relations of intentionality
13 Ibid., 2930.
14 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 8.
15 Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition.
Concept 195
 NON-CORRELATIONAL THOUGHT
to anything beyond itself, and even without establishing any sort of reflexive relation
to itself. If we seek to liberate the world of objects from its servitude as a mere cor-
relate of our thought, then we must also strive to liberate thought from its servitude
to its own self-imposed grounds, reasons, and conditions of possibility. Only in this
way can thought get outside itself as Meillassoux demands, so that we can truly reach
the great outdoors, the absolute outside to which he so stirringly calls us.16
This point can also be made in another way. There is a curious slippage in the
course of Meillassouxs analysis. He argues that any non-correlationist philosophy
must be open to an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid
of all subjectivity.17 The slippage comes in the way that Meillassoux implicitly
moves from an object, or a world, that is independent of anything that our thought
imposes upon it, to objects and worlds that are also devoid of thought in themselves.
Meillassoux seems to take it for granted that thought is unique to human beings. He
justifies this acknowledged anthropocentrism on the grounds that any attribution of
thought to nonhumans is simply a case of anthropomorphic projection.18
However, there are good reasons, empirically at least, to doubt that human
beings are as unique as Meillassoux claims. Ample scientific evidence points to
the sentience of organisms like trees, slime mold, and bacteria, and to the evolu-
tionary continuity between such sentience and that of animals, including ourselves.19
Meillassoux is simply wrong to assume that a world not yet affected by the modes of
apprehension of our subjectivity must necessarily have no subjective-psychological,
egoic, sensible or vital traits whatsoever of its own.20
It is also worth noting that there are many different degrees and forms of
human sentience, and many different modes of perception, sensation, awareness,
and cognition. Not all of these are necessarily directed at objects. The range is even
broader when we turn to other forms of life. Organisms like slime molds probably
do not think according to our own all-too-human models of conscious intention-
ality. Even if human beings are inveterate correlationists, slime molds need not be.
Establishing just how slime molds think is of course a matter for empirical
research. But philosophy can give us guidelines as to how a non-correlational mode of
thought might work, either in ourselves or in other entities. Gilles Deleuze offers us one
possible clue. He writes of the historical crisis of psychology that arose at the end
of the nineteenth century, at the very moment of the invention of cinema. This crisis
concerned the confrontation of materialism and idealism, leading to a duality of
image and movement, of consciousness and thing. At the time, Deleuze says, two
very different authors made efforts to overcome the duality: Edmund Husserl
16 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 3, 7.
17 Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition. forthcoming.
18 Ibid., 5.
19 Steven Shaviro, ed., Cognition and Decision in Nonhuman Biological Organisms
(Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011).
20 Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition," forthcoming.
196 Concept
STEVEN SHAVIRO
and Henri Bergson. Each had his own war cry: all consciousness is consciousness of
something (Husserl), or more strongly, all consciousness is something (Bergson).21
Bergsons war cry resonates more strongly for Deleuze than Husserls,
because Bergsons formulation short-circuits the correlation at the heart of phenom-
enology. It allows for sentience without reflexivity, and for a kind of experience that
remains in-itself, without transcendence toward an external object. If all con-
sciousness is something, then thought immanently coincides with matter, in the
absolute identity of the image and movement.22 Therefore, as Deleuze puts it else-
where, It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something.23
Rather, we must move backward and downward, in order to reach the primordial
point where consciousness ceases to be a light cast upon objects in order to become
a pure phosphorescence of things in themselves.24
Non-correlational thought happens on a level below or before what Deleuze
calls the structure-Other.25 Without the explicit presence of an Other to provide
a structure of the perceptual field, such thought simply does not make the dis-
tinction of consciousness and its object.26 In this register, thinkingor better,
sentienceis nonintentional and noncognitive. Quite literally, it is not involved in
processes of cognition or recognition. It does not recognize or interpret anything;
which is to say, it comes before, and does not participate in, anything on the order
of the Heideggerian as-structure, or of what the cognitivist philosophers of mind
describe as representationalist information processing.
We might well describe such non-correlational thought or sentience as
autisticprovided that we use this term in a nonpejorative and nonmedicalized
sense. Contrary to popular (and sometimes medical) prejudice, autists are not solip-
sists, and they are not lacking in empathy. As the neurodiversity movement helps us
understand, autistic modes of thought should not be stigmatized as deficient, just
because they are evidently different from the neurotypical ones. In particular, people
along the autism spectrum seem to be less incorrigibly correlationist in their
basic attunement to the world than neurotypicals are. They do not entirely operate
according to Deleuzes structure-Other or Heideggers as-structure. Further
exploration of autistic perception and autistic affectivity might take us a long way
toward an account of non-correlational thought.27
21 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 56.
22 Ibid., 59.
23 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 220.
24 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990), 311.
25 Ibid., 309ff.
26 Ibid., 307, 311.
27 Emily Thornton Savarese and Ralph James Savarese, eds., Autism and the Concept of
Neurodiversity, Disabilities Study Quarterly 30 (2010): 1.
Concept 197
 NON-CORRELATIONAL THOUGHT

Non-correlational sentience is an immanent attribute or power of being.

It involves what Whitehead calls feelings,28 rather than articulated judgments
or Heideggerian implicit preunderstandings. It is nonintentional: it is not directed
toward, or correlated with particular objects, even though it may well be implicated
with them. Such a mode of sentience is nonreflexive, and may well be unconscious;
it is a kind of phenomenality without phenomenology, or a nonconceptual what-
is-it-likeness. One task for Speculative Realism in the years to come is to explore
the potentialities of this mode of thought.

28 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 4042.

Fig. 11
198 Concept
 Fig. 13

Fig. 12
 Fig. 15

Fig. 14
 The Idiot Paradigm
Matthew Poole

Art today exists within a post-Duchampian condition that eschews any dominant
paradigm or, indeed, the very notion of art historical progress. It is a condition in
which art historical hierarchies of genre, aesthetic categories, and formal genealogies
have been flattened, creating a field of production that is now principally ordered by
the vagaries of capital exchange. This condition indexes arts presumed democratic
materialism1 as it provides a polyvalent groundlessness according to which all sub-
jects, be they bodies and/or languages (and body/languages), can participate equally
and freely in the political currency of art, free from the strictures of the academy
and the biases of ideology. This is, however, merely a pseudo-materialism, one of
the many ideological illusions of neoliberal idealism.
If by the term paradigm we mean model or pattern, showing things side-
by-side rather than progressively one-after-the-other, as per the once dominant
Greenbergian genealogy of modernism,2 then there would appear to be no models for
art now. Art is taken to embody a post-medium, post-Conceptual, post-diachronic
condition, where there are no distinct genres or hierarchies of subject matter,
where art may take any material or immaterial form, be that a static physical form
1 I use this term to distinguish classical Enlightenment liberal idealism from the rhetoric of various forms
of neoliberal economic politics that we see burgeoning today globally. Where classical Enlightenment
liberalist idealism is based on the unattainable but regulative ideals of Truth, Justice, and Beauty,
democratic materialism operates on and through the substrate of actually existing bodies and languages
proposing that, as Alain Badiou put it, The individual is convinced of, and formatted by, the dogma
of our finitude, of our exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death. So, instead of subjectivities being
oriented to and driven by and toward regulative ideals, subjects instead are driven to attend to their
own subjective affectual modulation and amplification as goals (or quasi-ideals) in themselves. This
analysis helps to explain the rise of the experience economies and economies of scope in contemporary
capitalism, as well as the burgeoning of immaterial labor models. See Alain Badiou, Bodies, Languages,
Truths, available at www.lacan.com/badbodies.htm.
2 As is well known, Clement Greenbergs genealogy of modernist painting maps a linear and progressive
trajectory of formal innovations and dialectical transgressions of subject matter from Gustave
Courbet and douard Manet through Abstract Expressionism to Post-Painterly Abstraction, halting
abruptly at and rejecting anything that might resemble what we now refer to as Minimalism. Marcel
Duchamps oeuvre challenges this linear teleological syntagmatic trajectory. From as early as 1912,
Duchamp produced things that were, formally, extraordinarily diverse and eclectic and that
appeared to represent a confusing blizzard of subjects. Duchamp indeed placed this diverse range of
things side by side as discrete paradigms, but by eschewing either formal or hermeneutic connections
between them he also and simultaneously collapsed the horizontality of syntagmaticism and the
verticality of paradigmaticism. This collapse of hierarchies within Duchamps oeuvre is crucial to
understanding the level and structure of the spatiotemporal critique that he was attempting to
produce through his work. Equally, if we take Duchamp at his word when he describes tant donns
(1966) as the same art work as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (191523) then we are forced
to rethink the spatiotemporal specificity of the artwork since, according to Duchamp, it both exists
in two places at once and was produced at a minimum of forty-three years apart.

Concept 205
 THE IDIOT PARADIGM
or a dynamic processual form, and where art is produced and evaluated outside
of a dialectics of the temporal. I propose, however, that this condition does have
a paradigm, albeit a quasi-paradigm of particular malleability, a quasi-paradigm
that produces the illusion of and allusion to art having a particular ontological and
epistemological malleability vis--vis the presumptions about bodies and languages
that democratic materialism proposes and propagates. I propose that art today exists
within the quasi-paradigm of paradigmaticism: the idiot paradigm.3
In ancient Greece, those regarded as idiotes were excluded from public affairs
on the grounds that they had nothing to offer the affairs of the polis and nothing to
lose by the actions taken therein. The idiotes existed at the periphery of the sphere of
sovereignty of those with stakes in society and validated to exercise agency in public.
The uneducated, the mentally ill, slaves, and women were such groups barred from
taking part in the affairs of the polis and thus regarded as idiotic. By not participating
in the civic or public life of the polis, the idiotes was a figure who lived an abstracted
life, disinvested from the field of politics, disconnected from the hegemonic relations
of the wider society and thus trapped in a condition of assumed non-relationality.
The idiotes did have a relation to the polis and its sphere of sovereignty, but no legit-
imate power to put into effect its agency to this relation as a validated political force
because its relation to society was simply one-way: total subjugation. As peripheral
to the sphere of sovereignty, however, the status of the idiotes actively delineates a
horizon, providing a form of political potential, albeit a static one.
Philosophers that deliberately undertook life as idiotes include Antisthenes,
Diogenes, other Cynics, and Socrates. To say that they were not concerned with
larger affairs, though, is not strictly correct. Such characters were concerned with
larger affairs, but believed that their way of life existed on a much larger and more
profound level, a cosmic level unconcerned with the trivial business of other citizens.
They thus deliberately withdrew from the status of metropolitan citizen to become
cosmopolitanfigures without familiar topological or spatiotemporal grounds, or
at least figures that presented the illusion of and allusion to such groundlessness.
Unfortunately, it is within this illusion that neoliberalism proliferates, as it not only
permits everything within its parameters of sovereignty (within the assumed-to-be
infinite parameters of hyper-capitalist economies of scope); but, more significantly,
proliferates by and as the reification of subjects to permits, radically renouncing
the dialectic of subject-object relations that might otherwise govern or constrain its
subjects.4 Within neoliberal crypto-ideology everything that is valuable is a subject,
and so every subject, including the human subject, has a value that can be calibrated
3 The idiot paradigm of contemporary art is a paradigmaticism in that it is a model that promotes
a proliferation of diverse paradigms, apparently unconnected by linear temporal relations,
a random bustling of atomized individual parts not subject to any conjunctive directional force
or criteria. It is a quasi-paradigm in that it is at once a paradigm, a syntagm, and neither.
4 Here, I literally mean that any subject, whether a human subject or any other material
abstraction, is permitted to effect any material or abstract force and transformation upon any
object whatsoever, simply by virtue of the fact of validation as a subject (and not an object).
206 Concept
MATTHEW POOLE
and measured, though all these values/subjects remain in a state of pseudo-absolute
dynamism. As values, all neoliberal subjects, like all subjects, point toward a telos,
albeit an embodied one, an ideal of the permissive and permitting force of capital
(in the case of neoliberalism) in whatever form, even though the illusion of a total
pragmatism is expounded by their hidden attenuated ideology.
It is important to note that all idiotae, self-declared or not, are apolitical fig-
ures without agency to engage in politics, without a polis, and specifically without
a civic connection. Aristotle famously believed there was something pathetic about
being apolitical, citilesslike being a solitary piece in checkers.5 Similarly, in her
1958 book The Human Condition Hannah Arendt writes a brief passage focusing on
the privations suffered by those engaging in or afflicted by idiocy.6 Arendt, however,
believed in the private sphere, the proto-idiotic domain, as an important space of
refuge, like a backstage, where one could regroup ones thoughts to reenter the pub-
lic-political stage reinvigorated. Similarly, the likes of Antisthenes and Diogenes saw
freedom in this deliberate act of withdrawal, though they had no desire to reenter
the metropolitan stage of, in their view, the corrupt polis of Athens. Indeed, pathos
(solitary suffering) was their very condition of life, not ethos (collective habit(ation)
or enculturedness). However, the freedom in which such philosophers believed is
only an illusion of and an allusion to another ideal image of freedom bound up
within the dialectic of public and private. It is not a materialist freedom, that would
consider existence per se utterly indifferent to the existence of perceptual appara-
tuses (such as humans) that can perceive things existing; rather it is an idealist, or
we might say ideological, imago of freedom that re-invokes the ideologically con-
structed public/private dialectic.
The paradigm of contemporary arts freedom suffers this same pathos and rigid
self-limitation as it seeks out ever more atomised paradigms laid side-by-side as if in
non-Euclidean parallel lines. Private subjects exist within the illusion of a freedom in
which they are permitted and determined as valuable simply because they can exist
as subjects, away from the form of a field or ground of any absolute relationality,
toward an assumed non-ground of what we will call a pseudo- absolute relativity:7
away from any grounding syntagmatic rules or external governance of any kind.
This is the great lie of neoliberalism and, in the art context, the great conservative
5 And a man that is because of nature and not merely because of fortune citiless is either low in
the scale of humanity or above it (like the clanless, lawless, hearthless man reviled by Homer,
for he is by nature citiless and also a lover of war) in as much as he resembles an isolated piece
at draughts. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a 47.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 38.
7 Absolute relativity appears to be an oxymoron, but only if it is conceived from the perspective of
an idealist language that seeks and operates upon an assumedly stable ground of assumptions of
an a priori spatiotemporal background. By analogy, in physics Absolute Relativity Theory (ironically
crowned with the acronym ART) does not presume a preexisting spatiotemporal ground to
the universe, instead proposing that space and time are as much material symptoms of the as yet
unfathomed forces of the universe as anything else that can be currently observed or theorized
within it.
Concept 207
 THE IDIOT PARADIGM
irony of, for example, relational or dialogical aesthetics8that each and every
participating voice is valid and free to be expressed as equally valideven though the
proponents of such types of art believe that they are producing points of resistance
against the prevailing hegemonic ideology in interstitial spaces or microtopias, as
both Nicolas Bourriaud and Hans Ulrich Obrist have consistently asserted. The lib-
eral assumption here is that the multiplicity of subjective expressions can and does
emanate from stable subjects that are first of all assumed a priori to exist as such with
an a priori validated agency, and then secondly, but equally importantly, can be and
are located in and of themselves however abstract they areand they are necessarily
material abstractions (meaning that subjects are reified). This in itself is a patently
conservative politics, as it does nothing to change subject relations, especially property
relations. Instead, it simply propagates the ground necessary for the more aggressive
forms of subjection and subjectivation that we find in neoliberalism. It is the cryp-
to-ideological locating of subjects within their subjectivity that is the hidden ground
that is never questioned (as all subjects must be ideologically oriented and produced,
even if they are assumed only to point to themselves, as in neoliberalism), because the
telos of their assumed embodied freedom obscures this contradiction from discourse
that would otherwise diagnose the reality of their status and ontic state.
In the canons of art history, and in particular the canon of modernism, it is
Dada that explicitly attempts to inhabit and embody this quasi-paradigm of the
paradigmaticism of the idiot; and it is the Dadaist ethos that is reproduced in most
art today. In Hugo Balls 1916 Dada Manifesto his aggressive use of the concepts
of first-cause, destruction and creation, foolishness, eternal bliss, madness, and the
transmutation of subjects and objects:
Dada is a new tendency in art. [] Dada world war without end, Dada revo-
lution without beginning. [] How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying
dada. [] Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. [] I let the
vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur. [] I want the word
where it ends and begins. [] Each thing has its word, but the word has
become a thing by itself, [] the word outside your domain.9
8 I am referring to the participatory art practices championed by Nicolas Bourriaud, Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Maria Lind, Uta Meta Bauer, and Grant Kester, among others, where relational aesthetics
and dialogical aesthetics respectively denote the titles of Bourriaud and Kesters most well-known
historico-theoretical accounts of the rise and proliferation of such practices in art from the late
1980s to the present day. It is worth noting, although it is obvious and well documented, that these
participatory practices have become a significant and dominant mode in contemporary art that is
dubbed politically active, or, more controversially, socially engaged. It is also worth noting that
these two phrases are not only woefully inaccurate, being both blindly tautological, but also often
used incorrectly because of the actually antidemocratic hubris of the ethics of those that utter them
in earnest together with the incorrect theorizations of sociability and the political that they espouse.
9 Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto, 1916; available at www.manifestosarchive.blogspot.com/2011/11
/hugo-ball-dada-manifesto.html.
208 Concept
MATTHEW POOLE
Similarly, Tristan Tzaras 1918 Dada Manifesto alludes to such idioticism in its
imagery of dance and fecund creation from wild destruction:
abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada. []
every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the
precise shock of parallel lines, are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition
of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada. [] Elegant and unpreju-
diced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; [] the interlacing of oppo-
sites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.10
But it is Richard Huelsenbecks 1918 Berlin Dada Manifesto where we see the
most direct connotation of idiocy: The true Dadaist [] half Pantagruel, half St.
Francis, laughing and laughing.11
Repeatedly in all the Dada manifestos we see references to powerful vitality,
superabundant creative fecundity, ouroborosic hermeticism, and the collapse of
morality and ethics, which are all allusions to the condition of the paradigmaticism of
idiocy. As the plurality of techniques, forms, subject matter, and approaches in Dada
works attest, each work is itself idiotic, and is believed to sit in parallel with every other
work: a nebula of non-relationality that creates the illusion of the uprooting of every
subject from its relation to a corresponding object, freeing it supposedly radically.
These attempts at producing a radically paradigmatic (non-)structure ulti-
mately fail because the proponents of Dada aim to provoke the paradigmaticism
of idiocy; hence the need for manifestos. Because of this they unwittingly invoke
a quasi-syntagmatic field, albeit a strange pseudo-non-relational field in which the
de facto relation between nodal points of transgression is the illusion of refused
relationality. Dada ultimately reproduces the paradigmatic/syntagmatic dialectic
because it attempts to provoke the collapse of the dialectic itself. This happens pri-
marily because of the insistence that Dada is not Expressionism, is not Futurism,
and so on. What the Dadaists did not learn from the symbolism of the mythological
figure of the idiotes is that this state cannot be provoked but only divinely ordained
(if one believes in such things). It is as if they forgot that idiocy is allegoricala
metaphor, an ideologically constructed representation. Much like heroism, the
condition of idiocy cannot be self-declared. One must befall such conditions, and
the befalling is absolutely chaotic and unpredictable, just as the anointment of the
idiotes as Carnival King can only be divinely ordained. What Dada produced was
merely pseudo-anarchism, which is entirely commensurate with the radical pseudo-
freedoms expounded by neoliberalism, as it ultimately fails to escape the dialectics of
same and other, master and slave, producing simply a conservative reactionary form
10 Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918; available at: www.manifestosarchive.blogspot.com/search/label/1918
11 Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Manifesto (1918), in German Expressionism, Documents from the End
of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 26769.
Concept 209
 THE IDIOT PARADIGM
of abnegated sovereignty. What we see in the ethico-aesthetics of much art today is
equally pseudo-anarchism existing within the contradictions of the idiot paradigm.
Turning to the mythological figure of the idiotes to explore its symbolism, we begin
to see how and why its epistemological and ontological status closely maps arts current
idiotic status, albeit a status that is not fully or coherently achieved by contemporary art.
One of the clearest depictions of the idiotes can be found on the Townley Vase,
a second-century Roman vase discovered in 1773. Upon its relief surface we see the
idiotes leading a Bacchanalian/Dionysian triumphal procession, its principal function
to lead an epistemo-ontological collapse of reverie and delirium, to collapse the dyad
of the primal and the civilized. It is symbolized by alpha, signifying a new beginning,
first cause, or origin. So the idiotes is a heroic fool representing chaotic, irrational,
random action intended to break the conventions of the polis. The idiotes is depicted
moving from right to left symbolising a shift from conscious to unconscious cognition,
eschewing its ego, entering an archetypal realm and becoming god-like, its own arche-
type, its own origin, and thus object-like, insomuch as it is shedding its skin of the
ego-illusion of being a sovereign individual subject. The idiotes is also seen whistling,
representing a spirit of vitality. Fool derives from the Latin follis denoting a bellows;
follis is a Latin euphemism for the scrotum, another bag containing vital creative spirit.
The fool is then an unrestrained source of breath. So the idiotes is the ontic object
of aspiring creativity: an artwork sui generis. As such, it is beyond ethics embodying its
own telos, which it suffers existing within this pathos. In this sense it is Olympian. But,
the idiotes is also barefoot, connoting spiritual and material humility, grounding it in
ordinary life connected directly to matter. Thus it is also chthonic. The idiotes cloak
is multi-coloured, representing spring, transformation, and rebirth. Its seven headband
feathers signify the pantheistic spirit of the seven planets and the fools coxcomb (the
cock heralding the dawning of new awareness). Dionysian primal fecundity is also
connoted in depictions of the idiotes being followed by a panther, being in proximity
to vines, grapes, figs, a serpent, and wearing fawn skin. It also carries a thyrsus, a pine-
cone-tipped stalk of the giant fennelthe tool Prometheus used to steal fire from the
sun: a powerful phallic symbol of fecundity and liveness, but also an allusion to the
foresightedness, or scope, of the Titan (and the meaning of his name) and the eternal
suffering inflicted upon him by Zeus for his acting independently of the Olympian
gods in his act of pity toward mankind.
Most significantly of all, the idiotes is the archetypal puer aeternus, the eternal
child. So the idiotes is half-devil/half-savior, the threat of destruction and the promise
of creation held synthesised within it. The idiotes is fundamentally immature, incom-
patible with the public sphere as it can never be pubes, adult. Because of this it is
always alongside (para) and shows (digm) the path between worlds that can never be
placed or arranged in order syntagmatically. The idiotes is always parallel to the sov-
ereignty, or paradigm, of any given order, and can move simultaneously between and
through dimensions that are ordered by their own respective paradigms, such as life
and death. The simultaneous transverse movement of the idiotes between and through
210 Concept
MATTHEW POOLE
sovereign realms allows it to be the embodiment of a complex matrix of conflicting,
contrasting, or even contradictory paradigms, such as life and death (it is after all
a figure that is alive in the realm of the living, yet as an eternal child also somehow
dead) making it the paradigm of the paradigmatic.12 Such a state characterizes con-
temporary art today, which is distinguished by the paradigm of paradigm-less-ness,
or a paradigm that permits the endless proliferation of disconnected paradigms.
The contradictions of the idiot paradigm are of course entirely commensurate
with the contradictions of neoliberalism, where a pseudo-liberal humanism of pseudo-
radical individuality fuels and legitimates the crypto-syntagmatic field of capitalist
economic relations. That is to say, capitalist economic relations appear to be so blin-
dingly complex and intertwined with all aspects of life that we appear not to be able
to discern cause-and-effect relationships between social, political, ethical, or eco-
nomic activities in the world. However, there are ordering systems and logics at play,
as there must necessarily be (however difficult they may be to grasp) because capital
can still be accumulated and subjects are still the points at which capital accumulates
and around which it is oriented. Art today suffers within this contradictory system
where its innovations, changes, and developments are either explicitly and overtly
market driven or are explicitly and overtly driven by the ideological illusions of liberal-
humanist ethics. For example, the work of artists such as Jeff Koons or Maurizio
Cattelan functions predominantly by the violence of repression in the apparatus
of the art market, but also in the museum, in art criticism, and in art history, while
functioning secondarily by the more subtle violence of ideology in all these appara-
tuses to ensure its own apparent cohesion and the reproduction of the values that
it propounds to self-legitimize its violent means.13 In the same way, but conversely,
the work of a self-proclaimed ethical artist such as Marina Abramovic functions
predominantly by the violence of liberal-humanist ideology, but also secondarily by
12 Here, for example, we can use the example of death to help clarify. Living human subjects can have
no access to or knowledge of death while they are living. To access death or to have knowledge of
it means one is, of course, dead. This means that the knowledge of the living and the knowledge of
the dead cannot be conjoined in any way. The manifold of the moment of death itself provides an
abyssal rupture in the continuity of the knowledge of the living. Death is a paradigm that the living
paradigm cannot assimilate and so the syntagmata of the living ends abruptly at the manifold
disjunctive conjunction with death in the moment of death. The idiotes, by contrast, is able to hop
and skip back and forth across this abyss and thus contains secret knowledge of both the living
realm and the realm of death, though to neither of which can it disclose the others secrets. This
monstrous capacity that the idiotes embodies is a principal reason for the fear of and hence public
exclusion of those branded as idiots (women, slaves, the mentally ill, and so forth). What I am
proposing here is that art can be encountered idiotically but must not be regarded as embodying
or representing function or, worse, the meaning of the idiotes as paradigm.
13 In any market there are many layers and mechanisms of violent repression, such as those that allow
certain goods and certain vendors into the market place, the agora, or bar them from it. Others are
the mechanisms that determine the pricing of goods, which create violent repression of other forms
or registers of value or currency to be admitted to operate in the market place. And, of course,
the very notion of private property is a form of violent repression that confiscates objects or services
from free public usage into the private sphere. Maurizio Cattelans and Jeff Koonss oeuvres have
been deliberately choreographed by the artists to gain their value principally from the art markets.
Concept 211
 THE IDIOT PARADIGM
violent repression, even if this is highly attenuated and concealed, symbolic even, as
with it is for the ideological state apparatuses of the family or education systems.14
What is at once obvious, banal, and ubiquitous is that the humanist-capitalist
matrix produces a nebula of pseudo-radical difference within the material of the field
of the art world (i.e., a plurality of forms, techniques, subjects, and attitudes toward
difference) in order to sustain and reproduce the illusion/allusion of the (pseudo-)
radical freedom of the individual artwork under the illusion/allusion that we are rad-
ically free individual subjects that are targets for and products of both the economic
and ethical surpluses of such art. This ethico-economic matrix promises that art can
make life better in some way, and indeed that its duty and function is to do so. What
this produces is a complex field of apoliticity, where politics as such is impossible.
Instead, the play of ethics is confused and misinterpreted as the force of politics; only
a self-sustaining field of ethics is reproduced and no substantive change in the material
abstractions that govern permitted ways of life occurs, because the polis itself is idiotic.
In order to challenge this apolitical hegemony, a non-idealist materialist cri-
tique of the quasi-syntagmatic ethico-economic conditions of art needs to super-
sede the self-limiting and confining illusions/allusions of freedom that are both the
principal currency and the constraining embodied weblike structures of art today.15
14 Abramovics work since the 1960s has been dedicated to an ethical way of living in which art plays
a central ameliorative and curative role. She believes in the power of obscure rituals, which are
prescribed as her art practice, to directly improve the lives of individuals. In a revealing interview,
Abramovic candidly explains her messianic world view and project for art: Art can help so much
in society because we have lost our beliefs. There [are] no churches anymore, so we have to
rebuild. [] Ive always believed that why Im here is for the big picture. [] I just want to create thought as a productive nihilism: nihil unbound, as the title of your book
situations where people forget time. [] I never saw so much pain. People are afraid to express
their inner feelings, but when you go inside, youll see it. People live in so much pain. I
understand it. Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, Once Upon a Time, Harpers Bazaar, February 7, 2012.
Available at www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/fashion-photography/bedroom-marina-abramovic-
interview-0312#slide-1. The very fact that Abramovic believes her art to be the key to unlocking
the happiness of other people is itself a form of violent repression; and as the author of the rituals
that she uses in her practice for such unlocking she also controls the means. While her intentions
might be good, she paves the road to hell in precisely the manner outlined by Badiou (see note 1).
At no point does her work challenge subject relations, especially not property relations. Instead,
like the great charitable philanthropists of the nineteenth century, she dedicates her time to
making people happy by such means as making them eat bread balls wrapped in gold leaf while
bathing in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, while children in the Third World continue to work
under slave-labor conditions making the designer clothes that she also claims she agonizes about
in the Harpers Bazaar interview. On the violence of ideology and ideological state apparatuses, see
Louis Althussers Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 12788.
15 This essay is principally a diagnostic summary of one of the many key problems in contemporary art. In
order for it to contribute to a materialist critique of contemporary art and of the waning political currency
of art, it must provide no prognosis. To do so would be utterly contradictory as it would be an act of
prediction, of foreknowledge. As an element of a materialist politics, this essay, indeed any essay, can only
be diagnostic in as much as it properly will act as an idiotes as it passes through (dia-), acrossand not by
a spiritual metaphysical knowledge (gnosis) but simply a knowledge of things, of knowledge as a thing.
However, this diagnosis is not merely a description but the statement of a position. As a diagnostic
description it is an instantiation of the non-idealist gnostic elements of the parts that are stated here
as such, and so is a firm taking of a stance, which is its properly political materialist dimension.
212 Concept
Reason Is Inconsolable
and Non-Conciliatory
Ray Brassier in Conversation with Suhail Malik
Suhail Malik: By way of general introduction, lets start with the develop-
ment of your thinking and ideas through nihilism. In Nihil Unbound, you
advocated a (perhaps modernist) project, maybe best exemplified by science,
in which the rational understanding of the world undoes all conventional
accounts for it (from the mythic to structured or individualized beliefs to
most philosophical structures insofar as they do not take seriously enough
the discoveries and horizons opened up by the sciences).1 As I see it, you
argue that the rational revisions of understanding, the cosmos (philosophi-
cally and scientifically apprehended), the self, and the conditions of thought
do not depend on or lead to anything predetermined. Or, to put it otherwise,
they depend on and assume nothing as their condition other than the itera-
tion of rational thought in a material world. The absence of any positive term
as a condition or result of this processthe absenting of a transcendental
condition or determination of rational enquiry, its nothingmarks rational
has it. One way to capture this nihilistic condition for thought, its termless-
ness, is your image of the death of the sun, which, thanks to scientific pre-
diction, we know will happen in about five billion years. You ask the ques-
tion Lyotard does of how thinking addresses its own extra-terrestriality as a
rational injunctionand perhaps organizes its own departure from the solar
system in a politics of survival2but, beyond that, solar burnout captures
a kind of ultimate nothing for thinking as we have understood it so far, and
of its (terrestrial) conditions. Soand here is an audacious movesolar
burnout becomes a positive figure for how rational thought in a way assumes
nothing as its condition. If this is right, clearly thought cannot be predicated
on human interests or have the human as its term, even if it is the human
who thinks rationally (perhaps not exclusively, but as at least one such spe-
cies-actor). This is the antihumanism and non-correlationism of your work.
My initial questions are twofold. The first concerns the drama
of nihilism: solar burnout if not universal termination is a grand and
Conversation conducted by e-mail in September and October 2013.
1 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
2 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Can Thought Go Without a Body, in The Inhuman: Reflection on
Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Concept 213
 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
catastrophic vista from which to think the base conditions for rational
thought and its development. Your more recent work revolving around
the work of the mid-twentieth century American analytic philoso-
pher Wilfrid Sellars seems by comparison relatively modest. The aspects
of Sellarss work you are interested in are his theorizations of how
ideas are revised by a rational agent by the relation between what he
calls the manifest imageapproximately how the world appears and
makes sense to a general rational consciousnessand the scientific
imagethe world as it is known in the terms of theoretical science.
Other than explaining your turn to Sellars, the questionwhich I think
is not just about rhetorical strategies but is close to core shifts in your
approachis: Why this modesty of returning to an encultured human
actor as the basis of your inquiries now? At first blush, it seems a regression
or stepping down from the scales and ambition of your earlier work in two
regards: first, it concerns only intricacies of processes of rational thinking
and concept generation rather than literally stellar conditions for thinking
the future of thought; the scope seems much reduced. Second, given your
earlier advocacy of a trenchantly antihumanist or non-correlational condi-
tion and term for rational thought, the concept-monger (to take up your
citation of Robert Brandom) involved here seems indelibly human. And
this is very far from a now established perception of your interests. In either
instance, the emphasis now seems more constructive than nihilistic, more
anthropological than cosmological. (I think they are no less nihilistic
but it may need some explanation to make it clear why so.)
Brassier: At the heart of Nihil Unbound (NU) is an argument defending the necessary
link between rationality and nihilism, such that, as you put it, rational thought must
assume nothing (what the book calls being-nothing) as its productive condition.
But the subsequent move toward Sellars, who was all too summarily dealt with in NU,
is a direct continuation rather than a detour or a regression from this agenda. I realize
it may look like a step backwarda retreat from the impasse of extinctionbut in
fact its a case of what the French call reculer pour mieux sautez, that is, stepping back
in order to leap farther. In this particular context, it means reconsidering my overly
hasty dismissal of Sellarss defense of the manifest image in order to think through
what it might mean to unbind thinking from its terrestrial condition.
Ive come to understand why Sellars insisted on the indispensability of the
manifest image and its role in the process of conceptual revision that fuels cogni-
tive discovery. Theres nothing sacrosanct about the contents of the manifest image
(except perhaps for the category of personhood, which is not species-specific for
Sellars: persons need not be human). What is crucial is its normative infrastructure,
by virtue of which it constitutes what Sellars called the space of reasons. This
normative infrastructure is spelled out in Sellarss inferentialist theory of meaning,
214 Concept
RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
which has been vastly amplified by Brandom. The basic idea is simple: if you believe
or mean something, you also ought to believe or mean everything that follows from
it. Inferentialism ties together semantic and epistemic holism. Semantic holism is
the idea that the meaning of any individual claim is defined by its relations to other
claims: not just the claims it implies, but those that imply it in turn. These relations
are inferential: what something means is a function of what you can infer from it, and
what implies it in turn. But this means that to be committed to the meaning of any
single claim is also to be committed to the meaning of all those other claims with
which it is inferentially bound. This has an epistemic consequence: any individual
belief is defined by its inferential relations to all the other beliefs presupposed by or
implied by it. So if you believe one thing, you also ought to believe everything that
follows from that one thingregardless of whether or not you are explicitly aware
of it (which, clearly, most of the time we are not).
This notion of discursive commitment is central to inferentialism: the
meanings of our claims regularly outstrip what we currently intend or are aware
of. This is because the implications of our claims regularly outstrip what we are cur-
rently aware of. To be rational is to keep track of those entailments and thereby to
track what we become committed to when we commit ourselves to a belief or claim.
Deontic scorekeeping is the name Brandom gives to the practice whereby we keep
track of these discursive commitments. We as rational beings strive to keep track of
what we ought to say, think, or do, just as a good chess player strives to keep track
of what will follow from all the possible moves that might be made given a specific
configuration of pieces on the board. In other words, what we mean when we think
or speak is determined by all the things we also ought to think or say in its wake.
This inferentialist account of meaning and belief turns out to be a valuable
resource for me because it defends the autonomy of rationality without violating
the constraints of naturalism (or, if one prefers, materialism). The normativity
invoked in this inferentialist theory of meaning and thought must be distinguished
from the sense in which we refer to as socio-cultural norms. Rational normativity
is distinct from social normativity even if it is invariably socially instituted. This
is something Hegel understood and its the reason why Hegel can be a rationalist
(indeed, an absolute rationalist) while insisting that rationality is always socially
and historically embodied. Sellars is Hegelian to the extent that, for him too, the
practice of giving and asking for reasons is socially instituted. But institution is not
constitution: to say that reason is socially instituted is not to say that it is socially
constituted; that is the kind of historicist relativism that both Hegel and Sellars
were attempting to avoid, not least because it founders in incoherence. Reason is a
practice, but not all practices are equivalent. To claim that they are is to lapse into
the kind of vulgar pragmatism which subordinates all practices to a single standard
of utility, whether social or biological. Inferentialism insists that the ends governing
the practice of giving and asking for reasons cannot be reduced to those of other
social practices, even if they are bound up with them in complicated ways.
Concept 215
 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
This is one way in which inferentialism has allowed me to substantiate the
distinction I made in NU between the ends of thought and the ends of life. This is
also why it would be a mistake to view my current focus on the inferentialist link
between conceptual function and linguistic practice as symptomatic of a drop
from the cosmological register to the anthropological register. The modesty of
my apparent stepping back from thoughts cosmic condition and returning to an
account that roots thinking in the activities of encultured human agents is strategic.
Its necessary in order both to ground the normative valence I accord to thinking,
and to explain what thinking is and why it ought to be deterritorialized. Unless I
can give an account of the ought in a statement like thinking ought to be freed
from its terrestrial condition, its status as an imperative is null. More generally,
one has to give an account of the normativity of truth in order to break out of the
paradox of nihilism: if nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters
doesnt matter. Therefore mattering cant be adjudicated by thinking; it can only be
determined by living. Having destituted reason and truth, nihilism crowns feeling
and instinct in their stead. Living holds sway over thinking.
Equally, the Laruellean account of thought which I sought to repurpose
in NU proved unsuited to the task of liberating thinking from living because it
relegated the need for justification to the transcendent realm of philosophy that
it claims to suspend. From the standpoint of what Laruelle calls radical imma-
nence, rational normativity is just another philosopheme among others. The
move from Laruelle to Sellars is the move from the absolute suspension of justi-
fication to the justified suspension of the absolute. For my purposes, Laruelles
non-standard philosophy remains too static, too formalist a procedure; its
realism of the last instance reifies conceptual structures and reduces inferential
necessity to authoritarian whimthat of the philosophical decision. But unless
one can give an immanent, materialist account of the status of rational normativity,
one cannot but regress from the cosmological to the anthropological. Inferentialism
provides an account wherein thinking that thinking makes no difference does make
a difference in and for thinking itself. It matters whether or not anything matters;
determining whether or not nihilism is true makes a difference for thinking and
this makes a difference in reality: not because thinking is magically keyed in to the
fabric of reality, but because thinking is an activity performed by language-using
animals, an activity that makes a difference because it is embedded in material
reality. Because concepts are functions, they are relayed by the activities of lan-
guage-using animals, but this does not mean that the properties of conceptual
function are to be identified with properties or capacities exclusive to the human
animal. Humans may be the only concept-mongers on Earth, but this is not to say
they are the only possible concept-mongers. Ultimately, the inferentialist account
of conceptual practice ties into a metaphysics of processes wherein conceptual
function may be realized by very different kinds of physical processes. Sellarss
vision entails a transcendental functionalism wherein thinking is a process among
216 Concept
RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
other processes, but one whose peculiar involution generates a cognitive gateway
onto those other processes.
Lets clarify and situate your broad ambition a little more. Two interrelated
aspects are worth highlighting here, even at risk of repetition. The first
is forward-looking, the second is backward-looking. Prospectively, what
is the farther horizon you want to leap toward, that the turn to infer-
entialism will help you secure? Retrospectively, accepting the divergence
between the interests and claims of reason and those of lifereason trans-
forms life because it is other to itit seems that rational thought is for you
more fundamentally yet the engine for its own extension beyond human
determination, in two senses: first, you avow the extension of reason qua
inferentialism outside of the human into material and practical processes
in general; second, it is rational thought qua philosophy that generates
an adequate account of this extension and its possibility. Philosophy is then
not just a belated self-reflection on the conditions of thought and reality
but at once a practice effected through language. This nuanced global distinc-
tion leads to the question of what other recursive inferentialist pattern for-
mations there can be.
Certainly, making inferences through a recursive pattern formation
is a central conceit of capitalist markets as pricing mechanisms constituted
through the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Here, all prices in a market are
true reflections of the market as a whole insofar as it is transparent to itself;
price changes arise only as a consequence of nonsymmetrical information
before returning to rationally determined equilibrium precisely through
recursive operations of trading for maximal gains. This may not quite be
an inferentialism as per the philosophical lineage you are drawing on, but
it seems to observe the same functionalist account. If so, todays capitalist
markets, drawing on these basic premises and also the automation of their
practical implementation, would seem to constituteyou may prefer insti-
tutea kind of rational agency, and at speeds and capacities that far exceed
human limits. At least, thats whats declared by those who advocate for cap-
ital markets as generating accurate prices. Equally, writers, artists, and
filmmakers have embodied capitalist markets or recursive information
network systems as fantastical, spectral figures, proposing a personifica-
tion of a kind of nonhuman inferentialist functioning: William Gibsons
Neuromancer trilogy is one influential example here.
If these or other extensions or generalizations of inferentialism qua
recursive patterning process have validity qua reasoning for you, how do
you locate inferentialism qua philosophy as a practice in relation to other
inferentialist/patterning operations? Sub-question: What is its privilege,
if any, and what can you say about this privilege compared with the one
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
philosophy had in the high Enlightenment as the rational discipline (given
that philosophy then also covered what are now distinguished as sciences
and now does not)?
First of all, Id like to obviate a misunderstanding: I wouldnt say that I avow the
extension of reason qua inferentialism outside of the human into material and prac-
tical processes in general. While its true to say that reason is incarnated in mate-
rial and practical processes, this is not to say that these processes are themselves
rational or that inferential patterns are realized by all sorts of material and practical
processes in general. On the contrary: I want to uphold the crucial (Kantian) dis-
tinction between rule-governed conceptual practices, which I take to be constitutive
of rationality, and which are exceedingly rare and metaphysically exceptional, and
pattern-governed processes, which are ubiquitous and metaphysically unremarkable.
In other words, I want to maintain the exceptional status of reason and insist on
the unnatural nature of our rational capacity without lapsing into a metaphysical
dualism of the mental and physical (of the sort recently rehabilitated by philoso-
phers like David Chalmers)3 but also without attributing to it a supernatural origin.
The distinction between rule-obeying activity and pattern-governed behavior dis-
qualifies the claim that markets think or dynamic systems reason. Rule-following is
pattern-governed but not every pattern incarnates a rule.
So, not everything thinks: rationality is a metaphysical exception. But its the
exception constituted by the rule that discriminates the exception from the rule. So
the farther horizon toward which rationality propels itself is one that reason must
construct: it is not pre-given and it is fundamentally incompatible with the brand
of metaphysical eschatology for which the ultimate horizon is the reconciliation of
mind and matter or reason and nature. Reason is inconsolable and non-concilia-
tory. Rational inquiry is propelled by cognitive interests that are generated anew by
breaking with past modes of understanding. In this regard, reason is the restless-
ness of the negative. It progresses by refusing the lure of reconciliationeven and
especially the lure of being reconciled to the irreconcilable. The farther horizon
toward which it progresses is the universal understood as determinate negation of
parochial, context-specific modes of understanding.
What this progression ultimately implies is a transformation of reasons rela-
tion to time. Why? Because the critique of intellectual intuition, which is the ratio-
nalist variant of the myth of the given, requires that we acknowledge the discursive
structure of rationality: concepts are linguistically instantiated functions. But to say
that reason is discursive is also to say that reasoning takes time: just as there is no
nondiscursive rationality, there is no timeless reason. It is because reason takes time
that it constitutes a self-correcting enterprise in which even our most cherished
categories may have to be revised or abandoned. Among these are the temporal
3 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
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RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
categories of past, present, and future. My wager is that our understanding of the
articulation of past, present, and futureand hence of the structure of timewill
eventually be transformed in the light of cognitive discovery. This is where I think
reason harbors the possibility of a cognitive solution to the problem of nihilism,
which, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is simply the problem of what to do with time. Why
keep investing in the future when there is no longer a transcendental guarantor, a
positive end of time as ultimate horizon of reconciliation or redemption ensuring a
payoff for this investment? Reason promises to transform our relation to time such
that the purposelessness of becoming would become intelligible as the enabling
condition of action. In Platonic terms, this would be to grasp the intelligible form
of formlessness, which is time as such. This would be the rationalist alternative to
Nietzsches irrationalist solution, which is simply to affirm, rather than understand,
the senselessness of becoming (eternal recurrence as amor fati).
Its an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To opt for
the latter is to extend the Prometheanism of reason to becoming itself. Prometheanism,
in the words of Alberto Toscano, is the articulation of action and knowledge in the
perspective of totality.4 It is the attempt to eradicate the discrepancy between what is
humanly made and what is nonhumanly givennot by rendering the world amenable
to human whim or by merely satisfying our pathological needs, but by remaking our-
selves and our world in conformity with the demands of reason. In metaphysical terms,
this requires reinscribing the transcendence of time into the immanence of space. To
grasp the form of formlessness would be to transform the structure of fate understood
as the way in which things happen to us. The gain in intelligibility is practically trans-
formative once one realizes, with Sellars, that thinking is a kind of doing, or as he puts
it, that inferring is an act. Thinking is not a preliminary to doing, but a kind of doing
whose potencies we have yet to understand. The point at which thinking and doing
coincide is the point at which idealism and materialism fuse.
Pete Wolfendale has suggested that its time to rehabilitate logocentrism,
a sentiment with which I heartily concur. Everything is ultimately accessible to
reason, but reason is not accessible to everything. The Kantian resonances of infer-
entialism may chafe against contemporary neo-materialism, but among its clear
advantages over the latter is ruling out the suggestion that corporations are per-
sons. The personification of complex systems, whether corporations or markets,
is among the most unfortunate consequences of the pseudo-materialist tendency
to elide the distinction between rational agency and complex behavior. The result
is neo-animism: the indiscriminate attribution of agency to anything and everything
(speed bumps, traffic cones, pencil sharpeners, and so forth). This is theoretically
and politically disastrous. Among the duties of philosophy is reminding theorists
that hard-won distinctions like the one between action and behavior cannot be
4 Alberto Toscano, The Prejudice Against Prometheus, Stir (Summer 2011). Available at
www.stirtoaction.com/the-prejudice-against-prometheus.
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
dissolved by fiat. But this is not to say that philosophy can reclaim its former priv-
ileges, such as claiming to be the rational discipline. The secession of the special
sciences cannot be overturned. Philosophersand metaphysicians in particular
should be more humble before the astonishing achievements of the empirical sci-
ences. But philosophers need not abase themselves before natural scientists or social
scientists. Philosophy retains two indispensable tasks: scrutinizing the conceptual
logic underpinning theoretical discourses and identifying the most fundamental cat-
egories presupposed by those discourses. This is a modest remit with far-reaching
consequences. Its preferable to a grandiose trumpeting of the return of metaphysics,
which often means the regression to precritical dogmatism.
Accepting that rational thought deprioritizes human life as its privileged
agent (a historical privilege attributable, in fact, to various evolutionary
contingencies and, in myth, to human self-regard) seems to subscribe to
an antihumanism. Yet, that the human is one rational agent in the uni-
verse among others (a condition familiar from science fiction) would be a
trans-humanism. And if rational thought extends the human as its historical
agent in terms other than those (primarily biological-symbolic terms) estab-
lished to date, this corresponds to a post-humanism. Would you identify
any one of these as of greater importance to you than the others? Or do you
advocate these multiple yet cogent de-anthropologizing effects and conse-
quences of rational thought (among others) equally and simultaneously?
Where and how do you situate your work and ambitions in relation to the
spectrum of antihumanism, post-humanism, and trans-humanism?
My primary commitment is to a rationalistic naturalism, so there are elements in your
characterization of each that I would endorse, viz., that humans are not necessarily the
privileged bearers of rationality (antihumanism); that humans may not be the only
rational agents (trans-humanism); that rationality may extend itself through post-bi-
otic systems (post-humanism). Others may quibble with these definitions, but what
I endorse in your version of these positions is the emphasis on rationality, which is
precisely what some advocates of these stances are concerned to minimize or deny.
The matter is complicated because there is a disavowed humanism in anti-, post-,
and trans-humanism, and there is a necessary inhumanism implicit in humanism. Its
the latter that Im particularly interested in. So I dont think one can simply pit the
nonhuman against the human, or plump for one over against the other.
In order to clarify my own position on these issues, I need to explain what I
think rationalistic naturalism entails. I think it has four basic consequences. First,
there can be no such thing as an extraterritorial or arational critique of reason,
since critique is a normative term whose ultimate warrant derives from reason
itself. This remains the case even if one accepts, with Hegel, that the structure of
human reason is always historically bounded. Second, reason is our sole means of
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cognitive access to nature. There is no other way of knowing what nature is (cer-
tainly not intuition, pace Bergson and others). Third, Kants critique of dogmatic
rationalism, which I accept, rules out the possibility of an a priori or metaphys-
ical science of nature. This means that empirical science is the privileged source
for our understanding of nature, as well as for demarcating the natural from the
supernatural. But after Darwin, it becomes increasingly implausible to maintain
the Aristotelian thesis that a kind of proto-rationality is already encoded in nature.
From a Darwinian perspective, rational purposefulness is an artifact of purposeless
processes. Yet reason is purposeful and is honed to track purposes. This engenders
the following dichotomy: on the one hand, there are naturalists who think reason
is natural because nature is reasonablea repository of essences and final causes,
as Aristotle maintained; on the other hand, there are rationalists who think reason
must be unnatural because nature is unreasonable. They see an absolute disjunction
between reason and nature. I reject both forks of this dilemma, which leads me to
my fourth consequence: reason is unnatural but not supernatural. It is unnatural
because rational purposiveness cannot be reduced to natural process: every rule is
incarnated in a pattern, but not every pattern incarnates a rule. Yet reason is not
supernatural because rules (i.e., concepts) must be realized in patterns: they can do
nothing independently of their material realization. In other words, concepts are
functions, but functions must be materially realized in order to do anythingand
I use material in the broadest possible sense here, to encompass the microphys-
ical, neurobiological, and sociohistorical domains.
Part of philosophys remit is then to excavate the infrastructure of rationality
as contingently instantiated in the cognitive capacities of the human organism. Since
Homo sapiens is the only concept-monger we know of on this planet, it is the bearer
of rational capacity and deserves to be privileged, albeit only insofar as it exercises
this capacity. From this point of view, rationalist anthropocentrism is indissociable
from logocentrism understood as reasons self-interestedness. In other words, reason
is self-interested because it is the source and legislator of every interest. Without it,
nothing is of any interest whatsoever. Reason is nonanthropological precisely insofar
as sapience is the defining attribute of humanity.
Does nonanthropological reason then necessarily require its cosmolog-
ical determination as you have it in NU? If rational thought is a non-
anthropological functionalist pattern formation by inference, there are in
principle many determinations of the nonanthropological in addition to the
cosmological one. Why then privilege the cosmic dimension of reason as the
direct consequence or horizon of its ex-human generalization? In doing
so, dont you flatten or obviate the proliferation of inferentialist processes
exposed in principal by the step back from the cosmic as condition of
rational thought to Sellarsian persons? Doesnt Sellarss functionalist
account of reason instead offer a complexification of generalized reason?
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
Nonanthropological reason requires its cosmological determination if the cosmo-
logical is understood as the piercing of the terrestrial horizon by the universal
construed as intelligiblebut inhumanexteriority, rather than some spurious
absolute alterity. This is what physics, biology, and cosmology jointly encourage
philosophy to elucidate. But it doesnt if cosmological is understood in its limited
regional sense as a specific empirical discourse about the physical universea dis-
course that deserves no special epistemic privileging by philosophy. To follow up on
my previous response, it is a cosmological rationalism that affirms the inhuman core
of human cognitive capacity, i.e., sapience as the gateway onto nonhuman reality,
while those varieties of post-humanism whose leveling of the difference between
the human and the nonhuman is predicated on dissolving the distinction between
sapience and sentience end up promoting an unbridled anthropomorphism. They
generalize certain properties of human subjective experience and attribute them to
everything. The result is what Wolfendale has called introspective metaphysics:
a metaphysics that believes it can feel its way into the ultimate nature of reality
because it claims that what is going on in us is also going on everywhere outside us.5
This may well be realism, but its a wildly indiscriminate realism that is incapable
of explaining the difference between appearance and reality because it has abolished
the distinction between knowing and feeling.
Rationalist anthropocentrism, through which reason reveals a radically unfa-
miliar universe, strikes me as far less parochial than arational anthropomorphism,
whose absolutization of human subjectivity encourages us to believe everything is
really just like us. And since Im a rationalistalthough of the Kantian rather than
metaphysical varietyI believe enlightened anthropocentrism marks a decisive
cognitive advance over anthropomorphism, whose rehabilitation leads to a kind
of post-modern animism. It is somewhat disconcerting to see animism proclaimed
as a theoretical advance: Im afraid I can only see in it a lamentable regression to
pre-modern superstition. Its the result of privileging feeling as a source of insight
into nonhuman reality. But if using feeling to move beyond anthropocentrism yields
only untrammeled anthropomorphism, then its hardly preferable to correlationism.
You are associated for better or worse with Speculative Realism, the one
tenuously common point of the various thinkers and projects gathered
under that umbrella term being precisely an interest in overcoming the
limitations of what Quentin Meillassoux has called correlationism: that
thinking always assumes and reinstantiates the thinking subject, so the real
outside of thought cannot be thought as such. Can you clarify whether
for you the affirmation of rational thought is necessarily non-correlational?
To explain this question a little more: the problem captured with a
striking reductive power by the term correlationism is not only how thought
5 Pete Wolfendale, The Noumenons New Clothes, Speculations: a Journal of Speculative Realism 3
(2012): 365.
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thinks the non-human in its exteriority to human apprehension but, more
precisely, how thinking as suchby any subject or person of thought such
as a postbiotic or alien rational agentcan think outside of itself (the real)
without supposing that the exterior to thinking is thought. You are clear
that inferentialism as the functionalist account of rational thought permits
the first-mentioned extraction of rational thought from the human as its
historically privileged subject, and it also seems that Sellarss secular account
of transcendental reason is itself a realist account of rational thought (it
is an exceptional kind of pattern formation amongst others in a material-
semantic dimension). But does it then follow that even such a de-anthropolo-
gized thought is non-correlational? Put simply, even if it is not a human subject
that thinks the real but an abstractly determined person, if that generalized
rational thinking no less apprehends what it thinks in terms of its thinking,
even in what you identify as an immanent, materialist account of the status
of rational normativity, it is nonetheless a (perhaps ex-anthropic) correla-
tionism. If it is to be non-correlationaland here, the conditional if is to be
stressedhow does inferentialism abdicate the thinking person it constitutes
with regard to what it thinks? How do you situate the realism rather than
materialism (non-anthropic cosmology) of rational thought qua inferentialism?
Its important to distinguish the good and the bad senses of correlationism.
Correlationism as an epistemic doctrine is perfectly unobjectionable and indeed
undeniable. It simply means that we cant know objects without concepts. This
sound epistemic doctrine only becomes objectionable if its conflated with a con-
tentious skeptical claim that we can never really know whether or not objects truly
correspond to the concepts through which we know them. The latter is rooted in a
fallacy commonly known as Stoves Gem, which Ive discussed elsewhere.6 The
inferentialism I endorse is a kind of naturalized Kantianism and it is correlationist
in the first, epistemic sense, but not in the second, skeptical sense.
I share Meillassouxs antipathy to the skeptical version of correlationism, but
I think hes wrong to think it follows ineluctably from the first, epistemic or Kantian
sense of correlation. Indeed, the suggestion that we can only refute skepticism by
dispensing with epistemic correlation, understood as the synthesis of concepts and
intuitions, seems to me untenable, since it assumes that either reason or sensibility can
separately intuit the real, the former being the rationalist variant of the myth of the
given, the latter its empiricist version. So I dont think Meillassouxs appeal to dia-
noetic intuition successfully avoids the difficulties associated with what Kant called
dogmatic rationalism.7 Once correlationism is understood as a strictly epistemic
6 Ray Brassier, Concepts and Objects, in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Graham Harman,
and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re-press, 2010).
7 See Quentin Meillassoux, Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and
Memory, trans. Robin Mackay, in Collapse 3 (November 2007): 433.
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
doctrine, it can be seen to be the condition for realismnot just empirical realism,
which is the corollary of Kants transcendental idealism, but transcendental realism,
which asserts the mind-independent existence of theoretical entities (this obviously
requires a lot of unpacking, but I dont have the space to do it here).
I find the idea of a non-correlational realism incoherent because the issue
of realism is tied to that of explanatory justification, which involves epistemic cor-
relation. The point is to know what we mean when we qualify something as real
and to be able to adjudicate questions about somethings reality on rational,
as opposed to dogmatic, grounds. Shorn of this rational constraint, the banner
of realism by itself becomes strictly meaningless. In fact, the relations between
realism, materialism, and idealism are of considerable dialectical complexity
so I think its a mistake to brandish any one of them in isolation from the others.
They derive whatever philosophical sense they possess from their contrastive inter-
dependence. Just as the assertion of an unqualified or indiscriminate realism is
uninformative, the proclamation of materialism has also become meaningless,
a genuflection to academic orthodoxy often licensing positions that are indistin-
guishable from the most objectionable theses of idealism (subjectivism, spiri-
tualism, pan-psychism, vitalism, the identity of thought and being, and so on). In
this context, I think the term idealism merits strategic resuscitation as a way of
reasserting the autonomy of the conceptual and combating the virulent anti-ratio-
nalism of certain contemporary strains of realism and materialism. Idealism
as a claim about the autonomy of the conceptual need not entail a realism of
the idea in Iain Hamilton Grants sense, although the two are closely linked.8
I think what divides Grant and me is a divergence over the ontological status of
concepts as well as the conceptual status of nature. But we both proclaim the
necessity of articulating eidos and hyle, idealism and materialism. As I understand
it, this means upholding the primacy of reason together with the arationality of the
real. Im not sure whether this makes me a materialist idealist or idealist materialist,
but in any case, oxymorons are dialectically instructive.
Lets return then to the distinction between rational norms, as youve fur-
ther elucidated them here, and sociocultural normspartly in order to
disambiguate the two and clear up confusions arising from the common term
norm, but also to understand better if one informs the other and, if so, how.
The question here is a short one but its reasoning requires a fairly
lengthy elaboration. From your earlier responses, we can take rational
thought to be a bio-semantic or bio-social contingency particular on this
planet (so far) to the human: rational thought need never have happened
but it has, as a historical and conceptual fact qua Homo sapiens, and
8 Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006). See also
Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, Sean Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy (Durham,
NC: Acumen, 2011).
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you propose, against a recent tendency to deprioritize human agency and
specificity, that we need not be unduly modest about this human privi-
lege with regard to reason nor unduly understate its capacity and effects.
Granting this exceptionality, rational inquiry renews cognitive interests
by, as you say, breaking away from past modes of understanding. That
renewalthe work of reason, if you willcan be further specified: (a) it is
universalizing qua negation of particularized instances of understanding
(perhaps including its own bio-semantic ontic particularity of human
instantiation?); (b) it is not eternal since it emerges in cosmological time
and history and also because it is a temporal self-correcting enterprise
in discourse (reason is a contingent fact in the cosmological dimension
and there is no intellectual intuition); (c) yet reason is cosmological in that
it is how human intelligibilitywhich is for you defining of humanityis
pierced by nonhuman non-terrestrial reality; and (d) rationalism is the
commitment to inferential adumbrations of any claim or proposition. Any
discursive or cognitive interest has to be committed to its consequences,
and consistently so (in your own case, the espousal of a materialist ratio-
nalism requires you to abjure Kantian reason as itself a myth of the given,
hence the turn to Sellars).
This last determination of reasonmeaning here only rational thought
and certainly not an autonomous realm of ideasis how and why reason
is normative. It is then clear why such norms ought not to be confused with
sociocultural norms insofar as the latter are historically (which is to say,
parochially and particularly) derived rather than rationally constituted (that
is, universalizing and inferentially rigorous). To return to the terms of your
earlier formulation: though rational normativity takes place discursively
in timeinstituted in language, with all the historical contingency that
supposesit is not constituted by given language or sociohistorical norms
(let us call such norms cultures). Rather, rational thoughts inferen-
tialist injunction is, if anything, directed against the necessarily residual
commitments of cultural norms. (Which is not to say that rational thought
is necessarily cast against this or that cultural given, only that its avowal of
the same takes place on another basis than that of culture: that of its episte-
mo-semantic holism. For rational thought, culture must align with reason.)
Now, if this outline of the distinction between cultural and rational
norms stands, then does it not follow that reason qua rational thought is
aif not thecogent engine of counter-normative cultural transfor-
mation (qua sociohistorical norms)? The reasoning is this: though rational
thought in principle negates the particularity of any culture or historical
fact in its universalizing tendency, rational thought nonetheless takes place
in time and discursively. As such, it is always occasioned in fact at a partic-
ular time and in a particular language, however formalized that language
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
may be (such a formalization could be understood precisely as a rational
undertaking in the continuing negation of the historical particularities and
parochialism of our languages as given cultures; but even this formaliza-
tion is in fact specific and parochial: it has to be learned). In other words,
rational thought is in principle distinct to culture but is in fact instantiated
in the languages we have, perhaps modifying them along the way. Manifest
in and through a parochial language, predicated on a bio-semantic contin-
gency, rational thought is historically located; or, again and in short, it is in
fact cultural. In its negation of the parochialism of culture and language,
its inferentialist imperatives even generate a cultural history. (Certainly, this
was the avowed task of the Enlightenment as a historico-philosophical
endeavor.) And even if rational thought were to confirm a particularity of
a given culture (a philosophy or scientific endeavor, say, but maybe also a
law or a mode of production), it would only do so on the basis of its univer-
salizing inferentialism, redetermining that particularity in terms other than
the cultural ones in which it had been temporarily manifest to that point.
(The relevance of Hegels dialectic of the idea that you mention above is
pressing here as, from another angle, are Edmund Husserls writings on the
foundation of European science. But lets leave this aside for now since I
think it is clear enough that the inferential account is distinct from these in
having the advantage of not proposing a horizon to the rational endeavor.)
More generally, we can assume that rational thought negates socio-
historical givensparticulars and normsbut it does so as itself a socio-
historical fact. In any case a negation of sociocultural norms, reason is a
counter-normative functional process of rule-following with respect to cul-
tures insofar as the latter are merely givenincluding those cultures in which
rational thought takes place discursively and historically. In fact, since it
is contingently occasioned in bio-semantic particularity, rational thought
is at origin culturally given. It is not just that rational thought is articu-
lated and instantiated in sociohistorical norms but is not subordinated to
them; rather, and moreover, reason countermands culture and, in doing
so, it proposes new cultural facts (less parochial discourses, unfolding in
time) and so renews culture. Without this cultural manifestation of thought
observing rational norms, there could be only intellectual intuition or a
non-discursive, atemporal reasona meta- or ex-cultural reasonand so
no inferentialism at all (as per Plato).
If the argument has traction for you, the primary question here is:
Even while observing the difference between rational and sociohistorical
norms in principle, does their confounding not in fact realize rational
norms as new cultural norms via a process that from any given culture can
only be seen as a counter-normative violation? Accepting the distinction
in principle and prescriptive conditions between reason and culture, is it
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not then untenable to hold on to their distinction in fact and descriptive
differentiation? Does the inferentialist account of rational thought not have
to accept that the consistent adumbrations of any statement are somewhat
shaped by sociohistorical particularities (that is, limited in time and language)?
This is a very difficult question. The claim that, as you put it, rational thought
is aif not thecogent engine of counter-normative cultural transforma-
tion (qua socio-historical norms) is a good distillation of the project of radical
Enlightenmentwith the proviso that the factual is be changed to a normative
should be, since, understood as a factual claim, this formulation is obviously
refutable. Its the claim that rationality should be the engine of counter-normative
cultural transformation that Im committed to, not that it is or has been. And Im
committed to it precisely insofar as Im interested in reactivating the project of
Enlightenment in its radical, Promethean form. But then the problem is precisely
the one youve pinpointed: having conceded that, as a matter of fact, rational norms
are always socially instituted, can I really insist that they have to be distinguished
in principle without relapsing into an objectionable dualism of rational form and
sociohistorical content? This would be another version of the traditional distinc-
tion between logical form and semantic content, which is precisely something that
inferentialism calls into question.
Inferentialism starts from the primacy of material inferencefrom It
is raining to The streets are wetand maintains that semantic content is
individuated by the rules governing such material inferences. These rules are
constitutive of the meaning of linguistic expressions; they are not just some-
thing derived from or applied to pre-existing semantic units. Moreover,
purely logical or formal inference is merely the rendering explicit, or
explicitation, of relations of discursive commitment, entitlement, and incom-
patibility that are already implicit in everyday perception, reasoning, and
action. So logic, in Brandoms words, is merely the organ of semantic
self-consciousness.9 This is to say that discursive rationalitythe game of giving
and asking for reasonsis more basic than logic, which presupposes it. But this
also implies that what we mean is indissociable from what we do, that is, from
our everyday practical purposes. Since these practical purposes are embedded
in a social context, this means that our rationality, understood as our ability to
give and ask for reasons for what we do and say, cannot simply be abstracted
from the social practices in which this ability is embedded. This is to say that
discursive rationality cannot be dissociated from practical, which is to say social,
rationality. In this regard, inferentialism relays the old Marxian idea that concep-
tual contradictions reflect practical contradictions. If the task of philosophy is to
render explicit the conceptual norms implicit in discursive practice, and to identify
9 Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10.
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 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
contradictions at the level of theoretical discourse, then it is also bound to expose
the contradictions, or rather incompatibilities, between theoretical norms and
practical norms, as well as the incompatibilities pitting various practical norms
against each other. Because rationality is indissociably conceptual and social,
theoretical rationality is inseparable from practical rationality in the broadest
sense, which encompasses every variety of human practice, whether material or
intellectual. In this regard, what you call the counter-normativethrust of phil-
osophical rationality is its latent revolutionary calling.
Philosophy does not (indeed, cannot) hold sociocultural norms account-
able to some allegedly superior tribunal of pure reason. What it does do is hold
sociocultural norms accountable to their own implicit criteria of rationality
by rendering explicit both their conceptual inconsistencies and their practical
incompatibilities. In doing so, it exerts the minimum degree of discursive pres-
sure required to initiate the process of revising and ultimately transforming both
social and cultural practices. Im not suggesting that such discursive pressure is
tantamount to political pressure, or that rational critique is a sufficient condition
of revolutionary transformation. But I do want to suggest that it is a necessary
condition, and that cognitive, political, and artistic revolutions can be understood
as propelled by the obligation to achieve the rational supersession of incompatibil-
ities between saying and doing, or between implicit norms and explicit practices.
This is the rational motor of universalization and, thus construed, it does not
imply any hypostasis of the universal. Its an immanent and eminently Hegelian
conception of universalization as a process that is implicit in every human society,
no matter what its state of development, and in every variety of human practice,
no matter how parochial.
Inferentialism is Hegelian insofar as it conceives of the universal as the self-
supersession of particularity. In Badiouian terms, I think this is how truth-pro-
cedures reconfigure the state of the situationbut the difference is that from an
inferentialist-Hegelian viewpoint, there are immanent cognitive criteria governing
the inception of the truth-procedure that brings about the situations generic extension
(truths subtraction from knowledge is still governed by extant knowledge: knowledge
supersedes itself by recognizing its own limitations). That the sociality of human
reason can compel us to overcome the shortfall between our practical ideals and
our practical achievements, whether in science, politics, or art, is the basic wager
of Enlightenment.
Inferential reasoning and the maximal prosecution of a propositions
consequences that such reasoning requires have so far been understood
as a linguistic practice. That is faithful to Sellarss philosophy extended
by Brandom, how far the argument can be taken in termss of broader cul-
tural practices, can the modality or medium of inferentialist reason also be
extended to nonlinguistic practices? What, if anything, would this change in
228 Concept
RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
the Sellarsian account of inferentialist practices? In an interview with Mattin
on the political and philosophical resources of post-music noise you propose:
If noise harbours any radical political potential [determined per
rational norms], then it needs to be elaborated via a process of
interrogation, which would involve working through questions such
as: What is experience, given that capitalism commodifies sensations,
affects, and concepts? What is abstraction, given that capitalism ren-
ders the intangible determining while dissolving everything we held to
be concrete? What freedoms are we invoking when we proclaim noises
freedom from the alleged constrictions of musical genre?10
The content and direction of such interrogations are in line with your
broad avowals of Marxism as the politics of a rational collective organiza-
tion necessary to challenge neoliberalism as the currently prevalent con-
figuration of capitalist domination. But the question that remains here is
whether such interrogations need to be overtly philosophical or linguistic
inferential consequences alloyed to noise but not themselves noise as a
material practice distinct from language, or whether such interrogations
and deontological scorekeeping can be undertaken through a cultural/
nonlinguistic material organization such as noise (qua genre) itself. That is,
can the nonlinguistic material practice draw up inferences and address the
questions you propose in its own logic and medium rather than in the con-
verted and displacing terms of linguistic inference?
The task here is distinct from the inferentialism characteristic of a certain
modernism in which a particular artistic or cultural genre follows its formal
or material logic to the end: you propose that the interrogations a particular
genre or medium needs to make are not determined or limited to its specific
conditions and limitations but according to horizons external to it (experience
in conditions of capitalist abstraction, the content of emancipation, and so on).
To be clear: the question here is not about noise itself as a genre of
cultural productionthe same argument and demands can presumably
be extended to other practices of material-cultural organizationbut about
the kinds of work that can be done by cultural practices: either as
being in relation to (and therefore not immediately) the kind of rationalism
you advocate or, instead, as being at once such a rationalist practice but
undertaken in and as nonlinguistic quasi-communication.
I think the answer to your question is yes, nonlinguistic practices can draw up
inferences and address the sorts of questions cited above in their own medium and
10 Metal Machine Theory: An Electronic Email Conversation; available at www.mattin.org/essays/
METAL_MACHINE_THEORY_3.html.
Concept 229
 REASON IS INCONSOLABLE

independently of language. Although the inferentialist premium on discursive Suprematist Ontology and the
practices privileges the game of giving and asking for reasons, this game is not only or
exclusively realized in specifically linguistic discourse. The category of discursive prac- Ultra Deep Field Problem:
tice is broader than that of linguistic practice. This is to say that reasoning understood
as the unfolding of discursive commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities, is Operations of the Concept
not confined to the medium of explicitly self-conscious theoretical discourse, which
unfolds in and through language. Not every rational discursive practice operates in Iain Hamilton Grant
this specifically linguistic medium. Artists think, and some artists think as rigorously
as any theoretician, albeit in and through a nonlinguistic medium.
Where noise is concerned, an artist like Mattin is engaged in thinking through
the implications of the commitment to the ideal of free improvisation. In the It took fourteen billion years to produce this image, for time to present its insuperably
course of working out these implications, he has discovered an incompatibility partial self-portrait:
between what is implied by the norm of free improvisation and the conventions
governing its actual practice. So he has undertaken a series of experiments designed
to test the limits of what is allowable within those conventions and in doing so he
seeks to expose the latent contradiction between the norm and the practice. I see
Mattin as someone engaged in an eminently rational cognitive practice, in which
self-consciously linguistic theorizing is just one element deployed alongside other,
nonlinguistic elements: sonic, gestural, verbal, visual, and so forth. His perfor-
mances frequently bring all these elements into play. And the fact that the rational
reconstruction of the complexity of assertions implicit in these performances is
often retrospective in no way compromises their discursive rigor: the rationality of
a discursive practice is always retrospectively constructed. This is what it means to
say that thinking takes time; the rationality implicit in a discursive practicewhere
rationality is understood as the intersubjective elaboration of discursive commit-
ments, entitlements, and incompatibilitiesis never immediately accessible to its Figure 1: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF)1

participants at any single stage of its unfolding.
Moreover, Mattins work is characterized by its self-consciousness (I mean
this in the sense of cognitive awareness) about the status of artistic practice in late
capitalist society and, in this regard, it explicitly addresses issues such as the nature
of abstraction and the content of emancipation. Thus he is doing more than merely
testing the conditions and limitations of a specific artistic mediumnoise and/
or free improvisationhe is exposing the ways in which specific artistic practices
are implicated in broader social and discursive contexts. And the philosophical
tenor of his interrogation of his chosen medium has been generated in and through
his practical engagement with it: it is not an extraneous imposition. In interrogating
the limitations of a specific artistic practice, he has been compelled to investigate
whether and how these limitations may be conditioned by the nexus of other prac-
tices in which it is enveloped. Thus the engagement with universality follows from
unpacking the logic of a specific practice.
The image raises many questions concerning the character of time, the emergence
of order, and the imageability of creation. It presents the early universe approxi-
mately one billion years after the big bang, yet was taken in 2004. The Hubble Ultra
Deep Field (HUDF) is the name of the image, not of what it images. It images
time through space because the farther into the universe imaging reaches, the deeper
into time it descends. For all the marveling we might do concerning science, or what
knowing makes, the image does not, of course, present the inexistence antecedent to
the imaged infant universe or that inexistence antecedent to the universes emer-
gence. The first inexistence is merely that of the billion years missing from the image,
which is, to that extent, a deep field problem. Yet this is merely a relative inexistence.
The ultra-deep field problem, which the HUDF does not image, involves not only
the relative inexistence that fringes the existent image, concept or entity, but the
absolute inexistence entailed when the deep field problem is acknowledged. Only this
1 This image should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the cold, dark universe
about one billion years after the big bang, when stars first started to shine, about thirteen billion
years ago. See www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04086_Hubble_UDF.html.

230 Concept Concept 231

 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
warrants the qualification ultra-deep field, since it exceeds depth in the direction
of the depthless, exceeds any existent in the direction of inexistence.
Historically, then, the HUDF is of something antecedent to its being imaged. In
other words, the image of the antecedent is consequent upon not only an image-capable
universe (deep field), but also upon the universe (ultra-deep field). As such, the image
is additional with respect to the universe: not merely an image of it but an additional ele-
ment in it. The HUDF shows that every journey into the past takes place not only in the
future of that past, as is entailed by journeying into it; it also shows that, as a result, this
past is consequent upon the future in which it is made; and that, as a result, the past for
which the infant universe was a future remains a past undisturbed by Hubbles intrusions.
From this perspective, despite the fact that the universe insuperably antedates its
being imaged, it is not inconceivable that creation itself be imaged, though this entails
the image of the inexistent universe consequent upon that inexistent universe. But the
imaged creation would be the future of the unimaged, its consequent rather than its
reproduction, and would amount to the production or emergence, within that universe,
of its own inexistence. Accordingly, the irreducible remainder of imaged inexistence will
be the existent universe. For the same reason, however, the surd or remainder of a newly
existent universe is precisely its inexistence, from which alone, according to the Earliest
System Program of German Idealism, creation can be understood as emerge[nt] out
of nothingness,2 that is, historically or temporally. It is this inexistence, the nothingness
or not-being of the universe, which, once there is a universe, is paradoxically ineliminable.
To see this, consider what temporality entails. According to F. W. J. Schelling,
temporality is what is always in excess of what is, because what is cannot be reduced
to a thing or an object. He writes: Everything is temporal, the actuality of which is
exceeded by the essence, or the essence of which contains more than it can contain
in actuality.3 Essence consists in more than actuality only if everything actual, every-
thing currently active, is emergent. Temporality therefore entails the inactuality from
which being operative must itself emerge if it exceeds actuality. Thus understood,
temporality is temporality only if creation is involved, and creation entails inactuality,
an inexistence consequent upon what is actual that remains irreducible to the inexis-
tence antecedent to the emergence of this actuality. Accordingly, creation is consequent
upon creation, or if creation is at all, it is creation to the nth power.
The time before the world, the antecedent of the image of the infant universe
or the HUDF, is therefore both a consequent of the existent universe and irreducible
2 F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Hlderlin, and G. W. F. Hegel, The Earliest Program for a System of
German Idealism, in Theory As Practice: a Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings,
ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7273.
3 F. W. J. Schelling, On the Relation between the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Emergence
of the Axioms of Naturephilosophy from the Principles of Gravity and Light (1806), Schellings
Werke II (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 185661), 364. (Hereafter Schellings Werke is cited as SW
plus volume number. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Schelling are my own). For
Schellings theory of essence (Wesen) or being operative (wirksam sein), see his Philosophical
Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Objects Connected Therewith (1809), in SW VII,
341342, 346, 258.
232 Concept
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
to the antecedence it conceives. In other words, the concept of creation is itself an
instance of creation, involving the same irreducibility to the conceived as the universe
has to its creation: there is always an irreducible remainder between creation and its
concept, image, or additional element because the latter are instances of the former
and therefore involve their ineliminable inexistence.
After Immanuel Kant,4 philosophers would object here that any attempt to
conceive or to image nature in its natural statethe time before the world5 is an
attempt to conceive without concepts, to conceive a preconceptual nature behind
all concepts. Hence they would conclude that any attempt to conceive of what
is without concepts is self-contradictory. The concept of universal inexistence,
such philosophers would argue, merely captures a mourning, in the act of con-
ceiving, for its inability to conceive its own creation, a melancholic Romanticism
bewailing what the concept cannot conceive, or what is given in advance of
the concept (nature in its natural state and so forth). Rather than pursue the
self-contradiction, it would be better, it might be argued, to abandon the attempt
to conceive of what being is before being conceived. Better not to do ontology at
all and to complete the shift that Kant initiated, according to some, from ontology
to deontology.6 The space of reasons that concept-using creatures by definition
occupy, they argue, is insuperable for such creatures which, to that extent, are not
saliently biological.7 To acknowledge that conceivers irrevocably occupy such a
rational space is thus to accept that it is not things that issue rational demands, but
only reason-givings. It is this on which philosophers should concentrate, and thus
privilege inference over reference, abstraction over representation, or the norms
entailed in making judgments over (hypothetically) nonrational realities.8 This need
not deny that there are photons before there are speakers, but only that photons issue
4 That contemporary philosophy is insuperably downstream from Kant is asserted, for example,
by Robert Brandom in his From German Idealism to American Pragmatismand Back, in
Perspectives on Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1: Developments over
the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kants status as being for contemporary
philosophers what the sea was for Algernon Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all.
5 This is the definition of Romanticism Novalis gives in 31 of his Allgemeine Brouillon, in Gerhard
Schulz, ed., Novalis Werke, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1987), 455: The time of universal anarchy
lawlessnessfreedomnature in its natural statethe time before the world (the state). Pre-world
time provides as it were the dispersed traces of post-world time. [] Chaos is creation fulfilled.
The future world is rational chaos, self-permeating chaos, chaos or .
6 As the neo-Hegelian philosopher Brandom claims, for instance, in Tales of the Mighty Dead
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 212.
7 Examining Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism, Brandom writes that, insofar as they
occupy the space of reasons, merely biological beings [] become spiritual beings, undertakers
of commitments (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 217). He later clarifies this view: The world consists of
things and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief
(Perspectives on Pragmatism, 12324).
8 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 1. Such non-rational realities are merely hypothetical in the sense
implied by the famous Hegelian dictum that what is rational is actual and what is actual is
rational. See 6 of Hegels Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 2830.
Concept 233
 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
rational demands to which reason-exchanging creatures are practically responsive.9
Such rational demands include well-justified scientific fact.
No one can deny that conceptual work is insuperable in all conceiving. But
can it be straightforwardly assumed that the space of reasons is therefore not nature?
Surely to do so relies on an assertion concerning what reason is that, contrary to the
hypothesis, privileges reference over inference, if only in this instancea realism,
that is, even if only with regard to the concept. This realism tends, interestingly, to
be cashed out in terms of doings, of practices (chiefly the making and justifying of
judgments), rather than by considering the concept to be an object, a risk philos-
ophers share, according to Freud, with schizophrenics.10 Yet since concepts issue
only from judgments and do not precede them, the only conceivably real doings are
those of judgment makers. Attention is paid neither to the operations of the concepts
themselves nor to actors other than those that occupy the space of reasons. Insofar as this
position maintains but does not elaborate this restricted realism, it fails to note the
deep field problem: as the HUDF shows, no matter how deep the field, it is fringed
with the inexistence of that field in which all imaging, conceiving, and constructing
are in consequence insuperably partial constituents. A consistent realism con-
cerning the concept, the image, or the additional element therefore entails either
that reality, being itself a concept, is a state that cannot be extended beyond the
conceptual or that the concept of reality, if not so restricted, entails conceiving the
inexistence of the concept.
Examining the work of Kazimir Malevich, I will contest the claim that the
conceptthis abstract entity or additional elementis not part of the universe in
which conceiving arises. For it is hard to see how a concept, an image, or an abstract
element may be added to a world if a world were not some field in which thoughts,
images, and abstract elements occur. In consequence, the insuperability of the con-
ceptual does not entail the abandonment of nature for norms, nor a naturalization of
normativity or, what amounts to the same thing, the normativization of nature.11 And
so I deny, secondly, that the insuperability of conceiving licenses the abandonment
of ontology: if conceiving arises, it does so (a) in a universe and, (b) consequently
upon the inexistence that the concept shares with the universe that arises and in
which that concept itself arises. The realism at issue concerns the operations, the
distributions of antecedence and consequence, by means of which alone elements
may be additional.
9 See Brandoms discussion of the status of photons before there were vocabulary users in
Perspectives on Pragmatism, 12527.
10 Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 204.
11 This last is John McDowells favored response to the problem. See especially his two sorts of
naturalism, in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 16797;
and his responses to Robert Pippin in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith
(London: Routledge, 2002), 27477.
234 Concept
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
The Flight Paths of Dust
Malevichs theory of The World as Non-Objectivity, as its title argues, does not claim
that because nonobjective art abandons imitation and expression, it therefore aban-
dons realism, but rather that the world is nonobjectively.12 Thus the realism Malevich
advocates for nonobjectivism, insofar as this consists in a knowing of what is, is for
him inseparable from the works of science, as he constantly argues, just as some
scientists have argued that the productive element and transformative productions
that knowing makes turn physics into art.13 It is not by virtue of their various objects
(stars, paintings, concepts) that the sciences, arts, and philosophy are realist in the
sense I wish to spell out, but rather by virtue of the surd-structure, the irreducible
remainder or the time before the world that the concept of creation entails and
that is entailed in turn if there are additional elements. The concept of creation,
that is, entails that what is created was not. This structure is universal, I will argue,
insofar as, if true even in a single instance, it rules out its non-occurrence.
Three theories underpin the philosophy of nonobjectivity, according to
Malevichs unpublished writings of the 1920s. The first concerns the theory of the
additional element, the second that of the world as nonobjectivity, and the third, the
theory of the copula. Each entails the other two: To the question To what is an ele-
ment additional? therefore, the answer isand of course, we might saythe
world; not, however, the world just as we find it, the world of experience and con-
crete objects for instance, but the world as it is, as nonobjectivity. Just as in any
proposition the copula is that element that combines a subject (such as a square)
with a predicate (such as white), so too an additional element augments the non-
objective world by means of the copula. What the copula does, therefore, its actions or
operations, how an element is added to a nonobjective world, forms the theory of the
Suprematist copula. Crucially, how the copula operates and in what environments
it operates demonstrate that it is not reducibly a concept or formal device, where
formal is understood as not being material. We will address each of the three
theories in turn. Malevich begins his account of creation thus:
Not in vain have little airplanes emerged from the bowels of the Earth [1].
They will not be stopped on Earth by the three-dimensional law [2], they will
fly to the place whence they have come [3], they are the dust of the Earth
12 Kazimir Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 192225, ed. Troels Andersen,
trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976).
13 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Die Physik als Kunst [Physics as Art] (1806), in Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse
eines jungen Physikers [Fragments from the Literary Remains of a Young Physicist], ed. Birgit and
Stefan Dietzsch (Hanau: Mller & Kiepenheuer, 1984), 288320. His account of what knowing
makes [was das Wissen schafft], a pun on Wissenschaft, or science, occurs at pages 294 and 319.
For a contemporary, albeit more constructivist variant, see Isabelle Stengerss account of science
as the experimental embrace of a risky future in Power and Invention, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16266.
Concept 235
 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
which flies off the Earths surface, and by this means pulverize the globe [4]
[] Everything is striving to leave the globe [5], and to make its way further
into space [6], but thanks to the relationship between the elements which
have not yet been discovered, it sits like a tick on the Earth [7].14
The seven points I have singled out clarify the sense of the passage, which concerns
the character of the world as nonobjectivity or demonstrates the problems to which
the category object is ontologically prone.
[1] Airplanes do not take off from airports but emerge from subterranean
worlds. The scope of the flight is larger than its geographically located points of
departure; and destinations, or its essential operations, to recall Schelling, exceed
the actual flight. The airplanes natural history thus encompasses the ores from
which its metals were smelted, the formation of these ores over geological times-
cales and the development of the engine. Accordingly, technology and nature are
not different in kind.
Just as the natural history of the airplane exceeds its flight, point [2] argues
that the flight exceeds the limitations of terrestrial geometry. Yet it also problema-
tizes this: implicit in geometry is that it does not measure all dimensions, but
only those of ge, of the Earth. It is a local or ontic science, tied to its object. That
there are other dimensionsand not reducibly spatial ones, as [1] affirmsagain
attests to temporality, of what Schelling called the excess of essence over actuality,
of the operation over any local what is (What is the Earth? What is flight?).
The core of the problem of the flight path that absorbs the entire passage is
addressed in point [3], which offers one solution to it, which I will call Trajectory A.
The passage asks whether the flight, as what Malevich will call an additional ele-
ment or culture of action, is a line or a curve. Here he asserts that airplanes, and by
extension natural history, will fly to the place whence they have come, that is, that
its flight paths are ultimately circular such that origin and end points are identical.
Point [4] thus completes the circuit: flight is from and to dust. From the dust the
flight becomes; the earth, its elements exhausted in this effort, turns to dust in turn,
raising the crucial question of whether first dust (D1) is equal to second (D2), to which
I will return below. Point [5] argues that it is not, and reposes the problem of flight
not in terms of orbits but of striving. If essential operations exceed actuality, then
this amounts to a realism concerning striving that is, for that reason, not restricted
to the airplane or to the Earth. With point [6], therefore, it is not the airplane or
the pilot (interestingly unremarked by Malevich) that strives; rather everything is
striving to abandon earth for space. Point [6] therefore opens Trajectory Bthat
of the line in the aerial element. Striving is a straight line insofar as striving is
considered as such and not in regard to the objects within which it is caught or,
what amounts to the same thing, to the subject whose striving it might be. Yet no
sooner is Trajectory B set against Trajectory A than an animal skepticism rears up
14 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 11112.
236 Concept
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
to recapture striving among objects. The airplane does not leave the Earth but sits
like a tick on the planet, locked into its changeless parasitism.
Finally, then, if [3] appears to be confirmed by tick-talk, that is, that the local
holds flight captive, that return is not a habit but a physically insuperable cycle,
our attention is returned to the presupposition of the Earth, the history of which
gives point [1] its force. If the natural historymineralogy, metallurgy, manufac-
ture, electricity, and combustionon which the extended flight path is inalienably
dependent, what gives the Earth its ultimacy, what licenses the Earths exemption
from this history? What makes it the ground upon which all else occurs and to which,
therefore, the flight paths of dust must invariably return? Malevichs first indication
of the Earths historicity is by way of its futurewhich turns out to be the future of
dust: Possibly our globe itself will be pulverized, as once a huge lump was pulver-
ized, creating the globe [8].15
Is this another cycle? More tick-talk? If the Earth itself emerges from pulveriza-
tion, from dust, then either this is an eternal cycle, or escape is the rule rather than the
exception. With [8], we are thus returned to the problem first spelled out in [3], namely,
that the place whence all derives is the flight path of dust. Dust is itself emergent from
pulverization, however, once again inculcating a behavioural cycle, like the tick, but
this time holding planetary formation (and everything consequent upon it) prisoner.
The Theory of the Additional Element
The problem raised here is whether antecedent and consequent dust are the same. That
is, is D1=D2? If [3] is true, then D1=D2; if [6], it is false. Only [5] supplies a possible
differentiator for the two trajectories, by raising the theory of action. An act occurs
only if its consequent is not contained in its antecedent, or just when it forges a dif-
ference such that, in this instance, D1 D2. Malevichs fullest account of action, and
thus a guide to what is meant by striving in nonobjectivity, occurs in his Theory
of the Additional Element in Painting (1926):
Under the sign of the additional element is hidden a whole culture of action
which (in painting) can be defined by a typical or characteristic state of straight
or curved lines. The introduction of new norms, the curved fibrous-shaped
additional element of Czanne, will make the painter different from that caused
by the sickle formula of Cubism or the straight line of Suprematism. [] After
Futurism comes a new element, the supreme straight, which I have called the
Suprematist additional element of dynamic order, the appropriate milieu for
the airplane, for the aerodynamic structure of planites, aerial Suprematism.16
15 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 112.
16 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 156, 188.
Concept 237
 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
This further clarifies the character of the problem that gives rise to the tick-cycle,
or to thesis [3] that D1=D2. Like a physicist, Malevichs construal of element is
not an indivisible atomic body, but rather concerns fundamental forces. An ele-
ment is additional, therefore, when it induces actions of which the field in which it
acts was previously incapable. Thus Cubisms sickle formula (figure 2B) does not
eliminate but mutates Czannes residual organicism, with its fibrous lines that
curl, twist, and knot. With the Suprematist aerial line, as in Malevichs beloved
Schopenhauer,17 everything strives, nothing rests.
Figure 2. A: Czannes fibrous curve, B: Cubisms Sickle-Curve, and C: the Supreme Straight.18
It is from that perspective that the flight is minimally different from the earth from
which it emerges. It is the worlds future (the future of what is both world and rest
in the Russian term mir) by means of which its past is first exhibited. The futurability
of the earthhow long it will endure, rather than how long it has endured, being the
true measure, according to Kant,19 of its agebecomes finite just when it is destroyed;
but its destructionand this is the second point to note from the earlier passageis
coincident with its creation, just as the airplane will fly to the place from whence it
has come, remaining dust, or a tick on the planets skin.
Hence the question whether D1=D2 remains unresolved. Implicit in this
account, if from dust to dust is true, is the impossibility of novelty or the non-
occurrence of creation. To claim that there are no actions, therefore, amounts to
the hypothesis that creation has never been, that what is, insofar as it is or even if it
is, always is, so that the world is eternal. The slightest novelty in such a world, the
most meager additional element, would eliminate the hypothesis. In the present
context, is a world without flight the same as one with it? Surely the fact of flight is
17 Troels Andersen cites Malevich from his notebooks as saying On Schopenhauers book it says
The World as Will and Representation. I should have said The World as Non-Objectivity.
Accordingly, Andersens introduction to The World as Non-Objectivity analyzes the structural
similarities of the two works.
18 Ibid., 118.
19 Immanuel Kant, The Question whether the Earth is aging, considered from a physical point of
view, trans. Olaf Reinhardt, in Kant: Natural Science (The Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Immanuel Kant), ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
16566.
238 Concept
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
sufficient to demonstrate that, even if the world were not created, creation is nev-
ertheless effected. Yet it is just this that Malevich disputes, insofar as, across large
timescales, the fact of flight is reducible to orbital dust.
The flight paths of dust bring critical focus to the object as a frame of reference
regarding the temporality of creation. Whether the measure of creation is world, air-
plane, dust, or tick is irrelevant to the problem. Each entails its perspective accidents
because in each case these objects cannot but remain constant referents.
Hence Malevichs emphasis on striving, on the actions that form the theory
of the Additional Element: Everything is striving to leave the globe. This prop-
osition counters the others: the airplane is planetary dust, the world is rest.
They can be countered because they concern particular states, so the truth or
falsity of the proposition is timescale dependent: as a simple consequence of the
second law of thermodynamics, the airplane will be dust and the world will be
rest, even if neither is dust or rest now. A key Platonic insight: what can be stated
of anything consisting of time-dependent states is neither true nor false, since it
will have been both.
The three propositions at issue run:
P1. Everything is striving.
P2. The airplane is dust.
P3. The world is rest.
According to P1, an action (striving) is predicated of all things, an action ruled out
if P3 is true, or if everything covers the same number of cases as does world.
Yet P1 and P3 are notably dissimilar to P2, which is the most concretely objective of
the three. This is because it simply asserts of one object that it is another. Yet in so
doing, the copula, the is in the proposition, effects or covers the transit between
what must, if P2 is true, be considered two states of the one object: the airplane state
and the dust state are, accordingly, not different objects but just one.
The Ring and the Copula
How the copula, the is in the world is rest, is understoodwhether it effects or
eliminates transitionis what is at stake between P1 and P3. If P3, then no transition
takes place, so that P3 is the hypothesis of the eternity of the world, or the non-oc-
currence of creation. If P1, then not only is there transition, but the transition has con-
sequences for the subject or the everything, such that no state is taken as primary
or as the ground of consequent actions, since every state consists in striving. P1
is therefore object-eliminating while P3 is transition-eliminating. Malevichs decision is
evident in a 1916 Suprematist manifesto:
Concept 239
 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects,
the horizon ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature.
This accursed ring, by continually revealing novelty after novelty, leads the
artist away from the aim of destruction. [] Objects have vanished like smoke; to
attain the new artistic culture, art advances toward creation as an end in itself
and towards domination over the forms of nature.20
Thus Malevich opts for P1 over P3 precisely because P2 is both true and false. Several terms
are introduced here that flesh out the theory of the world as nonobjectivity. Firstly, the
ring of the horizon imprisons not just the artist but also the forms of nature. As with
nature and technology, neither is art of another kind than nature. If this were not so,
nothing could bond the two and arts dominion over nature would be inconceivable.
Secondly, while art pursues creation as an end in itself, the artists aim is destruction
in the first instance, of the ring. There thus arises the question of what this ring is, such
that it is capable of binding both artist and nature yet is susceptible of destruction.
The ring or cycle is the universal copula to the extent that it binds all things
(nature and art) insofar as it asserts of one thing that it is another (the airplane is dust;
the world is rest). As binding all things, it consists in continuous novelty as form follows
form; but this continuous sequence of forms thereby destroys all novelty. Thus the
ring is accursed because, insofar as it is restless novelty, the only true noveltyrestis
impossible, so that, conversely, because it is ceaseless, absolute novelty is absolute rest,
just as the airplane is dust. Restmir, or the worldlures the artist from destruction
and art from creation because the cycle returns all forms to ultimate formless indiffer-
ence. The ring is the horizon, remaining the constant point of reference not merely for
the division of earth from sky, mapping the terrestrial geometry within which aerial
escape is condemned to return, but also thus fixing the coordinates of all transit,
sealing reversible motions into objects and all objects into one world, so that D1=D2.
The ring is accursed because it precisely eternalizes objectsnoveltiesand thus
imprisons the forms of nature in changeless eternity. It is destroyed when objects no
longer circumscribe the capacities of creation, when creation cannot be reduced to
the created. The ring is therefore the form and consequence, the self-identical pattern
of entailments following from the hypothesis of the eternity of objects.
Malevich hates the curve because it welds all differences into a single intuition
of the world, a single horizon. As a partial ring, a curve describes the horizon of
object, apparently guaranteeing particularity but betraying it to another, since limit
states, like outlines, belong both to the limited and the limiting. As such, the curve
endlessly unravels particularity: if the airplane is dust, if all things are just things,
then their destiny is not the maintenance but the elimination of particularity. As
such, the ring or the curve, the universal copula that welds all differences into one,
20 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,
trans. John E. Bowlt, in 100 Artists Manifestos, ed. Alex Danchev (London: Penguin, 2011), 10607.
240 Concept
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
is transition-eliminating since a cycle, having no end, has neither beginning nor
finality: in consequence, claiming to describe particularity, to outline things, the max-
imal non-particularity of the curve (the concave interior is externally convex, such
that the single line describes both) entails the deep field inexistence of objects: the
airplane is dust, returns to the earth which was and will be dust again. All is dust.
Thus, an objects outline does not individuate it but generalizes it qua object such that
no object, insofar as it is an object, differs from another. At best, objects flicker in
and out of existence; but this, too, is a merely local phenomenon, since this, too, is a
cycle, a being and a not-being of the same thing. The endlessness of the ring therefore
proves, for Malevich, that reality is nonobjective, that is, that the world is nothing:
If the world is endless, i.e., has no end, neither a beginning nor a finality, then
the circumstances of the movement of matter are also endless. The facets,
therefore, are endless, if this is correct, [and] it proves that the reality of the
world cannot be expressed, for there is no limit, there is no beginning, there
is no finality, and under this condition there can only be a nothing.21
What is there to image in all this dust? If all particularity is eliminated in it, then there
is nothing to image, nor, since an image is part of the world it images, could there
be sufficient differentiation between it and what is not it such that an image might
be possible. In the nonobjective world into which the ring plunges all existents, the
deep field problem is that of the elimination of objects, of particularity, for which
reason it cannot be resolved by representation or expression. But even the proposition
all is dust is a differentiator, so the image of dust remains, as the HUDF shows,
too objective. The image is trapped, as in Platos Sophist, between plurality of being
and unlimited not-being,22 but pointing forward to an inexistence antecedent to
what both is and is not. Hence, once there is existence, ultra-deep field inexistence
(unlimited not-being) arises consequently upon deep field inexistence.
The Operations of the Concept
Thus, in accordance with the post-Kantian philosophical horizon within which he
works, Malevichs realism is not only inferentially based, but realist concerning all
inferences, all abstract or additional elements. That everything that exists for us also
exists in the universe23 does not mean that the universe consists solely in everything
that exists for us. Rather, from conceiving the insuperability of the deep field problem,
there derives the ultra-deep field problem of the inexistence of the universe. Inexistence
is ineliminably an element of the universe. Thus, it is due to the operations of the concept
21 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 60.
22 Plato, Sophist, 256e56.
23 Ibid., 87.
Concept 241
 SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM

that ultra-deep field inexistence is consequent upon deep field inexistence. Since such
an operation has occurred, therefore, it follows that it had not. The transition between
had not and has is itself therefore the additional element, the action that differ-
Representation
entiates the inexistence consequent upon the operation of the concept not only from
the concept itself, but from the inexistence antecedent to what acts.
If, following Kant, the great, gray mother of us all, everything is concept,
the concept concept is maximally indifferent. This is why Brandom insists that it
is the judgment rather than the concept that is the minimal unit of sense: to say some-
thing about something, even if this something is insuperably conceptual, is still to
say something, and from this, various rational commitments flow. Nevertheless, this
acknowledges even as it denies deep field inexistence: rational commitments buttress
concept users against the inexistence from which reason turns. Yet the world of which
the concept is part, when there is a world in which there is a concept, is capable of
differentiation only if the concepts actuality is not given in that world, but arises.
That the concept is thus operative rather than representative was, in fact, Schellings
response to the post-Kantian problem of the insuperability of the concept:

It comes to a point where man must liberate himself not merely from rev-
elation but from everything actual (Wirklich) in order to flee into a complete
desert of all being, where nothing is to be encountered but only the infinite
potency of all being, the sole immediate content of thought in which it
moves only within itself as within its own ether.24

Schellings reading of Kants lesson does not stop with the straightforwardly idealist
thesis that all is insuperably concept, so that the concept being is, firstly, the only
being there is, and secondly a consequent of conceiving (in fact Kant expressly denies
this, as does Schelling).25 Rather, thoughts or conceivings are acts or motions, even
if only in their own ether. Being consists in motions or acts only if being is cre-
ation. But it is by moving in itself that thought discovers the infinite potency of all
being. That is, even if being were a mere creature of thought, a concept, it would
be consequent upon an act antecedent to which being was not. Even consequent
being entails that inexistence from which alone its production can be conceived.
Moreover, if thought were this act by which being arose, then thought, too, would
have to emerge from what is not thought, or no act would have taken place. The
consequent inexistence of everything actual follows therefore from chasing down
the movements of thought that are instances of the potencies of being which, since
they are infinite, cannot eliminate inexistence once there are concepts at all.

24 F. W. J. Schelling, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2007), 142. (Translation slightly modified.)
25 Kant goes to some lengths to demonstrate that existence cannot be a predicate, from which
arguments Schelling draws the following conclusion: It is not because there is thinking that
there is being, but because there is being that there is thinking (Ibid., 203n).

242 Concept
 In Defense of Representation1
Tristan Garcia

Throughout the century of modernity and postmodernity, representation has

been frowned upon, even forbidden, to such a degree that it has been necessary to
invent ways to dispense with this old and embarrassing concept in art, politics, and
ontology: expression, exemplification, reference, or even pure and simple presen-
tation, pure and simple.
There is an understandable aesthetic reason for the rejection of the concept: its
unsatisfying definition, capable neither of anticipating nor of following the mutations
of art in the twentieth century, from Kazimir Malevich to Allan Kaprow, from Marcel
Broodthaers to body art. But if representation no longer succeeds in accounting
for the natural inclination of the plastic arts toward presence (of objects, bodies,
events), it is also because philosophy has failed, has not been capable of proposing
and presenting to artists a well-grounded concept of representation inscribed in
matter and in the reality of objects.

*
Any theory that claims to be materialist or realist should be judged according to
its ability (or lack thereof ) to provide an account for the status of representations.
An image, for example, is certainly a material object or a real object, but it is also
another object that has the particular nature of not being what it is: a watercolor
and gouache by Drer that represents a hare is not itself a hare; moreover if it
were the animal, it would no longer represent the animal. But if it is not in any
way the thing itself, how can it represent that thing? Must I admit the existence of
an ideal hare, in addition to its image? In that case, entities proliferate: theres the
real hare, the image of the hare, the hare of which this is the image. Or perhaps
the hare of which this is the image exists neither outside of the image nor in the
image, but rather in the mind of the one who sees it? This way I remove represen-
tations from objects, locate them in consciousness, and then, eventually, seek a
materialist or naturalist theory of mind. Thus I am rid of representations, these
sort of half or double objects that proliferate in matter, in reality, and undermine
materialism and naturalism.
Yet it would be particularly strange to think that a materialist or realist
would not situate representations in things themselves rather than in consciousness,
because materialists, realists, and idealists agree on this one thing: representations
do not exist in truth except by and for those things that they represent. On the
1 Translators note: The French title, Dfense de Reprsentation, carries a double meaning that is
difficult to render in English: dfense can mean both defense and prohibition.

Representation 245
 IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION
contrary, I assert that an authentic realist or materialist way of thinking should be
able to account for the objective, real and material, existence of representations
produced by human art.
The history of Western philosophy proposes at least three major ways to
conceive the status of representational objects: the representational object is
understood to be either a copy, a sign, or a duplex.
I representamen; the bison that these traces seem to me to designate is the object; the
The first model for thinking about representation is mimesis, which is the idea that
in the West dominates antiquity and the classical age. The major contribution of
mimetic theories is the affirmation that representation is a relationship between
two terms in which one of the terms transposes the other by extracting certain of
its qualities; thus a two-dimensional representation of a chair transposes the chair
onto a surface, making an abstraction of its third dimension. Every copy made by
representation is a diminished version of the representable object. Plato considers
that there exists a ladder of ontological degradation from the idea to the object and
from the object to the representation. Not only natural objects are susceptible to
being imitated in this wayfor Aristotle, that which is said or that which should
be is also representable.
Mimesis can be understood as the linking of two objects or of two series
of objects: the first is present, or real, and the second is represented, meaning
transposed into a form that draws certain qualities from the first. The identity
between the two is assured by a certain resemblance: recovery, analogy, or structural
homology. However, three difficulties hobble such a definition of representation.
First, as Nelson Goodman has noted, resemblance, unlike representation, bespeaks
a symmetrical relationship.2 The portrait of Thomas More by Hans Holbein surely
resembles Thomas More, and Thomas More resembles his portraitbut the portrait
represents the face of the humanist while the face does not represent the portrait.
So representation is not resemblance. Next, mimesis supposes not only the prece-
dence but the pre-existence of that which is represented relative to its represen-
tation: one can not represent that which does not already exist. Finally, mimesis
implies an ontological degradation between what is represented and the represen-
tation: that which is represented is in some way de-presented, since something
has been snatched from its full and entire presence to make it exist under another
form, diminished, as a copy.
Lets try another model.
2 See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 3ff.
246 Representation
TRISTAN GARCIA
II
The second model for representation is signification. This is the model that has
dominated modernity since the nineteenth century, under the influence of the
work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. A representation is
no longer thought of as a copy but rather as a sign. For Peirce, representation is a
relationship between three terms, the representamen, the object, and the interpretant.3
A bison drawn with pigment that I perceive on the wall of a Paleolithic cave is the
set of signs that I mobilize in order to attach the first to the second comprise the
interpretant. All the images of bison, drawn or photographed, that I have perceived
in the past contribute to the composition of this specific representation of a bison.
To interpret a sign is to triangulate ceaselessly between the sign, its object, and other
signs. The same word, with the same spelling and the same sound, can designate
many different objects, depending on the interpretants brought into play. When
associating the word rock with the terms Chuck Berry and Telecaster, you
get a very different object than if you reference granite or clay. Thus, to signify
is to link a sign to an object through the mediation of other signs; it is no longer a
question of resemblance or imitation.
Within the context of our semiotic model, representation would never be
anything but a type of signification: the portrait of Emile Zola by Manet relates to
what it represents, the French writer, by the mediation of a series of other signs. If,
after an apocalypse, survivors who lost all trace or memory of the existence of Zola
were to discover the painting in an archaeological excavation, they would find a
representation of a bearded man, but not of mile Zola. And if we were to discover
a representation of something that we couldnt identify, made by an extinct people
of whom we know nothing, we would perhaps not even be able to recognize it as a
representation. Thus, according to the semiotic model, there is no representation
without signification, that is to say without interpretation.
However, there is one major objection to the subordination of representation
to signification. An essential characteristic of a representation as a sign is its vari-
ability: the official sign for no smoking shows a cigarette in a barred circle. But
each airport, hospital, or cinema, in each region of the world, uses different images
to embody this signa cigarette or perhaps a pipe, a cigarette with filter or without,
a cigarette inscribed in a circle or a square, barred by a cross or by a simple trans-
verse line, on a black background or whiteyet the meaning remains the same.
Several images can thus serve to signify exactly the same thing, such that one
can alter a sign without altering what it means. But does the same go for the image?
A steam locomotive can easily signify any kind of train, because it has become the
3 See Charles Sanders Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in Philosophical Writings of
Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 98119.
Representation 247
 IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION
archetype of this mode of transport in the collective imagination. But even so, it
does not represent all trains. And an image of a cigarette does not represent exactly
the same thing as an image of a pipe.
If the image can become sign, or the sign image, they nevertheless remain
absolutely distinct; what separates them is the delicate attachment of the image to
what it represents.
Thus, no representation can be affected without affecting that which it rep-
resents. Marcel Duchamps Mona Lisa with a moustache is no longer the Mona Lisa of
Leonardo da Vinci; a photograph retouched by software that permits the accentuation
of contrast or the erasure of blemishes no longer represents exactly what it represented
before. By contrast, the signdetermined by the triangular relation between the sign
itself, the object to which it refers, and the interpretant that attaches one to the other
can vary without changing the object, so long as the interpretant adjusts the triangu-
lation. In signification, the presence of the sign erases itself behind its relation with its
object mediated by an infinity of other signs, while in representation there is nothing
other than a relation between that which is present and that which is represented.
III
To explain this phenomenon, a third contemporary model exists, one that per-
tains neither to classical or ancient mimesis nor to modern semiotics. The redefinition
of the image, as distinct from the sign, has been an important trend in analytic phi-
losophy since the 1960s. This trend has submitted the notion of mimesis to scrutiny,
all the while resisting the semiotic and structuralist groundswell that, in the fifties
and sixties, increasingly classified the image as a sign among other signs.
In pondering the status of iconicity, Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Kendall
Walton, John Hyman, and Flint Schier have attempted to propose a redefinition of
representation. At the heart of their reflections, diverse as they are, lies the same
concern for understanding how an image can really combine two things in one: that
which represents and that which is represented. For this reason it is tempting to
describe this third model as the duplex concept of representation, since it is based
on the intuition that a representation presents itself as other than it is and that a
theory of representation should seek to model and explain this duplicity.
It is possible to organize all the proposed answers by imagining that they have
all evolved in a space defined by three axes: an ontological axis, a logical axis, and a
psychological axis. Along the ontological axis, the theories oscillate between objec-
tivism and subjectivism, according to whether the object represented is objectively
or subjectively understood in the representing object. On the logical axis, it is a
matter of the relation between the two that is debated: the positions vary between
recourse to resemblance (which leads to mimesis) and recourse to referentiality
(which leads to semiosis). Finally, the psychological axis is bounded on the one hand
248 Representation
TRISTAN GARCIA
by naturalism (the recognition of images is a natural cognitive facility developed by
our species) and on the other by conventionalism (recognition of images is regulated
by conventions that vary from one culture to another).
All the contemporary stances on the duplex character of representations
situate themselves in this complex three-dimensional space: Goodman is objec-
tivist, while supporting a logical theory of reference and tending toward a moder-
ated conventionalism; Hyman, by contrast, defends the determining character of
resemblance (in his occlusion shape principle); Wollheims theory of seeing-in
is ontologically subjectivist, logically midway between resemblance and reference;
Waltons make-believe shifts this position toward a radical conventionalism, while
the defense of recognition by Schier pushes it the other way, toward naturalism.4
What stays constant throughout all these variations is the concept of the image
as a duplex reality: one thing is two, two things are one. All these theories, what-
ever their respective merits, tend to consider representation as the relation between
two things presented in one alone. For this reason, they are condemned to develop
ontologically, logically, and psychologically between two poles, always still missing
an aspect of representation. The more they account for the image as an object, the
less they can account for the object of this image, and vice versa. Their error is to
attribute a single presence shared between two objects (the representing and the rep-
resented), instead of conceiving a single object shared between presence and absence.
That is why I have been working for several years on a completely different model
of representation.
IV
To represent is first of all to absent.
All representation, be it visual, sonic, or even tactile, presupposes the work of
absenting present matter: an image is a three-dimensional object reduced to the state
of a quasi-surface, whose depth has been reduced to almost nothing, and one side
of which has been transformed into the verso. Thus, to apprehend a photograph as
a representation supposes that one is capable of not equally considering the edge,
the recto, and the verso of the photographic image: the recto becomes the prominent
surface, the edge is overlooked, the verso is the blind back of the image.
4 See Goodman, Languages of Art; John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory
of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard Wollheim, Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and
Pictorial Representation, in Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 20526; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures:
An Essay on Pictorial Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Representation 249
 IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION
Thus, a visual representation consists first of all in the absenting of a spatial
dimension. For a sonic representation, its not exactly the same: when we hear, for
example, the recording of a birds song, what is absented is the spatial origin of the
sonic phenomenon, since we dont consider the speaker, the stereo, or the record
to be the one that sings. Also, in a certain sense all music is representative as soon
as you separate the sound from its cause and no longer hear the effect of a guitar
or a violin, but rather a sonic development where each sound seems to cause the
following sound, whether in a rhythmic or melodic phrase.
Visual representation, like sonic representation, is the absence of presence,
of a dimension of space or of the spatial source of a sound. And in absenting a
presence, one necessarily presents a presence. The key to our argument is that all
representation should be understood as a system of exchange that takes place within
objects themselves: in constraining a dimension or a portion of space to reduce
itself to almost nothing (in absenting it, that is), one, not by magic but rationally,
makes something that isnt there appear. And the representation is not initially the
presentation of something absent that would exist elsewhere, but the emergence of
something absent, owing to the absence of something present. One understands thus
that even Malevichs white square on a white background, the blue monochromes
of Yves Klein, or Pierre Soulagess black monochromes represent something in the
sense that they absent a dimension of space and therefore also present something
absent. What? At least a surface. Maybe a colored surface. Maybe a surface broken
up by forms.
In this way, the great aesthetic illusion of the twentieth centurythe belief
that we were done with representation because we had discovered the power of
abstractiondissipates: all representation is an abstraction, the abstraction of the
presence of things. And this abstraction has the necessary consequence of presenting
something absent: a countryside, a face, a feeling, shapes, colors, an event, and so
forth. What we see in an image, what we understand in a piece of music, is never
therethe image and the music present something absent because they absent
something present.
This absenting is neither a conventional decision nor a power of our cognition:
it is a constraint that the representing object exerts on our perception. Representation
is a constraint produced by art and incorporated in an object by work, which forces
our perception to absent a part of the presence of things. Insofar as it is a constraint,
our perception can always oppose it, and I can try to consider a photograph as a
three-dimensional object, observing with equal interest its front, back, and side;
I can listen to music forcing myself not to perceive the sound as the effect of an
instrument. But in so doing I will need to spend considerable energy forcing myself
to believe that I do not see or hear the representation, because the representational
object contrives to constrain my perception from recognizing it for what it is.
The representational object is not a copy: it does not imitate another present
object, but rather, it presents an absent object. What a photograph of Henry Fonda
250 Representation
TRISTAN GARCIA
in My Darling Clementine seems to present to me is not really Henry Fonda himself,
but his absence.
But how to present an absence? All representation possesses a certain degree
of determination: in presenting me with an absence, even an emptiness, the rep-
resentation determines, surrounds, or defines this emptiness. If I merely trace a
circle on paper, I produce a large and enveloping absence: it could be almost any-
thingme, you, a balloon, the earthjust as easily as it could be Henry Fondas
head. In working the circle, scrutinizing it, I can constrain my perception to elimi-
nate more and more possibilities: viewing a face traced in charcoal, with eyes and a
mouth. I can always pretend to see the earth or a balloon, but my perception must
strongly resist the drawing. By fortifying the stricturesfor instance, by including
a caption inscribed at the bottom of the drawingI can force the drawing to des-
ignate Henry Fonda. But the representation will never be constraining enough to
be saturated, that is to say, to achieve the presence of that which is presented: this
will never be the cut-off head of Henry Fonda in person appearing on the sheet of
paper in the same way that Henry Fonda will never be present in his representation.
What is present in a representation is an absence, which can be strongly determined
but never to the point of saturation with presence. In this way, there is no ultimate
degree of realism of a representation.
A representation is thus neither an imitation nor a type of signification; it
neither resembles nor refers to what it represents. It presents something absent and
determines it without otherwise transforming it completely into presence.
In redefining representation this waystarting from an ontology of objects, a
human art as a form of representation, a specific manner of absenting a certain part
of the presence of objectsI propose that it is possible to restore it to the heart of art,
and to rethink the work of the artist as that of a transmuter of absence and presence.
*
Our representations are, then, neither in our minds nor in our perceptions: they
are inscribed by human art in certain objects, which constrain our cognition to
recognize the absence of a presence in them, and by way of compensation the
presence of something absent. This operation, which to me is the impetus of all
human art, is neither mimetic nor semiotic; it requires a new model of ontology to
understand that it is not a matter of magical, irreal, or immaterial thought: quite the
contrary. The only way for materialist or realist theories to recognize the status of
artistic representations is to understand that representation is that which objectively
inscribes absence in matter, or in the real.
Translated from the French by Molly Whalen
Representation 251
 Concepts That Surrender to Materiality
and to the Real
Katerina Kolozova

Quentin Meillassouxs critique of correlationism and Franois Laruelles non-

standard philosophy (or non-philosophy) have demonstrated that materialism is
yet another project determined transcendentally rather than realistically. In other
words, materialism is not determined in the last instance by matter or the real
immanently affecting the idea of matter, but rather by a philosophical doctrine
of materialism and matter. Eliminative materialism is yet another philosophy
about matter and materialism, a theory relying on the philosophical presumptions
that matter is in the last instance situated in biology and on the purely philosoph-
ical decision that materialism equals realism. The equation materialism=realism
pretends to have always already established the site of truth and appointed itself as
the supreme guardian of that truth. My claim is that in order to radicalize materi-
alism we ought to resort to the realism of non-standard philosophy, a term more or
less synonymous with what Laruelle formerly called non-philosophy. Both terms
refer to a theoretical position that enables use of philosophical material in a way
determined not by any doctrine but instead by what Laruelle calls the syntax of
the real. The procedure of realist thinking is one that follows the syntax of the
real, a procedure Laruelle terms cloning.1
Laruelles non-philosophy is a complex and open-ended project pursuing a
theory of scientific rigor that makes use of philosophical concepts in order to arrive
at their determination in the last instance, the conceptual result of the effect of the
real. The operation of conceptualization surrenders to the immediacy of trauma pro-
duced by the real rather than to the clarity of the transcendental plane of philosophy.
To produce a radical concept means to employ language and signification, that is,
the work of the transcendental in the sense in which the term has been used since
Kant. Like any other concept, the radical concept is transcendental. Nonetheless, it
is minimally so. It does not come from philosophy or science (not even from folk
psychology, which is yet another form of philosophy) but from the raw attempt
of the affected instance of the real to transpose its experience into an abstraction
that should represent an absolute and immortalization of the effect of the real. The
maladroit attempt to transpose the lived into a meaning is the first gesture of
transcendence. It is one bruised by the marks of the symptom (the only way that
the real leaves a mark that then serves as the backdrop for signification), one that

1 Franois Laruelle, Lintroduction au non-marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 4647.

Representation 253
 CONCEPTS THAT SURRENDER TO MATERIALITY AND TO THE REAL
is descriptive and affective, while also rigorous through the accomplishment of the
simple task of indexing the instance of the real. According to the Western specu-
lative mind (in Luce Irigarays sense), the affective transcendence belongs to the
realm of the poetic/artistic, whereas the rigorous belongs to the scientific.2 If the
radical concept represents a hybridity of the two presumably incompatible modes
of thought, it is then fundamentally monstrous.
How does one radicalize concepts and clone the real according to the method
of non-philosophy? To rigorously explain a reality means to describe effects of the
real, and to assume a posture of thought that reacts to the workings of the real
nesting in the conceptual phenomenon that re-presents it. In order to execute
thought radicalized in the way non-standard philosophy proposes, it is indispen-
sible to disorganize any philosophical system or anti-system (which merely mirrors
the structure of a system). The philosophical cosmos should be affirmed for what it
isauto-referential. Simultaneously, its transcendental material should be extrap-
olated from its cosmological structure in order to be conceptually minimalized by
way of rendering it a philosophical chra, the unordered transcendental material
with which thought operates. This chra succumbs to the authority of the instance
of the real rather than to that of a philosophical legacy or the authoritarian figure
of a Thinker.
For example, one can theoretically operate with the concept of unilaterality
one finds in Gilles Deleuzes philosophy without having to become a Deleuzian
or use it only in modes that are determined by and within Deleuzes system (or
organized thought). In order to radicalize the term, that is, execute its transcen-
dental impoverishment, one has to reduce it to its conceptual contents, describing
the symptom of the real that necessitated the creation of the concept. The minimally
transcendental contents of a concept consist in its determination in the last instance.
In order to arrive at a radical concept, thought has to correlate with the real in an
immanent way rather than with the entire apparatus of a doctrine.3
According to Laruelle, three doctrinal legacies are minimally philosophical
such that their radicalization can prove to be more productive than that of the great
philosophical legacies sensu stricto. The three legacies at issue are Marxism, psy-
choanalysis, and Gnostic Christianity rid of philosophy/theology and grounded in
the figure of Christ as a radical concept.4 The application at stake concerns the
use of concepts in the interpretation of a particular reality. The fact that concepts
of Marxian or psychoanalytic origin are used in an interpretation does not make
the interpretation and/or its author automatically a Marxist or a Freudian. What
2 Luce Irigaray explores this bifurcation in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
3 Ibid., 21, 66, et al.
4 See, respectively, Laruelle, Lintroduction au non-marxisme; Franois Laruelle, Thorie des trangers:
Science des hommes, dmocratie, non-psychanalyse (Paris: ditions Kim, 1995); and Franois Laruelle,
Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (London: Continuum, 2010).
254 Representation
KATERINA KOLOZOVA
characterizes all these three forms of thought is that they are grounded in radical
concepts that are fundamentally hybrid or monstrous. They describe the effects of
the real, the imprint of the trauma of the experienced. The singularity of the expe-
rience they describe is elevated to a statement that stipulates a universal, which is
grounded in the given of the experienced. It is fundamentally detached from pro-
cedures of subjectivizationin spite of the fact that the theorizing subject invokes
its own experienceand, therefore, does not impose a cultural, class, racial, and
other societal model as a universal that, in fact, only camouflages the generalization
of ones subject position.
Does art need the radicalization and philosophical impoverishment offered
by non-philosophy? Philosophy is any conceptual tendency to establish a self-
sufficient universe that will usurp the position of the real and act in its stead. It
is defined by its decision (Laruelle) as to how the world and real/ity should be
enjoyed and what is thinkable. Art has always been constitutively co-defined with
philosophy, just as philosophy has always sought to determine itself and the world
aesthetically. A philosophical universe is always a cosmology: an orderly organiza-
tion of representations that aim to sublimate the real. Nonetheless, art has always
been heretical with regard to the philosophy it seeks to express. The affect, the lived
(Laruelles le vcu), le joui sans jouissance (or the joy without a predetermination of
its meaning and the ways in which it is to be enjoyed) 5 exceed the philosophical
message of the artistic feat. That feat liberates itself from the idea, supersedes
the intention, and through its raw materiality surprises the philosophizing subject
that the artist is. The materiality at issue consists in the effect of trauma, that is,
the sheer lived that evades mediation through language. The almost autonomously
acting instance of the lived (du vcu) dissolves the masterful philosophical subject,
reducing it to the vulnerable, exposed, heretically rebellious realthe point of
departure of all alienating processes leading toward the constitution of the speaking
subject. Philosophy or the transcendental is at work while constantly submitting
itself to be checked by the purely lived. The lived or the experienced is in fact
the effect of the real introduced by the philosophical intention and desire. Desire
or intention is an event of the real that precedes its philosophical transposition.
A philosophical system is always dissolved into chra and subjected to the dictate of
the real (in its aspects of trauma, the sheer lived, or the purely experiential).
The more artistic work suspends philosophy, reduces it to chra, and subjects
itself to the pure trauma of the unmediated lived, the more radical it is and the
more the philosophical project has surrendered itself to the rule of the real. Take
for example Michael Gira and his band Swans. Beginning in 2010, the latest phase
of Giras musical project is essentially nonmusic in the sense that it steps out of any
known doctrine or philosophical definition of what music is. It is not anti-musical,
which would make it a philosophical project par excellence. It is nonmusic yet
5 Laruelle, Thorie des trangers, 225.
Representation 255
 CONCEPTS THAT SURRENDER TO MATERIALITY AND TO THE REAL

radically and in the last instance musical in the same sense as non-Euclidian geom-
etry is geometry in the last instance, determined by its heretical stance toward the
philosophical legitimizations of geometry as science. Giras artistic production is
radically affective and traumatic. That is, it confers pain while its effect in the last
instance is joy (without jouissance). It disturbs the philosophically established cate-
gories of music, poetry, theater, and religious ritual only to collapse their transcen-
dental pillars into a philosophical chra to be used by what can be determined in the
last instance as radically musical or radically poetic (in the etymological sense of
poiesis). The material determination in the last instance lies in the praxis of music. Its
generic determination in the last instance is the radically poetic. The real by which
any determination in the last instance is affected is the joy or the trauma that are
the two first names of the purely lived.
In April 2013, Gira initiated a curatorial project titled Mouth to Mouth, which
consists only of musical events and in which the only participating artists are musi-
cians. Artists are chosen based on their ability to resuscitate, set fire to the air, or
mesmerize, explains Gira. All of the performers chosen for this years festival I find
personally to be compelling in this regard. The goal: joy!6 He resorts to transcen-
dentally impoverished terms, non-philosophical or descriptive of the radical iden-
tity or of the effect of the real that language seeks to mediate. They are also poetic
and, therefore, hybrid or monstrous. That is, they are sheer descriptions of effects of
the real, something that would be by definition characteristic of scientific expression.
Nonetheless they operate only through recourse to the purely imaginary, phantasmatic,
or the fetishistic, that is, through signification liberated from the obligation to refer-
ence the real. It is a signification out of joint acting independently as if it were an
instance of the real itself. Insofar as it produces an effect of trauma or joy, it is such
an instance. The radical concepts Gira uses in this statementas he does in his poetry
and musical expressionappear as instantiations of the real in their own right; but
they also fulfill the function of the transcendental in the form of radical concepts.
Radical concepts are produced in an immanent way; they follow the syntax of the
real and are affected by immanence. Thus emerges the monstrous double effect of
the reals penetration into the universe of signification. When Gira invokes Jesus on
stage through the hallucinatory enunciation shouted as a commandJesus, come
down right now!the experience conferred on the audience is that of trauma and
joy, as instances of the lived par excellence.
The more radical a conceptual art is, the less it is conceptualist. The conceptual
or the transcendental is accentuated in such radical way that philosophy (that is, the
conceptual cosmos) collapses into the black singularity of that minimal thought condi-
tioned by the trauma of the lived. The lived does not recognize the opposition between the
body and the mind, matter and idea. Nonetheless, it is determined in the last instance by
trauma (pain or pleasure). This makes it fundamentally material or physical.
Fig. 16
6 See koko.uk.com/listings/mouth-mouth-04-04-2013.

256 Representation
 Fig. 18
Fig. 17
Fig. 19

Fig. 20
 The Temptation of the Diagram
Matthew Ritchie

Toward Diagrams

This essay is concerned with the diagram as a tool of inquiry and as an expres-
sive and causal form. I use the term diagram here in its widest sense, including
hand-drawn diagrams, phase diagrams, maps, graphs, open and closed logical and
circuit diagrams, and wider applications such as large and small-scale biological
and physical network theory and the study of diagrammatic thinking, whose use in
the selective processing of eidetic and physical choices is necessary to all theories
of consciousness. To diagram is to intentionally compare and link alternatives,
to indicate potential choices and boundaries, typically using a conceptually clear
line or boundary to indicate the limits of the comparison underway. A successful
diagram not only expresses an underlying topology but also produces a manifold
where otherwise invisible force relations between pluralities of subjects can be
articulated. Diagrams, seen and hidden, constitute the pivotal means, or body, by
which we can move through the overlapping topologies of prediction, memory,
language, and metaphor without contradiction. Over the last two centuries, the
diagram has become the essential mechanism for our collective efforts to articu-
late and negotiate an almost impossible circumstance: reality itself.
John Bender and Michael Marrinan identify the reemergence of the diagram in
the seventeenth century as an essential tool of research whose openness and ability
to cut across boundaries can be clearly distinguished from the rules that govern
access to the closed disciplinary arrays that Michel Foucault describes as inherent to
any system of knowledge.1 As Bettina Funcke observed, Foucaults archive, or dis-
course of rules, is inscribed on a hidden carrier taken up in the materiality of the
medium; and there exists an unarticulated contradiction between the materiality
of signs and the indestructible identity of this hidden carrier (the diagram) that for
Foucault induces a fear of the proliferation of meaning.2 Boris Groys describes
this hidden carrier as a figure of suspicion that can only be imagined.3

I am indebted to the Getty Research Institute, Columbia University, the Mellon Foundation,
Dr. David Brafman, Natilee Harren, and Andrea Rosen for supporting my interest in this entire
area of researchand most especially to the editors for their tireless efforts.
1 John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2010); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
2 Bettina Funcke, Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low, trans. Warren Niesluchowski (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2009), 47.
3 Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

Representation 263
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM
In contrast, for Bender and Marrinan the open form of the diagram is the basic
form of what Krzysztof Pomian calls the elements of discourse in science4the
propositions, images, and theories that allow us to connect objects, forces, and interac-
tions that would normally be inaccessible to us. Beginning with Newton and Maxwell,
the cumulative articulation of a complex series of otherwise humanly inaccessible
object-to-object relations has been accomplished through the proliferation of a vast
series of diagramsthe isomorphic manifolds of increasing abstraction shown in Max
Tegmarks diagrammatic classifications of formal systems (fig. 1). This is not simply a
disguised essentialism: for Tegmark the scientific pursuit of higher and higher orders
of formal abstraction definitively does not necessarily point toward a final Theory
of Everything; rather, each generation of diagrams offers radically new perspectives
on local nature.
Figure 1. Relationships between various mathematical structures. The arrows generally indicate
addition of new symbols and/or axioms. Arrows that meet indicate the combination of structures
for instance, an algebra is a vector space that is also a ring, and a Lie group is a group that is also
manifold. The full tree is probably infinite in extentthe figure shows merely a small sample near the
bottom. (Reproduced by permission from Max Tegmark, The Multiverse Hierarchy, in Universe or
Multiverse?, ed. Bernard Carr [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 4.)
4 Krzysztof Pomian, Vision and Cognition, in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Peter Gallison and
Caroline A. Jones (London: Routledge, 1998), 227.
264 Representation
MATTHEW RITCHIE
Through a precise definition of inherent topological relations, a new diagram can
ultimately produce a radical reduction of local complexity and a corresponding
change in relative accessibility as the defining local force relations become apparent
and newly accessible, as for instance in the way Richard Feynmans famous
diagrams reintegrated the confusing bestiary of particles and interactions that pre-
ceded the standard model (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Electron-electron scattering is described by one of the earliest published Feynman
diagrams. [] One electron (solid line at bottom right) shoots out a force-carrying particlea virtual
photon (wavy line)which then smacks into the second electron (solid line at bottom left). The
first electron recoils backward, while the second electron gets pushed off its original course. The
diagram thus sketches a quantum-mechanical view of how particles with the same charge repel one
another. As suggested by the term Space-Time Approach in the title of the article that accompanied
this diagram, Feynman originally drew diagrams in which the dimensions were space and time; here
the horizontal axis represents space. Today most physicists draw Feynman diagrams in a more
stylized way, highlighting the topology of propagation lines and vertices. (Reproduced by permission
from David Kaiser, Physics and Feynmans Diagrams, American Scientist [MarchApril 2005]: 153;
diagram from Richard Feynman, Physical Review, 1949.)
As Manuel DeLanda noted, a diagram contains all its possible expressions; the
inventorying of natural properties may be suddenly and effectively replaced by a
higher order of unity.5 The recent discovery of the amplituhedron is another such
example (fig. 3).6 This remarkable jewel-like form replaces the need for hundreds of
Feynman diagrams with a single graphic equation.
5 Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Genesis of Form, ANY: Architecture New York 23
(June 1998): 30.
6 Nima Arkani-Hamed et al., Scattering Amplitudes and the Positive Grassmannian,
arXiv:1212.5605, 2012.
Representation 265
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM
Figure 3. A sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle interaction. Using Feynman
diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra. (Reproduced by permission
from Nima Arkani-Hamed, A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics, Quanta Magazine, September
17, 2013; www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/.)
By proposing new conventions of dimensional connection across an infinite sheet,
such exploratory diagrams also reinvigorate theories of picture and the possibili-
ties of agency within them. Frederik Stjernfelt, in his magisterial Diagrammatology,
characterizes the diagram as a form of hypostatic abstraction, demonstrating that
any painting or sketch always indexes another group of terms, even as it moves away
from it, always referring back reciprocally through a kind of sublated or hidden dia-
gram.7 Stjernfelt goes on to link C. S. Peirces theory of diagrams, premised on the
concept of an isomorphic continuity or transformation across an invariant structure
(such diagrams being co-extensional with mathematics and theories of picture), to
Edmund Husserls analysis of representational forms and his series of time-diagrams
(fig. 4) that describe a separation of objective and experienced time and seem to
promise a final reconciliation with the infinite.
7 Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and
Semiotics (Heidelberg: Springer, 2007), 306.
266 Representation
MATTHEW RITCHIE
Figure 4. (Reproduced by permission from James Mensch, A Brief Account of Husserls Doctrine of
Time Consciousness, available at: www.academia.edu/590652/A_Brief_Account_of_Husserls_
Doctrine_of_Time_Consciousness_with_Accompanying_Translations.)
Like Feynmans and Tegmarks diagrams, the diagrammatic conventions used by
Husserl and Peirce are semasiographic, not dependent on the conventional organi-
zation of meanings linked to human experience of time and space.
So effective is the diagram as a scientific tool, it might be easy to mistake its
functions for a basic condition of informational space. But the diagram (a diagram,
all diagrams) is neither a simple expression of the terms of the space it occupies,
nor simply a useful metaphor for a hidden bridge between the local manifolds or
ordering system and the proliferation of localized difference that constitutes the
primary operating system of conscious thought. It is something more than a trans-
lator; in the presence of diagrams, the profound questions of relative time, scale,
distance, gauge symmetry, proximity, and imagined immunity from discontinuity and
relationality that define our use of any shared informational space become painfully
evident. This discontinuity has recently entered a new and increasingly ubiquitous
sphere of influence, making it more relevant than ever. Computational space, the
hidden substrate and indexical basis of contemporary culture, is built from highly
ordered diagrams of microstates that physically integrate quantum force relations,
relying on directed movement and a central ordinator to make the letters we see into
lines of code, patterns of electronsan architecture of pure energy.
As an artist, Im most interested in the extent to which this environment, with
its simultaneous advantages and problems, can be properly understood and utilized,
both physically and metaphysically, as an exploratory tool. Despite the familiar com-
plaint of information overload, the humanly experienced web largely duplicates,
Representation 267
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM
juxtaposes, or compresses what we already know into degraded sensory appear-
ances, while the non-human, object-to-object force relations that sustain it (tem-
poral, physical, political, and environmental) are increasingly hidden. The culture of
diagrams introduced through publishing, globalized in the nineteenth century and
now radically extended by computational space, is becoming a continuously edited
substrate, a form of shared creation whose extended use might powerfully affect
how reciprocal relationships between material and concept are understood. As the
horizontal force relations of networks become increasingly predictable, as shown
in the scale-free network theory of Albert-Lszl Barabsi,8 and our own responses
become more and more conditioned to the limited options within it, will this highly
programmed and increasingly predictable computational environment come to
know us better than we will ever know ourselves? Given the growing reliance of
contemporary art culture on computational management systems, performance
metrics, and financial engineering, the stealthy but steady emergence of an essen-
tially eidetic or algorithmic art culture makes the review of underlying concepts of
diagram all the more urgent. Hand-made diagrams have tellingly begun to vanish
from the visual tool-kit of artists and architects to be replaced by the invisible hands
of programs; the concepts of network, distribution, and hub are becoming central to
art historical presentation. For a discipline whose basis is the movement away from
the index and toward the proliferation of meanings, surely the only unacceptable
trajectory is a too complete belief in the current diagram, one that would abandon
its exploratory modes and become fixed into the rules of discourse.
Toward the Maelstrom
The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are
the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profun-
dity and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater
than the well of Democritus.
Joseph Glanvill, Against Confidence in Philosophy and Matters of
Speculation, in Essays (1676)
This epigraph was used by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 as the introduction to A Descent
into the Maelstrom,9 exemplifying his theoretical project to elaborate the difficulties
faced by a rational author in a chaotic universe. In Poes tale, a fisherman recounts his
8 Rka Albert and Albert-Lszl Barabsi, Topology of Evolving Networks: Local Events and
Universality, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000): 523437. Available at www.barabasilab.com/pubs
/CCNR-ALB_Publications/200012-11_PhysRevLtr-TopologyEvolNetworks/200012-11_PhysRevLtr
-TopologyEvolNetworks.pdf.
9 Edgar Allan Poe, A Descent into the Maelstrom, in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan PoeVol. II:
Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas O. Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 57497. Available
at www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom2t044.htm.
268 Representation
MATTHEW RITCHIE
experiences surviving an enormous whirlpool, describing how he had coolly observed
the various features of the terrifying gulf with an unnatural curiosity, and then, fol-
lowing the principles of Archimedean physics, had lashed himself to a barrel, the only
geometric form that can be successfully propelled out of the abyss. Poes Maelstrom
has been characterized as an early form of scientific fiction or science fiction (a term
whose inverse complement might easily be the phrase weird realism coined by H.
P. Lovecraftor even Speculative Realism itself ). Poes text contains no fantastical
or supernatural elements. It is only his narrative rigor and personal distance when
describing phenomena extending beyond human terms of reference that make it sci-
entific fiction at all. It is in this superposition of informational space and imaginative
space that we find the accompanying premise: that human cognition needs metaphor-
ical technologies to extend itself effectively into transitional areas and new sensory
experiences, which we may find only partially comprehensible and hence weird.
As Poes contemporary and admirer Gustave Flaubert wrote in The Temptation
of Saint Anthony, somewhere there must be primordial figures whose bodily forms
are only symbols. Could I but see them, I would know the link between matter
and thought; I would know in what Being consists!10 Flauberts tortured hermit,
besieged by an encyclopedic parade of gorgeous visions, still hoped to reconcile
Bouvard and Pcuchets later confusion between sign, symbols, and reality at
a time when diagrammatic thinking and behaviors were moving from symptom
to syndrome. Fifty years later, Poes story and Flauberts vision would collide in
Stphane Mallarms poem Un coup de ds, which features another shipwreck
survivor, this time consumed by the whirlpool of chance and myth. When Mallarm,
another admirer and translator of Poe, wrote that the poetic act consists in suddenly
seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping
them,11 he almost seems to be echoing Poes The Philosophy of Composition: It is
my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either
to accident or intuitionthat the work proceeded step by step, to its completion,
with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.12 And so Poe,
already well known for his incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers
of horror and science fiction,13 must also be given credit for his role in the introduc-
tion of systematic thinking into fiction, a concept that would lead to the so-called
death of the author, so vital to the linguistic turn against which Speculative Realism
sets itself. The emergence of derealization as a widespread clinical condition, closely
linked to depersonalization and the ensuing disbelief in the world as a continuous
10 Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, trans. Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Modern
Library, 2001), 179.
11 Stephane Mallarm, Crise de vers, trans. Rosemary Lloyd, in Mallarm: The Poet and His
Circle (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 231.
12 Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition. Available at www.eapoe.org/works/essays
/philcomp.htm.
13 Joyce Carol Oates, The King of Weird, New York Review of Books 43 (October 1996). Available at
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/oct/31/the-king-of-weird/.
Representation 269
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM
phenomenological whole (which disbelief Speculative Realism so ardently refuses),
can also be definitively located in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cotards
syndrome, a complex form of schizophrenia where the patient believes they possess
a body that is dead, or without physical limits, was first diagnosed in 1880.14 The
contemporary impulse in philosophy and art was to produce a similarly deperson-
alized algebra of signs that would support the messianic and exponential proposals
of the nineteenth century, through whose geometries, graphs, and encyclopedias the
possibility of totalizing, multi-positional strategies of art production (and every-
thing else) would became a historic inevitability in the twentieth century. As Wassily
Kandinsky wrote ecstatically from the heat of the crucible, when time and space
were collapsing as fast as precision-guided munitions could eliminate them, the
life of the spirit may be fairly represented in [a] diagram.15
The exploded geometric spaces of Gaspard Monges technical drawings and
Nikolai Lobachevskys non-Euclidean geometry converged into Kazimir Malevichs
squares and his statement that the artist who wants to develop his art beyond the
potentialities of conventional painting is forced to resort to theory and logic,16 then
exploded into Kurt Schwitterss Merzbau. Under the misnomer machine drawings,
diagrammatic connections were critical for Francis Picabia, Raoul Hausmann, Marius
de Zayas, and Marcel Duchamp. For Duchamp, the universal connectivity of the dia-
gram became an essential tool in the dimensional isomorphism of the Large Glass and
ultimately the only stable referent in the construction of a project as scale-free as the
world itself. Over time, Duchamp produced a hidden web of imprisoned connections,
an unstable pseudo-archive, variable in meaning, legibility, scale, and materiality that
could be projected (in reverse) into the art history of the twentieth century, constituting
a series of isomorphic manifolds far exceeding the terms of a private language.17 This
essentially diagrammatic premise, the superposition of multi-positional formal and
temporal terms, of a passive carrier and active body in a single practice or volume,
would eventually give rise to a wide range of different sculptural possibilities and
ways of contemplating pictures, depending on which abductive, bodily, or intellectual
stance was adopted. The combines of Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg led to the
combinatorial logics of Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner. If the diagrammatic program
began with an artist becoming the world, it reached some kind of conclusion with the
world being diagrammed as a potential space for art in the practice of Joseph Beuys,
an artist in whose practice diagrams and drawings are indissoluble.
14 Jules Cotard, Du dlire hypocondriaque dans une forme grave de la mlancholie anxieuse,
Annales Mdico-Psychologiques 4 (1880): 16874.
15 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sandler (Toronto: Dover, 1977), 6.
16 Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism, trans. Howard Dearstyne
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 51.
17 This experiment [of the Three Standard Stoppages] was made in 1913 to imprison and preserve
forms obtained through chance, through my chance. Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Myself,
in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne dHarnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1973), 273.
270 Representation
MATTHEW RITCHIE
As is evident in the range of diagram projects, there is a price for this freedom.
Diagrams of universal conditions produce a further superposition, one of ludic con-
fidence, simultaneously encouraging limit-case thinking and a hermetic withdrawal
from the conventional taxonomy of the world. With its properties as universal trans-
lator, limit-case eidetic, Peircian abduction-deduction-intuition machine, fantasy
generator, and thing-in-itself, the diagram as model-of-thought offers one final
fantasy, of omni-directional potency. Rhapsodic thinking, quasi-science, suspicious
topologies, and mathematical inconsistencies can all be elided with a confident group
of gestures and terms. There is no requirement for rationality, only mutualityor
isomorphism of parts. As Deleuze wrote: A diagram is a map, or rather several
superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn.18
Without a gauge theory to discipline it, every new diagram displaces the author
horizontally to the authority of the diagram and cloaks the anthropomorphic
centrality of the rules or local regime.
This is not to suggest that diagrammatic thinking constitutes an easy escape
route for the visionary or fantastical impulse (far from it!). Poe, Duchamp, Flaubert,
Mallarm, Beuys, and a thousand others labor under infinite obligation to the
freedoms, compulsions, and intensities of their own universes and achieved varying
degrees of mutuality. Whether we are truly accessing higher orders of reality or
simply fantasizing that we are (which is the central question underlying mathemat-
ical formalism as well as art), diagrams are where concepts connect to their con-
sequences, where ideologies are inexorably networked to the specific concepts and
compromises that undergird or undermine them. An incomplete diagram is like an
incomplete equationif it does not portray a full set of relations, then its orienta-
tion is ultimately away from mutuality. The price for failure is high, an incoherent
(or non-isomorphic) dead-end cosmology of the kind Poe published as Eureka
mixing fact, speculation, and outright fantasy but unable to distinguish between
them, swamped by a maelstrom of unmapped intensities and opposing forces.19
Any practice that seeks to describe an overall reality in any way, no matter
how obscure or personalized, must also always describe a relationship between the
opposed or cooperating forces and objects that support it. If, as Husserl contends,
scientific realism takes physical objects and their determinations [to be] correla-
tives of logical, categorical, theoretical thinking, and therefore not experienceable
in sensory experience, which is misconstrued as being taken as implying unknow-
ability, then, by contrast, for Husserl, to posit a noema as an entity is to posit the
object corresponding to the noema. The object appears within the noema as the
moment of unity among its constituent predicates.20 For Stjernfelt, this process is
18 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 44.
19 Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (New York: Putnam, 1848). Available at www.eapoe
.org/works/editions/eurekac.htm.
20 J. N. Mohanty, Edmund Husserls Freiburg Years, 19161938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011),
21, 69.
Representation 271
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM
accomplished through the diagram itself; in building diagrams of thought, we are
constructing a variable, non-corporeal body for the eidetic exploration of the infinite
variety of objects and spaces. Diagrammatical experimentation is [] only made
possible by gaining access to a landscape by means of a body, thus complicating
the conventional understanding of the landscape as passive and the body as active
or causal, and fusing body and landscape as active, causal terms.21
This non-corporeal, roving body provides the promise and the reality of an
environment in which we can endlessly vary the terms of what Husserl calls fantasy,
in that fantasy shares the pictures relation to its subject, defined by similarity and
variation, while, on the other hand, fantasy seems, just like perception, to take
place directly and without any intermediary.22 Diagrams not only bring ideas into
proximity through a body, they then both superimpose and superpose them. The
intensities of localized forces will always define the expression of the topology.
The diagram is, in certain fundamental ways, the generator and interpreter of this
topology or body, capable of being read in the terms of both emergent quality and
sensual object, fantasy, and facts. Just as we cannot truly create an ontological
diagram of nature, we cannot create one of mental reality. But what we can do
is create new assemblages inside this condition, a diagram of what we can relate
to, that produces its own distinct form of knowledge.
Toward Confidence
The most merciful thing in the world [] is the inability of the human mind
to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the
midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu23
In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman details how Lovecrafts
precisely nuanced relations between object and background or ontography allow
him to develop a convincingly allusive weirdness that allows his concept of gods
(the Cthulhu mythos) to become narratively plausible as a direct consequence of
their orientation between the normal object or figure and the background.24 As
we read Lovecraft, we search our memories for comparisons between the human
figure and the universal ground only to find a space growing between the psychic
landmarks we use to locate ourselves and a universe Lovecraft explicitly identifies
as indifferent to human concerns or concepts of knowledge and yet highly specific
21 Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology, 290.
22 Ibid., 159.
23 Weird Tales 11, no. 2 (1928): 15978.
24 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Alresford: Zero Books, 2012).
272 Representation
MATTHEW RITCHIE
in every detail (though very differently than Kants indefinitely large mathematical
sublime). Paradoxically, the distant and impersonal author relies on an artificial
collapse of distance and time to dramatize our bodily awareness of the induced dis-
association as widely separated categorical terms are vigorously collided, inducing
the rhapsodic confusion familiar from biblical, alchemical, and political tracts.
Like Foucaults hidden carrier, Lovecrafts hideous Cthulhu, the engendering
proliferator of nonhuman topology can (must) only be imagined. By bending two
human imaginary spaces, language and time, Lovecraft creates a kind of interme-
diate zone, a diagonal disassociation of the dimensional isomorphism between
allusive and eidetic spaces similar to Harmans (and Husserls) separation of space
from time and similarly ambiguous in intent.
For Harman, Lovecrafts project is rendered isomorphic through its specific
use of local conventions of narrative and language, forcing us to progress along the
semiotic axis that Peirce labels abduction or guesswork. For artists, it may be
precisely the progress their work makes along this axis and away from the original
index that constitutes its true sensual objecthood. But in Lovecrafts work our
movement along the abductive axis is placed under an insufferable tension, as the
process of human-oriented abduction is warped toward a nonhuman pole. This
extended informational space, the intermediate space of weird realism and real
weirdness, or the space of possible knowing, seems to be precisely the condition
that Speculative Realism is interested in exploring. Since diagrams initiate a vertical
disassociation between informational space and real space and have a theoretically
infinite capacity for extension by proposing new conventions of connectioniso-
morphism in many directionsit is only to be expected that a philosopher positively
oriented toward research, vertical isomorphism, overlay, and connection would
have ultimately to produce a diagram of his own. The curious notion of a human
capable of a nonhuman perspective, the implausible in pursuit of the impossible,
leads us to Harmans diagrams in The Quadruple Object (fig. 5).
Figure 5. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011), 78.
Representation 273
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM MATTHEW RITCHIE

Like Poe and Lovecraft, Harman proposes finitude as a guiding principle, arguing
that the universe is not only finally incomprehensible to human minds (and, indeed,
to any relation, human or nonhuman) but is also ontologically incapable of being
grasped in its totality. But that Harman felt compelled to produce a diagram (albeit
with a collaborator) reveals something about his universalist and intentionalist
sympathies. Harmans view of what he terms polypsychism (which might otherwise
echo Lovecrafts bleak cosmicism) has (to me) a charming relation to vitalism, the
spiritual fuel of Gothic romance that is (for me) where Harmans own diagrammatic
impulse reveals itself as a particularly generous and relevant gesture. We do not
yet have a shared language to describe changes in the intensity of our knowledge
of ontological force relations (or tensions, junctions, and radiations as Harman
calls them), so we have no way to gauge the effect a radical reduction in noetic
complexity might createbut Harmans diagram provides a critical step toward
any articulation of such force relations by offering an inclusive topology to access
regional ontologies that have been warped away from each other.
Like the other ardent diagrammaticists he cites (Plato, Aristotle, Greimas,
Heidegger, McCluhan, and others), Harman expresses his polarities through the Figure 6. Detail of RMA table of contents. (Illustration by the author.)
bridge of a fourfold diagram possessing the visual authority (as Peirce insists) of an
icon.25 Considered as an icon, Harmans diagram can be read as both image and In figure 7, the six core categories of RMA (selected by the editors) are isolated from
metaphor, referring back to its own ontology through the intermediary of itself, the indexical diagram and specifically matched to the six poles and axes of Harmans
creating a hypo-iconic feedback loop. diagram as an initial gesture towards diagrammatic commutation.
Although Harmans diagram is thereby completed on its own terms, the
accompanying premise, that this might open the door for a diagram of diagrams,
a philosophical equivalent of the amplituhedron, leaves the field wide open for
additional inquiry. In the terms Harman uses to isolate and articulate space and
Speculation
Speculation Matter
Matter Speculation
Speculation Concept
Concept
time in relation to each other, the diagram here constitutes both background
and foreground. Who knows how additional dimensions, categorical changes,
or more complex topologies might affect our reading of questions of mutuality,
force relations, relative isomorphism, folding, and disassociation? In the spirit
Representation
Representation
of speculation the following series of diagrams continue this premise as a visual
game for the reader. ScaleScale Object
Object ScaleScale
In figure 6, a detail of the table of contents diagram at the front of the book,
the core categories used by the editors of Realism Materialism Art (RMA) to group
various approaches and interests are shown as an interconnected hub.
Concept
Concept Representation
Representation Object
Object Matter
Matter

Figure 7. Unwinding the topological links between the sections of RMA allows them to be matched to
the poles and axes of Harmans quadruple object. Potentially any group of diagrams can be presented
25 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero Books, 2011), 79. in isomorphic or commutative diagrams of varying graphic types. (Illustration by the author.)

274 Representation Representation 275

Speculation Matter Speculation

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Space Space Theory Space
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Factiality Factiality Factiality
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Non Human Oriented
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Non Human Oriented
Nihilism NihilismSciences Nihilism Grant
Diagram Diagram Diagram Diagram Stratification Stratification De-positional
Sincerity De-positional
Sincerity De-positional Sincerity
Sincerity Oppositional
De-positional
Duplicity Oppositional
Duplicity Oppositional
Duplicity Oppositional
Duplicity Non Human Oriented
Non Human
Meanings
Oriented
NonMeanings
Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented Me
Stabilization Meanings
ofStabilization
meanings System 4 System 4 System 4 System
System
4 3 System 3 De Landa
System 3 De Landa
System 3 De Landa De Landa Meillasso
Human Oriented
Non Human Agencement
Meanings
Oriented
Non Agencement
Meanings
Human Non HumanofOriented
Agencement
Nature OrientedSign/Signifier
meanings
Stabilization
Meanings
Ranciere
of meaningsStabilization of meanings
AgencementRanciere Ranciere
RanciereOpen diagram Open
(Algorithm)
diagram (Algorithm)
Open Deleuze DeleuzeBIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
Deleuze Nature
Deleuze Nature Nature
Non Human Oriented
Non Human
Meanings
Oriented
Non Nature
Sign/Signifier
Meanings
Human OrientedSign/Signifier
Meanings Sign/Signifier
Non Human Oriented
Harman Meanings Harman Sign/Signifier
Harman Harman Harman
Nature Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier NON SELF NONdiagram
SELF (Algorithm)
NONOpen diagram (Algorithm)
SELF NON BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
SELF BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER Nature Nature Nature Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier
Nature Sign/S
Human AccessHuman Access Human Access Human A

Aisthesis Aisthesis Aisthesis Aisthesis Divergent Actualization

Divergent Actualization
Divergent Actualization Divergent Actualization Mysticism Mysticism Allure Mysticism Allure
Allure Mysticism Allure
Contingency Contingency Contingency Contingency Eidetic variation
Eidetic variation Eidetic variation Eidetic variation
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings Proliferation of meanings
meanings Fantasy
Proliferation of meanings Fantasy
Proliferation Fantasy of meanings Fantasy
of meanings Proliferation Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation
(Chimeras)
of meanings (Chimeras)
Proliferation of meanings Proliferation
(Chimeras) of meanings (Chimeras)
Open diagram (Search)
Open diagram (Search)
Open diagram (Search) Open diagram (Search) Essence Essence Essence Essence
Non Human OrientedNonMeanings
Human OrientedNon
Meanings
Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented Meanings Non Human Oriented
NonMeanings
Human Oriented
Non
Meanings
Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented
ArtObject Object Subject/Society
Sign/Signifier Subject/Society
Sign/Signifier Subject/Society
Sign/Signifier Subject/Society
Sign/Signifier Aggregation Aggregation NatureMatter
Aggregation Matter Matter
Aggregation Matter Sensual
Real ObjectSensual
Objects Object Causation
Real Objects Sensual Object Causation
Real Objects Sensual Causation
Stabilization
Object
Sensual
Real Objects
Real Qualities of meanings
Qualities
Sensual Causation
Stabilization of meanings
Qualities
Real Qualities Stabilization
Sensual of meanings Stabilization
Qualities
Real Qualities Sensual
Real of meanings
Qualities
Qualities Real Objects
Sensual RealObject
ObjectSensual Objects Sensual
RealObject
Objects RealObject
Sensual Objects
Sensual
Real Qualities
Qualities Sensual
Real Qualities Sensua
Qualities
Oriented Sciences
Non Representation
Induction/IntuitionHuman
Art Oriented
Representation
Induction/Intuition Sciences
Art
Stabilization ofRepresentation
Induction/Intuition Stabilization
meanings Art
Induction/Intuition
of meaningsRepresentation
Stabilization of meanings Stabilization of meanings Nature
Object Nature
Object Nature
Object Form
Object Form Form Form
Non Human Oriented
Non Human
Sciences
Oriented
Non
Sciences Confrontation
Human Oriented Sciences Confrontation
Non Super-positional
Human Confrontation
Oriented Sciences Confrontation Non Human Oriented
Non Human
Sciences
OrientedNonSciences Human Oriented
Human Oriented Human
Sciences
Non Sciences
Human Oriented Sciences
Oriented Human Oriented
Sciences Sciences Human Oriented Real Q
Scienc
Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory) Nihilism Nihilism
Super-positional Nihilism AbstractionsNihilism
Super-positional
(logically Super-positional
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstractions
objective)(logically objective)
Abstractions (logically objective)
Attention Attention Attention Attention
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Abstractions Distinction of meanings
Abstractions Abstractions Abstractions Time Time Time Time Scientific observation
Scientific observation
Scientific observation Scientific observation Abstractions (logically
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstrac
obje
(technologically (technologically
subjective) subjective)
(technologically subjective)
(technologically subjective)
Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Contingency Mysticism
Contingency Mysticism
Contingency Mysticism
Contingency Mysticism
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Stabilization of meanings Proliferation of Quasi
Proliferation
Objectsof(Hybrids)
QuasiProliferation
Objects (Hybrids)
of Quasi Objects
Proliferation
(Hybrids)of Quasi Objects (Hybrids)
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meaningsProliferation of meanings No Human AccessNo Human Access No Human Access No Human Access
Space Space
Theory Dematerialization
Dematerialization
of
Space the
Theoryart objectof Dematerialization
Oppositional the art object of Oppositional
Theory
Space
Oppositional the art
Dematerialization
object
Theory of the art object
Oppositional
De-positional De-positional De-positional De-positional Non Human Oriented
NonMeanings
Human Oriented NonMeanings
Human Oriented Meanings Non Human Oriented Me
System 4 System 4 System 4 System
System
4 3 System 3 System 3 System 3 Factiality Factiality Factiality
Human OrientedNonMeanings
Nature Human Oriented NonMeanings
Human
Nature Oriented Meanings
Sign/Signifier Non Human Oriented
Sign/Signifier Meanings
Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Nature Nature Nature
Non Human Oriented
NonMeanings
Human Oriented Nature
Sign/Signifier
NonMeanings
Human Sign/Signifier
Oriented Meanings Sign/Signifier
Non Human Oriented Meanings Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Brassie
Sign/Si
ement Measurement
Eidetic variationMeasurement
Eidetic variation NON SELF NON SELF NON SELF NONBIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
SELF BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER Nature Nature Nature Nature Grant
Deduction Eidetic Measurement
variation
Deduction Eidetic variation
Deduction Deduction Non Human Oriented NonSciences
Human Oriented
NonSciences
Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences De Landa De Landa Stratification
De Landa De Landa
Non Human Oriented
NonSciences
Human Oriented
Non
Sciences
Human Oriented
Nihilism Sciences
Non Human Oriented
Nihilism NihilismSciences Nihilism Meillas
Diagram Diagram Stratification
Diagram Stratification Stratification
DiagramDeleuze Duplicity Duplicity Duplicity Duplicity
Ranciere Deleuze Deleuze Sincerity
Deleuze Sincerity Sincerity Sincerity
Agencement Object Stabilization of meanings
Agencement Stabilization
Agencementof meanings
Stabilization ofRanciere
Agencement Ranciere
meaningsStabilization of meanings Ranciere Harman Harman Harman Harman
Object Object Object Object
Interpretant Interpretant
Harma
Interpre
Object Open diagram (Algorithm)System 1 System
Open diagram (Algorithm) 1 System 1
Open diagram (Algorithm)Open diagram (Algorithm) System
System1 2 System 2 System 2 System 2 Object Object Object
Mysticism Mysticism Object
Interpretant
Mysticism Interpretant Mysticism
Interpretant Interpretant
Phenomena Phenomena Phenomena Interpretant Phenomena
Interpretant Interpretant Interpretant Phenomena (physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically subjective)
Phenomena (physically subj
PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF
CORE-SELF CORE-SELF CORE-SELF CORE-SELF Phenomena (physically
Phenomenasubjective)
(physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically subjective)
Phenomena (physically subjective)
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings Distinction of meanings Distinction of meanings Positional Contingency
Positional Contingency
PositionalContingency Positional
Multi-positional
Multi-positional Multi-positional
Contingency Multi-positional Human
Human OrientedHuman
Sciences AccessSciences
Oriented HumanOriented
Human Access Sciences
Human Access
Human Human A
Oriented Sciences
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation
Divergent of meanings
Proliferation
DivergentofActualization
Actualization meanings Proliferation
Divergent of meanings
Actualization Divergent Actualization
meanings Fantasy
Proliferation
Aisthesis of meanings Fantasy
Proliferation
Aisthesis of meanings Fantasy
Proliferation
Aisthesis of meanings Fantasy
Aisthesis Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation
(Chimeras)
of meanings
AllureProliferation
(Chimeras)
of meanings (Chimeras)
Allure Proliferation
Allure of meanings (Chimeras)
Allure
Eidetic variation Eidetic variation Eidetic variation Eidetic variation
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Stabilization of meanings
Oriented
Art Sciences
Non
Representation
Human
Art OrientedRepresentation
Sciences
Art
Stabilization Representation
of meanings Art
Stabilization Representation
of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Stabilization of meanings Non Human Oriented
NonSciences
Human Oriented
Non Sciences
Human Oriented
Nihilism Sciences
Nihilism Non Human
Super-positional Oriented Sciences
Nihilism
Super-positional Nihilism
Super-positional
Abstractions (logically Super-positional
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstractions
objective)
(logically objective) Non Human
Abstractions (logically Oriented
NonSciences
objective) Human Oriented
NonSciences
Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences

Object
Abstractions Abstractions Abstractions
Subject/Society Subject/Society Stjernfelt
Object Subject/Society
Abstractions
Attention Attention Attention Attention
Figure 8. Using Harmans graphic convention to show isomorphic relations between other Scientific observation
Scientific observation
(technologicallySensual
subjective)
(technologically
Scientific observation
subjective)
(technologically
Object subjective)
Scientific observation
(technologically Sensual
Abstractions (logically
subjective)
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstract
ob
uction/Intuition Induction/Intuition
Biosemiosis Induction/Intuition
BiosemiosisInduction/Intuition Stjernfelt Subject/Society
Stjernfelt Stjernfelt
Object Object
Aggregation
Object
Aggregation Matter
Aggregation
Object
Matter Matter
Aggregation
Neurology Neurology Matter
Neurology Sensual Object
Neurology Sensual Object Sensual Object
Confrontation
Sensual
Confrontation
Object
Sensual Qualities
Confrontation Art
Sensual Qualities
Art Sensual QualitiesArt
Confrontation
Sensual Qualities Art Object Sensual Sensual Object
Human Oriented Sciences
Object
Human Oriented Sciences
Sensual Qualities Sensual Qualities
Human Oriented Sciences Human Oriented
Sensua
Material
SciencS
Biosemiosis
tinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Stabilization of meanings diagrammed
Time ProliferationTime
systems
of Quasi
Proliferation of thought
Objects (Hybrids)
of Quasi
Time Proliferation and
Objects (Hybrids)
of Quasi Harmans
Objects
Time (Hybrids)of Quasi quadruple
Proliferation Objects (Hybrids) object. (Illustration by the author.)
Dematerialization Dematerialization
of the art object Dematerialization
of the art object of the art
Dematerialization
object of the art object

ement Measurement
Eidetic variationMeasurement
Eidetic variation EideticMeasurement
variation Eidetic variation De-positional
De-positional De-positional OppositionalOppositional
De-positional Oppositional Oppositional Non Human Oriented
Non Human
Meanings
Oriented
Non
Meanings
Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented Me
System 4 System 4 System 4 System
System
4 3 System 3 System 3 System 3
on Human Oriented
Non Human
Nature Meanings
Oriented
Non
Meanings
Human
Nature OrientedSign/Signifier
Sign/Signifier Meanings
Non Human Oriented Meanings
Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Nature NatureNon Human Oriented
Nature
Non HumanMeanings
Oriented
Non Nature
Sign/Signifier
Meanings
Human Oriented Sign/Signifier
Meanings Sign/Signifier
Non Human Oriented Meanings Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Interpretant
Sign/Signifier Brassier
Sign/S
NON SELF NON SELF NON SELF NON SELF
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER Nature
Object Nature
Object Nature
Object Nature
Object
Interpretant Interpret
Object Object System 1 System 1 System 1 System
System1 2 System 2 System 2 System 2 Object Object Object Object
Interpretant Interpretant Interpretant Interpretant

276 Representation Representation 277

Phenomena Phenomena Interpretant
Phenomena InterpretantPhenomena
Interpretant Interpretant Phenomena (physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically subjective) Grantsubj
Phenomena (physically
PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF
CORE-SELF CORE-SELF CORE-SELF CORE-SELFDe Landa Phenomena (physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically
Phenomena
subjective)
(physically subjective)
Phenomena (physically subjective)
istinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings Distinction of meanings De Landa De Landa Positional
De Landa Positional Positional Positional
Multi-positionalMulti-positionalMulti-positional Multi-positional Human Oriented Sciences
Human Oriented Sciences
Human Oriented SciencesHuman Oriented SciencesMeillassou
Ranciere Ranciere Ranciere Ranciere Deleuze Deleuze Deleuze Deleuze Mysticism Mysticism Mysticism Mysticism
Harman Harman Harman Harman Harman
Contingency Contingency Contingency Contingency
Proliferation of Proliferation
meanings of meanings
Proliferation of meanings Proliferation of meanings
meanings Fantasy
of Proliferation of meanings Fantasy
Proliferation Fantasy of meanings Fantasy
of meanings Proliferation Proliferation of Proliferation
meanings (Chimeras)
of meanings
Proliferation
(Chimeras)
of meanings Proliferation
(Chimeras) of meanings (Chimeras)

Stabilization ofStabilization
meanings of meanings Stabilization of meaningsStabilization of meanings
Oriented
ArtSciences
Non Human
Representation
Art Oriented
Representation
Sciences
Art
Stabilization Representation
meanings Art
ofStabilization Representation
of meanings
Stabilization of meaningsStabilization of meanings
Stjernfelt Stjernfelt Stjernfelt Stjernfelt Neurology Neurology Neurology Non HumanNeurology
Oriented
Non Human
Sciences
Oriented
Non
Sciences
Human Oriented
Nihilism Sciences
Nihilism Non Human
Super-positional Oriented Sciences
Nihilism
Super-positional Nihilism
Super-positional
Abstractions (logically
Art Super-positional
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstractions
Art objective)(logically
Art objective) Non
Art Human
Abstractions (logically Oriented
Non Human
objective) Sciences
Oriented
NonSciences
Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences Material S
Attention Attention Attention Attention
Abstractions Abstractions Abstractions Abstractions Scientific observation
Scientific observation
Scientific observation Scientific observation Abstractions (logically
Abstractions
objective)
(logically
Abstrac
obj
(technologically(technologically
subjective) subjective)
(technologically subjective)
(technologically subjective)
s Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Biosemiosis
Stabilization ofStabilization
meanings of meanings
Stabilization of meaningsStabilization of meanings Proliferation of Proliferation
Quasi Objects of Quasi
(Hybrids)
Proliferation
Objects (Hybrids)
of Quasi Objects
Proliferation
(Hybrids)
of Quasi Objects (Hybrids)
 Nature Nature
Matter Matter Object Object Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory)
Object Object Concept Concept

Speculation
Representation Representation
Speculation
Subject
Subject Plato Plato

Ideal Ideal

Theoretical Science Theoretical Science Philosophical Understanding

Philosophical Understanding
Deduction/Empicism
THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM MATTHEW RITCHIE
Opinion/Intuition
Opinion/Intuition Deduction/Empicism

Scale
Scale Real
Real
Nature Nature
Matter Matter

In figure 8, the inherently diagrammatic mutualism of Harmans conceptual framing Object

Object Speculation
Interpretant
Speculation
Interpretant
Concept
Concept
Object
Object
Subject/Society Subject/Society
Eidos (Theory)
Eidos (Theory)
Representation Subject Subject

is further shown by locating diagrammatic equivalents from several other well-known Representation Plato Plato

systems of philosophical inquiry onto a similar schematic. Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction Theoretical Science
Ideal
Human Access IdealAccess
Human
Philosophical Understanding
Opinion/Intuition
other Opinion/Intuition
Theoretical Science
other Deduction/Empicism
OTHER Deduction/Empicism
Philosophical
OTHER Understanding
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Scale Scale
Real Real

The potential utility of this principle for hypo-iconic communication (especially for Abduction Abduction
Symbolic Order
Nature
Symbolic Order

Nature
Object Object Matter Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier

those lost at sea) is shown in figure 9, which uses the color key from figure 7 to create Matter Concept Concept Object Object Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory)
Object Object
Interpretant Interpretant Subject/Society Subject/Society
Representation Representation The Real The Real
Imaginary Order Imaginary Order

a simple tiling system. Proliferation of meanings

Ideal
Proliferation of meanings
Ideal
Plato
Plato

Human Access Human Access

Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction Theoretical Science Theoretical Science Philosophical Understanding
Philosophical Understanding
other other OTHER OTHER
No Human Access No Human Access
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings

Symbolic Order Symbolic Order

Nature
Nature Nature
Nature
Abduction Abduction
Object Object Matter Matter Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Object Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier

Interpretant The Real The Imaginary

Real
Subject/Society Order Imaginary Order
Interpretant Subject/Society
Pierce Pierce PlatoLacan Plato
Lacan

Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings

Human Access
RMA Plato Aristotle Kant Induction/Intuition Deduction
other
No Human Access
Human Access
No Human Access
OTHER
Induction/Intuition Deduction
other
Stabilization of meanings OTHER
Stabilization of meanings

Symbolic
Nature Order Nature
Symbolic Order
Abduction
Object Abduction Sign/Signifier Object Sign/Signifier
Object Sign/Signifier Object Sign/Signifier
Subject/Society Subject/Society Local Topology Local Topology
Interpretant Interpretant Subject/Society Subject/Society
The Real Imaginary Order
Pierce Pierce The Real Imaginary Order Lacan Lacan

Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Aggregation Aggregation
Divergent Actualization
Human Access Divergent Actualization
Stratification
Human Access Stratification
Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction
other other
No Human Access OTHER OTHER
Agencement Agencement Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization
No HumanofAccess
meanings
Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction

Pierce Lacan Foucault Latour

Symbolic Order Symbolic Order
Nature
Abduction Abduction Open diagram (Search)
Open diagram
Matter
(Search) Matter Nature Form OpenForm
diagram (Algorithm)
Open diagram (Algorithm)
Object Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier
Object Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier Object Object
Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory)
Subject/Society
Aisthesis Aisthesis
Subject/Society LocalArt/Diagram
Topology Art/Diagram
Local Topology
The Real The Real
Imaginary Order Imaginary Order
Pierce Lacan
Pierce Non Human Oriented
Non
Sciences Proliferation of meanings
Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation of meanings
Non Human Oriented
Non
Meanings
Human Oriented Meanings Lacan
Distinction of meaningsDistinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Aggregation Divergent
Aggregation
ActualizationDivergent Stratification
Actualization Stratification
Science Science Philosophy Philosophy

No Human Access No Human Access

Agencement Agencement
Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction

Nature Nature

Deleuze Harman Speculative Nature Nature

Rancire Object Object Sign/Signifier
Eidos (Theory)
Sign/Signifier
Eidos (Theory)
Open diagram (Search)Open diagram
Matter (Search) Matter Form Form (Algorithm)
Open diagram Open diagram (Algorithm)

Realism Aisthesis Aisthesis Art/Diagram Art/Diagram

Subject/Society Local Topology
Subject/Society Local Topology
Pierce Pierce Non Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation of
Proliferation of meanings Nonmeanings
Human Oriented Meanings De Landa
Lacan
Non Human Oriented Meanings De Landa
Lacan
Ranciere Ranciere Deleuze Deleuze

Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings

Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings Science
Aggregation Science
Divergent Actualization Philosophy
Stratification Philosophy
Aggregation Divergent Actualization Stratification

Agencement
Induction/Intuition Agencement Deduction
Induction/Intuition Deduction
Nature Nature

Object Sign/Signifier Open diagram (Search) Matter Form Open diagram (Algorithm)
Object Eidos (Theory) Sign/Signifier Open diagram (Search) Matter Form Open diagram (Algorithm)
System 2 System 2
Stjernfelt Brain Sciences Art Physical Sciences Aisthesis
Subject/Society
Interpretant Subject/Society
Interpretant Aisthesis
Eidos (Theory) Art/Diagram
Local Topology
CORE-SELF Local Topology
CORE-SELF
Art/Diagram
De Landa De Landa
Ranciere Ranciere Deleuze Deleuze
Non Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation of meanings Non Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation of meanings Non Human Oriented Meanings

Figure 9. A folding isomorphic language showing some formal relations between the diagrammed Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Distinction of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Aggregation
Science
HumanActualization
Divergent
Aggregation Access Divergent
Human Stratification
Access
Actualization
Philosophy
Stratification
Science Philosophy
systems of thought shown in figure 8. Colors and divisions indicate philosophical orientations, Phenomena Phenomena Eidetic variation
Agencement
Eidetic variation
Agencement
Abstractions Abstractions
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Figure 9. Using quadratic geometry to create a visual isotypical language showing formal relations between the same Induction/Intuition Induction/Intuition Deduction Deduction
diagonals indicate folds, circles indicate topological holes. It is hoped that this might be useful for
diagrammed systems of thought shown in Figure 2. Colors and divisions indicate philosophical orientations. Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Representation Representation

It is hopedlong
this distance
might be communication when atcommunication
sea. (Illustration by at
thesea.
author.) Nature
Nature Positio
useful for long distance when Object
Object Object
Object Sign/Signifier
Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier
Sign/Signifier Open diagram (Search)
OpenSystem
diagram
Matter
1 (Search) System
Matter
1 Attention Attention System
Form 3 OpenSystem
Form3 (Algorithm)
diagram
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
Open diagram (Algorithm)
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
Eidos (Theory) Eidos (Theory) PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF System 2 System 2
Aisthesis Aisthesis Art/Diagram Art/Diagram
Measurement Art
Measurement
Interpretant Art
Fantasy
Interpretant Fantasy CORE-SELF CORE-SELF

Figure 10 uses Peirces graphic convention instead to show clearly that system-wide
De Landa
Ranciere Non Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation of meanings
Non Human Oriented Sciences Proliferation ofNon
meanings
Human Oriented Meanings
Non Human Oriented
DeleuzeMeanings De Landa
Non Human Oriented
Non
Sciences
Human Oriented Sciences Non Human Oriented
Non
Meanings
Human Oriented Meanings Ranciere Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings Deleuze

Distinction of meaningsDistinctionProliferation
of meaningsof meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Human Access Human Access

isomorphic commutation is not dependent on Harmans own graphic layout. Phenomena PhenomenaEidetic variation Eidetic variation Abstractions Abstractions
Science Science
No Human Access No Human Access
Stabilization of meanings
Philosophy

Stabilization of meanings
Philosophy

Categories can be can moved, inverted, and mirrored without affecting any of their Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Representation Representation
Nature Nature Nature Nature
Nature

topological relationships.
Positiona
System 1 System 1 System 4
Attention System
Attention4 System 3 System 3
Object Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier
PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF NON SELF NON SELF BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
Measurement Art
Measurement FantasyArt Fantasy System 2
CORE-SELF System 2
Interpretant
Interpretant Stjernfelt Stjernfelt CORE-SELF Neurology Neurology
De Landa De Landa
Non Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences Non Human Oriented Meanings Ranciere
Non Human Oriented Meanings Ranciere Deleuze Deleuze
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Proliferation of meanings
Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings Human Access
Distinction of meanings Stabilization of meanings Human Access
No Human Access No Human Access
Phenomena Eidetic variation Abstractions
Phenomena Eidetic variation Abstractions Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings

Nature Nature Nature Nature

Biosemiosis Representation
Biosemiosis Representation System 4 System 4 Position
System 1 NON SELF
Attention NON SELF System 3
Object Sign/Signifier Attention System 3
Object Sign/Signifier PROTO-SELF System 1 System 2 System 2 BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER

278 Representation Representation 279

Measurement Art PROTO-SELF BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
Interpretant Fantasy
Interpretant CORE-SELF CORE-SELF
Measurement Art Fantasy Stjernfelt Stjernfelt Neurology Neurology

Non Human Oriented Sciences Non Human Oriented Meanings Proliferation of meanings
Non Human Oriented Sciences Non Human Oriented Meanings Proliferation of meanings
Distinction of meanings Proliferation
Distinction of meaningsof meanings Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization of meanings Human Access Human Access
Proliferation of meanings
Phenomena Phenomena Eidetic variation Eidetic variation Abstractions Abstractions No Human Access
Stabilization of meanings
Stabilization
No HumanofAccess
meanings

Biosemiosis Biosemiosis Representation Representation

Figure
Figure
10. 10.
Using
Using
Pierces
Pierces
graphic
graphic
convention
convention
to show
to show
isomorphic
isomorp
Nature Nature
Nature Nature Position
System 1 System 1 System
Attention4 Attention System 3 System 3
Object Object Sign/Signifier Sign/Signifier NON SELF System 4
PROTO-SELF PROTO-SELF BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
BIOGRAPHICAL-SELF/OTHER
 THE TEMPTATION OF THE DIAGRAM MATTHEW RITCHIE

Subject/Society Harmans categories (and by extension all topologically similar categorical

systems) are applied to other potentially useful systems, including Feynman, Muller,
Subject Interpretant

Abstractions (logically objective)

Luck

Distinction of meanings Stabilization of Human Oriented meanings

and Oswald in figure 11, visually expressing the different tensions inherent to
Deduction/Empicism

each. This implies significant possibility for a theory of potentially unifying

Opinion/Intuition
Phenomena (physically subjective) Correlationism

Rationalism Deduction

gauge symmetries.
Efficient cause Induction/Intuition Empiricism

Sign/Signifier
Object
Material Cause Formal Cause

Real
Objecthood (RO)
No Access Idealism
SO
Theoretical Science Philosophical Understanding

Contingency

Essence Time
SQ
Space RO
Nature
Nature
Space
Final Cause Sensual
Objecthood Real
(SO) Qualities (RQ)
Subject/Society
Time
Subject/Society
RQ
Sensual
Qualities (SQ)
Designation Agency
Derivation
Distinction of meanings Human Access RO
Abstractions (logically objective)
Human Oriented Sciences Stabilization of meanings

Articulation Representability Attribution Essence

Eidos RQ
Power relations Factiality Time
Abduction Sign/Signifier Object Proliferation of Quasi Objects (Hybrids) Essence Eidos
Object RO
Closed diagram (Table) RQ Space
SO Space SO
Proliferation of meanings
Time
SQ
SQ
No Human Access

RO RQ
Nature Nature RO

Time
Essence
Sensual Qualities E PERIENCE Sensual Qualities SPECULATION
SO RQ
Space

Agency

Space
Time
SQ
Human Access
SO SQ
Human Oriented Sciences Correlationism

Sensual Object Sensual Object

Eidetic variation Factiality

Real Qualities
Figure 11. (Illustrations by the author.)
Real Qualities
Eidos (Theory)

Nihilism Mysticism

Non Human Oriented Sciences

No Human Access
Non Human Oriented Meanings
Harmans diagram is both completely specific to him and us (how could it not be?)
Contingency
and diagrammatically multiversal, explicitly attempting to build bridges across
SCIENCE
universes. Like the survivors barrel in Poes Maelstrom, propelling him through
Real Objects FICTION

the impossibly vast but utterly specific forces of nature, Harmans diagram both
Real Objects

Multi-positional
proliferates toward and secedes tidally away from multiple meanings, conveying
Brassier

Interpretant Interpretant

Human Oriented Sciences us toward and through the totalizing hermeticism of real objects by the underlying
forces of the universe he invokes. The assertions of his diagram reveal a beguiling
Human Access

Stabilization of meanings Phenomena (physically subjective) Abstractions (logically objective)

Phenomena (physically subjective) Abstractions (logically objective)
Dematerialization of the art object
Proliferation of Quasi Objects (Hybrids)
confidence in the universal search for mutual association that reinforces the poly-
Positional Object
Agency
Super-positional
Sign/Signifier Oppositional
Object Sign/Signifier psychic orientation of Harmans project. At least in this particular instance, the
(Agencement Engagement Entanglement) rational author can be embraced as the most confidently irrational figure of all:
an artist. And in this, much like Object-Oriented Ontology, Harmans diagram
Proliferation of meanings (Chimeras) Non Human Oriented Sciences
Non Human Oriented Sciences Non Human Oriented Meanings Non Human Oriented Meanings
Nihilism Mysticism Scientific observation
(technologically subjective)
No Human Access

Contingency
emerges as a research tool in and of its time. It embodies our interest in humanity
Nature
as a directed and limited quantity, one we all have a vested interest in understanding
Nature

De-positional
and extending to the very limits of our abilities.
Figure 10. Using Peirces graphic convention to show isomorphic relations between other diagrammed
systems of thought and Harmans quadruple object. (Illustration by the author.)

280 Representation Representation 281

 -non-music-non-stop-
Achim Szepanski

The Laruellian concept of superposition proposes two different treatments of sonic

thinking (that is, thinking sonically rather than about sound) as non-representation.
One illustrates an incommensurability of sounds closure, hermetically separated
from other materials, paradigms, and theories; the other illustrates an incommen-
surability of the relation and exchange of sound, which is porous enough to permit
heterogeneous assemblages without imposing them. While closure includes repre-
sentation as thinking about sound, permanent exchange tends to confusion as it fuses
thinking and sound. This confusion reflects the belief of experimental electronic
music in its first period (from Luigi Russolo through Pierre Schaeffer and classic
musique concrte) that everything in the world is musical, an unrecognized belief
associated with what Jarrod Fowler calls the Principle of Musical Sufficiency.1
By contrast, non-musicology breaks with the idea that everything is musical and
develops a science of music as well as a music related to science (Iannis Xenakiss use
of stochastic processes, for example). For Fowler, the program of non-musicology
is to use musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded
by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: All is not musical, this is our news.2
Non-musicology breaks not only with musical self-sufficiency; it also articu-
lates another break that does not so much involve a new subversive immersion of
the audience into the conditions of hearing as lead to the ecological anticause, what
Fowler calls a different hearing-in-rhythm, which is identical with rhythm insofar
as rhythm is different from metrics and recurrence. What is rhythm? First, rhythm
is a temporally extended pattern that can be described by information-processing
systems through several parameters summarized by Inigo Wilkins: spatial, tem-
poral, amplitude, frequency, and superposition.3 While processing systems involve
an observer-dependent reality of rhythm, it is possible to discover the existence of
rhythms that are beyond human sensory perceptual capacities through technology,
math, and science. Second, it has to be asked whether or not there is a simple
opposition between noise and rhythm. The answer is no, because we can define
rhythm as the relation of identifiable and unidentifiable processes that allow the
incommensurable chaos to pass into an order of difference, a degree or quantity of
nonlinear and nonrhythmic noise. Rhythm may exist at many degrees of dynamics

1 Jarrod Fowler, A Sequence of Non-Musicological Praxis Corresponding to Phases of

Non-Musicology. See www.irreversiblenoise.wordpress.com.
2 Ibid.
3 Inigo Wilkins, Enemy of Music," Irreversible Noise (blog), www.irreversiblenoise.wordpress.
com/2013/03/06/enemy-of-music/.

Representation 283
 -non-music-non-stop-
and magnitude. It may emerge from noise; the simulation of noise through stochastic
processes demonstrates that the process of the enfolding of rhythm and signals offers
a large quantity of heterogeneous movements occurring at different time scales and
frequencies. Still, noise has a larger dynamics and magnitude than rhythm. Noise
is foreclosed to any ontological or epistemological theory.
If rhythm is distinct from metrics, we enter the field of non-frequency politics,
the politics of productive difference, which includes the fact that rhythm is distinct
from metrics and science, and therefore uses science and music as pure material.
Here, nonmusicians start to reduce discourses of philosophy and science to pure
material to achievein interaction with hearing-in-rhythmpulse rhythmights.
A non-musicological term invented by Fowler, rhythmight opens up experimental
methods of rhythm production: we can now speak of rhythm in terms of nonperiodic
pulsed or clicked music. We find here a transversal disjunction, heterogeneous tem-
poralities, and spatial components that overlap and coexist in a track; in the invin-
cible evidence of its short signal and contextless reference, the click opens various
potentials to move on without giving any noticeable association. Through the con-
catenation of signs something like indetermination starts to be indicated, whereby
failure can become part of music. Failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and
cuts, but rather a referential that indicates possibilities of previous and emerging
sign concatenations. In the nameless in between, meaning is constructed with
the help of signs that are not what they pretend to be. Through reference to other
signs, a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realizes
diffrance, suspended presence, while also referring to signs to come. Similarly, the
pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats.
While listening to the clock, one might hear tick-tock instead of tick-tick,
because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before. This repeating stress
is the pulse; and in music different sorts of pulses can be overlapped and constructed
by grouping beats together in different milieus or patterns. The technique of anti-
human music forces a temporal division into such nuanced patterns, which only
machines can perform with perfect precision.
Here is another hotspot of nonmusic in a Laruellian sense. Laruelle claims a
dispersive a priori of an autonomous theory (here, transposed to music) related to
the foreclosed and indifferent real, posing the question: How can a generic and real
but nevertheless transcendental and a priori term of difference be constructed, an
a priori of difference that is a matter of an immediate given condition?4 The rela-
tion between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity or the zero
degree of variation constitutes a dispersion. At this stage rhythm is still hearing-in-
rhythm as radical ecology. While non-musicology imposes a unilateral relationship
between rhythm and hearing, hearing-in-rhythm cannot affect rhythm, while rhythm
4 Franois Laruelle, The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, trans. Ray Brassier,
Pli 12 (2001): 3340.
284 Representation
ACHIM SZEPANSKI
is foreclosed to hearing-in-rhythm. For example, the theoretical practice of music
remains dependent on sample politics, oscillating between an actual pool of samples
and the capacity to create new samples. Samples are nowadays part of the media
pool, regardless of whether they are saved on analog or digital media. Sampling
includes the program-controlled, machinic transformation of the musical material
with special features, transposing, time-stretching or cut up, and so forth. Sampling
is a technology for access and transformation of media material, that functions by
grasping the signals of the media of transmission. Sampling subverts the purposeful
transfer from source to destination. Instead of an exact process of mapping the input
onto the output, sampling activates a production process, using the signal subtracted
from its functional and contextual environment. As a condition of that production,
it is a sampling-in-the-last-instance. Going from sampling to so-called pulse rhyth-
might (produced with techniques through immanent and generic methods of per-
cussive flights and differential structures of sound) is to attend not to being-in-the-
world, but being in music. A music that remains radically immanent, rhythmight is
constructed from the heterogeneity of rhythm as incommensurately sampled-in-the-
last-instance and binds the methods of rhythmics to ecological hearing-in-rhythm.
The relation between rhythm and hearing is unilateral: it only goes one way. The
unilaterality of rhythm, which is anticausal, doesnt imply that music can be reduced
to rhythm, but rather that, aside from its territorial motives and melodic landscapes,
music is in-the-last-instance rhythm and heard from rhythm. The exology (the closure
of paradigms, knowledge, and so on) of hearing, which arises from the indifference
of rhythm, must hallucinate music as metrics, order, and composition by ignoring
the radical ecology of rhythm, which is related to non-musics objectivity without
representation.5 At the same time, rhythmight corresponds to a relative ecology
(perception of music) that is permanently infiltrated by the convertibility of money,
the processes in which the virtuality of value is actualized as price. At this juncture
non-musicology has to indicate a radical mutation of the radical ecology of rhythm
according to the foreclosed real.
If nonmusic or nonstandard music is, as Inigo Wilkins says, situated in the
non-standard phase space between periodic sine tones and non-periodic or
non-individual complex transformation and modulation, it might fall within the
same theoretical neighborhood as Dantes bourdon or Olivier Messiaens compo-
sitional techniques.6 The latter combines listening to the rhythmic singing of each
individual bird and the overall rhythm as an orchestra. On one side, there is no total
rhythmic disorder, analogous to the incommensurability of closure, as unrelated
tones do not couple with one another; on the other side, the birds are not synchro-
nized to the ticking clock, as though a regular pulse would allow them all to share
a common beat. Now, it looks as though non-frequency politics would be nothing
5 Fowler, Sequence of Non-Musicological Praxis.
6 See Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, 719; and Wilkins, Enemy of Music.
Representation 285
 -non-music-non-stop- ACHIM SZEPANSKI

other than a reinvention of Dantes bourdon; but the ritornello of the birds as accom- nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, a radical abstract
panied by the noise of the wood is not only a musical sensation. It forces rhythm via theory that is absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music
an interaction with hearing-in-rhythm, in order to find a radical objective music, is not oriented to a world, nor is it perceptual; rather it focuses on the immanent
which includes the refusal of the world, even the refusal to create alternative worlds, character of music as such, being in music. Music is radical objectivation without
yet demands the real as parallel to the world. Rhythmight produces tension and representation or intentionality. Following Laruelle, this semblance of music must
solidification at the same time in hearing-in-rhythm, while non-musicians become be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, or a representation of world or
aware of how to subtract rhythm from the metrum, endlessly mixing and remixing of language, of affect, or whatever. Rather, there exists a non-world of music for both
the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time separating frag- the musician and the philosopher of music. This non-world still exists in the present
ments from these mixtures in order to use these autonomous theoretical fragments and is real, while nonmusic is always rooted in matter. At this point non-musicology
indifferent to the musical structure. stops tracing the Rhythmicity of rhythm in hearing-in-rhythm through sampling-in-
Laruelle would reject Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris treatment of music the-last-instance. As a kind of objectivity without representation, non-musicology
as the capture of affects and percepts (the relationship between material and forces)7 begins instead to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical mate-
and would instead postulate in music an autonomous theoretical order, a nonscien- rial itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix of nonmusic, which is no longer
tific thought according to the radical immanence of the realthe real, here, under- overdetermined by the capitalist relation of production and circulation.
stood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or
being mirrored by science; the real, which has to be thought as neither a meaning
nor a truth but rather as immanently given without givenness. The exteriority of
the real is being-nothing, which confronts being with nothingness. This demands the
real as parallel to the world. By reducing all transcendental thought to pure material,
thought can be developed according to the syntax of the real. Instead of a truth, which
has its telos in the white silence of a full speaking, in which even the real should be
countable, nonmusicology presents an incestuous conjunction of the principles of
superposition (immanence of One-in-One) and non-commutativity. Where Deleuze
and Guattari distinguish between scientific variables, artistic varieties, and philo-
sophical variations, Laruelles non-philosophy reduces all concepts of philosophy
and philosophy itself to pure variables.8 Non-musicology reduces philosophy, science,
and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within
nonmusical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the Principle
of Musical Sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception
and affect might be also cut off. Nonmusic instead produces an irreflective processing
of variables by variables, a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence.
In his latest works, Laruelle speaks of the nonstandard method as a kind of
immanent fiction that includes invention, construction, performance, and so forth
as a nonrepresentational and non-expressive method that uses only abstract and
pure thought for non-aesthetics and that doesnt need to appeal to the parallelism
of philosophy and art.9 This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy

7 See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16399.
8 See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy; and Franois Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences
gneriques (Paris: Editions Petra, 2008), 200.
9 See, for example, Franois Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans.
Robin Mackay (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

286 Representation Representation 287

 Concept Without Difference:
The Promise of the Generic
Amanda Beech

Art today reeks of a lack of imagination. It is burdened by its own histories, its tales
of emergence, its attachment to contexts, its sick love affair with location and the
personal histories of lives.
Identifying art as the great social redeemer aids and abets capitalism as does
the private self-reflective work of the artwork as personal memoir. Equally, intel-
lectually rigorous art increasingly defends the viability of a labor of the mind. Here,
the artist as interdisciplinary researcher conducts anthropologically revealing
exercises on others, yet the work ends up revealing more about its maker.
In general terms, art today is based on an ethics of making and recognizing dif-
ferences, the problems of which stand as the defining crisis of arts good conscience.
The demand for another art, a different artone that we long to seemust
therefore be taken in distinction to the proliferation of art observing an ethics of
difference. It proposes a difference from the proliferation of differences.

*
We assert here that all problems of art observing an ethics of difference are mani-
festations of the condition of being Duchampian.

Two currently prevalent examples of arts being Duchampian are:

Immaterial, inaesthetic, experiential modes of practice that claim to

manifest the real through the overcoming of mediation; an art that brings
us together via the social axis of free interpretation and free experience;
a reveling in the orgiastic collectivity of sensational feeling.

Tiresome but still popular intellectual word-game art that puns its
way toward oblivion, language here being the primary means for signaling
some form of finitude: Art as the game of representing the knowledge of
the limits of knowledge itself. It is an art of irony and parody at the limits
of meaning.

To be Duchampian is to be in contradiction. On the one hand, art is claimed as a

nonhierarchical field of differences: Duchamps work itselfespecially the ready-
madesbuys into the assumption that some objects are wholly indifferent (the

Representation 289
 CONCEPT WITHOUT DIFFERENCE
bottle rack for example, is chosen for its arbitrary status, its anonymity). Yet, on
the other hand, such differences are established against present-historical-empirical
conditions, setting up a hierarchy or inequivalence of differences including, primarily,
that art is something different than the chosen object. The anything whatever of
the artwork is eclipsed by the predilection for meaning as art.
Being Duchampian, art has stood as its own measure, defining itself through sets
of differential relations from which it can articulate its own existence and spe-
cific identity.
The Duchampian claim that the artwork can be anything at all is here designated
as the generic. The generic artwork is nonspecific as an object or even as an idea.
The Duchampian artwork manifests the force of the generic, of leveling hierarchies
toward a yet-more anarchic equality of signs, objects, and meanings as its primary
critical moment.
Yet it presents the contradiction of art as immanent differentiation and as a supe-
rior result of difference, in turn posing the primary question: favoring immanent
differentiation, how then to understand the generic without principle, without dif-
ference, and without relation?
What would it mean to capture the promise of the generic otherwise than as the
manifestation of difference as a genre?
* By contrast, the generic promises the real unbinding of differences required for
To be clear, to be Duchampian is to be equivocal with regard to the generic:
1. Duchamps leveling of hierarchies relies upon an idea that neutral, everyday,
or common sense languages and idioms are exempt from the hierarchy of
categories in the first place. The readymade is appealing as a context-free
object, and it is this referent to alterity that lends the readymade its critical
weight. The critique it gives rise to, including institutional critique (which
only prosecutes this program in a particular context), claims this more egal-
itarian and anarchic basis as the condition for identifying and condemning
the abstraction of hierarchical languages, institutions, power, and so on.
The assumption of neutral forms organizing the hierarchical distinction pos-
tulated by such condemnations is itself predicated on an idealizing claim to
the anything whatever as an abstraction or genre. The claim to the any-
thing whatever manifests the standardized and incorrect assumption that art
can access the unknown. This aspiration for radical differencethat art can
offer the experience of what is unknown to usis won by securing the generic
290 Representation
AMANDA BEECH
as a form of knowledge. This faith in the generic exposes arts central and
defining methodology. Art figures the generic method through its processes,
which now define its claims. Art finds itself as genre in this methodology of
critique. It is very much at home.
2. In contrast to genre, the generic is then immanent to the artwork, its readings,
and its production. Franois Laruelles philosophy is preoccupied with the
notion of generic immanence and so provides an important guide to addressing
the problem for art identified here. Whereas for Duchamp the generic is occa-
sioned in the collision of art and life, concept and practice, critique and habit-
uation, for Laruelle the generic is immanent to a collision of philosophy and
science. Being Duchampian in its radical sense therefore enables an extended
apprehension of Laruelles conceptualization of the generic.
*
The generic in this sense promises a complex condition of equality that cannot
be obtained or captured by already existing designations, including that of art. Yet
this is what is blocked and revoked in the restitution of the everyday object as art, by
being Duchampian qua genre. The latter rescinds the promise of arts self-estrange-
mentits alterity, its value, and its name artwith a notion of difference that
takes art to be determined in the relation that the generic has to difference rather
than in the generic itself.
Being Duchampian subordinates the generic of art to difference.
meaning and, on the other hand, reinstates the standard and inherited systems
of difference that are the mainstay of arts critique. The promise of the generic is
to evacuate the standard forms of a politics of difference that have been captured
and sedimented in post-Duchampian art without reinstating extant institutions.
The difficulty is in conceptualizing and obtaining the generic without the standard
politics of difference that is todays artistic commonplace.
*
The generic as a concept is a means by which art divests itself from the paradigms
of the claustrophobic isms that have regimented its production and reception. Now
difference is inherently tied to the concept of the generic and vice versa.
*
The demand for another art traverses the problem of how to disengage itself from the
all-encompassing and all-permissive system of art being Duchampiana problem
that can now be cast in terms of the difference between generic art and art as a genre.
Representation 291
 CONCEPT WITHOUT DIFFERENCE
The target here is the system that misidentifies the generic as a genre. We must tra-
verse this problem without underscoring or falling back into the mistaken logic of
elevating difference over the generic.
The idea that the generic can be art is to be supplanted by an art that must be generic.
We cannot be held back by empirical constraints or by any sense of redemption that
idealizes thought over matter or image. The challenge here is to conceive an art that
no longer imagines that it can act as the difference-agent or hero of the political event.
The generic is to be the condition of our aesthetic paradigm. It is to be the para-
digm for arts modes of production, what it is as a product, its aesthetic dimension,
and the rhetorical affect of the image.
* not seek to become science but instead to effect its discipline at the highest level,
To fully expunge art as a genre we must also identify the real limits set by an art that
tries to out-maneuver the constraints imposed by the ethics of difference; that is, iden-
tify the art that looks to surpass the limitations of genres neutrality by reinstantiating
itself as becoming different, and even in understanding itself through a theory of its own
edicts by becoming the thought of difference and, in either case, escaping representation.
*
The specter haunting our inquiry is the perennial myth that escaping representation
provides a comprehension of a real or of objective reality as it is.
Our difficulty is that philosophical or artistic critique is today habituated in para-
digmatic and ideological formations, and this is arts dominant formation in neo-
liberal culture. In this condition, art spontaneously formulates an operation called
critique, rejects representation, assumes its own language is free from power.
Stipulating that arts critique should be other than this ideologically supine condi-
tion requires us to overcome this condition.
* repetitive indoctrination, the stamp of the circle as philosophy itself in a yet more
Louis Althussers description of the circle of decision as the defining practice
of philosophy is instructive here. For Althusser the crisis is that ideology and sci-
ence are at risk of collapsing into one totalizing milieu. Philosophy must intervene
in order to produce a distinction between a corrupt manifestation of ideology,
a culture that cultivates, and real science as the advancing of facts.1 The circle
of decision philosophy draws up in response to this danger is in fact not a circle
at all but a practice without coordinates that nevertheless leads somewhere:
1 Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, trans.
Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1990), 95.
292 Representation
AMANDA BEECH
I entered the necessary circle deliberately. Why? To show even crudely that
whilst it is indispensable to leave philosophy in order to understand it, we
must guard against the illusion of being able to provide a definitionthat
is, a knowledgeof philosophy that would be able radically to escape from
philosophy: there is no possibility of achieving a science of philosophy or
a meta-philosophy; one cannot radically escape the circle of philosophy.
All objective knowledge of philosophy is in effect at the same time a position
within philosophy. [] There is no objective discourse about philosophy
that is not itself philosophical.2
The formulation is instructive in that Althusser assumes that while philosophy
is part of this whole it is nonetheless unfree to establish a speculative relation
to knowledge, and is implicitly bound to its spontaneous form. Philosophy does
policing and producing correct science.
This is not a practice of looking back. It is rather the exacting power of philosophy itself.
This is a rendering of decision as the drawing of a line between science and ideology
that grasps their difference and remains philosophy in doing so.
This is philosophy as difference: a processional method that seeks to overcome
any requirement for a comparative distinction between those naive habits and the
correct path.
Philosophy is then privileged in that it draws the circle of decision as a practice of
power even as it embosses that circle as the figure of thought.
*
The drawing of the curve of this circlephilosophy for Althusser, critique for
usas the ceaseless mark of an inaccessible extra-philosophical reality is now a
spontaneous form.3
2 Ibid., 102.
3 Pierre Macherey presents the final problem latent in the circle: [Althussers] intervention consists
in tracing the lines of demarcation, which in reality only retread the lines already traced, and demand
to be retraced again, with no assignable issue, in so far as the conflict of forces that it brings to light
cannot emerge as a definitive division that would once and for all isolate all its manifestations. One
might see in this approach the index, not so much of a vulgar theoreticism, as of a mystique of the
philosophical, which would fundamentally be the last word of Althusserianism, a last word which
no autocritique would succeed in rescinding. In Pierre Macherey, Althusser and the Concept of
the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, trans. Robin Mackay, Parrhesia 6 (2009): 1427.
What Macherey here identifies as the mystique of the philosophical is the ever-yet-greater
spontaneity of philosophy.
Representation 293
 CONCEPT WITHOUT DIFFERENCE
Althussers demand for a nonspontaneous drawing up or generation of differences
returns us then to another spontaneous philosophy. This is a problem that Althusser
identifies but also re-inaugurates.
To be Duchampian in art is to be Althusserian in philosophy. That is, critique is
figured through difference in Duchampian art and Althusserian philosophy.
However, these processes and methods advance another spontaneous philosophy
for Althusser and a spontaneous artistic critique for Duchampians.
Because art today for the most part inherits and practices a critical method in this
manner, contemporary art as we know it strikes us as being disastrous.
*
Laruelles non-standard aesthetics and nonstandard philosophy acknowledge the
paradigms identified here and the apparently intractable problems they present,
and no less look to overcome them by subjecting them to the power of a universal
science (distinct in this from the everyday science preoccupying Althusser).
Laruelle leans into the Althusserian problematic by tackling what might be called
a spontaneous philosophy of philosophers. Where for Althusser vigilant philo-
sophical intervention prevents the collapse of science and ideology into one another,
for Laruelle critique is charged by the destruction of these relations. In The Concept
of Non-Photography Laruelle argues that the circle of decision need never be entered
in the first place.4 The idea that we should think that we are always already in the
circle, and that a philosophy need work through it in order to overcome it is evi-
dence of yet another spontaneous philosophy.
In fact, for this reason all philosophy is spontaneous.
* is that the generic is mistaken for a genre, establishing a difference between aesthe-
Being Duchampian, being Althusserian, philosophy or aesthetics or critique or art
are inadequate to the real.
How then might we think the adequacy of thought or aesthetics or art to the real?
In Photo Fiction, An Essay in Non-Standard Aesthetics Laruelle writes that the photo-
fictional camera of nonstandard aesthetics is no longer indexed to or inclined toward
philosophy []; it does away with the pretensions of philosophy, without denying it
4 Francois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 82.
294 Representation
AMANDA BEECH
completely.5 As Laruelle concedes, philosophy enters into photo-fiction as an essen-
tial [] materiality, and in doing so is deprived of its pretensions of the absolute.6
And what is the photo-fictional camera?
It is a new type of object [] adding fiction to the photo according to a precise
logic, without imitation or dialectics, and then elucidating this structure. This
photo-fictional theoretical apparatus will be an aesthetic impossibility, a non-
aestheticizable or non-philosophizable impossibility, and it is as such that it
will realize a non-aesthetics of the photo. This photo-fictional apparatus []
is made only for generating fictions that are like theoretical captions that
eventually accompany [the viewing of] photos.7
In short, and to return to the considerations above, the construction is that photo-
fiction is a generic extension of the photographic apparatus, which is to say that it
is neutralized in its philosophical or aesthetic pretensions.8
If the aesthetic/philosophical regime of the image is temporal, unnatural, and irreal,
the image as photo-fiction is by contrast a generic matrixthe matrix here being the
extended box of the photo-fiction apparatus, to photo-fiction what a camera is
to a photo.9
*
This solution is, however, only an apparent one.
The lingering incompleteness of philosophy/aesthetics within the generic matrix,
together with the invitation to identify a hierarchy between non-philosophy and
philosophy and between nonstandard aesthetics and aesthetics, risks reinscribing
the relational problems outlined in the Duchampian paradigm. The problem here
tics and non-aesthetics to which the generic must be subordinated.
This hierarchy operating across both the science-image and the philosophy-image
dislodges the truth of the generic because what is claimed is impossible: that some
images are more generic than others.
5 Franois Laruelle, Photo Fiction, An Essay in Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk
(Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), 20 (translation modified).
6 Ibid., 18.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Ibid., 14 (translation modified).
9 Ibid., 15.
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 CONCEPT WITHOUT DIFFERENCE
* Consequently, and second, philosophy is reawakened as a real enterprise because
In order to settle this, we have to pay closer attention to Laruelles careful articu-
lation of the non-relation between standard regimes and the nonstandard axis of
the thought-image.
To achieve the overcoming of specific regimes, Laruelle invites an almost pragmatic
trust in the nature of things, while at the same time promising that a scientific
attitude can effect a new formation of thought out of philosophy. What Laruelle
calls the photo-fiction
represents the extinction pointrather than the suppression or destruction
pure and simpleof philosophy as ontology or World-thought, an
extinction that is effectuated through the infra-photographic objective
lens of the scientific stance in regard to the real. It testifies just as much
to the manifestation as such (the explicit manifestation) of science and
to its refusal of the World, as to the resistance of the latter and of the old
thoughtphilosophyof which it is the element.10
Philosophy, then, is to die a death through evolutionary means. It will be asympto-
tically extinguished.
It is a death effectuated through the scientific stance taken in regards to the
real.
It seems that this death requires no relation between philosophy and non-philosophy.
In Althusserian terms, it is the struggle between the life of a real force and the
death of the false.
* established. It requires thinking art in a truly generic way as much as a truly generic
Laruelles philosophy then marks the reality of philosophys death (and therefore
its own) and holds the truth of science to come.
Yet, even at this point of philosophys demise, two things happen that once again
recover a conditional relation between philosophy and non-philosophy: First,
Laruelles description of philosophys extinction serves to reenter the circle as another
form of spontaneous photo-fiction. While photo-fiction is not claimed to be philos-
ophy but its extension by science, that claim is nonetheless made on philosophys
behalf and so, as Althusser notes, remains distinctly philosophical.
10 Ibid., 15; and Franois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2011), 91.
296 Representation
AMANDA BEECH
the hitherto categorized irreal philosophical-aesthetics now actually turn out to
tell true stories: the story that evidences their demise.
The act of bearing witness to the evolutionary extinction of our bad regimes
reinforces the circle as the obstacle and remainder of a weak ideal, won as a booby
prize through another tale of self-transcendence.11
*
We must then carefully distinguish between the false claims to comprehend realities
through (the production of ) difference qua neutral genre and, on the other hand,
the real materialism that thinks the real as such.
Following Laruelle, science qua universal is the paradigm for a real materialism. The
counter-risk, however, is spontaneously to assume or neutralize scientific thought
itself, be it a natural or universal science; that is, to assume that any scientific
thought transcends the language that manifests its articulation, however abstract
and technical that language may be.
*
It is the scientific stance that does not naturalize scientific thought that provides
the clue for how art can effectively surpass the confines of our initial aesthetic
paradigm (which constrained the generic to difference) as a genre of the arbitrary
or neutral sign or concept.
What is advanced here is an interdisciplinary project of a new scientific realism.
Such a scientific realism challenges the ethical paradigm of art as it is presently
art, overcoming our predilection towards a genre of aesthetics, leaving behind of
the category of the uncategorizable. To not be Duchampian.
11 As Ray Brassier remarks, non-philosophy cannot give up on its determination of philosophy as the axiom
against which it determines itself. Brassier argues that Laruelles concept of adequation reproduces
certain strictly philosophical problems because while it may be perfectly coherent to claim, as Laruelle
does, that I am identical-in-the-last-instance with radical immanence, or that I think in accordance
with the real and that my thinking is determined-in-the-last-instance by it, it does not follow then that
I am the real qua One. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 136. That is, Laruelle confuses thinking with an identity that fixes both the
real and the human as category form and, in doing so, risks a transcendental individualism (Ibid., 137).
Representation 297
 CONCEPT WITHOUT DIFFERENCE

*
Not being Duchampian: we are not seeking a modification of art under the name
art, but rather an interrogation, traversal, and a leaving behind of art as a name for
Scale
difference. And also, crucially, the overcoming of the fear of aesthetics toward a
greater understanding of how we operate with and through aesthetics, not as stable
and established entities but rather as systems of force.

These are the central challenges for art made through and with science. At issue is
whether art can take the risk of annihilating its own identity.

298 Representation
Geographies of Time (The Last Pictures)
Trevor Paglen

On November 21, 2012, planet Earth acquired a new moon. It wasnt anything
particularly out of the ordinary. In fact, hardly anyone noticed. Since the former
Soviet Union placed the first artificial moon in space on October 4, 1957, the
worlds nations and corporations have added thousands of satellites to Earths
orbit. Some of them monitor the weather, others take pictures or relay telephone
calls. One of them, the International Space Station, even serves as temporary
home for humans. In 2012, theres nothing remarkable about adding new moons
to Earths vicinity.
Some of these satellites, however, are a great deal stranger than we realize.
The vast majority of satellites (and space debris) are in relatively low orbits, any-
where from a few hundred to a thousand kilometers above Earth. Because of their
close proximity to our planet, they experience small amounts of drag as they dart
through the highest wisps of the upper atmosphere. In time, drag accumulates,
the satellites slow down, and they eventually fall back to Earth. A small number
of other satellites, however, have an entirely different destiny. The majority of
communications satellitesproviding Internet bandwidth, broadcasting television
signals, routing credit card transactions, and streaming music toward the Earth
beloware in an orbit designed to keep the satellite stationary over a fixed point
on Earth. The television dishes seen on so many houses and apartment buildings
are pointed toward satellites based at a fixed location in the sky. To hover in one
spot, a satellite must orbit around the Earth at the exact same rate that the Earth
itself rotates. This is called a geosynchronous or geostationary orbit. Theres
only a very small band in space where this particular orbit works. The magic number
is 35,786 km above the equator. Several hundred communications satellites hover
at that distance from Earth, forming a ring of machines sometimes referred to as
the Clarke Belt.1
But the Clarke Belt is not only unusual for its orbital characteristics.
Communications satellites are so far from Earth that they experience no atmospheric
drag whatsoever. Hence, theyre never pulled back toward Earth. Every spacecraft

Information about Trevor Paglens The Last Pictures project is available at www.creativetime.org
/projects/the-last-pictures/.
1 The name honors science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who in 1945 proposed using
geosynchronous spacecraft to create global communications relays. Nonetheless, the name
Clarke Belt is somewhat unfair. The orbit was first theorized by the Russian aerospace
visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the late nineteenth century and the Slovenian engineer
Herman Potocnik first calculated its distance in 1928.

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 GEOGRAPHIES OF TIME (THE LAST PICTURES)
placed in the Clarke orbit over the last half century remains there (or in a slightly
higher graveyard orbit) to this day. Whats more, they will remain in Earths orbit cial markets. Over the course of a single generation, time sped up so quickly and so
indefinitely. The implications are profound: 35,786 km from Earth, some of human
civilizations greatest engineering achievements are effectively frozen in time. More
than the cave paintings at Lascaux, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China,
or the ancient city of atalhyk, the ring of abandoned satellites far above the
Earths equator will be human civilizations longest lasting artifacts. In fact, theres
really no comparison with any other human invention.
The ultimate fate of geosynchronous satellites lies with the sun. About four
billion years from now, the sun will have burned through most of its hydrogen and
will start burning helium. When that happens, our star will swell to become a red
giant and will probably swallow the Earth (and the lingering geosynchronous satel-
lites). But four billion years is a long time from now. For a bit of perspective, four
billion years is about sixteen times further into the future than the advent of the
dinosaurs was in the past; it is four times further into the future than the entire
history of complex multicellular organisms on Earth. A billion years from now, a
species as unrelated to humans as we are to ancient trilobites may look up at the sky
and see the ring of machines leftover from a civilization in the impossibly distant
past. Placing a satellite into geosynchronous orbit means placing it into the deep
and alien time of the cosmos itself.
One of these satellites is different from others in the Clarke Belt. Like most
spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, EchoStar XVI is a communications satellite. It
doesnt do anything appreciably different from what EchoStars I through XV have
done. Like its predecessors, EchoStar XVI is designed to broadcast pictures on
hundreds of television channels. But there is nevertheless something unique about
EchoStar XVI: it carries other pictures. Attached to its anti-earth deck, a gold-plated
aluminum housing contains a small silicon disc designed to last for billions of years.
Embedded into this disc is a collection of one hundred pictures.
EchoStar XVI and the image disc onboard have a profound and counterintuitive
set of relationships to time. On the one hand, the satellite is an instrument of speed,
transmitting hundreds of thousands of images per minute, all at the speed of light.
On the other hand, EchoStar XVIs materiality inhabits time (billions of years) in
a way that is utterly alien to human experience and understandings of history. As
such, EchoStar XVI, like other communications satellites, embodies a deep contra-
diction in time itself.
EchoStar XVI comes from a lineage of communication and transportation
technologies that have, in a relatively short historical period, fundamentally altered
our relationship to time and space. In the nineteenth century, the advent of steam
engines, trains, and telegraphs made the world dramatically smaller. Railroads meant
journeys that had once taken days or weeks were reduced to mere hours. Telegraph
cables meant messages that were once hand-carried by men riding horses could
now travel at the speed of light. Transportation and communication technologies
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TREVOR PAGLEN
integrated global commodities markets and led to the creation of international finan-
dramatically that humans found it nearly impossible to keep up. Communications
technologies had outstripped time-keeping. Time, it seemed, had been broken.
Nineteenth-century artists and philosophers tried to make sense of a new
world of speed, commerce, and distorted geographies. In 1844, J. M. W. Turner
showed the unmooring of time from human perception with a blurry painting called
Rain, Steam and SpeedThe Great Western Railway. Four years later, Karl Marxs
Communist Manifesto, declared that the constant revolutionizing of production, unin-
terrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. [] All that is solid melts into
air.2 He later expounded on this point, arguing that the continual speeding up of
time was one of capitalisms fundamental dynamics, which he famously described
as the annihilation of space by time.3
So complete was the nineteenth centurys annihilation of space and time that
time itself had to be reinvented. Before the railroads, each place kept its own time.
When the sun was overhead, the time was noon. In England, Oxford time was five
minutes behind Greenwich, and Leeds was a minute behind Oxford. Dover, in the
east, was separated from Penzance by half an hour.4 But in order to coordinate their
schedules and prevent accidents, the railways had to create their own system of
time, railway time, to bring the discipline of a shared clock to the towns and stations
along their routes. Railway time was the first step in a grand reinvention of time, an
international effort to engineer a centralized, common time. Time coordination,
explains historian of science Peter Galison, was an affair for the individual school
buildings, wiring their classroom clocks to the principals office, but also an issue
for cities, train lines, and nations as they soldered alignment into their public clocks
and often fought tooth-and-nail over how it should be done.5
The creation of absolute time meant subjugating localities, regions, and
nations to the centralized tick of a clock at the Royal Observatory in south London:
Greenwich mean time. Not everyone wanted to go along: in 1894, the French anar-
chist Martial Bourdin tried to blow up the Royal Observatory (his bomb exploded
prematurely, killing him). But by the end of the century, the transformation was
nearly complete. Time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the
cosmos, explains Rebecca Solnit, and became one administered by technicians
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476.
3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 539.
4 Dan Falk, In Search of Time: The History, Physics and Philosophy of Time (New York: Thomas Dunn
Books, 2008), 7071; see also
www.greenwichmeantime.com/info/railway.htm.
5 Peter Galison, Einsteins Clocks, Poincars Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2003), 40.
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 GEOGRAPHIES OF TIME (THE LAST PICTURES)
to link industrial activities to each other.6 Time became something that was both
absolute and malleable. The second hands at the Royal Observatory ticked uni-
formly, but time-bending technologies from railroads to telegraphs could be used
to manage, leverage, destroy, and create time anew, particularly in the service of
warfare or profit.7
The industrialization of time had a curious historical partner in the dis-
coveryand subsequent invasionof geologic time. In 1788, James Hutton pub-
lished his Theory of the Earth. By carefully cataloguing geologic strata, Hutton began
to realize that the Earth was far older than the six thousand years biblical scholars
had calculated. The world which we inhabit is composed of materials not of the
earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which []
had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land
was yet beneath the water of ocean. From the deep histories inscribed in rocks, he
said, we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.8 Hutton is credited
with the discovery of deep time: the timescale of tectonic plates and gradual ero-
sion, the forces that slowly sculpt the earths surface over millions of years, creating
mountains, canyons, continents, and seas. Just as the industrial age discovered deep
time, it began actively to shape it.
The Anthropocene is an informal term for the period in which humans
began to shape the earths surface on a planetary scale, and when political and
economic forces began to have geologic consequences. In his 1994 article On the
Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents, earth scientist Roger Hooke set out to
assess the impact of human activities such as agriculture and mining on the earths
surface. He found something remarkable: over the last hundred years or so, humans
have moved more sediment than has been moved by classical geomorphic processes.
Agricultural erosion, he estimated, moves about seventy gigatons of sediment
annually, almost twice as much as meandering rivers (at forty Gt/y). Mining and
highway construction move more earth than plate tectonics, glaciers, wave action,
and aeolian (wind) processes combined.9 The implication was profound. Shortly
after the Industrial Revolution, human activity eclipsed natural earth processes as
a geomorphic agent.
Other earth scientists have expanded Hookes work, suggesting the idea of an
anthropic force and proposing new fields of neogeomorphology or anthro-
pogeomorphology. Geologist Peter Haff explains: Anthropic modification
6 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York:
Penguin, 2004), 61.
7 For the space-time dialectics of capitalism, see David Harvey, A Companion to Marxs Capital
(New York: Verso, 2010), 37; and David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006).
8 John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 79.
9 Roger LeB. Hooke,On the Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,GSA Today, vol. 4, no. 9
(September, 1994): 217, 22425.
304 Scale
TREVOR PAGLEN
of landscape is a new and unique phenomenon, whose effect on the earths surface
may be as significant as the emergence of vascular plants four hundred million years
ago. Contemporary scientists wanting to understand earth processes, he argued,
might do well to study economics, sociology, demographics, and other fields usu-
ally associated with the soft social sciences.10 In the Anthropocene, the price of
gold futures determines whether mountains will rise or fall, and farm subsidies and
commodity prices influence the rate of erosion.
The Anthropocene is a period of temporal contradictions, a period in which
Marxs space-time annihilation chafes against the deep time of the earth. The coal-
fired plants and mass-produced automobiles of the industrial age have remade the
air, concentrating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and eating holes in the ozone. It
is an age in which ever-faster economic and political forces have ever more enduring
consequences. The timescale of climate change, which unfolds over thousands of
years, contradicts the timescale of human experience, which we measure in years or
lifetimes, and the timescales of capital accumulation, measured in quarterly profits.
With nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the timescale of geopolitics and strategic
military planning intersects the deep time of nuclear waste, which poisons its sur-
roundings for countless thousands of years. A cup of fast-food coffee is meant to be
sipped for a few minutes, but its Styrofoam takes more than a million years to biode-
grade. A carbon-saturated atmosphere, nuclear waste, and Styrofoam cups inhabit
space at the expense of time. As such, they become historic agents, producing their
own futures. In the Anthropocene, communications and transportation technolo-
gies are ruthlessly deployed to annihilate space by accelerating time, but in human
activitiesfrom coal burning to fast-food coffee cup manufacturingwe find an
equally pitiless annihilation of the future: something we might call the annihilation
of time by space. The fractures and folds in spacetime that form where the times-
cales of economics and politics collide with the deep time of geomorphology are
emblematic of the contemporary moment.
The various ways in which humans have remade time, both speeding it up and
slowing it down, show that time is not something that just happens, like a ticking
clock as backdrop to other activities; quite the opposite. Time is produced through
human activities, and through the things we make, and through our interactions
with the world around us. To quote physicist and theorist Karen Barad, Time is
articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices [] time itself
only makes sense in the context of particular phenomena.11 The implication, then,
is that the production of time is a political phenomenon. How, and in accordance
10 Peter K. Haff, Neogeomorphology, Prediction, and the Anthropic Landscape, draft paper, Division of
Earth and Ocean Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University,
Durham, NC, 2001), www.duke.edu/~haff/geomorph_abs/neogeomorph%20paper/
neogeomorphology.pdf.
11 Quoted in Rich Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism: Interview and Cartographies
(Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 66.
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 GEOGRAPHIES OF TIME (THE LAST PICTURES)
with whose interests, is time produced? Producing time carries a set of ethical obli-
gations that we have paid scant attention to: How to produce time in a manner that
is just, not only for the present, but for that which has yet to come?
Too often, we imagine the future to be an unknowable voidsomething
that does not exist because it has not happened yet. But much of the future has,
in fact, already taken place. Through the annihilation of time by space, the things
weve made have guaranteed certain futures at the expense of others. The prison
at Guantanamo Bay, for example, is still open and operating. The brute fact of
its sedimented concrete walls provides much of the inertia needed to carry it into
the future: it continues to exist, in large part, because it exists. In the longer run,
the climate will continue to change as the result of anthropogenic transforma-
tions to the atmosphere. Nuclear waste will poison great swaths of earth for tens
of thousands of years. And a ring of dead machines, far above the equator, will
silently watch it all unfold over millions of years. All of this has already happened,
in the future.
Earths new moon, EchoStar XVI, is an instrument of time, frozen in time.
While it whirls and hums with energy over its fifteen-year operational life, EchoStar
XVI will broadcast more than ten trillion pictures and video frames to earth-based
televisions and computer screens.12 All these pictures will be as fleeting as the radio
signals that carry them, appearing and disappearing with the speed of light. But
EchoStar XVI holds other pictures. A modest collection, to be sure, but one designed
to last far longer than the oldest cave paintings. A collection designed to transcend
the Anthropocene and to transcend deep time itself. A collection of pictures meant,
in part, to acknowledge the future.
12 This estimate assumes that EchoStar XVI broadcasts thirty frames per second on one thousand
channels over fifteen years.
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Computational Infrastructures
and Aesthetics
Nick Srnicek
Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations on tracings
are set in interaction. Thus, here the map is opposed to the structure; it can
open itself in all its dimensions; it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted
to all kinds of assemblies. A pragmatic map can be started by an isolated
individual or a group, it can be painted on a wall, it can be conceived
as a work of art, it can be conducted as a political action or as a mediation.
Flix Guattari, Reference Points for a Schizoanalysis1
Recent years have witnessed a resurgent philosophical interest in materialist and realist
ontologies.2 Following the lead of sociology, archaeology, and feminism, philos-
ophy is once again taken up with the task of thinking materiality. This ideational
movement is paralleled in turn by a political movement seeking to deal with the
complexity of the global capitalist world. The latter finds its intellectual inspira-
tion in Fredric Jamesons notion of cognitive mapping: those techniques that allow
individuals to situate themselves within a larger structural whole.3 Whereas at one
point the phenomenology of the world could plausibly be argued to correspond
with the structural forces of the economy, in todays globalized world, we are buf-
feted by forces far beyond our finite conceptual capacities. It is in this context,
this conjunctural moment, that we increasingly recognize the limits of relying on
internal cognitive capacities and subsequently the potentials within technology for
extending our minds.4 We exist in, as, and from socio-technical assemblages. The
complexity of these systems gives rise to both the need and the means to cogni-
tively map them, increasingly permeating our phenomenology with a new digital
aesthetic. The aim of this essay is to examine the political implications of this new
world of cognitive technologies.
1 In The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2011), 173.
2 For two representative examples see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Levi Bryant, Nick
Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism
(Melbourne: re-press, 2011).
3 Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 34760.
4 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
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 COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND AESTHETICS
Machinic Cognitive Capitalism
For the most part, these technologies find themselves associated with cognitive
capitalism, whose most striking feature of the past decade has been the degree
to which the supposedly unique qualities of human laboraffective, intelligent,
cunning, and communicativeare all being transformed into the fixed capital of
machinery. At their speculative edges, the computational infrastructure of todays
capitalism tangentially approaches the limits of physics, with the speed wars of
high-frequency trading forcing decisions into the nanosecond scale. More mun-
dane developments combine the collection of massive amounts of data about
individuals (purchasing habits, travel patterns, browsing history, and so forth)
with sophisticated mathematical analytics that provide forecasts for marketers.
Emerging developments, such as drone deliveries and automated driving, all portend
an increasingly automated and computational future. The world is being rebuilt
to communicate with itself, outside of human perception. It is giving rise to what
Benjamin Bratton calls the Stack:
The Stack is planetary-scale computation understood as a megastructure.
[] At the scale of planetary computation, The Stack is comprised of seven
interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Network, Address, Interface,
User. In this, it is an attempt to conceive of the technical and geopolitical
structures of planetary computation as a totality.5
It is the emerging global computational infrastructure that forms the material basis
of todays economy. Yet in spite of its ubiquity within circuits of capitalist accu-
mulation, the computational infrastructures being constructed also contain within
them the potential for repurposing.
In particular, they contain a potential response to one of the fundamental
problems of contemporary leftism: its inability to think the global economy.
Broadly speaking, analyses of neoliberalism tend to remain at either a local,
reactive level (for example, campaigns against welfare cuts, social housing cuts,
precarious work, and so on) or attempt a global analysis through obsolete dialectical
categories (David Harveys work being the paradigm here). For most of the left,
what is missing is a cognitive map of the situation we find ourselves inthat is to
say, the means to make our own world intelligible to ourselves through a situational
understanding of our own position.6 This type of knowledge situates the individual
observer in a larger array of forcesand remains, in a sense, unliveable by the indi-
vidual. In much the same way that Thomas Metzinger shows how consciousness
5 Benjamin Bratton, The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation,
Metahaven, December 16, 2012, mthvn.tumblr.com/post/38098461078
/thecloudthestateandthestack.
6 Jameson, Cognitive Mapping.
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NICK SRNICEK
cannot live the knowledge of itself as a fleshy entity (because to do so would simul-
taneously eliminate the consciousness that is aware), so too does cognitive mapping
of our structural position remain unliveable.7 It is instead recognized as a form
of abstract knowledge partially divorced from our phenomenology. In cognitive
mapping, the spectator has the opportunity to understand that what he is seeing
is how he is being seen8 the transformation of the first person perspective into
a third person perspective. What is required in order to make the structural image
of neoliberalism amenable to action is stereoscopic vision, combining the manifest
image and the scientific image, the local and the global, the ideological and the sci-
entific. The phenomenological everyday experience of being-in-the-world appears
in tension with the scientific and abstract image of our structural position. Yet
the issue here is not that the manifest gets eliminated by the scientific. Rather, the
manifest becomes material for the scientific perspectiveit is both its foundation
as well as its material. The global-structural to local-phenomenological shift here
needs to be made continuous (ideally both visually and conceptually), but this is
precisely what is its most difficult task. It is here that speculation on the material
nature of thought can be productively combined with the political manipulations
of technology in order to marshal together the resources and capacities needed to
construct a cognitive map.
Recent reflections on the nature of thought and its situatedness within com-
putational infrastructures has demonstrated that certain aspects of cognition can
be outsourced beyond our biological surface, entering into material circuits of
technology and augmenting our limited capacities. In fact, one of Bruno Latours
most significant insights is that complex societies cannot exist without such material
embodiments of social relations and cognition. We build, embed, and manipulate
objects into material infrastructures precisely in order to solidify a state of society.
These infrastructures thereby form both the reification of a state as well as the plat-
form for expanding into new states. Take technologies away from human societies
and one is left with very little, reliance on memory and institutionalization instead
being premised on fallible oral and auditory methods of interaction. In this regard,
representational technologiesthose technologies that expand our specifically
conceptual capacities to make intelligible large-scale structuresare particularly
crucial to the task of cognitive mapping. Such technologies have a long history,
particularly as employed by state and proto-state political formations:
The long-distance organs of perception of social complexity enabled the
state to see the past and the present and, consequently, to foresee and
program the future. [] Graphic statistics made it possible to encompass
7 Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004).
8 Mercedes lvarez, Tracing a New Map, in Situation Room, ed. Pablo de Soto (Barcelona:
dpr-barcelona, 2010), 13.
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 COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND AESTHETICS
in a glance the society as a whole, to compare and contrast all the objects
comprising it, and hence to make calculated forecasts. They contributed,
in fact, to the decline of the hegemonic regime of discourse and its
replacement by a dictatorship of measured factswhich would be the very
foundation of social planning, social security and national accountancy.9
While these technologies are ubiquitous in literatures on state-formation, they can
also be appropriated by critical perspectives. A critical use of these representational
technologies entails two primary types of cognitive mapson the one hand, an
economic model of contemporary neoliberalism, and, on the other, a model of a
post-capitalism system. The former provides a navigational tool (both epistemic
and political), while the latter provides a flexible cognitive map for a future system.
Yet what must be made clear is that the idea of cognitive mapping remains
empty insofar as it limits itself to a passive contemplation of a representation.
Cognitive mapping only takes on political significance once it generates an active
means for leveraging the dynamics of a system. It should, in true Jamesonian fashion,
be capable of augmenting our phenomenological experience in such a way as to
make clear the structural elements determining it, thereby making them visible
and open to transformation. It must be capable, in other words, of translating
structural forces into amenable aesthetic perceptions. One of the political prob-
lems of aesthetics is therefore not how to represent power, but how to create power.
How, in other words, does one use art in order to construct mechanisms of effec-
tive action? In a world where overwhelming complexity and the futility of central
planning are the default beliefs of neoliberal economics (that is, the basic Hayekian
point against communism), the creation of means to modulate complexity from
the bottom up is an essential political intervention. What must be constructed
is what John May calls a managerial surfacean interface that makes possible
the manipulation of a complex system. Yet whereas May sees the managerial surface
as a control mechanism and as a flight from reality, in fact, the logic of a complex
assemblage dictates that it is precisely the managerial surface that makes self-gov-
ernance and autonomy possible.10 In all these aspects, it is the figure of the control
room that most clearly concretizes them.
Opening the Local onto the Global
The control room operates here as both a metaphor (a physical embodiment of an
abstract diagram of local-to-global transitions) and a literal configuration of mate-
rials and cognitive capacities. These are centers of calculation that mediate between
9 Bureau d'etudes, "Representing the System," in de Soto, Situation Room, 30.
10 John May, Logic of the Managerial Surface, in Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building
13 (June 2012): 11624.
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NICK SRNICEK
local phenomenology and global structures in order to render a complex system
amenable to modulation and action. The classical control room finds its paradig-
matic example in the war room: products of that moment where existential threat
compelled capitalist economies to shirk their liberal pretenses and adopt a thorough
system of economic planning. The links between centralized economies and war are
so close that its no surprise to learn that Gosplan in the Soviet Union was inspired
by and modelled after Germanys World War I economic system.11 In these classical
modelsoften constructed by designers and architects manipulating technology
around human contoursemerges a system of top-down, highly centralized control,
with orders emanating from the top and acted upon by below.
Yet it is precisely these types of control rooms that are ineffective and made
obsolete after the failures of really existing communism. New situation rooms have
sloughed off the traditional pretenses toward full control and instead attempt to
modulate flows: examples include the traffic control rooms in global cities, border
management in politically sensitive areas, and the policing of major metropol-
itan areas.12 In this regard, the Chilean experiment with Cybersyn (an interactive
national cybernetic communications network utilized during the Allende period) is
an important precedent.13 Precisely because it incorporates worker autonomy and
worker control over the factories into a decentralized planning system, Cybersyn
tore apart the ancient ideas of Soviet Gosplan with its impersonal and tedious
bureaucracy. Cognitive mapping enters here both in the overall structure, which
aimed to modulate the national economy, as well as in the form of a simulator of
the Chilean economy. While the simulator was a relatively simple model of the
Chilean national economy at the time, the principle behind it still holds today:
melding epistemic accelerationism of economic science with political accelera-
tionism of post-capitalist planning. With todays computing power, this simulator
could not only be greatly expanded but could also run multiple possible outcomes
in order to determine the best possible one. Whereas the real economy today, run-
ning on a price system of information, can only run one outcome at a time, the
virtual economies of the simulators could choose which path through phase space
an economy would be best suited for.14
The figure of the control room therefore condenses within it (1) the necessity
of technology to extend cognitive capacities and map the current system, (2) the
necessity of translating this structural map into a local aesthetic, (3) the necessity
of technology to act as a means for leveraging power, and (4) the necessity of com-
putational infrastructures for achieving all of this.
11 Bureau dtudes, Representing the System, 33.
12 Jos Prez De Lama, From Control Rooms to Situation Rooms, in Situation Room, ed. Pablo de
Soto (Barcelona: Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2010), 38.
13 For a discussion of the history of Cybersyn, see Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology
and Politics in Allendes Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
14 W. Paul Cockshott, et al., Classical Econophysics (London: Routledge, 2009), 32930.
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Conclusion

The problem that remains is that most attempts at cognitive maps have stalled
at the level of the beautiful and evaded the level of the useful. The French artists
Bureau dtudes, for all the beauty of their work, are a prominent example. Their
works present global capitalism at a glance: intricate and detailed networks of
financial, political, and social relations embodied in alluring designs. Yet this work
remains content with the technological sublime. The viewer remains overwhelmed
at global capitalisms complexity, and struck by the beauty of the connections,
but the viewers capacity for transformation is left unaugmented. What is needed
instead are artworks that move beyond the replication of capitalisms complexity
and that seek to design means to begin thinking and altering the current conjunc-
tion. These are models that generate an understanding of how to take apart and
rebuild economic systems. What happens if a basic income is instituted? What
happens if automation permanently removes large numbers of workers from the
labor force? What happens if quantitative easing for the masses is carried out? Such
questions require a cognitive map to navigate the ramifications of new possible
paths. Moreover, these cognitive maps create new possible practices by expanding
the means of intervention and interaction with systems. For instance, Cybersyns
coordination of workers during a strike by the bourgeoisie was made possible by its
cognitive map of the Chilean economy. In this regard, such cognitive maps literally
create power by generating new capacities to act in the world.
In conclusion, what is needed is not a perpetual nomadism or a withdrawal
from power (two standard figures of contemporary leftism); instead, what is neces-
sary today is a counter-hegemonic operation. The field of power and the shaping of
material infrastructures and social relations all need to be contested and fought for,
not removed from struggle. The material infrastructures and cognitive extensions
provided by technology act as a platform for both speculative political thought
and action.

Fig. 21

312 Scale
Fig. 22

Fig. 23
Fig. 24
Fig. 25
 Real Noise Acts
Mikko Canini

Most are now aware of the arms race known as high-frequency trading currently
underway in the market as investment firms, deploying custom-coded algorithms,
compete to exploit microfluctuations and capture the bits that add up to bytes
that add up to dollars. As this practice relies absolutely on speed and volume (any
individual buy or sell is evaluated by a system that counts in microseconds and
calculates in microprofits), its most noted effect has been the competition for
physical proximity to the various exchange servers and access to the fiber-optic
cables through which the market streams. In the first instance, this points to the
material limit rapidly being approached by disparate teams of mathematicians,
coders, engineers, and their financiers: the speed at which information can travel.
The obvious consequence of this acceleration toward the material horizon is that
the closer they get to this limit, the less marked the differences (and therefore the
possibility for competitive advantage) between each firm. If we had, so far, fully
accounted for the dynamics of high-frequency trading, the inevitable resolution is
that, taken as a whole, the practice would become janitorial: predictably vacuuming
up the small change in a role accommodated for byand eventually indispensable
tothe market. (There are indications that this might already be happening, as
the firms that specialize in this practice have reported diminishing returns in the
years following their first explosive profits.) However, the possibility of resolution
is forestalled by other strategies that exploit not so much raw technological power
as the theorization and practice of noise.
In 2010 the newswire Dow Jones introduced a service called Lexicon that
delivers real-time financial news translated into actionable form for its subscribers
computers to parse. In the first instance, this provision simply underscores the
raw power of computer-assisted trading insofar as no human trader could read
and assimilate this constant stream of data while analyzing the market to exploit
any lag between the immediacy of the news and its effects. The more fundamental
principle at work, however, is the capacity for algorithms to recognize meaning in
noiseto draw information from data. If in the above example this is rendered as a
simple effect of speed (the possible effect of any specific bit of news on the market
Fig. 26 may well be better understood by the mind than the algorithm, and the latter only
acquires its advantage through the raw computational power that backs it), this
speed, which is after all the effect of power, is also deployed to explore the noise
of the market in order to generate information. In one tactic, the noise of real-
time market data is scanned for signs that a large fund is buying specific securities
in order that the high-frequency traders system can leverage its speed, buying up

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 REAL NOISE ACTS
these securities and immediately selling them for a marginal but significant profit.
In response, these large funds now deploy their own algorithms to camouflage their
trading activities, breaking up larger trades into smaller units that they hope will
be indistinguishable from noise. Market analysis firms that commercialize their
ability to read market noise have stepped into this fray, selling their information to
teams hoping to uncover competitive strategies and to see if their own algorithmic
signatures were identified. And of course, there is the practice discovered by market
analysis of introducing noise (through the tactical dispersal of algorithms that,
say, place tens of thousands of buy orders per second before canceling them over
extended periods) in order to increase latency (a kind of noise) in a system for which
ones own productive algorithms are tuned accordingly.
In very practical, immediate, and diverse ways, high-frequency trading is
involved with noise, and this makes it a useful model through which to think about
recent work in noise theory. What I am particularly interested in are those theoret-
ical models that take noise, as a figure, to be invested with subversive potential, a
potential analogous to the possibility of the political act in the field of the social.1
If this is a big claim, and it is, the reasoning is nevertheless sound. The logic is
best explicated through thinking about noise as a category of music production:
noise as (anti-genre) genre.2 For the musician, the challenge of producing noise
properly, and avoiding any of the mannerisms that we might expect when presented
with noise music (which function to standardize the genre and thus negate its
aspiration to be noise), is significant. For this reason, certain practical principles
have come to be articulated for the noise artist: improvisation, dissonance, the use
of nontraditional instruments and sounds, and, above all, the principle of non-
repetition. (Non-repetition is fundamental if sound is to escape the structuring
principles of rhythm and melody and be noise, not music.) Formally, then, claims
for the radicality of noise as a music are justified, at least to the degree that (a neces-
sarily specific instantiation of ) noise evades assimilation as genrethe established
order that structures the production and reception of music.
From this short description, it is clear why this model of noise would be
attractive to those interested in theorizing the political act. The act, as a disruptive
gesture that forcibly reframes the symbolic order, is opposed here to an action, which
1 For examples of this position, see Mattin and Anthony Iles, eds., Noise & Capitalism (Donostia-San
Sebastian, Spain: Areteleku Audiolab, 2009).
2 Ray Brassier notes: In being used to categorise all forms of sonic experimentation that ostensibly
defy musico-logical classificationbe they para-musical, anti-musical, or post-musicalnoise
has become a generic label for anything deemed to subvert established genre. It is at once a
specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be subsumed by genre.
Genre is Obsolete, in Noise and Capitalism, 62. For this reason, everything from Beethoven
to free jazz to black metal can be articulated through noise. However, for our purposes, noise
music can simply refer to a category of music production whose practitioners are explicit in
their commitment to exploring radical notions of noise, and includes such figures as John Cage,
The Nihilist Spasm Band, and Hijokaidan.
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MIKKO CANINI
is any gesture that is already accounted for by this order. In the political dimen-
sion, the acts paradigmatic instantiation is obviously revolution. As it is typically
understood, what allows for the act to occur in the first instance is the subjects
alienation from a complete absorption in the symbolic order. Put simply, for the
act, the order that structures the subjects world must first be denaturalized insofar
as the subjects alienation from this order is at the same time the acknowledgement
of this order as contingent and mutable. What this inevitably involves is some kind
of engagement with the real, namely that which is unaccounted for by the sym-
bolic order, indeed, that which the order attempts to foreclose. If, in music, noise
is inescapably an exploration of the space outside the symbolic order (of genre), it
is at the same time an exploration of the real as such, and is in this sense a model
for radical alterity.
Part of what makes this model of noise and its relationship to the real con-
vincing is noise musics inherent antagonism. This antagonism is not because noise
needs to be aesthetically aggressive (John Cages 433 demonstrates this nicely),
but because in situating itself as music it needs to perform its otherness. According
to Jacques Lacan, of course, the real is experienced as threatening to the degree
that it undermines the integrity of the symbolic order and that orders capacity to
organize the subjects experience of reality. And it is easy enough to map this on to
noise musics antagonistic otherness. However, so far as this model of noise exists
as a negative relation to the symbolic order, it is that order which decides whether
this or that is noise. And if, in this model, noise is our stand-in for the real, then
what distinguishes the real (i.e., noise) from banal reality (say, sound, in general)
is its framing as such by the symbolic. In this case, then, the real is rendered as the
effect of a positioning, or attitude, on the part of the symbolics subject.
In order to articulate the problem with this account, we will return to the
example of high-frequency trading. It is immediately observable that the model of
noise being employed here is of a different kind. Noise, the markets oceans of 1S
and 0S that comprise the practices milieu, is not the real, but merely reality. In the
simple bifold model weve been describing, reality simply names the matterthe
undifferentiated all of everythingon which the symbolic is understood to work.3
From the level of the subject, of course, reality is reality-as-mediated-by the sym-
bolic, and we can call this ground. The noise ground that forms the world of
the market articulates one problem with the noise model of the real weve already
pointed toward, which is that noise as such doesnt trouble the symbolic so far as
it can be articulated as (mere) noise. (When noise appears in that space organized
for it by the symbolic it is nothing more than a recognized element of the what-is.)
3 The distinction here between reality and the real is not dissimilar to the difference between
the real as it is articulated in early and late Lacan. In the former, the real simply names the
undifferentiated matter on which the symbolic is understood to work, while the articulation
of the real in late Lacan intervolves the real with notions of traumatic excess.
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 REAL NOISE ACTS
Noise, as it exists in the model of the market, is not formally antagonistic for the
symbolic, but is, rather, indifferent, having been domesticated as one of the sym-
bolics elements. (It is of course not a question of intentionality but the extent to
which this noise conforms to the role accorded to it in ground.) This indifference,
or at least non-antagonism, gives us a clue as to why the noise (music) model above
inevitably articulates the real in its subjective dimension, which is that its noise is
fundamentally a representation of noise that, as an intentional (art) thing, exists for
the subject (in the first instance, anyway).
If indifferent noise in the market model is analogous to pre- or un-symbolic
reality, where nonetheless this noise is accommodated as ground by the symbolic,
one might expect that the real makes its appearance in those moments when analysis
uncovers some previously unobserved aspect that has escaped symbolization, for
example, the discovery of a pattern that signals the presence of an algorithm that
expresses a novel strategy. One can imagine here a technician running a mass of
data through a freshly tweaked algorithm and finding not the previously observed
noise, but that part of that noise was the result of a pattern of orders and cancel-
lations, emanating from a single IP address in bursts every 400 milliseconds, 1200,
3600. If this does not fully work as a model for the real, it is because this operation
is already accounted for by the symbolic: it is precisely the kind of thing that the
original algorithmic analysis was expecting to find, even if its specific instantiation
surprises. If the real is to have any meaning beyond its effects for the subject, it
must be both material and novel (and therefore antagonistic to ground if only to
the extent that its novelty is disruptive). Like the act, it must disrupt the symbolic
order in a way that is coextensive with its own appearance; unlike the action, its
existence cannot have been prescribed a place in ground. The market model of noise
provides us with a useful analogue, most dramatically instantiated by the so-called
flash crash of May 6, 2010.
On that date at 14:42, the US stock market experienced a sudden, massive
plunge before returning, more or less, to its previous state twenty-five minutes later,
in the process evaporating and then recreating one trillion dollars in assets. Though
there is disagreement over the causal mechanisms, the official report published by the
US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission (CFTC) argues that the event was sparked by a single, poorly executed
algorithm that, in the first instance, caused the value of the shares it was written to
sell to sharply decline.4 The effects of this mishandled algorithm were then exacer-
bated by high-frequency trading algorithms that had first purchased the contracts
en masse as they appeared on the market, but then rapidly began unloading them
as their value fell, accelerating the drop. As these effects were registered across the
4 Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010, prepared by the staff of the US Commodity
Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Washington,
DC, September 30, 2010). Available at www.sec.gov/news/studies/2010/marketevents-report.pdf.
322 Scale
MIKKO CANINI
market, and because of the speed and scale in which the event unfolded, these algo-
rithms got caught up in feedback loops with one another, rapidly buying and selling
the same securities back and forth and in the process driving the prices of some blue-
chip stocks to a single cent, while others ballooned to $999.99, if only temporarily.
Although there are numerous reasons to doubt the accuracy of this official
account, of special interest for us is that this narrative articulates the origin of
this event as the result of a rogue algorithm (programmed to sell a large block of
shares at a rate set to a percentage of the trading volume of the previous minute,
but crucially without consideration of price or time, and with the consequence
that too many shares were offered too quickly, thereby driving down their value).
In effect, the report frames the event as the result of an externality insofar as the
alien logic of the algorithm in question did not conform to the logic of the market
to the extent that it continued to put shares up for sale even as this action continued
to drive down the value of the shares that it was still programmatically committed
to sell. This narrative of a disruptive externality aligns with the noise music model
of the real insofar as the real (in this case, the logic of this specific algorithm) is
understood to derive its power to subvert the symbolic order precisely through its
otherness to this order. However, the SEC and CFTCs practical responsethe
introduction of virtual circuit breakers that automatically suspend trading on
shares that are seen to move up or down more than a certain percentage over
a short period of timegives the lie to their own narrative.
There was nothing novel about the original trades, either in volume (which
was not uncommon for the investment firm in question) or in the use of this par-
ticular algorithm (which had been deployed in the past). All of its actions were
actions, gestures that were legal in the sense of conforming to the symbolic orders
established practices. The response (of introducing circuit breakers) evidences this
in that officials could not identify a core generator responsible for the event of May
2010 against which to regulate (despite the narrative of the report). Its response was
therefore confined to the attempt to register and limit the effects of this unknown
cause should it reappear (which it has numerous times since). And it is here, in our
market model of noise, that we find the real: when, as a consequence of the normal
run of things, reality returns unexpected effects and a spectral shape emerges from
noise. It is the experience of ground-become-figure: some hidden element of mate-
rial reality appears to act, to escape the symbolically mandated options to produce
a new, simultaneously undermining the symbolic orders hegemony insofar as this
new has no place in the established order.
While the preceding does not invalidate the noise music model of the real, it
does require a different model of the act. As we have seen, the noise music model
values the real insofar as it demonstrates alterity and therefore carries the potential
to provoke an act: the subject, when presented with the choice between actions A or
B, and having caught a glimpse of the noisy real beyond the symbolic order, chooses,
instead, nineteen. That is, the subject acts when it performs a gesture that escapes
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 REAL NOISE ACTS

the symbolically mandated options and thereby reflexively forces a reconfiguration
of ground, of the what-is recognized and what-is possible. The subjective (noise
music) model of the real is thus paired with the thoroughly subject-affirming model
of the act. From a different perspective, however, the realin its appearance as a
new in groundis already involved in this work of forcing. This real does not instan-
tiate the possibility of an act (as a gesture that reconfigures the symbolic) since,
in this sense, an act has already occurred. However, as a new, the real necessarily
opens up the possibility for new gestures, or what we might here call quasi-acts.
These gestures, made possible by the appearance of the real, are not acts as such to
the extent that they do not originate in the subject (but are, rather, made available
to this subject). But nor are they properly actions, for they do not originate in the
symbolic order and therefore participate, as all actions do, in the maintenance of
this order. And it is here that we come to the crux of the matter, which is that this
gesture (neither an act nor action) only has meaning in relation to the real, while
from the perspective of the symbolic it can only appear as noise.
Thick Dia-Chronic Crash.
Incision into Delay
Andy Weir
Drone script: Scene from moving train window. The glass is in focus to
pick up plays of sunlight over cracks and texture of its surface, turning
the landscape behind into a smoothly shifting blur of bokeh. It looks,
as much as can be gathered, like generic Western European country-
side. The shot is held long enough to announce itself as a drift from
narrative. An electric hum slowly swells and fades, interrupted with
sporadic PA announcements about die Versptung. Focus pulls to indus-
trial landscape approaching view. Machinery overflows contaminated
ignimbrite and tuffaceous rock. Inside steel casing, copper canisters
cool in storage pools.

Contemporary Art Tension

Delay in Glass
Use delay instead of picture or
painting; picture on glass becomes
delay in glassbut delay in
glass does not mean picture
on glass
Its merely a way
of succeeding in no longer thinking
that the thing in question is
a pictureto make a delay of it
in the most general way possible
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (The Green Box) (1934)

Thanks in particular to the ongoing research project The Matter of Contradiction at the
Treignac Project (201213), as well as to the projects Does Contemporary Art have an
Ontology? (2012), Escapologies (201213), and When The Site Lost The Plot (2013), all at
Goldsmiths, University of London, for research, collaborative work, and opportunities to discuss
and produce the material on which this paper is based.

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 THICK DIA-CHRONIC CRASH
What is the time of contemporary art? Boris Groys addresses this question in his
2009 essay Comrades of Time, proposing the contemporary as a time of delay,
uncertainty, and indecision.1 It is, for Groys, a hesitant boring time, allowing for
reflection on the projects of modernity. He defines it as a time of suspense, or wasted
time, that precisely through its nonproductive excess gains its power, escaping
absorption into history or product. This suspense could also be understood as a
specific form of tensiona holding in wait for thought, or openness to a plurality
of reflections and interpretations. A paradigmatic aesthetic operation, for such
contemporaneity is the extended delay of the slow, correlating conveniently to an
affect of escape from the hyper-accelerated subjectification of semiocapital,2 time
to think, and the warm encasing of the body in stretched images and bass drawl. In
2011, for example, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg staged an exhibition titled The Art of
Deceleration, which included deceleration cubes where viewers could immerse
themselves in contemplation of works such as Douglas Gordons video 24 Hour
Psycho (1993) feeling the suspense of Hitchocks film elongate into the tense lure of
contemporary delay.3 It is also 24 Hour Psycho that sparks inchoate reflections by the
protagonist of Don DeLillos novel Point Omega. Watching the work at MoMA in
New York, this character notes, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving
science and philosophy and nameless other things.4 Gordons flow-of-nameless-
thought-provoking work is premised on two simple operations: first, using video
to delay and extend the temporality of Hitchocks Psycho to twenty-four hours; and
second, through gallery installation and framing, situating this under the conditions
of contemporary art viewing;5 a readymade delay in video.
Delay draws in and spits out, while it anticipates and opens to a subject
of reflection. In 24 Hour Psycho, temporal material coagulates, addressed to a
viewing interpretive subject. Encountering the image, attention is jolted inward,
stuck, through its seductive unfamiliar pace, which lures a responsive perceptual
body open to the image as it sticks and drifts, a subjectivity bound to the image
in sweet horror. At the same time, attention is jolted outward, repelled, through
the self-conscious unfamiliarity of the slowing operation, drawing attention to the
conceived limit of the worktwenty-four hoursin excess of its experienced force.
Through this slowing, the work, firstly, proposes a utopian gesture of subjective
1 Boris Groys, Comrades of Time, e-flux, no. 11 (December 2009). See www.e-flux.com
/journal/comrades-of-time.
2 Franco Berardi Bifo, Cognitarian Subjectivation, e-flux, no. 20 (November 2010).
See www.e-flux.com/journal/cognitarian-subjectivation/.
3 The Art of Deceleration: Motion and Rest in Art from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Weiwei
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, November 12, 2011April 9, 2012.
4 Don DeLillo, Point Omega (London: Picador, 2010), 12.
5 Understood here as a viewing condition that, following an extended logic of the readymade,
frames anything whatever as art, creating dependence for meaning upon the prioritization
of an interpretive subject (figured conceptually and affectively), addressed as free within the
meta-institutional framework of contemporary art itself.
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ANDY WEIR
transformationattention is bound to the image in a viscous perceptual drawl,
a molecular drift that nonetheless plays out within a given territory. Secondly,
on its conceptual premise, through awareness of a limiting frame, a subject is
bound to a limit constituted by the duration of the piece in its institutional set-
ting. In this oscillating movement between immersive image and distancing
image, the work performs a play of self-loss and self-masteryof indetermi-
nate freedom and controlled autonomya production of affect and thought
that point to but are contained within and rely upon a specific subjective frame.
Its promise, calling out from the dark gray analogue hole of Janet Leighs jud-
dering throat to DeLillos anonymous character, or the cubic communites of
decelerators addresed by the exhibition in Wolfsburg, is that of exchanging your
capital-speed-subsumed time for the liberating suspense of contemporary delay.
What it pays out in return, however, is a specific subjectification premised on
freedom within its own frame, inseparable from the spirit and affective demands
of current neoliberalism.6 Subject, environment, and screen, through the inci-
sion of contemporary temporality, form an exogenically tense system of open-
ness, staged through the affective play of flux and control, which maintains
their mutually supportive limits.7 The time of contemporary art is premised
on this field of reversible exchange, where subject and artwork are mutually
co-constituted within its meta-institutional framework.
Drone script: Scene cuts to viewpoint of a UAV hexacopter. It surveys
granite bedrock walls cut with exploratory boreholes, bounces LIDAR
through access tunnels, and drops through dolostones and shales deep
into the earth.
Dia-chronic Image
The deep geological repository is a site designed to store nuclear waste securely
underground without future maintenance. The time of nuclear storage and decay
is of great concern to human beings; yet at the same time this projection of
a future without maintenance also invokes a time span indifferent to the human,
6 Contemporary art, in other words, is structurally and ideologically inseparable from the legacy
of the myth of freedom. As Matthew Poole puts it, This seems to be exactly the dilemma we
face today in democratic states organized centrally around the principles of capitalist economic
imperatives: there is total freedom within the bounds (law) of the system that produces those
freedoms, either/both representative democracy and Post-Fordist Capitalism. Matthew Poole,
Anti-Humanist Curating, Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 9, no. 2 (2010): 99.
7 Exogenic tension is an economical tension [] whereby the system, instead of staving off or
dismissing exteriority, economically binds it within the affordable duplicity of capacity
and exorbitant external world. Reza Negarestani, Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on
Geophilosophical Realism, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 17 (2011): 28.
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 THICK DIA-CHRONIC CRASH
that of the continuum of deep time.8 The thinking and material construction
of these sites, therefore, is premised upon registering and modeling conditions
not dependent on the priority of a free interpretive subject separated from
its objects of concern. This deep temporality contradicts and is unaccounted
for by the time of contemporary art, failing to be bound to its limits. If delay
promises freedom while opening to resolution by a transcendent subject, the
repository designs a scenario where any such transcendence is flattened out
into its surrounding environment. Its architecture is proposed as a defense
against this ungrounding, which attempts to manage contagion through the
fiction of control over an indifferent world.9 What the repository registers, ultimately,
is the horror of a real of which we are already a part since we cannot be separated
from it, where any transcendent positioning of the human subject against a static
nature has already been undermined.10 Against the space to think within a framed
environment of the delay, it forces thought to hurtle toward an unknown limit of its
own irreversible decay. This can be understood in terms of moving toward a time
of extinction without becoming bound to finite limits or recursive futurity,11 and,
drawing on Franois Laruelle, as an incision into the reciprocal reversible co-
constitution of being and thought.12
8 The half-life of Uranium-238 in spent nuclear fuel, for example, is 4.46 billion years. See Richard
J. D. Tilley, Understanding Solids: The Science of Materials (New York: Wiley, 2004), 501. This almost
mirrors the time of 4.5 billion years from now, proposed by Jean-Francois Lyotard as the
time of the extinguishing of the sun, and consuming of the terrestrial horizon. See Jean Francois
Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), 910.
9 It is a fiction insofar as none have yet been designed that store high-level nuclear waste. For
discussion of this, as well as design without future maintenance, see the art research
project by Smudge Studio, Containing Uncertainty (2010) at fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/24
/containing-uncertainity-design-for-infinite-quarantine. The argument for fiction can be extended
by considering the role the repository plays in imagining both a world of human control over
radiation and a world without humans, while actually collapsing both of these scenarios into
a situation where inside (contamination) and outside (nature) become impossible to separate.
10 It registers, in other words, the shock of the Anthropocene as the geological age that marks the
evidence and extent of human activities on their environment, flattening out the priority of
the human as one object among others. See, for example, lamatiere.tumblr.com/ungrounding
-the-object.
11 This is situated, therefore, against the recuperation of radiological temporality through its
folding, evident for example in Susan Schupplis analysis of such time as anarchic feedback
loops between radically non-contiguous temporalities in which the future-yet-to-come is overlaid
onto the past in a process of continuous modulation. See Susan Schuppli, The Most Dangerous
Film in the World, in Tickle Your Catastrophe: Imagining Catastrophe in Art, Architecture and
Philosophy ed. Frederik Le Roy, Nele Wynants, and Dominiek Hoens (Gent: Academia Press,
2011), 12641. Such analysis relies upon the reversible co-constitution of irreducible excess
potentiality and actual punctual eruption, which is undermined by the irreversible cut.
12 Reversible, drawing on terms from Franois Laruelle, as a form of mutual co-constitution
premised on a bifurcated real. The dual reciprocal symmetry of reversibility is opposed by
Laruelle to the irreversibility of the unilateralization and contingency of a second term by the
One which however does not posit this second term and, consequently, is not determined in
turn by it. See Franois Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy,
trans. Rocco Gangle (London: Continuum, 2010), 15.
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ANDY WEIR
It is this correlation of being and thought that has been brought into question
by Quentin Meillassouxs After Finitude. Meillassoux uses the term dia-chronic to
refer to the statements made by science about events anterior or ulterior to every
terrestrial-relation-to-the-world.13 While the arche-fossil or fossil-matter
plays the role of indicating the existence of ancestral reality or event,14 the dia-
chronic statement includes the claims to make verifiable and meaningful reference
to this matter as well as to events ulterior to the extinction of the human species. For
Meillassoux, such a statement, which includes describing the decay of radioactive
material, introduces a temporal discrepancy between thinking and being: the
meaning of the dia-chronic statement about a radioactive decay older than all
terrestrial life is only conceivable if it is construed as absolutely indifferent to the
thought that envisages it, referring to something both contingent and absolute.15
This raises the question of what the conditions of meaning would be for such a
statement, leading to contradictions for correlationist thought, which is defined
through its refusal of the absolute and its wedding of thinking to beingwe can
only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, never to either term
apart from the other.16 Through the dia-chronic statement, thoughts capacity to
think what is, whether thought itself exists or not, is unveiledthought thinks its
own contingency. Meillassoux, therefore, uses this contradiction to build his argu-
ment against correlationism and speculative proposals of rational mathematical
access to the real.
Art that draws on the deep geological repository has a different relation to
the dia-chronic than does the scientific or philosophical statement.17 The former
manifests temporal collisions through the complexities of their material embod-
imentsimultaneously as conceptual (through the conditions of its framing as
art) and as material recalcitrance. It is this traumatic investigation, both interior
and inasssimilable to the contemporary horizon, that can be understood as the
dia-chronic imagedefined as art practices registration of time indifferent to the
human subject (deep time) through materializations addressed, at least partly, to
human subjects.18 The gelatinous dia-chronicity of this image acts as machinic reg-
ister of exposure to deep time, intercessor to its inassimilable objecthood, while its
13 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008), 112.
14 Ibid., 10.
15 Ibid., 117.
16 Ibid., 5.
17 Such as, for example, the Containing Uncertainty project (see note 8). See also Ele Carpenters
Nuclear Cultures (blog), nuclear.artscatalyst.org.
18 Reza Negarestani defines trauma as a universal and contingent transplantation of the
exteriority and regional realization of openness. See Negarestani, Globe of Revolution, 30.
Negarestani also discusses the non-dialectical negativity of the insider, as an interiorized yet
inassimilable (unilateralized) negativity which uses the economic affordability of the conservative
horizon as an alternative medium for the eruption of exteriority. See Reza Negarestani,
Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy, in The Speculative
Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 210.
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 THICK DIA-CHRONIC CRASH
ungrounding humiliation of the anthropocentric suggests a horror unaccounted for
by the bounded-image-thought of the contemporary. What the latter depends upon,
through the condition of its viewing, as well as through its play of image, affect, and
thought, is a subject/object split that assumes the transcendentalization and priority
of a viewing, participating or interpreting subject. The time manifested in the dia-
chronic image, on the other hand, is that of an absolute indifference to this split,
and so an indifference to the sovereignty or openness of the subject-viewer addressed
by the work. As art, the dia-chronic image traumatizes contemporary conditions of
presentation and representation through interiorizing material indifference to their
limits. While the arche-fossil brings into question the conditions of meaning of
the scientific statement, the dia-chronic image brings into question, and so incites
reflexive analysis of, the conditions of meaning for contemporary art, which is forced
to think its own contingency.
Drone script: The repository site is approached from a number of rep-
resentational angles. It is diagrammatized and digitalized. Pans scurry
or sweep across unremarkable wall features, dark and indistinct, while
shots of inside and outside merge into a flat and indistinct procession.
Images repel and rebut containment in vision.
Opaque Aesthetics
The dia-chronic image runs into a number of problems. First, a motif of opacity
emerges. This opacity has two faces: on the one hand, as thought is put into contact
with the unimaginable, it can be figured as romantically sublime, serving to institute
a limit to knowledge through the ultimate unknowability of what can only be felt
as beyond all possibility of measurement.19 On the other hand, it can also be banal,
steeped in its own failures and incapacities, figured as a rejection of any sensuous
response to deep time.20 We are left, in other words, with either the epistemological
emptiness, pseudo-religiosity and political quietism of an affect of wonder,
or a simple rejection of art as form of knowledge of the real. Neither are sufficient. This
two-faced opacity suggests that figuration of the repository is affecting in a way
irreducible to its reception and, simultaneously, that this horror of the image is
unreadable through its qualities as they appear to perception, leaving only a repellent
19 See, for example, the underground anechoic chamber as Repository Experience proposed by
Liam Croft and James Perry, using the architecture of the void as an image of the unspeakability
of the repository materials in Half-Life: A Deep Geological Repository for Nuclear Waste (2012), available
at www.presidentsmedals.com/Project_Details.aspx?id=3063.
20 William Verstraetens Metamorphosis (2012), for example, a painted repository exterior gradually
fading to become invisible by 2103, can be read as drawing attention to the failures of paint to
figure deep radioactive temporalities adequately.
330 Scale
ANDY WEIR
surface that can not define any real power of the image. Secondly, refusing the sub-
lime limit-institution of unknowability as its end, such opacity necessitates didactic
supplements in the form of fiction and theory. Such fictions excavate the strangeness
of a world opaque to subjective reconfiguration, but remain at the level of subjective
fictions. At the same time, through description or theoretical explanation, deep time
is brought back under the condition of existing philosophy and existing subjectifi-
cations, subordinating arts potential to think and its capacity to change.
Drone script: Pyroclastic soaked chrono-dread accelerates, chewing at the
edges of the skin like a William S. Burroughs tape experiment melted
into rock. Through sonic fictions, the force of deep times abduction is
captured and transmitted virally through blocks of recorded and cam-
ouflaged sound.
The incision of the dia-chronic image interrupts the bipolar drift between the
romantic irreducibility of art and the didactic reduction of it to existing theory,
creating another tension, one that does not anticipate its resolution by a subject
but is triggered by a cut across the subject, opening toward panic. Stripped of its
qualities, the dia-chronic image becomes a surface for these anxieties, transmitting
and dispersing them though media networks. While the bounded image-thought
of the contemporary immunizes against the real, open to a pre-negotiated outside
that perpetuates its survival, the dia-chronic image turns immunization to auto-
phagic dieback, performing its own paradoxical limitations through the production
of an affect of simultaneous panic and reassurance (its all OK, its just an image).
While the figure of the bounded image-thought is the credit cardit will give you
as much freedom as you want because it knows it can afford youthe figure of
the dia-chronic image-thought is a valiumic vampiricism, biting your throat while
whispering into your ear that its all going to be OK.
Drone script: Image data files compress. Acoustic fossil oscillation detec-
tion, used by theoretical cosmologists to infer properties of the early
universe through modeling sound waves, is combined with the use of
computer simulations to model the material effects of stored nuclear
waste over an extended time period beyond human life. Together these
methods are used to simulate future acoustic oscillations.
Untitled
Contemporary art feigns to offer absolute freedom while establishing the limits of
an affordable exorbitance. This relies upon a temporality that reaffirms the finitude
of the interpretive subject as determining center of its world. The dia-chronic image
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 THICK DIA-CHRONIC CRASH
cuts across this, severing its reliance on the reversible co-constitution of being and
thought, and transplanting unassimilable exteriority within, while also running into
further problems. Thinking art synchronous with the radical decentering of events
such as nuclear waste storage, as well as with realist and materialist philosophy,
incites this traumatic complicity with the temporal conditions of contemporary
art.21 Responding to this, if art wishes to escape its inflated promise of indeterminate
freedom and produce speculative knowledge within the real, it can no longer rely
upon the subjectifying demands and desires of the contemporary nor abandon them
for a practical leap into an untheorized absolute. These conditions instead become
part of its materials, flattened out according to the contingencies of an immanent
and continuous real, in a process of self-devouring reflexivity.
This brings into question arts conditions and alliances, as well as those
of the data processes it employs. As such, it demands ongoing experimentation
in methodologies and modes of presentation that refuse a reprioritization of sub-
jective experience through affect and interpretation, or impose a limit to artistic
knowledge through didactic reduction, aesthetics of opacity or the sublime. If the
time of contemporary art is bound to the limits of neoliberal subjectification, then
its dia-chronic incision demands the crafting and mobilizing of new navigational
tracks between subjects of regional focalization and their universal contingent his-
tories, without delay.
Drone Script: Plot twist. Radiation erases data, drone loses connection to
operational controller spiralling into rock. Paranoia collides with quartz,
mica, and plagioclase-rich feldspar, causing unexpected porphyritic
agitation. PVC resins of melted clay plasticize, disrupting endocrines.
Crystallized from magmas evolved to the eutectic through igneous dif-
ferentiation, the discounted theory of metasomitism is unearthed. Bokeh
spreads to surface glare. Pushed up through stoping intrusion and gooey
surface leaks, the pumped-up drone repurposes its vision function to
compress silica and soda ash, spraying GBU-12 Paveway IIs. Sparks
strike sand-spiked polyethylene terephtelate, branching fulgurite and
producing non-crystalline polymer moldavites, which, drone-blown,
exhibit glass transition and cover the surface of the earth.
21 Synchronous is understood in terms proposed by Gabriel Catren, drawing on Jean-Claude
Milner, as both conditioned by and desutured from. See Jean-Claude Milner, Outland
Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism, in Bryant, Harman, and Srnicek, The Speculative
Turn, 338.
332 Scale
Synechistic Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment
Reza Negarestani
Even though the interwoven yarn of science and speculative philosophy has long
frayed into separate individual threads, evolutions of both are driven by the same
impetusthe history of shifts in perspectives. This is the history of the invention
and modification of new perspectives as modes of epistemic mediation. From the
eye of Zenos tortoise that sees the geometrical synthesis of infinitely many terms,
to the medieval angel whose transitory location is defined by its noetic operation
rather than by a predefined position, to the diagram of the classical perspective
in which the vanishing point is the homothetic center of the observers scope
launched into infinity, to the telescopic perspective of the Copernican subject who
sees itself only from an imaginary point beyond the orbit of its manifest location:
the trajectory of speculative and scientific thought takes shape as the evolution of
perspective, an abstract technology for the systemic deracination of the subject.
Rather than heralding the abolition of the subject, the perspective operator cuts
the subject loose from its immediate foundation by mapping it from one domain
to another. Once the subjects reference point to any privileged instance or posi-
tion (first or last, particular or generic) is removed, it is finally possible to draw
a nontrivial passage from the local subject to the global structure, in effect realizing
a continuity that defines an absolutized nature as a universal continuum. It is this
nontrivial continuity that uproots the subject from its immediate foundation and
reconstitutes it as a site in the reflexive relation of nature to itself.1 For this reason,
the reflective relation of the deracinated subject to itself and to nature cannot
1 Throughout this essay, the concept of nontriviality is used in a sense similar to its original
application in mathematical language. In terms of conceptual behavior, triviality expresses
a condition according to which the behavior of the concept regardless of the context and
application is always the same (self-similar) and is not required to be modified. In terms
of structure, triviality suggests a local-global relationship in which the global structure is simply
the extension of the local structure (for example, the image of world being the extension of
the image of man, or a cylindera global structurebeing generated by the revolution of fiber
or a local structure around a central axis). Nontriviality on the other hand is the expression
of an asymmetry between local and global levels of the concept and structure. For example,
a Mbius strip is a cylinder with a global twist; in other words, the global is not simply the
extension of the local. Nontriviality is often a condition arising from a multi-modal continuity
that permits different trajectories of evolution, global structural plasticity, and complex local
orientations. Accordingly, nontriviality entails epistemic navigation of different behaviors of the
concept. It demands the change of perspective and action according to a logic of rules, spatial
situations and structural parameters.
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 SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
be addressed unless through the reflexive relation of absolutized nature to itself. In
other words, following Gabriel Catrens formula for absolving the Kantian legacy
from its reactive premodern proclivities and remnants of anti-Copernicanism, the
reflectivity of the subject must be subsumed within the reflexivity qua self-reflection
of nature.2 This subsumption is indeed tantamount to a transcendental dehuman-
ization of experience by way of opening a nontrivial space for transcendental
faculties and modes of judgment, including aesthetic judgment.3
If the subject is now immersed in a continuous global structure, the separation
of the subject from nature is a required epistemological distinction, not an inherent
ontological severance. And if such separation is not ontological, then instantiations
of the absolutized nature cannot be measured or scaled against the subject. The
Bataillean nature as immensity connotes a magnitude only possible by a radical
break in nature, thus conditioning a dialectics of magnitudes (between the magni-
tude of nature and the magnitude of the subject) suggestive of the premodern image
of the world and the pre-Copernican account of nature. From a historical perspec-
tive, both the aesthetic judgment and aesthetic paradigms of art have been directly
influenced by the determination of nature or a global structure for the subjective
faculties in terms of magnitudes. Along with the history of shifts in perspective,
the history of articulation of magnitudes should indeed be identified as the second
defining trajectory for the evolution of speculative thought and science.
In order to briefly investigate the influence of the evolution of articulations of
magnitude on art and reinterpret some of the concepts of aesthetics in terms of the
determination and interaction of magnitudes, it would be best to begin with a classic
but helpful definition of magnitude. Magnitude is anything that may be said to be
equal to or not equal to another. Two things are said to be equal, if in each statement
you can substitute the one for the other.4 In this sense, magnitude is articulated
through the dialectic of sameness-otherness or equality-inequality within the same
subject. The credit and debit columns of a ledger represent magnitudes of gain and
loss. A bar of iron expands as its temperature rises, expressing the magnitude of
heat extended over the arrow of time. A windmill moves under the pressure of two
different wind currents. And, most importantly, the epistemological determination
of nature that requires the dialectic of nature (natural causes) and thought (norma-
tive causes) within the subject are both expressions of magnitude. Mathematically
speaking, quantity is the product of the dialectical articulation of magnitudes within
one subject: the total balance of a ledger page, the extension of a bar of iron due to
being heated, the amount of ground flour produced by the windmill, or a judgment
undertaken by the thinking subject. Here quantity denotes the productivity implicit
2 See Gabriel Catren, Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism, in
The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek,
and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 33367.
3 Ibid., 333.
4 Hermann Grassmann, Lehrbuch Der Arithmetik (Berlin: Enslin, 1861), 1.
334 Scale
REZA NEGARESTANI
in the interaction of different magnitudes within a subject; it is a marker of intelligi-
bility that can be extracted by measurement. In each of the previous cases, quantity
is characterized dialectically as a negative link between two positive predicates or
magnitudes whose opposition is not that of logic (i.e., it is not a contradiction) but
that of balancing, compensation, suppression, translation, and further disequilibrium
of forces. Quantity is therefore the explicit or intelligible result of articulating or con-
joining magnitudes, no longer as passive parts but instead as distinct dynamic and
oriented/vectorial forces. This is in fact the meaning behind the late scholastic concept
of articulation as related to measurement and quantification: to express degrees of
intelligibility of a subject, form, or phenomenon by putting together and joining (artic-
ulatus) various intensive and extensive magnitudes, which abstract the interaction or
points of liaison (joints) between the subject in question and its surrounding matrix.5
Properly speaking, then, magnitudes are expressed through tension-spaces and
are rendered intelligible as quantities. Immanuel Kant suggests that magnitudes are always
articulated in negative fashion via an oppositiona dialectic of forcesthat joins them
together within one subject. To this end, judgment is a tension-space for articulation of
magnitudes insofar as judgment is the determination of the magnitude of the universal
(nature or a natural law for example) with regard to the magnitude of the particular
(the manifold of subjective or cognitive faculties) for and within the thinking subject.
Just as the articulation of magnitudes always exerts a dynamic expression that drives
the subject (for instance, the motion of the windmill in the above example), judgment
does not leave the thinking subject intact either. It drives the subject and its faculties
(sense, imagination, reasoning, power of action, and so forth) according to the manner
by which it expresses and effectuates the interaction of the universal and the particular,
nature and thought, stimulation and sensation. From this perspective, since aesthetics
is a category of judgment, a deep understanding of aesthetics as a dynamic interactive
system that structures both certain modes of cognition and action is impossible without
an analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment in terms of magnitudes and the con-
ditions of their interactivity. Conditions of interactivity can be defined as schemas
of space or points of liaison that structurally parameterize and give orientation to
each magnitude; by doing so, they dictate the manner by which magnitudes act upon
themselves or one another, and consequently drive or mobilize the subject in a specific
way. The analysis of the conceptual matrix of aesthetics in order to upgrade ita task
whose absence in canonical art criticism has put art in jeopardy of becoming a bastion
for human narcissism and a playground of myopic alliancesleads us to perhaps the
most systematically developed account of aesthetic judgment. This is Kants histori-
cally consequential attempt at outlining aesthetics not in terms of eternal categories
but in terms of the spatiotemporal positioning of the subject within the world and, by
doing so, putting it in the direction of a thoroughgoing disenchantment.
5 On the concept of articulation with regard to magnitudes and intelligibility, see Gilles Chtelet,
Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).
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 SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
In The Critique of Judgment, Kant formulates aesthetic categories as categories
of reflective judgment, while defining modes of judgment themselves in terms of
interaction and expression of magnitudes that delineate natural causes (or causal
determination) and normative causes specific to the rational agency. But the question
is, what is the manner of articulation of aesthetic categories? Under which conditions
do magnitudes enter dialectical interaction within the subject? The answer lies in the
reflectivity of the reflective judgment. Reflectivity is a specific relation to the world. It
is conditioned by a certain intuition of the spatiotemporal arrangement of the subject
and the world with regard to one another. The reflective is a topographic model of
interaction according to which the magnitudes of thought and nature act upon each
other in a specific way. In the reflective relation, the subject is invariably delineated by
two vectors, one facing out toward the world and the other facing inside in the direc-
tion of the given and allegedly well-secured interiority of the subject. This orthog-
onal orientation always registers nature as a magnitude both outside the subject and
greater than itan immense entity that is growing, indeterminate, and in excess of
the subject. This is because the reflective orientation translates the rigid inside-outside
tension of the subject and the world into the open andhence, indeterminatemag-
nitude of nature versus the strictly demarcated magnitude of the subject. Moreover,
since the reflective relation posits a spatial model in which the world always faces the
subject and is lived as a confrontation,6 the articulation of any magnitude associated
with an unbound nature or the world is readily quantified against the subject. Here we
can identify a trajectory of aesthetic and philosophical paradigmsfrom the Kantian
sublime to Batailles exorbitance, Freuds model of trauma, and the philosophy of
Speculative Realism, for which the incalculable scales of nature are readily expressed
in confrontation with the human subject. This is, of course, no arbitrary juxtaposi-
tion, in that these aesthetic and philosophical paradigms are products of the same
model of articulation of magnitudes that is the extension of a quasi-Ptolemaic struc-
tural model of the world. Why quasi-Ptolemaic? one might ask. Because worldly
magnitudesthat is, natures dialectics of sameness-otherness, equality-inequality,
and the relaying of this dialectics by means of magnitudes of tensions and calculi of
forcesare always articulated according to a privileged frame of reference: whereas
in the Ptolemaic model for a subject on the surface of the stationary Earth the sky
is given as the world above, in the quasi-Ptolemaic modelby virtue of the subjects
privileged frame of referencethe world always confronts the subject as an object
of experience, its magnitudes external to the subject and its perturbing forces issuing
forth from the infinite, formless, and generic (that is to say, purposeless) trajectories
of nature. The still evolving trajectory of the Copernican Revolution terminates this
isolating difference between the world above and the world below, and in the process,
it problematizes the subjects privileged frame of reference.
6 Gilles Chtelet, Sur une petite phrase de Riemann, Analytiques (Psychanalyse-critures-Politiques),
no. 3 (Paris, 1979): 6775.
336 Scale
REZA NEGARESTANI
Figure 1: Kants reflecting bonhomme and its tale-telling world
In the sense that for Kant the aesthetic judgment is a reflective judgment that seeks
to find a non-given universal (expressed by an inexact magnitude) for a given partic-
ular, it is bound to a certain mode of articulation of magnitudes, as seen in Figure
1. In Kants aesthetic judgment, nature is inherently susceptible to being expressed
by way of a great magnitude that always confronts the subject. This is a restricted
tension-space in which forces of the world and the subject, thought and nature, are
perpetually posited in a head-to-head collision and generate both privileged visions
of nature and bound conceptions of the rational subject.
Accordingly, it is no surprise that at the pinnacle of Kants aesthetic judgment
rests the aesthetic paradigm of the sublime. The sublime and its subject qua genius
are not quandaries for the aesthetic judgment, as one might suspect, but rather are
the logical consequences of how worldly magnitudes interact and condition a specific
judgment for a subject. When an external indeterminate magnitude associated with
an unbound nature or a formless object interacts with the intensive magnitude of
sensation, a quantity of this interaction for understanding is produced.7 If subjective
faculties cannot determine a quality for this quantity because it is an overwhelming
quantity that scrambles the senses of the subject, the feeling of the sublime is effec-
tuated. For Kant, beauty, for example, is also a quantity produced by an indetermin-
able magnitude, but it is a quantity whose quality can be determined and is also in
harmony with understanding. It is important to note that the external indeterminate
magnitude associated with a formless object or boundlessness does not directly give
rise to the sublime. The sublime is the consequence of how the indeterminable mag-
nitude is parameterized by the structure of the reflective relation of the experiencing
subject to itself and to the world that now appears to be confronting it. The sublime,
in this sense, is the outcome of a judgment formed by a subject whose privileged
7 The mathematical sublimeas different from the dynamic sublime of worldly magnitudes
is generated by formally abstracted magnitudes.
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 SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
position and frame of reference have not yet been assimilated within the reflexive
relation of an absolutized nature to itself. From this perspective, the sublime is not
that of the impersonal abyss of nature; it is quite simply confined to the personal.
If until now art has not managed to fully dispel the omnipresent specter of the
sublime, it is because: (1) it has not seen the world and the subject within different
geometries of interaction, and (2) it has not explored alternative tension-spaces in
which magnitudes of this or that event are articulated in different ways and as a result
drive the subject in entirely different trajectories. The history of articulation of magni-
tudes is the history of shifts in the geometry of interactions between magnitudes and
the examination of complex tension-spaces. In other words, it is the realization that
magnitudes, like forces, interact and act upon one another according to the underlying
spatial organizations that influence terms of interaction through orienting, arranging,
and liaising magnitudes. In order to expand frontiers of action and understanding for
the subject of judgment, the geometrythat is to say, the spatial organizationof
interactions between magnitudes should be treated as a hypothesis. It is the hypothet-
ical structure of the tension-space, its manipulable variables, its normative plasticity,
constructible horizon, and ramified orientations toward hitherto unenvisaged land-
scapes that broaden the horizon of understanding and augment the armamentarium
of possible action. Constituted by the interaction of magnitudes, judgments are, in
this sense, sites for reorientation and navigation according to new rules and spaces.
Within the tension-space, magnitudes play the role of vectors that simulta-
neously open up new hypotheses of orientation (forcing the subject of judgment
to orient toward ) and dimension (introducing the subject to new spaces of rule-
based navigation). Since every magnitude carries its own space or parameterizing
structure with it, judgment as a site for the articulation of magnitudes always yields
new orientations and dimensions.8 Here magnitude is no longer seen as something
that affects the subject by decrease or increase (of scales, quantities, or intensities)
but as something that is capable of creating complex situations of productivity and
production for the subject, even new complex magnitudes. Such complex magni-
tudes are in reality new platforms for expression, manipulation of forces, tensions,
syntheses, and judgments. The head-to-head model of collision between intensive
and extensive magnitudes can be replaced by magnitudes that enter dialectical inter-
actions hitherto inaccessible to the classical subject of personal experience. A whole
bestiary of tension-spaces is born in which the interaction of magnitudes enables new
modes of extraction of intelligibility, modes of judgment, and, correspondingly, new
8 The examination of magnitudes within a continuous medium (rather than a discrete
identification) demonstrates that magnitudes are vehicles for transporting spatial situations (such
as orientation and dimension) and structural parameters. This is a revolutionary insight of the
Kantian philosopher and mathematician Hermann Gnther Grassmann. A similar view has been
expressed by G. W. Leibniz in the context of analysis situs and philosophy of situations. See
Hans-Joachim Petsche, Hermann Grassmann (Basel: Birkhuser, 2009); Vincenzo De Risi, Geometry
and Monadology: Leibnizs Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space (Basel: Birkhuser, 2007).
338 Scale
REZA NEGARESTANI
decision-making directives, rational orientation, and action. The diversification
of these tension-spaces, as well as the complex modes of judgments they unlock,
is impossible without annulling the subjects privileged frame of reference and
immersing its so-called personal reflectivity within the impersonal reflexive continuity
of nature to itself. It is the epistemological analysis of natures protean continuity
that grants the possibility of the subjects access to a range of complex structures and
modes of interaction otherwise inexistent from the reflective perspective.9 Likewise,
the conceptual foundation of aesthetic judgment must be revised from the viewpoint
of this impersonal reflexive field, whose continuity allows not only continuous/con-
stant and discrete/variable structures but also structures with intermediate geome-
tries.10 This is the kernel of what we shall callfollowing Charles Sanders Peirces
doctrine of continuity or synechismthe synechistic critique of aesthetic judgment.
The exhaustion of aesthetic judgment and paradigms in contemporary art
what perpetuates the illusion of a fast approaching death for art practicesis
largely due to an overinvestment in a model of subjectivity in which the world is
always readily lived as an experience, a personal experience. According to such a
model, novelty is always the expression of a world that confronts the subject. But
since indeterminable magnitudes of a confronting world are always articulated in
excess of the magnitudes of the subject, novelty becomes synonymous with ener-
getic rupture, defeat of senses, and the eruption of a messianic regime of force that
is deemed liberating and limiting in equal parts. Any account of aesthetic novelty
is surreptitiously built upon a classical regime for the articulation of magnitudes, a
trivial tension-space between a subject whose conditions of experience are already
given and a world that by definition always faces the subject like a tale-telling outside.
To overcome the exhaustion and replenish the inventory of aesthetic paradigms as
hypotheses through which art further deepens its sovereign trajectory and broadens
its scope, it is imperative to accentuate new regimes of tension and diversify ten-
sion-spaces. The aim of a tension-space in this case is not to express the quantitative
9 The continuity of the reflexive field should be understood as a nontrivial continuity insofar as its
structure does not permit overstretching any particular field or inflation of any specific horizon
and its functions. Neither can everything be subject nor can everything be object. Instead it brings
about the possibility of intricate (diachronic, asymmetrical, entangled) co-constitution of subject
and object. Furthermore, the nontriviality of this continuity distinguishes the interaction of
magnitudes on the basis of their orientations. This allows for diversification of modes of synthesis
and, respectively, judgment. Suppose A is the oriented magnitude of the subject and B the
oriented magnitude of the object. AB is not equal to BA; that is they express two non-commutative
terms because they are different products of magnitudes and their specific orientations. Since
they suggest different syntheses, they occasion and demand different modes of judgment as well.
10 On continuum as a protean continuity, see Fernando Zalamea, Peirces Logic of Continuity:
Existential Graphs and Non-Cantorian Continuum, The Review of Modern Logic 9 (2003). Also on
the theory of topoi as what allows the passage from constant to variable sets (and back) and is a
basis for studying relationships between (variable) quantities and (variable) structures see Francis
William Lawvere, Continuously Variable Sets: Algebraic Geometry=Geometric Logic, in
Proceedings of the Logic Colloquium (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1975), 13557.
Scale 339
 SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
or qualitative measure of the magnitude of the object and the subject, nature and
thought, or the stimulation and sensation, in terms of greatness, intensity, size,
scale, escalation, intensification, and general dissensus between forces. It is instead
to reparameterize and reprogram tensions or magnitudes that mobilize the field
of the subject by nontrivial orientations and spaces of navigation. These tension-spaces
bring about the possibility of renegotiating the geometries of interaction between the
universal and the particular. The renegotiation of formal dialectical maps between
inside and outside, thought and nature, is equal to changing how magnitude finds
expression and forces interact. And insofar as the interaction and expression of
magnitudes within and for the subject directly determine the mode of judgment, we
can say that redefining the spatial situation of local-global products (subject-world,
immanence-transcendence) allows new modes of judgment and action. Every geo-
metrical relation in terms of interaction and operation of magnitudes is a propo-
sitional content for the subject and is endowed with a pragmatic assertion. It calls
for a specific action by conditioning judgment as what forces the subject to enter a
complex system of rational commitments, to contrast between existing judgments
and taking judgments to their ultimate conclusions. Here lies the meaning behind
the task of diversifying modes of judgment by diversifying tension-spaces.
If there is a lesson to be learned by art from the speculative-scientific history
of the articulation of magnitudes, it is that magnitudes by themselvesregardless
of how great and singular they might bedo not offer any particularly liberating or
speculative opportunity for the subject of judgment. The liberation both in terms of
judgment and the paradigms it offers is to be found not in the extent of this or that
event, the intensity of this or that experience, but in the nontrivial fields of inter-
action between themthat is, in the structure of tension-spaces and their valence
for moving the subject, even systematically deracinating it, according to complex
judgments that not only shed the subjects local privileges but also reorient and rein-
troduce it to new spaces of navigation, in effect perpetually revising the self-portrait of
man drawn in sand. In order to reinvigorate the aesthetic judgment and overcome
the paralyzing illusion of the crisis of aesthetic paradigms, art must adopt new ten-
sion-spaces that are not limited to the trivial relation between a world out there and
a subject whose condition for experience is already given. It is in its renewed com-
mitment to highlighting and crafting new tension-spaces between the artist and her
materials, between the spectator and the art, the manifest and the scientific images,11
11 The manifest image is the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as
man-in-the-world, a commonsense framework comprised of intentions and thoughts through which
man correlates the observable image of himself to the world and objects, and understands the world
as a global projection of himself. According to the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, the posterior
alternative to the manifest image is the scientific image in which the world consists of microphysical
entities behaving according to natural laws that are no longer seen as truncated persons. See Wilfrid
Sellars, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, in In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid
Sellars, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
374, 381.
340 Scale
REZA NEGARESTANI
the conceptual and the sensible that art finds its own political asymptote. If the global
dominance of neoliberalism aims to nullify all tension-spaces under the pretext of
fighting the evil of ideology, art is returned back to political consequentiality and
contemporaneity by the shift from scale of events (magnitudes of tensions and their
affective valence) to structures through which such tensions are expressed, manipu-
lated, or translated into alternative driving forces for the subject. Only by seeing and
acting beyond the ready-made regime of affect (itself a trivial mode of articulation
of worldly magnitudes) and mobilizing its resources in the direction of alternative
tension-spaces as navigable hypotheses of understanding and action, can art stave
off the realization of a so far illusory death. Without manipulative and navigational
possibilities of tension-spaces that align the subject with the deracinating trajectory
of modern thought, the prospect of breaking away from existing liberal models of
interactivity and trivial tension-spaces of non-cooperation and dissensus is indeed
truly remote.
As for the jaded fascination with great scales of the beyond and their aesthetic
import for art: if a genuine inhumanism is to be found, it is not in the expression of
great magnitudes of abyssal timescales or vast spaces. It is in how such magnitudes
force the sapient to renegotiate its own capacities and descriptions in each and
every turn. It is in how tension-spaces drive the rational subject according to com-
plex fields of synthesis and navigation maps in which there is no privileged frame of
reference whether in the name of the given conditions of experience or the global
orientation of an environing world. This is the inhumanism intrinsic to articulation
and the dynamics of complex magnitudes that result from the systemic softening
of rigid designations of inside and outside. It is an inhumanism that, rather than
antagonizing the human, takes human significance to its ultimate rational con-
clusions. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a mystical antihumanism that seeks
to belittle the rational subject by imposing upon it the so-called great and singular
magnitudes of the universe. Inhuman aesthetic judgment is not given; it is a matter
of struggle, revision, and construction.
Scale 341
Speculation
 What Is It That Makes Todays
Realism So Different, So Appealing?
Joo Ribas

The very premise of a book dedicated to the intersection between contemporary

artistic practice and the so-called speculative turn in continental philosophy
invites a set of questions. First, what is the place of art within these divergent vari-
eties of realism and materialism, emphasizing once relatively marginal themes1 and
loosely collected by terms such as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented
Ontology? Second, what, if any, is the relevance of such thought to contemporary
artistic or curatorial practices? To ask this last question in another way: Within
contemporary art, why should there be any interest at all in these new types of
philosophical thought, beyond mere novelty or instrumentalization? Even asking
the question is to admit it: everyone seems to be a Speculative Realist now.
These two questions can be parsed into distinct themes. Why should contem-
porary artistic production be interested in a return to objects or in issues of realist
ontology or Kantian epistemology? Lets call this the external question. And what
aspects of this philosophical thought have been concerned with, or even pertain to,
art or aesthetics directly? Lets call this the internal question, that of the place of
aesthetics in an ontology. Is there a natural affinity between the thematics of con-
temporary art and the nature of such thought? Do curatorial or artistic practices
need to develop anti-correlationist forms? If so, why? Does a flat, nonhierarchical
ontology invite consideration of art objects by extension? In discussions relating
such discourse to artistic or curatorial contexts, it is easy merely to conflate such
questions or to assume that one discipline casually compliments or entrains the
other, supposing that, because contemporary artists or curators are interested
in such thought, it has something to say about, or for, contemporary art.
The external question is perhaps the most obvious one to address: a return
to accommodating things, matter, science, and the real qua objects as important
as language, thought, the phenomenal, and the social would seem to be of clear
interest in light of the emphasis on participatory, relational, and social practices in
the art of the last two decadesthat is, as a return of the repressed.2 Moreover, this
allows for a return substantiated by new formations of objecthood (a much benighted
term), new ideational contexts, and a novel lexicon, seemingly unburdened by the
trappings of formalist, phenomenological, or post-structuralist approaches.
1 Louis Morelle, Speculative Realism: After Finitude, and Beyond? A Vade Mecum, Speculations 3
(September 2012): 242. Available at speculations.squarespace.com/speculations-3.
2 Ibid., 241.

Speculation 345
 WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES TODAYS REALISM
SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING? JOO RIBAS

of empirical science in the early pages of After Finitude.8 Such a relation is already
Here the external interest might mirror the internal one in the way that forms
evident in art historical confluences: Andr Bretons first Manifesto of Surrealism of
of anti-correlationist thoughtthis being the remaining singular feature that unites
1924, proposing the uniting of two distant realities, was published the same year
an otherwise heterogeneous set of approachesare positioned as reversing anti-
as Louis de Broglies doctoral thesis extending wave/particle duality to all matter.9
realist trends of postwar philosophy. That is, both the external and internal questions
As such, these aesthetic propositions suggest a world of objects as strange as
have Kantian biases at their source: Kantian epistemology and the critical turn in
that proposed by Harmans dark subterranean reality of withdrawn, mereological
the case of the former; aesthetics and Kantian judgment in the case of the latter,
relations,10 the kind reflected as much by the quantum entanglement of spooky
as we shall see. Yet is this interest more than a nostalgic or reactionary turn toward
action at a distance,11 as the curious world of Jarrys Dr. Faustroll. Perhaps particu-
objects or object-based artistic practice,3 or at worst a kind of metaphysically fueled
larly relevant to the non-anthropocentric focus of Speculative Realism, we can look
return to formalism? Is it a case of new philosophical language appended to the
to Robert Smithsons interest in crystalline structures and his formulation of the
same old objects?4 Or does the speculative turn only continue the long critical
enantiomorphic, proposing relations between vision, objects, and their mirror, but
history of the relation of ontology to aesthetics?5
not equivalent, image.12 Or the ontology of Paul Valrys seashell, which he turned
A return to thinking about objects through these new forms of realism may in
between his fingers, asking:
fact reveal a gap in our ability to think about the speculative nature of art itself. I want
to suggest that any supposed inability to deal with the complexity of objectsthis pre-
By what sign do we recognize that a given object is or is not made by a man?
sented as the central lacuna in continental philosophy that such thought addresses6
It may seem somewhat absurd to pretend not to know that a wheel, a vase,
can be reformulated as a repressed or lost function of the aesthetic. If we are somehow
a piece of cloth, or a table has been produced by someones industry, since
compelled to turn to realist ontologies to tell us something about art objects, this is
we know perfectly well that it has. But what I say is that we do not know
because we need to recover an alternative art history of speculative propositions.
this just by examining these things. If no one had ever told us, then by what
Such propositions in fact pervade aesthetic practices. The history
marks, by what signs should we know? What is it that indicates the presence
of twentieth-century art, in particular, is suffused with radical, speculative ontol-
or absence of a human operation? When an anthropologist finds a piece of
ogies. We can find them in Alfred Jarrys pataphysics, the science of imaginary
flint, does he not often hesitate as to whether man or chance fashioned it?13
solutions; in Joseph Beuyss Energy Plan for Western Man, originating in his studies
in biology and entailing relations between energy and matter conceived with anti-
In fact, the turn itself, at least in its application to aesthetic practices, might
positivist rigor; in Marcel Broodthaerss metaphysics of the mussel (a kind of
rest on a mystification, in which artworks are provided with an autonomous exis-
Cartesian irrationalism); or even earlier, in the aesthetic pedagogy of Friedrich
tence to the point where [they are] sometimes treated like quasi-subjects capable
Frbel, centered on play and learning through color and form.7 These all braid aes-
of autonomous thinking [] [where this] thinking work begins to take action by
thetics to science, as Meillassoux reconciles realism with the (post-critical) condition
itself, in the words of artist Nairy Baghramian.14 Such a conceptionthe reifica-
3 Robert Jackson, The Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks: Michael Fried, Object Oriented tion described by Marxs metaphor of dancing tables in Capital15relies on what
Ontology and Aesthetic Absorption, in Speculations 2 (May 2011): 137. Available at speculations. Bruno Latour calls factishes, the neologism conjoining fact with fetish, in the
squarespace.com/speculations-2; Jackson, Heidegger, Harman, and Algorithmic Allure,
paper presented at the Annual Association of Art Historians Conference, 2010. Available at sense of both as fabricated by particular orders of knowledge. As such, factishes
www.academia.edu/313558/Heidegger_Harman_and_Algorithmic_Allure. The question
was suggested to me by Christoph Cox: Does the speculative turn only continue a critical
history of the relation of ontology to aesthetics in the first place? 8 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
4 Harman has lectured about Greenberg and Warhol, for example. See Darius Kazemis notes on (London: Continuum, 2008), 927.
one such lecture, available at tinysubversions.com/2012/10/notes-graham-harman-non-relational 9 Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology
-aesthetics-cmu-oct-23-2012. The present author is no exception: the thrilling language of (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2325.
Meillassouxs then newly published Aprs la finitude (2006) found its way into an exhibition on the 10 Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 2.
allusion to noumenal aspects of form I organized that year. 11 See Jurgen Audretsch, Entangled Systems: New Directions in Quantum Physics (Weinheim: Wiley
5 As Robert Jackson writes, fusing ontology and aesthetic expression has a long, convoluted, Blackwell, 2007), 130.
and chequered history (Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks, 138). Heideggers aesthetics 12 See Jennifer Robertss masterful study, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale
and Michael Frieds discussion of theatricality and absorption are two examples that Jackson, University Press, 2004), 3660.
in a particularly lucid way, has related to Speculative Realist thought and to Harmans notion 13 Paul Valry, Man and the Sea Shell, in Paul Valry, An Anthology, trans. James R. Lawler
of allure in particular (discussed later in this essay). (London: Routledge, 1977), 118.
6 This is evidenced by the term correlationism itself. 14 Nairy Baghramian, Le Mepris in Texte Zur Kunst 22 (September 2012): 22, 11014.
7 See Gabriel Compayr, History of Pedagogy (Boston: J. S. Cushing & Co., 1892), 45762. 15 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163ff.

346 Speculation Speculation 347

 WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES TODAYS REALISM
SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING?
are those beings we fabricate and that fabricate us, giving a discipline the power
to talk about the world independently of the relationships that humans create,
as Isabelle Stengers explains.16 It is from these factishes that the practitioner (be
it the physicist or artist, technician or curator, etc.) receives autonomy by giving
[them] an autonomy he does not have, writes Stengers, summarizing Latour.17
If any turn to speculative thought in contemporary art is symptomatic of
a gap in our ability to think about objects (which might at least answer the
external question), this does not mean that such philosophies can, or should, be
directly applied to art objects as a kind of theoretical appendage, at the expense of
addressing precisely the terms through which aesthetic modalities have themselves
been curtailed. They would then merely suffer the same fate as phenomenology, late
Wittgenstein, Deleuzian becoming, or Chantal Mouffes antagonism, to name a
few, while precisely missing the point of Valrys type of speculation (for example).
The internal questionabout what aspects of this philosophical thought
concerns or even pertains to artis perhaps more complicated to address, and
certainly more technical. It is partly a hermeneutical problem, as a major text on
the relation between aesthetics and speculative ontologies is yet to be produced.18
As such, this should invite an ethics of reading, an address to Speculative Realist or
OOO texts with both analytical rigor and methodological clarity, one that does not
reduce them to easy quotation or second-order summary in their application to aes-
thetic concerns.19 In response to this hermeneutical, or rather, Talmudic problem,
two approaches can be emphasized: Timothy Mortons writing on aesthetics and
causality, and Graham Harmans ongoing discussion of allure.
Mortons aim in his recent book Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality is
to free aesthetics from its ideological role as matchmaker between subject and
object, a role intrinsically tied to its Kantian basis.20 For Morton, the aesthetic is
directly linked to the philosophical discussion of causality that spans from Aristotle
to Hume to quantum mechanics. The ontology of withdrawn things suggested by
OOO implicates the aesthetic as a domain of relations: If things are intrinsically
withdrawn, irreducible to their perception or relations or uses, Morton writes,
they can only affect each other in a strange region out in front of them, a region
of traces and footprints: the aesthetic dimension.21 The significance of art is pre-
cisely that it acts as an investigation of causality, itself an aesthetic phenomenon:
16 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 8.
17 Ibid., 23. Stengers uses the neutrino as an example of a factish.
18 Harman is said to be working on just such a text. See Interview: Jonas Zakaitis talks with Graham
Harman, The Federal 1 (March 2011). Available at the-federal.com/index.php?/editions/issue-1.
19 The style of Harmans writing in particularly is notable for its mixed registers, the way he shifts
to poetic, rhapsodic modes when the limits of language mirror the limits of ontologya character
lost in many references to his work.
20 Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities
Press, 2013), 22.
21 Ibid.
348 Speculation
JOO RIBAS
Aesthetic events are not limited to interactions between humans or between
humans and painted canvases or between humans and sentences in dramas.
They happen when a saw bites into a fresh piece of plywood [] [when]
a massive object emits gravity waves. When you make or study art you are not
exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making
or studying causality. The aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension.22
Harmans conception of allure has for its part considerable repercussions on art
history and criticism, as Robert Jackson notes.23 For Harman, allure is an aesthetic
effect, through which objects become, as he explains, split from their accessible
qualities and seem to lie at an inaccessible distance despite our being able to sense
that they are there.24 As Harman suggests:
Usually aesthetics is treated as a somewhat minor branch of philosophy
a pleasant hobby for philosophers who happen to like pretty music and
pictures. For me, by contrast, aesthetics lies at the very core of reality, since
allure is one the four basic ruptures that can occur between objects and
qualities.25
This aesthetic effect of allure is thus not reducible to aesthetic reception by the
subject, but inherent to all relations. As Harman writes, given the apparently over-
whelming scope of allure, aesthetics may deserve a rather vast role in ontology.26
Aesthetics, for Harman, thus becomes first philosophy.27 We have then a case
not of art without the subject, as the ready interpretation of Speculative Realism
might suggest, but of an aesthetics without art itself. This recursive negation from
within seems to displace any specific relation of such thought to contemporary
artistic forms.
In fact, the central possibility that speculative ontologies are thought to offer
is precisely that which is largely neglected as a result of the Kantian grounding
of Western aesthetic theory: knowledge gained from aesthetic modalities. As a
result of such bias, the value of aesthetic experience has persisted between the
strictures of empiricism and the ineffable enchantment of qualia. Is this by the
nature of the properties of aesthetic objects? Or perhaps it is less a concern for
the possible relations of objects than of the value of the aesthetic in relation to the
dominant form and privileged guarantor of knowledge after the critical turn,
22 Ibid.
23 Jackson, Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks, 135. Jacksons work on Harman has set early
and fertile ground for discussion of the relation between Speculative Realism and aesthetics.
24 Jonas Zakaitis talks with Graham Harman, 14.
25 Ibid., 21.
26 Graham Harman, On Vicarious Causation, Collapse 2 (March 2007): 216.
27 Ibid., 221.
Speculation 349
 WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES TODAYS REALISM
SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING?
namely, science.28 The space that is opened between speculation and metaphysics,
and between science and philosophy, by such strains of thought then becomes
invaluable in opening a horizon of ontological speculation that points directly back
to a function of the aesthetic. As Franois Laruelle puts it:
Art is a half-science rather than a half-philosophysomething which, in the
former case, does not mean to say, as in the second, that it is poorer than
science: perhaps on the contrary, it is more complex. [] It is the non-scien-
tific use of science, that is to say a use outside the totality of its conditions
of validity or knowledge-relation. It is science applied to the World outside
the reduction that founds the scientific relation to the World.29
The gap that Speculative Realism might fill for art objects might then be reformulated
as the repressed function of art as a speculative form of science.30 As a speculative
science, a way to articulate an account of the world, can art amend the potential
of what belongs to the domain of scientific or philosophical speculation? What of
those forms of speculation or understanding that transcend, or merely fall beyond,
the domain of any particular science, as with speculative metaphysics? Is this the
place where artistic speculation of the type described above resides? Is this not the
very territory that these realisms attempt to fold into the concerns of speculative
philosophythe kind art has always attempted to occupy?
Perhaps it is this domain of the speculative that art has always addressed,
though it has sat uneasily between metaphysics and science, and so reduced the
aesthetic to regimes of taste, beauty, or affect as a result of its own Kantian bias.
Such new varieties of realism merely braid the aesthetic precisely with those modal-
ities of knowledge it has always attempted to claim. Rather than the reality that art
objects are accessing or attending to, the concern is with the possibility of the
speculative as both analogous to the experimental in the empirical sciences, and
yet as a claim to knowledge outside of experimental fact, or empiricist, positivist,
veridical, or falsificationist criteriathe possibility, that is, of an aesthetic modality
of speculative knowledge, of art as a speculative science.
28 See Meillassoux, After Finitude, 119120. The ontology of aesthetic objects is interesting in some regards: take
for example, ectoplasm, a kind of matter produced by the technology of photography, as Marina
Warner describes it. See her Phantasmagoria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 301; and Mike Kelley,
The Aesthetics of Ufology, in Minor Histories, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 409.
29 Franois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 143.
30 In using the term science I am invoking Alexander Baumgartens idea of aesthetics as the
science of sensual cognition, while also alluding to a series of practices with ideational,
experimental and observational criteria, if not necessarily empirical or veridical ones. This entails
a rejection of the autonomist and epistemic implications of Kants aesthetics parallel to that of
Speculative Realism/OOOs larger rejection of Kantian grounds. See Kai Hammermeister, The
German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7. See also
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 74.
350 Speculation
Speculative Poetics
Preliminary Reflections
Armen Avanessian
Linguistic Ontology
Speculative poetics is an attempt to link the language-based philosophy of recent
decades with the contemporary interest in ontology. It is generally overlooked
that speculative thought since Leibniz and Hegel has consistently striven for self-
determination through its linguistic practice. By such self-determination I do not
mean the correlationist myth of the creation of the world by language but an onto-
logical reinterpretation of the following (post-)structuralist thesis: language alters the
world. At the same time, the world-altering and world-creating function of language
poiesiscan only be understood on the basis of linguistic-ontological approaches in
philosophy and theory of language. Poetics is speculative when it takes as its phil-
osophical horizon both a tradition of speculative linguistics and semiotics (from
the mereology of the speculative universal grammarians of the Middle Ages all the
way to Charles Sanders Peirce), and when it bears in mind the poietic function of
language. Recent examples of the linguistic-ontological approach advocated here
can be found in the work of the linguist Gustave Guillaume (especially his thesis of
a linguistic chronogenesis of time) and, following him, Gilles Deleuze.1
All too often, however, the increasingly numerous exponents of the speculative
turn understand it one-sidedly as the complete repudiation of a linguistic turn in force
since the early twentieth century. According to a cherished myth, the linguistic turn
kept deconstructionists, structuralists, and analytic philosophers at the levers of discur-
sive power for an entire century of darkness and distance from the senses. But this effort
at discursive-historical revisionism is the symptom of a profound misunderstanding.
It is based on a simplistic misinterpretation to which the new speculative realists cling
no less stubbornly than do all the linguistic philosophers (whether deconstructionist,
structuralist, or analytic) they group together into a single united front. The dogma
shared by both sides is a belief in the arbitrariness and hence non-referentiality of
language. And so there is on both sides a largely unquestioned consensus surrounding
the fundamental gap between linguistic philosophy and ontology. From the vantage
point of a speculative poetics, which seeks to oppose the positions of postmodernism
without leaving behind post-structuralisms insights and accomplishments, both sides
form a united front that fails to recognize the speculative and ontological potential
1 See Armen Avanessian, Nachwort: Gustave Guillaume als spekulativer Denker, in Gustave
Guillaume, Zeit und Verb: Theorie der Aspekte, der Modi und der Tempora, ed. Armen Avanessian and
Anke Hennig (Zurich: diaphanes, 2014).
Speculation 351
 SPECULATIVE POETICSPRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS
of linguistic theory.2 (Against this self-proclaimed anti-linguistic ontology, it would be
not only fascinating but also quite rewarding to apply Graham Harmans analyses of
what he calls tool-being to the tool that has traditionally enjoyed a special privilege
where the subject is human access to the world: natural language.)
(Thinking) Literature
However, one of the fundamental theses of speculative poetics is that language,
literature, and thought are all part of the world. In this sense, thinking litera-
ture means situating natural language, literary artifacts, and poetic thinking on a
common plane. Here too, it is helpful to turn to established positions of speculative
thought. Alfred North Whitehead, and Isabelle Stengers with him, have already
shown that speculative philosophy calls for experimentation with language because
every ready-made use of words leads to failure.3 According to Stengers, the
experimental or ethopoietic character of knowledge never takes language to be simply
at hand and freely available for philosophical use. Hence, if speculative poetics
takes an interest in literature, it does so not primarily to discover individual works
or the poetologies of their authors, but rather because literature constitutes what
might be called a research laboratory of nonarbitrary language. And every instance in
which language turns back upon itself must also be regarded as a further unfolding
of the world. Viewed in this way, literature is neither pure style nor empty sign but
a knowledge of world. The universal mode of linguistic development in this arena
is recursion; that is, and precisely, not self-reflection in the modernist sense.
Against Aesthetics: The Speculative Poeticization of Philosophy
The broader thesis advanced here is that neither aisthesis (perception of the world)
nor noiesis (thinking of the world) can exist without poiesis (world-creating and
2 For example, if we read Hegels definition of the speculative proposition (in the preface to his
Phenomenology of Spirit), with his requirement of an identity of subject and object as an actual
proposition, that is, as a linguistic construct, we see that, unlike subject and predicate in the
predicative proposition, subject and object are precisely not identical to each other but become
different. Just as in Hegels distinction between the logic of being and that of essence, in the
dialectical movement of the proposition its original subject is negated by a predicate that turns
out to be a substance. Thus the content is, in fact, no longer a Predicate of the Subject, but is the
Substance, the essence and the Notion of what is under discussion. [] Starting from the
Subject as though this were a permanent ground, it finds that, since the Predicate is really the
Substance, the Subject has passed over into the Predicate, and, by this very fact, has been sublated.
See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 37.
3 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test, in Deleuze, Whitehead,
Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, ed. Keith Robinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 28.
352 Speculation
ARMEN AVANESSIAN
-altering). Hence every theory of language also requires a poietics of thinking.
Philosophy of artaesthetically oriented since Baumgarten and Kant and recently
dominated by visual studies (that is, further instrumentalized to suit the purposes
of the art market)has overlooked the poietic dimension of language. The dimension
of the poietic goes far beyond the production of texts, which is what it has been
reduced to under the aegis of the aesthetic regime of the last two centuries in a fore-
closure of the potential of poetics as world-making in its poiesis. To consistently point
out a poietic moment in language and thinking precisely does not mean further
aestheticizing theory. Rather, it forms part of a productive attempt to speculatively
poeticize philosophy, an attempt that opposes the correlationist dualism of sense
experience and thinking that has characterized philosophy since the invention of
aesthetics in the second half of the eighteenth century.4
The return to poiesis is thus by no means simply an attempt to restore a larger
role to literature within speculative philosophy. For this reason, the most recent
monographs of Quentin Meillassoux on Stphane Mallarm and Graham Harman
on H. P. Lovecraft should not be read as evidence that after all literature is still
more important to Speculative Realism than the visual arts. Rather than focus on an
entirely false and unproductive opposition between literature and art, postmedium
speculative poetics is concerned to discover alternatives to the continuing regime
of aesthetics. For the dominance of the aesthetic is also an obstacle to recognizing
non-correlationist tendencies in contemporary art. In fact, the generic post-
medium concept of art reincorporates literature, returning it to its philosophical
origins in early German Romanticism.5 And what Peter Osborne goes on to say
about the category of the contemporary in general applies to literature as well:
the concept of contemporary literature projects into presence a temporal unity
that is in principle futural or horizonal and hence speculative.6 These theses may
be adduced against a widespread misconception that holds that the aesthetic object
exceeds the specific domain of art, so that aesthetics would then be the theory of an
expanded concept of art or the artistic field. Here, too, a poietic approach proves its
value: first, the aesthetic object always derives the principle of its creation of world,
its poiesis, from what we know as art; and second, the truth of the aesthetic object
never exceeds the truth opened up by poiesis. While the essential characterization
of aesthetic truth is appearance (Schein), that of poietic truth is the new.
Speculative poetics is, then, oriented toward the future, alters our view of the
past, and interacts with the present. Under the sign of contemporary art, the literary
takes on the task of creating a global, social, and political present. The present as unity
4 For more on this, see the roundtable discussion Beyond the Contemporary, in which I participated
together with Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, and Suhail Malik in Spike 36 (Summer 2013): 90104.
5 Peter Osborne, The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and Transnationality
in The Atlas Group, in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, ed. Armen Avanessian and Luke
Skrebowski (Berlin: Sternberg, 2011), 109.
6 Ibid.
Speculation 353
 SPECULATIVE POETICSPRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS
of time is a poietic fiction, never a (medially given) fact. Thinking speculatively about
literatureand art in generalimplies a methodology that reflects this and, instead
of relying on a literary-historical chronology, bases itself on the poetics of time, in
which asynchrony is object as well as method. The reference point of an asynchronous
poetics is a speculative horizon that, conceived in line with Meillassouxs post-meta-
physical materialism, allows the future to return to itself and in this way opens up
access to an unpredictable pastle pass est imprvisible (the past is unpredictable).7
The Altermodern Present Tense
The asynchronous poetics of time in literature continue to develop modernisms
achievements while taking up classical questions as well by altering the meaning
of the present tense. A literary example:
He is fifty. He is the general in overall command of the artillery with the
French army in Italy. His residence is at Milan. He wears a high-collared tunic
with a front embroidered in gold. He is sixty. He oversees the completion of
the terrace of his chateau. He is shivering, wrapped in an old military cloak.
He sees black spots. By evening he will be dead. He is thirty. He is a captain.
He goes to the opera. He wears a three-cornered hat, a blue tunic gathered in
at the waist, and a dress sword.
What exactly is it that differentiates the opening of Claude Simons historical novel
Les Gorgiques (1981) from that of a traditional historical narrator? As an altermodern
novel, it is neither a modernist metafiction nor an instance of postmodern play with
narrative forms, both of which are extremely worn-out poetological variations on
the thesis of the arbitrariness and emptiness of the signifier, a thesis that finds no
corroboration even in literature. An answer can be found at the blind spot of a lit-
erary studies occupied with the philosophy of time, which gives primacy to aisthesis
and the experience of time and which has a preference for classical modernism
(Prousts Recherche, Woolf s moments of being, as well as certain perennial post-
modern favorites). In the area of grammar, which is situated linguistically between
phonology and semantics, we find that the present tense, unsuitable though it seems
to be for fiction, becomes in the late twentieth century the basis for the independent
phenomenon of the present-tense novel.
Attempting to cast out aesthetics or aisthetics (respectively, theories of the
arts or of perception) and still convinced of the linguistic materiality of the present
tense, the avant-gardes were certain that the present-tense novel would preclude
fictionality. Obsessed with negativity (anti-fictionality, anti-narrativity, etc.),
7 Quentin Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, trans. Robin Mackay, Spike 35 (Spring 2013): 95.
354 Speculation
ARMEN AVANESSIAN
modernism opposed traditional storytelling (the recounting of things past) with
a radical focus on the present. Instead of sublating traditional (past-tense) fiction
and nouveau storytelling, altermodernism develops the modern present tense further
in an effort to find its way back to a new type of fiction. The infinite poetic judgment
of the altermodern present-tense novel splits the now in order to narrate another
present, a pure present of the pasta present that was never actually present to
itself.8 According to the opening of Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow (1973), it
is too late for any Now: A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before,
but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late.
Methodologically as well as historically, there is a need for new conceptual
perspectives. Hence, instead of countering postmodernism with a return to mod-
ernist positions, conceptions of literary and philosophical altermodernism come to
the fore. The altermodern present-tense novel thus not only contributes a new type
of fiction to literature; it also enriches the tense system of our language as such.
The fact that language creates our chronological notion of time, and the manner
in which it does so, is something that becomes palpable only in the experience of
literary fiction. Speculative poetics documents what is never purely the achievement
of individual authors or works but the product of literature at large.
The Experiment of Poetics
Philosophy thinks literature, literature produces theory, and language itself is a form
of knowledge: speculative language (Jacques Derrida) and poetic ontology (Valerij
Podoroga) stand in an immanent relationship to literary production.9 Making that
relationship productive requires collaboration among writers, literary theorists,
and speculative philosophy, a collaboration that determines the structure of the
research project speculative poetics.10 In addition to the need for numerous trans-
lations, this also means working toward a swapping of roles between philosophy
and literature, a recognition that literature knows something about philosophical
questions and that philosophy has something to tell us about narratological issues
in liter-ature. Hence, making the knowledge embodied in literature fruitful also means
that we are still quite far from knowing what literature is or, better, what it can do.
8 These remarks are based on a monograph coauthored with Anke Hennig, Prsens: Poetik eines
Tempus (Present: Poetics of a Tense) (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012). Indeed, although I would be
unable to attribute them one by one, virtually all of the ideas in this essay are dependent on
our conversations and the writing we have done together.
9 Jacques Derrida, Preface, in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality
and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2004), xi.
10 Either through their participation in workshops, through lectures and talks, or through
translations (see the Merve Verlags series Spekulationen as well as the publications referenced
at www.spekulative-poetik.de), all of the (living) theorists mentioned in this essay may be
situated within the orbit of speculative poetics.
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 SPECULATIVE POETICSPRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

Against an aesthetic skepticism typical of modernism and postmodernism,

I follow Walter Benjamin and a speculative poetics that has been topical since
Romanticism in seeking alternatives in the limits of our experience rather than in its
crisis and impossibility. Poiesis creates those possibilities which can become conditions
of experience, and its speculative moment insists on the accessibility of (absolute)
knowledge. A corresponding speculative materialism chooses to explain what is, not
by calling on a notion of equivalence, a philosophy of becoming, or a science of causal
explanations, but by embracing a path of experimentation. Facts are contingent, nec-
essarily contingent. This is also the locus of a poietics: the creation of something that
could not be regarded as necessary before it was created; the production of some-
thing whose genesis cannot be causally motivated but that seems to have chance as
its model and that ultimately opens up a space of truth in this artistic act of poiesis.

Recursion and Speculation

Poiesis has recursion as its primary linguistic-ontological operator. Recursion

differs from what Meillassoux has famously called the correlationist circle (the
circle for which all objective reality is aesthetically perceived or thought by a
subject)11 in that poiesis introduces a difference: the new. Our consciousness itself
may be described as a product of precisely the recursive circles that thinking creates.
With the figure of the circle, a meta-level is no longer included within the paradigm
of a structural linguistics based on equivalence, reflection, and difference. On the
contrary, with recursion, which is based on part/whole relations, a linguistic func-
tion is described whose task is to establish higher cognitive planes. Language arrests
recursive states on a next higher level of wholeness. It is a speculative instrument
for thinking the world. In this sense, speculative poetics is not distinguished from
Speculative Realism simply by the addition of a theory of language, but rather by
the fact that it concretely investigates language in search of its cognitive dimensions.
Speculative poetics is not interested in aesthetic negativity or the nature of our
faculties; its gravitational pull is toward the future. Only when taken together with
a corresponding philosophical (ancestral) or poietic (asynchronous) conception
of time does the notion of speculation acquire practical effect and can new things
arise within a differentiation of future and past. The old arises through something
new, past arises through future. Correlationism is not a pseudo-problem that can
be discussed in the context of a philosophy of science alone and then dismissed; Fig. 27
rather, it is an aporia that must be resolved. Once again, speculative materialism
necessarily includes a poietics.

Translated from the German by James Gussen

11 See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008).

356 Speculation
 Fig. 29
Fig. 28
Fig. 30
Fig. 31
 Automated Architecture: Speculative
Reason in the Age of the Algorithm
Luciana Parisi

Early nineties cybernetic culture did not fully anticipate the emergence of the
automated form of reason that now subtends the infrastructural architecture of
everyday life. After more than twenty years, it has become apparent that what
Sanford Kwinter calls the age of the algorithm1 points to a new form of ratio-
nality not only leading to new methods of calculating economic risk, or performing
simulations of social behavior, but also involving the computation of space and
time. This new form of rationality, defined by the convergence of computation
and topology, or information theory and nonstandard geometry, has produced
a specific aesthetic that can be found in algorithmic architecture. In this field,
which includes the pioneering works of digital architect Greg Lynn,2 among others,
computational design has taken inspiration from vector fields so as to model, for
example, the speed and direction of a fluid moving through space, or the strength
and direction of a magnetic or gravitational force as it changes from point to point.
Here the architectural form is the result of the computational processing of bio-
physical variables (the distribution of weight, gravitational pressures, circulation
of air, intensity of traffic, frequency of movement).3 Influenced by second-order
cybernetics of evolving feedbacks, algorithmic architecture of the 1990s started to
adopt biophysical dynamics as inputs in software programs, and biophysical data
became a new parameter for computational design.
By closing the gap between mathematical models and biophysical
contingencies, computation has entered a field of spatiotemporal connected-
nessa topologyinvolving a continual transformation of form without cutting
or tearing. Topology, as the geometry of place, here refers to the mathematical

1 Sanford Kwinter, Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
(New York: Actar, 2008).
2 Greg Lynn, Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple, in
Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn, special issue, Architectural Design 63, nos. 3/4
(March/April 1993): 2229.
3 According to architect Karl Chu, algorithms have been central to the late twentieth-century
convergence of computational and biogenetic revolutions leading to the ultimate design
of biological and mathematical codes, which promise the embodiment of life, emotion,
and intelligence. See Karl Chu, Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation,
in Programming Cultures: Art and Architectures in the Age of Software, ed. Mike Silver,
special issue, Architectural Design 76, no. 4 (July/August 2006): 39. This position is not too
different from debate about cybernetics in the late nineties that directly engaged the new
techno-scientific ontologies of biological bodies.

Speculation 363
 AUTOMATED ARCHITECTURE
understanding of geometrical shapes and spaces, in which connectedness and
continuity are preserved under their continuous deformations, such as stretching
and bending. It also refers to the geometrical understanding of form in terms of
its evolution in time and thus to the genetic capacities of a form to change through
time. From this standpoint, biophysical unpredictability has become superior to
mathematical axioms, as the reality of abstraction has slipped behind the concrete-
ness of matter. In other words, the materiality of data and their variations in time
have replaced mathematical models in their attempt to represent reality through
abstract rules. The digital design of space has superseded the Euclidean matrix of
extension by adding temporal evolution to fixed points, developing a topological
surface enveloping all points in space and time.
The figure of the blob or the fold corresponds to the continuous topological
surfaces now defining the dominant aesthetic of digital architecture. In partic-
ular, as Patrik Schumacher has argued, parametricism now represents the new
global style for architecture and design.4 When applied to large-scale urbanism,
for instance, parametricism is said to transform the differential distance between
points into an integral surface of continual connection.5 From this standpoint,
parametricism implies the inclusion of contingent elementsatmospheric,
geological, biological, and physical elementsinto the program in the form of
variable parameters whose temporal evolution becomes the motor for the trans-
formation of the architectural whole. This means that variables are not only added
to the program (as if from the outside), but also partake of the software environ-
ment of parametric relations. Parametric programming is not just concerned with
the computation of existing elements, but additionally, and significantly, with how
feedback relations between finite parameters can engender the infinite variations
of an architectural form.
Nevertheless, as a style of contemporary digital architecture, parametricism
has been particularly discussed as a manifestation of the cultural logic of late neo-
liberalism, whose topological operations of continual transformation, structural
coupling, and mutual correspondence between the inside and the outside define the
4 Schumacher recently claimed that parametricism is the dominant style of todays avant-garde,
characterizing the power of large-scale urban schemes. See Patrik Schumacher, Parametricism:
A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design, in Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design,
ed. Neil Leach (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 1424.
5 In computer programming, a parameter is a variable: a symbolic name given to a known or
unknown quantity of information, so that the name can be used independently of the information
it represents and can then be assigned different values in different places. A parameter, therefore,
can be used in a new way or in the same way (iteration). Parameters are used in subroutines (a
procedure, function, routine, method, and so forth) to refer to one of the pieces of data provided
as inputs to the subroutine. In contrast to standard software packages based on datum geometric
objects, within digital architecture parametric software links dimensions and parameters
to geometry, thereby allowing for impact of the incremental adjustment of a part on the whole
assembly.
364 Speculation
LUCIANA PARISI
choreographic arrangement of data.6 Yet this critical view of parametricism is pred-
icated on the fact that parametricism promises a formally open-ended and flexible
space that does not physically match realized architectures, and that it is the direct
incarnation of the spirit of the neoliberal market. I propose that parametricism is
not abstract enough to meet the possibilities offered by a radical algorithmic for-
malism. If parametricism only relies on the operative function of algorithms and
the interactive programming of parameters without questioning what these material
forms of abstraction can do beyond the intentional design of the program, then
it remains unable to engage with the unthought-of capacities of these automated
systems to determine new spatiotemporal forms.
Without denying that parametricism is an instance of the topological aes-
thetic of governance, I want to problematize the rejection tout court of the agential
character of computer programming and its real algorithmic objects.7 That is, I take
algorithmic objects to be necessarily implicated in the sociality that they invisibly
structure. The stealthy intrusion of computational programming into everyday cul-
ture requires a close engagement with the nuances of the digital apparatus as well as
the axiomatic thoughtthat is, with logic and the formalism that subtends itthat
indirectly shapes culture. From this standpoint, the new topological architecture
of relations expressed by parametricism is precisely what needs to be challenged in
order to reveal the irreversible transformation that algorithmic objects have brought
to digital formalism. In other words, I suggest that it is now crucial to readdress
emerging types of formalism, parametricism in this case, that characterize the aes-
thetic of neoliberal capitalism (specifically its having subsumed all culture and life
to its own interactive and changing rules). However, instead of rejecting formalism,
I propose that one has to revisit its significance in the light of radical changes within
its computational modus operandi, which may offer aesthetic and cultural possibil-
ities inconsistent with the capitalist axiomatic of a whole that subtends all its parts.
In particular, I argue that these computational systems are populated with what
6 Parametricism has been criticized for many reasons, but I will briefly mention only two here.
On the one hand, typified by Owen Hatherleys criticism, parametricism is decried as an apolitical
self-proclaimed avant-garde. Referring to Schumachers text A Glimpse Back into the Future,
which accompanied the exhibition Zaha Hadid and Suprematism at the Galerie Gmurzynska in
Zurich, Hatherley argues that parametricism strips Russian avant-garde architecture of any social
or political dimension denuding it to its bare formal radicality. See Owen Hatherley Zaha
Hadid Architects and the Neoliberal Avant-Garde, Mute, October 26, 2010, www.metamute.org/
editorial/articles/zaha-hadid-architects-and-neoliberal-avant-garde. On the other hand,
Schumachers parametricism has also been accused of disengaging from the physical ground of
architecture and overlooking the contingencies of urban planning through an excessive search for
formal relations. In particular, it has been argued that the excessive search for the beauty of form
has completely derailed digital design from becoming useful for urban and infrastructural
problems. See Ingeborg M. Rocker, Apropos Parametricism: If, In What Style Should We Build?
Log 21 (March 2011).
7 On the problematics of nonphysical design of space associated with a Deleuzian reading of
architecture, see Douglas Spencer, Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal Space, Control and
the Univer-city, Radical Philosophy 168 (July/August 2011).
Speculation 365
 AUTOMATED ARCHITECTURE
Alfred North Whitehead calls eternal objects, which I conceive as incomputable
entities that possess an infinite capacity for the eventuation of change and for rad-
ical contingency.8 My aim here is to show, via Whitehead, that parametricism, as
a particular type of formalism, may offer, despite its ostensible homologies with
neoliberal capitalism, a non-intentional degree of interference that breaks open
from within the axiomatic wholeness of neoliberal capital. A close analysis of this
transformation can help explain how structural changes in programming are not
only not negligible but are in fact ontological expressions of computational culture
and power. This analysis highlights the incongruencethe asymmetry and non-
equivalencebetween software as a totalizing system of governance and algorithms
as a series of fractal or inconsistent events.
One could argue that parametricism immediately transforms formalism
because it incorporates contingencies into its model by using real time data. Yet
introducing temporality into programming does not fully challenge the formal
nature of the enterprise; it only affords formalism the pretension of describing how
mathematics can incorporate physics by creating a totalitarian system of relations,
according to which a few mathematical rules are able to lead to the evolution of com-
plex structures by establishing continual feedback with the environment. This means
that parametricisms topological qualities do not in fact challenge formalism: instead,
insofar as the computation of biophysical contingencies only serves to construct the
program as being open to change, they are but the reification of its formal logic.
The introduction of qualitative and real-time variations in algorithmic pro-
gramming aims at anticipating spatiotemporal changes, which means designing the
potential transformation of scenarios. In other words, software interactions with the
real data of the environment have become constitutive of the aesthetic of topological
governance based on the effects that potential data can have in its internal architecture
of relations. Instead of simply reducing biophysical variables and contingencies to
sets of binary codes, which are unable to process the gray areas between states, digital
design now uses the topological integration of differential relations, or intensive data,
to build spatiotemporal connections and anticipate incipient changes. The use of
evolving algorithms or open-ended instructions that respond and adapt to the external
environment also reveals that governance now relies on the calculation of differentials,
or the variable qualities or infinitesimals found in the relation between states.
Speculative Computing
It is important to specify that interactive algorithms and responsive computation
occlude, rather than reveal, the what and the how of algorithmic objectsobjects
deemed to remain passive in the face of an ever changing governance of continual
8 See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 22ff.
366 Speculation
LUCIANA PARISI
connectedness. We turn therefore to information theory to address algorithms as
sequential spatiotemporal data structures conditioned by infinite amounts of infor-
mation. I believe that these data structures are actual spatiotemporalities and are
precisely the objects of algorithmic architecture. This means that an algorithmic
object is more than a temporal form or the result of interactive inputs, that it defines
spatiotemporal structures as stemming from the increasing amount of automated
data exploding in our computational culture.9 In order to understand the status of
algorithms in digital architecture, I suggest that algorithms need to be considered
in Whiteheads terms as actualities: spatiotemporal data objects.10 Algorithms are
not simply instructions that have to be executed by a program, but are actualities
spatiotemporally constrained by the data of which they are composed. This spatio-
temporal conception of algorithms helps us to rethink algorithmic architecture as
the performative vehicle of the spatiotemporalities of data structures constituting
algorithms. In other words, in order to define the aesthetics of algorithmic archi-
tecture and the formation of new spatiotemporalities, one must first confront the
spatiotemporal matrix of algorithms.
Contrary to the view that computation is a reductive form of rationalism,
I want to rethink computation in terms of speculative reason, to borrow another term from
Whitehead.11 Computation as an instance of speculative reason does not correspond
to the topological order of potential connectedness between points. On the contrary,
Whiteheads understanding of speculative reason explains that the function of reason
is to add new data to the continual chain of cause and effecthere, the continual
processing of data. Similarly, a speculative view of computation implies that such pro-
cessing is not a mere compression of data or a structure of relation defined by sets and
subsets. Instead, a speculative understanding of computation implies that each set and
subset of instruction is conditioned by what cannot be calculated, the incomputable
9 This is an important argument against the idea that algorithms are merely temporal forms
destined to disappear in the background of ubiquitous computation. Computational design
problematically embraces the logic of prediction and the calculation of probabilities, which are
already set data and are unable to explain novelty in spatiotemporal experience. I argue against
this form of meta-computation and against rational logic that is based on few unchangeable rules,
the combination of which produces all forms of complexity.
10 For Whitehead, the actual world is composed of actual occasions, or actualities. These are
grouped in events and become the nexus of actual entities that are inter-related in some
determined fashion in one extensive quantum. Events therefore explain the togetherness of
actualities, which Whitehead calls the nexus. But every nexus is a component part of another
nexus that emerges as an unalterable entity from the concrescence of its component elements, and
stands as a fact, possessed of a date and a location. See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 109, 230.
11 According to Whitehead, the history of modern civilization shows that such schemes fulfil the
promise of the dream of Solomon. They first amplify life by satisfying the peculiar claim of the
speculative Reason, which is understanding for its own sake. Secondly, they represent the capital
of ideas which each age holds in trust for its successors. The ultimate moral claim that civilization
lays upon its possessors is that they transmit, and add to, this reserve of potential development
by which it has profited. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press,
1929), 72.
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 AUTOMATED ARCHITECTURE
data that disclose the holes and gaps within (and not outside) the formal order of
sequences. Algorithms are conditioned by incomputable data because that which
cannot be calculated in advance is the internal limit of any computational process,
manifested by the incapacity of a program to include all possible answers in its premises
or by the failure of formula to determine all of its expressions. This means that a notion
of speculative computing is not concerned with quantifying probabilities to predict the
future, but rather with a concrete system of algorithmic objects defined by randomness
or incompressible quantities of data. Thus, a notion of speculative computing is not to
be confused with the capacity of algorithmic architecture to create temporary forms
that simulate what spatiotemporal structures and infrastructures could become. On the
contrary, I advance the notion of speculative computing to suggest that random
datawhich in information theory means non-compressible dataare the contagious
architectures of the present. These data architectures, far from withdrawing from the
present as temporal forms that appear and disappear, are instead actual objects that,
even when they cease to be present or function, nonetheless remain objective data to
be inherited, evaluated, and selected by subsequent algorithms. I have so far argued
that the scope of algorithmic architecture cannot be confined to the specific forms
of built or designed environments. Algorithmic architecture inevitably unleashes the
question of what and how algorithms are, thus exposing the invisible dynamics of
spatiotemporal data structures that subtend and drive the increasing use of algorithms
to design environments.
It is therefore possible to suggest that algorithmic architecture reveals the imma-
nent reality of patternless data, exposing the inconsistent unity of algorithmic objects
and thus determining a fractal and not topological arrangement of spatiotemporalities
in our computational culture. What is most important here is that this reality cannot
be encompassed by the totalizing and invariant function of a topological model of
continuous surfaces. From this standpoint, algorithmic architecture does not just
reveal the neoliberal aesthetics of topological relationality; rather, this newly auto-
mated aesthetics consists of the abstract reality of algorithmic events emerging from
the automated selection and production of incomputable data: random information.
Like Whitehead, I contend that the aim of speculative reason is the production
of an abstract scheme, the concrete arrangement of relations.12 In other words, for
reason to be truly speculative, the schemes that are produced and realized must be
able to encounter their finitude and limits: to account for the incomputable, the dis-
crete parts that cannot be incorporated into the continual evolution of the whole.13
12 The true activity of understanding consists in a voyage to abstraction which is in fact a voyage
to the more fully concrete: to the system in which the fact is enmeshed. The system as
conceptualized may be more abstract than the fact itself in that it is more general, but the real
systematic context is more concrete, and its elaboration yields more about the existential
relations of the fact. Ibid., 76.
13 Abstract speculation has been the salvation of the worldspeculations which made systems and
then transcended them, speculations which ventured to the furthest limits of abstraction. Ibid.
368 Speculation
LUCIANA PARISI
What can be learned from understanding computation in terms of speculative
reason is that the contemporary form of governance ventures toward the actuality of
incomputable probabilities (infinite discrete unities that are bigger than the totality
of the whole sequence of algorithmic instructions) that lie behind the digital ground
of universal computation and the continual surface of topological connectedness.
The age of the algorithmic governance precisely marks the moment at which the
unintended consequences of ubiquitous computing unleash the limit of data pro-
gramming (the limit of computation) into the everyday, whereby new spatiotem-
poral structures that cannot be assimilated into what we know or perceive take over.
It would be wrong, however, to view these incomputable structures of data
with naive enthusiasm and thus rest in them our hope of breaking open the topo-
logical continuity of governance. Instead, it is important to address the reality of
algorithmic objects without overlooking the fact that the computation of infinity
is at the core of a new logic, rationality, and ultimately governance. This concern
with incomputable probabilities is therefore ultimately a concern with the transfor-
mation of the formal logic of computation. This is not to be confused with a call
for an underpinning mathematical or digital ontology or politics. Instead, I prefer
to follow Gregory Chaitins discovery of Omega, an incomputable probability that
shakes the mathematical or digital ground of truth by revealing that the probability
for infinity is an algorithmic affair, exposing the limit of reason and perhaps the
irreducible presence of a non-human thought.14 This also means that what subtends
the algorithmic architecture of contemporary culture is the computational process
of calculating that which cannot be predicted in advance, and that the computa-
tional idealism of efficiency is in truth internally challenged by its limit. However,
this is not simply to say that the incomputable always already escapes computational
formalism because it remains ungraspable and fully dependent on the physicality of
experience. Instead, I suggest that the incomputable is nonetheless apprehended in
the last instance by a computational process whose internal limit has become the
condition for any form of calculation. What enters the cultural field therefore is
not the failure of computation to incorporate the incomputable, but the capacity of
the incomputablethe uncompressible and entropic expansion of datato drive
what can be computed.
To conclude, I want to emphasize the argument that algorithms expose pre-
cisely the inevitable reality of automated modes of thought through automated
spatiotemporal data structures that cannot be subsumed under a totalizing prin-
ciple of computation. From this standpoint, if we want to understand algorithmic
14 The notion of the incomputable is a development of the halting problem defined by Alan Turing
in the 1930s. Chaitin explains that the definition of the halting probability is based on the
existence of prefix-free universal computable functions, defining a programming language with
the property that no valid program can be obtained as a proper extension of another valid
program. In other words, prefix-free codes are defined as random or uncompressible information.
See Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math! The Quest for Omega (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 13031.
Speculation 369
 AUTOMATED ARCHITECTURE
architecture as an extended practice of governance, it is important to challenge the
assumption that governance, in its conjunction with computation, corresponds to
a topological form (the continual variation of a whole connecting every point).
Instead, a closer look at automated architecture suggests that algorithms, or the
stuff of computing, are parts that can be bigger than wholes, as much as wholes
can be smaller than parts. Hence, automated algorithms have the opportunity to
turn the topological aesthetics of governance into a fractal arrangement of incom-
putable infinities.
370 Speculation
Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction
Quentin Meillassoux
I would like to discuss the difference, which seems important to me from a meta-
physical point of view, between two regimes of fiction that concern experimental
science, and for which I shall use two terms, one well known, the other my own:
science fiction and extro-science fiction: SF and XSF.
Before discussing the meaning of this difference, I would like to clarify some-
thing, so as to avoid misunderstandings and possible objections. I shall define science
fiction in what I believe to be a fairly commonplace way, in order to clearly distinguish
it from what I call extro-science fiction. But once I have given the definition of these
two notions, one could think that the literary genre of science fiction also contains
extro-science fictions, that there are examples of XSF books within SF, and thus that
the SF genre contradicts the distinction I propose. I do not intend to argue this point;
my intention is to bring to light a conceptual distinction and to demonstrate its phil-
osophical interest. After that, science-fiction specialists can decide for themselves
whether or not extro-science fiction stories already exist in futuristic literature, and
whether the genre of science fiction comprises the proposed conceptual difference or
not. My thesis is that if these stories exist, and whether or not they are inscribed within
the SF genre, they belong in truth to something profoundly distinct from science fic-
tion, and have a right on this basis to be considered in their singularity, to constitute
in some way a genre within a genre, an empire within an empire.
Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction
Now lets proceed to make this distinction: SF/XSF.
The relation of science to fiction in SF seems, generally speaking, to be as fol-
lows: it is a matter of imagining a fictional future for science that modifies, and often
enlarges, the possibilities of its knowledge and its mastery of the real. The relation
of man to the world is seen to alter along with this modification of scientific knowl-
edge, as it opens up unheard-of possibilities. In science fiction, possible futures,
whatever great upheavals they herald, are retained within the sphere of science.
All science fiction thus implicitly abides by the following axiom: in the anticipated
This essay transcribes a lecture presented at the cole Normale Suprieure in May 2006
and carries the traces of its oral presentation. A revised version is published under the title
Mtaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-sciences (Paris: Aux forges de Vulcain, 2013). It was first
published in English as part of a special edition of Florian Heckers CD Speculative Solution
(Mego/Urbanomic, 2010) and is reprinted here by kind permission of Urbanomic.
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 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
future, it will still be possible to submit the world to scientific knowledge. Science
may be profoundly transformed, but there will always be science. Hence, of course,
the generic name for this type of writing: fiction can produce extreme variations,
but within a science that always remains present, even if it becomes unrecognizable
as its possibilities are transformed.
Now, what do I mean by the fiction of worlds outside science, or XSF? When
speaking of a world outside science, I do not mean worlds where science is simply
absent, worlds where the experimental sciences do not exist, like worlds in which
people have not, or have not yet, developed a scientific relation to the real. A world
outside science means worlds where experimental science is in principle impossible,
rather than unknown. Extro-science fiction thus defines a particular regime of the
imaginary, which is concerned with conceiving of worlds structuredor rather,
destructuredin such a way that no experimental science can constitute its object
within them. The guiding question of XSF is: What could a world be like for it to
be in principle inaccessible to scientific knowledge, for it to be incapable of being
established as the object of a natural science?
My intention here is to give a precise conceptual content to this definitionso
far still very general and solely negativeof extro-science worlds. At the same time,
for me it is a matter of demonstrating the properly speculative interest there might
be, on the one hand, in being conscious of the difference between science fiction
and extro-science fiction and, on the other, of cultivating the type of imagination,
distinct from that of SF, that would be XSF.
If I am interested in extro-science fiction, it is because it is at the source of a
classic metaphysical problem to which I have long dedicated myself: the problem
of induction, or more precisely, the problem of the necessity of natural laws, as
posed by the philosopher David Hume first in his Treatise of Human Nature and later
in the Enquiry into Human Understanding. Now, it seems to me that this problem was
profoundly misunderstood by one of the most important epistemologists of the
twentieth century, Karl Popper. Popper has the honor of being the first to refer to
this problem of induction by the expression Humes problem. And he claimed
to have given it a rigorous and original response. I see Poppers misunderstanding
of Hume as precisely the result of the fact that he mistook an XSF problem for a SF
problem. Popper posed an entirely different problem from Humes, one that implies
the mobilization of another type of imaginary. For if Hume, as I believe, mobilized
the imaginary of extro-science fiction to pose his problem, the one that Popper
posed can only be conceived within the imaginary of science fiction.
Following this, I shall examine the response to Humes problem given by
Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, more precisely in the objective deduction of
the categories. Unlike Popper, Kant had no illusions about the nature of Humes
problem. He responds on Humes own terrain, which consists in creating the fic-
tion of a world where science has become impossible. But I am critical of Kants
thesis too, showing that the weakness of his transcendental deduction comes most
372 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
notably from an insufficiently developed, and rather limited, extro-science imagi-
nary. A more acute sense of extro-science fiction allows us to launch another type
of response to Humes problem, one that is neither Poppers nor Kants.
Two Billiards Matches: Hume and Asimov
The paradigmatic text in which Hume poses his famous problem of causal necessity
consists in a fantasized description of a billiards match during the course of which
the laws of dynamics cease to hold:
When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards
another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be sug-
gested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive,
that a hundred different events might as well follow from the cause? May
not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return
in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All
these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we
give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than
the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foun-
dation for this preference.1
The question Hume poses, through the use of these imaginary scenes, is that of
knowing what truly guaranteesbut also what persuades usthat physical laws
will continue to hold in a moments time, given that neither experience nor logic
can assure us of this. There is no logical contradiction in imagining that laws might
change in the future; and no experience of the past constancy of law permits us to
infer that this constancy will endure in the future. Hume concludes that only the
habit of past empirical constancies persuades us that the future will resemble the
past. This is a psychological solution of the problem he set himself, one that did
not satisfy those who tried after Hume to resolve, in their turn, the challenge he
issued to reason, principally, Kant and Popper.
Lets begin with the most recent solution, Poppers, as related in his famous
work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and pursued further in his later books. The
principle of Poppers solution is very simple: had we posed to Popper the question
of what guarantees that Humes billiard balls will not adopt the fantastical behavior
described above, he would have responded not only that nothing could guarantee it,
but moreover that this was a good thing, since there is nothing fantastic about these
possibilitiesthey must be taken entirely seriously. For Popper, our foreknowledge
1 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford University
Press, 2007), IV.10.
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 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
of the future consists in theoretical hypotheses that are essentially falsifiable by new,
that is to say not yet well-established, scientific experiments. For him, what makes
a theory scientific is precisely the fact that it is in principle falsifiable by experience.
It is this intrinsic falsifiability of scientific conjecture that explains the dynamism of
experimental science, the incessant movement in whose course physicists advance
to new hypotheses, recuse old ones, and submit rival theories to merciless testing.
In which case, there is no point in asking, as did Hume and the empiricists
who came before him, what assures us that the sun will rise tomorrow, that every
living being must die, or that bread nourishes. Nothing canor shouldassure us,
for the good reason that these things are not at all necessary. Moreover, they do not
always hold true. As Popper writes in Objective Knowledge:
In all three cases I found that these established laws were actually refuted
in the sense in which they were originally meant. (a) The first was refuted
when Pytheas of Marseilles discovered the frozen sea and the midnight
sun. The fact that (a) was intended to mean Wherever you go, the sun will
rise and set once in 24 hours is shown by the utter disbelief with which
his report was met, and by the fact that his report became the paradigm of
all travellers tales. (b) The secondor rather, the Aristotelian theory on
which it is basedwas also refuted [] by the discovery that bacteria are
not bound to die, since multiplication by fission is not death, and later by
the realization that living matter is not in general bound to decay and to die,
although it seems that all forms can be killed by sufficiently drastic means.
(Cancer cells, for example, can go on living.) (c) The thirda favorite of
Humeswas refuted when people eating their daily bread died of ergotism,
as happened in a catastrophic case in a French village not very long ago.2
Returning to the case of the impacts of the billiard balls, if we follow Popper we
must say that they could indeed behave in unprecedented ways in the future, either
because one has modified the circumstances of the experiment (by, for example,
metalizing the balls and introducing a powerful magnetic field); or because someday
one will have discovered a way of altering the gravitational field in which their
movement takes place.
Now, why did I say that this solution rests on a misinterpretation of the orig-
inal problem formulated in Humes Enquiry? First of all, the Popperian solution
belongs to an imaginary homogeneous with that of science fiction. For what does
falsificationism require us to admit concerning scientific theory? That in the future
the theory may be falsified in favor of other theories completely unenvisaged at
present. The examples Popper gives of such refutations belong, of course, to the
past; but the principle of his epistemology consists in projecting into the future
2 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 12.
374 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
the possibility of scientific ruptures equally radical to those that have already taken
place, which include, for example, Newtonian theory superseded by theories as
revolutionary and unforeseeable to the men of the eighteenth century as general
relativity and quantum physics. Even if we cannot know, or foresee, what a future
physics or a future biology might be, we must accept the possibility that an exper-
imental science to come might be as incommensurable with present science as
present science might have been with that of past eras. In order to accede to the
Popperian epistemology, it is very much a matter of conceiving of science fiction,
but an indeterminate science fiction, because rather than inventing the positive
content of a future science, we content ourselves with positing the beingperhaps
radically otherof such a content to come, in relation to our current knowledge.
So how does Popper misconstrue Hume? Well, Popper actually poses the fol-
lowing problem: Could our theories be refuted in the future by new experiences? His
problem is epistemological; it concerns the nature of our scientific knowledge. It is
not ontological, like Humes problem. The latter is not simply about the stability
of scientific theory, but about the stability of the processes described by physical
laws. Popper does not confront this problem at all. He tells us that new experi-
ences could refute our theories, but he never doubts that existing, well-established
experiments will always produce the same results in the future. Given exactly the
same circumstances, the same experiments will always yield the same results; only
unprecedented circumstances can give unprecedented results. We can see this very
well in the examples he gives: it is only in proximity to the pole that the sun ceases
to rise every twenty-four hours; it is only because of a bacteria that bread ceases to
nourish and instead kills. Never, in unchanged circumstances, will we see the sun
suddenly cease to obey gravity and, for a change, take a trip outside of the system
that bears its name; nor will bread identical in composition to that which nour-
ishes become for no reason deadly to whomever eats it. For if this were to occur,
we would no longer be dealing with a science bound to revolutionize its theories
to account for new experiences, but rather with an experimental science that had
become impossible with the collapse of the laws of physics themselves.
Now, this hypothesis of a future world where science itself would become
impossible is the real problem posed by Hume. Poppers problemwhat is the
guarantee of our theoryis a science fiction problem, a problem driven by a fic-
tion that presupposes that there will always be a possible science in the future. But
Humes problem mobilizes another imaginary, an imaginary of extro-science fiction,
the fiction of a world that has become too chaotic to permit any scientific theory
whatsoever to be applied to reality anymore. And here one can see very well that
the difference between two regimes of fictionSF and XSFhas real metaphysical
stakes, since Poppers misconstruction of it led him to conflate his own, epistemo-
logical, problem with Humes ontological problem.
To sum up the difference between Humes problem and Poppers, we can
return to the example of the billiard balls fantastic trajectory: according to Hume
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the question is what guarantees that the ball will not adopt a trajectory that is not
only unforeseen, but in principle unforeseeable, which cannot be modeled, since it
escapes not only every known law, but any law that might conceivably be known.
According to Popper, the question is what guarantees that unprecedented circum-
stances, combined with as-yet unknown laws, may not permit us, in an undetermined
future, to send the ball on a trajectory that is completely unforeseen, even if in prin-
ciple foreseeable for a future being of science. The first question goes beyond the
limits of science fiction, whereas the second belongs wholly within them.
There is a science fiction text that illustrates this difference so perfectly
it is as if it were written specifically for this purpose. Isaac Asimovs story The
Billiard Ball is the last in the collection Asimovs Mysteries, where the conceit is to
combine SF stories with detective mysteries, to fuse the whodunit la Agatha by sending a billiard ball beneath the central raya supreme perversion, which,
Christie with the SF genre. In The Billiard Ball Asimov narrates the tale of a
man endowed with a genius for theoretical physics, specializing in the Theory of
General Relativity, who is the suspect in a murder perpetrated by means of a billiard
ball. The whole intrigue lies precisely in the unexpected trajectory of a billiard ball;
but the question at the heart of this intrigue is none other than that of whether
we address this inexplicability from within the framework of Poppers problem
within the arena of the science fiction imaginaryor from within the framework
of Humes problem.
All will become clear once we explain the plot of this tale. The narrator,
a science journalist, intimates in his personal notes that he suspects the greatest
scientist of his time, Professor James Priss, of having committed a murder. Here
are the events he recounts: Priss, though more honored than any other scientist
of his time, had always remained in the shadow of Edward Bloom, who, devoid
of any theoretical talent, nevertheless displayed a great genius for applying the
most abstract thinking of his time, in particular Prisss. A sort of super-Edison,
through his concrete inventions and their considerable financial consequences,
Bloom becomes extremely rich and celebrated, both more so than Priss, who never
surpassed the limited notoriety of a professional scientist. An implicit rivalry, and
a sort of mutual jealousy develops between the two men, each secretly envious of
the type of knowledge the other boasts. Both men are known to be redoubtable
players, and their rivalry crystallizes in the weekly billiards match the two have
habitually held since youth.
This hostility, masked by amicable and civil outward behavior, explodes when
Bloom claims to have applied Prisss theory of the anti-gravitational field. In this
theory, which won him a second Nobel Prize, Priss foresaw the theoretical possibility
of annulling all gravitational effects by countering gravity with an electromagnetic
field. Only, according to Priss, this possibility is impossible in practice, because the
electromagnetic field necessary for the effect would have to be infinite and is thus
technically unrealizable. Bloom disagrees with this, and announces that he will
create an anti-gravity machine without an infinite electromagnetic field. Tension
376 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
mounts between the two men, their reputations on the line, until, a year on, Bloom
announces that he has succeeded. He invites the international press to attend the
first public demonstration of his success. And, of course, he also perfidiously invites
Professor Priss to witness before the whole world the marvelous application of his
brilliant theory.
When everyone is present, Bloom leads the audience to his laboratory, where
a device that stupefies them all is presented. At the centre of the room, in the
midst of numerous pieces of equipment, stands a billiards table, and at the centre
of the table is a luminous, vertical ray. Bloom gives the following explanation: he
has never before tried his antigravity ray on a material object, even though he is
sure it will work. The reason is that he wanted Priss to have the honor of doing so,
under cover of an homage, condemns him to making himself ridiculous before the
entire world by giving credit to his rival in a game of billiards that he will have lost
forever. According to Blooms predictions, the ball will become weightless in the
ray, and then slowly rise. The audience members are wearing sunglasses because
of the brightness of the beam, so they cannot see Prisss expression at the moment
when Bloom makes this announcement. At first paralyzed, Priss seems to gather
himself. He approaches the table and slowly takes aim; he strikes the ball, which
takes a complicated trajectory, rebounding, and finally entering the ray. A thun-
derous noise is heard, everyone panics, and, when calm returns, Bloom is dead,
a hole the precise size of the billiard ball puncturing his chest.
A totally unforeseen event occurs: the ball has followed a trajectory aber-
rant not only to our physics, real physics, but also to the fictive physics of Priss
and Bloom. If the story were Humeanthat is, an extro-science fiction story
then there would be nothing more to say about this aberrant event, and the plot
would leave us high and dry. But luckily, it is a science fiction storyPopperian,
not Humeanand the plot ends in a brilliant denouement. Priss explains what
he did not realize at firsthe explains that he is well-known for thinking slowly
namely, that an object exempt from gravitation would not move with the serenity
of a weightless object, but would be displaced with the speed of an object without
mass, that is to say, at the speed of a photon, the speed of light. The tale thus ends
with the narrator anxiously wondering whether, confronted with the risk of his
reputation being ruined in front of everyone, Priss had seen what would happen,
and taken the time to calculate the angle required for the billiard ball to avenge
him forever.
The story works because it is Popperian. It is based on the fact that the totally
unforeseen event was not unforeseeable in principle, since the laws of physics could
explain it. The crux of the story is precisely the forever unprovable possibility that
Priss had in fact foreseen what was going to happen. Prevision must be possible
for the story to function: the event must be subject to a law, even if the latter is so
unprecedented that our suspicion must remain forever a suspicion.
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 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
But beyond the case of this story, a more general conclusion seems to emerge
concerning the valuenot metaphysical but properly literaryof our two regimes
of fiction. It seems that only science fiction permits the construction of a fictional
framework, of a narrative, that may be fantastic but certainly is coherent. In sci-
ence fiction we inhabit a world in which physics is other, but not one where laws
are purely and simply abolished, where everything and anything can happen for
no reason whatsoever. Tales can be told because we are still involved in worlds
ordered totalitieseven if they are governed by another order. Individuals can act
in themand even premeditate a murderbecause they can always foresee the
consequences of their actions. In extro-science fiction, on the other hand, it would
seem that no order of any type whatsoever can be constituted, and consequently no
story can be narrated. If this is true, then we would be in error to speak of extro-
science worldssince a world incapable of giving rise to science would not be
a world but pure chaos, a pure diversity that nothing orders. This is precisely Kants
thesis, and his way of resolving Humes problem: according to Kant, if laws were
not necessary, then no world, and no consciousness, could emerge; there would be
only a pure diversity, with no cohesion. Now, this thesis is contestable, because in
truth an extro-science world, and even a plurality of such worlds, is conceivable.
So, we shall try to establish both the metaphysical validity of such worldsby
making them worlds whose possibility one cannot denyand their literary value,
by making them the possible milieu for the armature of fiction.
The Transcendental Deduction and the Three Types of XSF World
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kants response to Humes challenge belongs to the
moment of the transcendental deduction, more precisely the moment of the objec-
tive deduction of the categories. It is impractical to reiterate this in detail here, but
let us recall the general strategy: Kant certainly wishes to legitimate our belief in
the necessity of physical laws. But he does not want to do so as a speculative meta-
physician such as Leibniz would have. A Leibnizian, faced with Humes challenge,
would doubtless have responded that it is possible to prove the existence of a bene-
ficent God who has it in his heart to create and maintain the best world possible
namely, ours. The constancy of the world, from this point of view, owes itself to the
wisdom and beneficence of a sovereign being. Kant does not proceed in this way,
because he recuses all forms of speculative thought in general. His strategy is rather
to attempt an ad absurdum proof of the constancy of physical laws. This proof can
be summarized as follows: Hume asks what allows us to exclude the eventuality of
those fantastic trajectories of the billiard balls he has us imagining, on the basis
of a pure inconstancy of physical law. The principle of the Kantian response is as
follows: this scene we imagine could never really be perceived, because what would
render it possiblethe contingency of the laws of naturewould render impossible
378 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
all perception and all consciousness of an object. For if the scene of Humes billiard
balls is imaginable as a scene, it is because the decor before which the balls frolic
itself remains stable. The billiard table, the smoky room in which the match is held,
the players themselvesthe whole context around the billiard balls contradicts the
supposed hypothesis of the contingency of laws. This context testifies, more broadly,
to the persistence of the world that surrounds the balls, that is to say of a nature
that remains impeccably obedient to the laws of nature. Now, if the laws of nature
fail for the balls, they must fail in general; and then the world itself would crumble,
and with it, of course, any subjective representation of it.
The fault of Humes argument, according to Kant, is that he dissociates the
conditions of science from the conditions of consciousness. Hume gives us a situ-
ation where we are conscious of a world in which science has become impossible,
a world in which we can still perceive objectsthe billiard table, the ballsbut
where these objects might do anything. But, for Kant, consciousness without sci-
ence is nothing but the ruin of all reasoning: consciousness would not survive the
absence of science, which proves the impossibility of any such failure of science
and of the laws of nature one day manifesting itself to us. Broadly speaking, Kants
approach is as follows: Suppose that laws cease to govern the given and that objects
lose their constancy; science would then become impossible, but we could never
perceive itat most we might dream it. For Kant, the difference between percep-
tion and dream passes uniquely (and this is a consequence of his idealism) through
the difference between objects that obey physical constancy and those that do not.
If natural things were to cease obeying causal connection, everything would take
on the cast of a dream, and we could no longer assure ourselves in any case that we
had perceived a strange phenomenon rather than having dreamt or fantasized it.
This phase of Kants deduction can be illustrated by the oneiric scene of the
cinnabar, in the subjective deduction:
If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, some-
times heavy, if a man changed sometimes into this and sometimes into that
animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered
with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would
never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind
heavy cinnabar.3
We should emphasize here that the imaginary convoked by Kant, in which every-
thing takes on the consistency of a dream, is an imaginary homogenous with that
mobilized by Hume in his scene of the billiards, namely an extro-science imaginary,
an XSF imaginary. Kant, as I have said, no longer makes the mistake Popper did.
3 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan,
1929), A101.
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 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
He does not mistake an XSF problem for an SF problem. He confronts Hume on his
own groundthe real without lawsand opposes him with his own idea of chaos.
Chaos versus chaos, cinnabar versus billiards: the first victim of Kantian chaos is
that perception becomes indiscernible from phantasm. But Kants chaos is even
more intense than that described in the scene of the cinnabar. According to Kant,
if laws were to disappear, the real would no longer even have the consistency of
a dream, in which one still manages to discern things: cinnabar that decomposes,
people who transform, a landscape where the seasons speed along. A real without
laws, in truth, would be far too unstable to permit these identities-in-becoming to
be adumbrated: everything would implode, and even the consciousness I have of
myself within time would not survive, for my memory of my own persistence would
disappear along with the insubstantial remainder of those things the dream would
still accord me. All that would remain would be pure chaotic diversity, without
consciousness or consistency.
As we can see, then, Kants proof is a proof by fact: as the hypothesis of the
contingency of the laws of nature would imply, if it were true, the abolition of any
presentation of the world, the fact that there is a representation of the world, is a
refutation of the Humean thesis. At the same time that this thesis of the contingency
of physical laws is disqualified, the XSF imaginary as possible literary genre also
seems condemned in advance by the Kantian approach. Such an XSF imaginary
seems destined to degenerate into the monotony of a pure chaos, a pure diversity,
within which nothing can be distinguished from anything else.
Nevertheless, this remark on the XSF imaginary allows us to point to
a possible weakness in the Kantian solution. What prevents us from imagining
extro-science worlds far more stable, and by the same token more interesting,
than those described by Kant? Why indeed cant one imagine worlds that do not
obey necessary laws, rather unstable worlds, capable of absurd behaviors here
and there, but, on the whole, regulara regularity that does not at all result from
necessary causal processes? In other words, what allows Kant to exclude the pos-
sibility that there exist worlds that are in fact regular, but without that regularity
proceeding from necessary laws? Why should a world without laws self-evidently
be so frenetically inconstant?
Kant tells us: were our world not governed by necessary laws, nothing
would subsist of it. But we want to respond that a world that obeys no law has no
more reason to be chaotic than to be ordered. It must be able to be, indifferently,
one or the other, precisely because nothing stops it from being either. It seems
to me that Kant relies here on an implicit law that allows him to assert an iden-
tity between a world without necessity and radical chaos: it is a probabilistic law.
Kants reasoning here rests on the argument that, if the world were deprived of
laws, if the least of its components could behave in any way whatsoever at every
moment, it would be an extraordinary chance if it displayed the kind of enduring
and global order that, for example, characterizes the nature we know. But if this
380 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
is Kants argument, we could easily reply that a world that obeys no law has no
reason to obey any probabilistic or statistical law whatsoever. Nothing prevents
such a world from composing, even against all sane probability, a global order that
would constitute a world, an order of which certain aspects might, however, go
off the rails at any moment, like Humes billiard balls. Thus we discern that the
weakness of the transcendental deduction proceeds from its insufficient practice
of the XSF imaginary. A more acute XSF imagination would have prohibited Kant
from excluding the possibility that the world could in the future transform into
a lawless world, or even that we already live in such a world, although the chaotic
detail does not appear to us in any obvious fashion. Consequently, Kants reso-
lution of the Humean enigmahow to prove the necessity of physical laws, their
future persistencethis resolution via the transcendental deduction would seem
not quite as satisfying as it first appeared.
If we try, in turn, to deepen the hypothesis of extro-science worlds, we will
see that Kants thesis that consciousness and science have the same conditions of
possibilitythe necessity of physical lawsdoes not stand up to analysis, since we
can fictionalize as many worlds as we wish that blatantly contradict this hypoth-
esis. In fact, we can conceive of three types of extro-science worlds, of which only
one corresponds to that described by Kant, the two other types deviating from his
limited imaginary:
Type 1 Worlds: All possible worlds that would be irregular, but too little to affect
science or consciousness. Worlds, then, that are not extro-science in the strict sense
since they still allow the exercise of science. Still, they contradict the thesis that the
strict necessity of laws is a condition for the existence of science and conscious-
ness alike. These worlds contain causeless events that occur too spasmodically to
jeopardize consciousness or science. Such events consist in causal ruptures that
are observable, but impossible to reproduce in any regular fashion. These worlds
do not endanger science, because science is structurally indifferent to events that
can give rise to individual testimonies but not to a protocol for their reproduc-
tion. If in such a world someone claims to have observed the billiard balls in his
drawing room do all sorts of strange things for a good few minutes, scientists can
say nothing of itnot because they doubt the good faith of the spectator, not
even because they suppose him mad, or the victim of an hallucination, but simply
because science cannot do anything with events the observation of which admits of
no procedure to assure its reproducibility. Even if there were multiple testimonies
concerning unlikely physical events, and even if one supposes a world in which
these events were indeed physically absurd, experimental science wouldliter-
allyhave nothing to do with them, and would not even be endangered, since its
proper domainexperiments, experiences that are reproduciblewould remain
intact in the face of such chaos. For science, any spasmodic event without cause
is either nonexistent, or has a cause that is not yet attestable and is thus without
any consequence in its own right.
Speculation 381
 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
As to consciousness, there is no reason why it should perish any more than
science. Dream and hallucination would continue to exist, and exist qua distinct
from perception and from the sudden production of absurd phenomena. Certainly,
each witness of a causeless event might in principle question himself or herself as
to whether it was not a dream or hallucination, but there would be precise reasons
for them to suppose this not to be the case. In this type of world, which is regular
for the most part, a witness could consider that the context of the event was not
identical to that of a dream (he or she was not asleep, did not wake up after having
made the observation), nor that of hallucination (in this world, hallucination would
be linked to certain known pathologies). Further, they could appeal, in certain cases,
to criteria of intersubjectivity, as it is possible for these events to happen before
a multitude of witnesses, who would thus guarantee for each other that they were
not dreaming.
Since non-causal worlds of Type 1 are thinkable without contradiction, this
shows that neither science nor consciousness have as their condition of possibility
the strict universal applicability of the principle of causality.
Type 2 Worlds: Worlds whose irregularity is sufficient to abolish science but
not consciousness. These are the real extro-science worlds.
A Type 2 world would be a world in which experiments in the laboratory give
the most diverse results, abolishing the possibility of constituting a natural science.
But it would be, at the same timea supreme inconsistencya world in which
everyday life would still be possible, on the basis of relative stabilities. A world in
which there would be accidents of things, sudden slippages of material objects,
which are too rare to destroy all human life but not rare enough that a scientific
experiment could be conducted with any confidence. A world whose margins
have become capricious, but with a caprice that does not belong to any hidden
intentionality. This would be a world where one could only hold on to a chronics of
thingsfor example, one might say, supposing that we speak in the vocabulary of
our own scientific theory: Between this and that date, nature in the laboratory changes of epoch, impossible to inscribe in causal laws of an experimental type,
stopped being relativistic, and regressed to a Newtonian dynamics; from this date to
this date, there was a true renewal of quantum physics, but above all in laboratories
in the southern hemisphere, and so forth. One could no longer extract properly
scientific laws from the course of nature. But let us be more precise: in truth, no
manifest irregularity could suffice to prove that there wasnt some hidden law, subja-
cent to the apparent disorder. Whatever the manifest disorder, one might always, as
Henri Bergson emphasized after G. W. Leibniz, find within it an unknown order, or
one that does not correspond to the order we hoped for. One can therefore always
imagine, in an extro-science world, that there exists some hidden law beneath the
apparent disorder of natural chronics. But it would be a case of a world where
those who persisted in seeking such a secret law beneath the absurd variations of
nature would seem as eccentric or vain as those who still seek, in our own world,
a quantitative law that would explain the course of human history.
382 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
In such a world, we would be in the middle of things, like a driver surrounded
by other vehicles: we could rely on a reasonable behavior on the part of the real, but
we could never exclude an absurd behavior of nature, just as we can never exclude
pulling up alongside a driver who doesnt respect the highway code. An acute vigi-
lance would thus be the consequence of such a naturesubject to sudden crashes,
but still predictable for the most part. Road accidents can be submitted to frequen-
tialist laws; and it is indeed upon such frequencies that we base our vigilance, even
if we dont have in our mind any exact evaluation of risks. The same would go for
a world of Type 2: the plausibility of real behavior would be sufficient to act and to
live, even if in a painfully uncertain way. More generally, natural regularity would
be analogous to social regularity: stable for the most part, but capable of unfore-
seeable derailments.
But to accord such a social predictability to the Type 2 world, wouldnt
that be, after all, to admit that the beginnings of a naturaleven statisticalsci-
ence would still be possible therein? To render the analogy between the two types
of regularityType 2 nature and societymore precise, and to permit us to think
the world free of all experimental science, we must add a historical dimension to it.
Suppose that a man living at the end of the eighteenth century had tried to evaluate
the approximate frequency of horse-and-carriage accidents in the Paris of his time.
Had this man known that the number of such accidents in Paris in the twenty-first
century would be close to zero, he would have been able to deduce that progress in
equine security had made a great leap from one century to the other. But he would
not have been able to foresee the almost total disappearance of horse-drawn carriages
in Paris in favor of a mode of transport that did not exist in his own time. Thus,
social regularity, which allows us to base our lives on quantifiable probabilities as to
others behavior, despite its unpredictability in individual cases, goes hand in hand
with the possibility of historical change, which is unforeseeable in a more profound
sense, since it cannot be submitted to any quantitative law whatever. And yet these
have not suppressed all trace of social regularity, even during the greatest histor-
ical upheavals, that is to say during transitions from one era to another. Similarly,
we could then say that the denizens of Type 2 worlds would also know transitions
between natural eras, linked to progressivebut profoundly unforeseeabletrans-
formations in everyday constancies. But this time, contrary to what one might ulti-
mately suspect to be the case with historical change, these transformations would
be entirely free from any attestable cause: they would introduce epochs in nature,
whose long-term modifications would be compounded with short term leaps.
In short, such a nature, capable of marginal caprices and of epochal modifica-
tions, is thinkable without contradictionand with it we think an unbinding of the condi-
tions of possibility of science from those of consciousness. A world in which the conditions of
science disappear is not necessarily a world in which the conditions of consciousness
would also be abolished. Consciousness without science is not the ruin of thought.
Speculation 383
 METAPHYSICS AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION
Type 3 Worlds: Finally, the third type of extro-science worldif they can even
be called worlds, since in this case we are talking about lawless universes in which
disordered modifications are so frequent, that, like the chaos described by Kant
in the objective deduction, the conditions of science and those of consciousness
alike are abolished.
We see then that, among the three categories of universe that we have fiction-
alized, two contradict the transcendental deduction, and one constitutes a proper
extro-science world: the world of Type 2, world XSF-2.
Conclusion
To conclude, I would like briefly to address the question of whether XSF could
constitute a literary genre, like science fiction (if we at least agree that science fic-
tion is a genre). Could there beand under what conditions could there beXSF
stories? Or even: Are there already stories of this type, branded science fiction,
but which my efforts here expose as truly belonging to another type of imaginary?4
The difficulty in writing XSF storiesand what I think condemns them to
constitute isolated singularitiesis that one begins with what would normally
be excluded from narration: not just pure arbitrariness but an arbitrariness that
can strike again and again, at any moment. If the reader of science fiction is ready
to allow futuristic writers postulates as fantastic as can be, he or she nevertheless
expects the author to stick rigorously to those postulates and not to introduce into
the fictional world ruptures without any cause or reason, which would remove any
interest in the narrative as a whole. To get around this difficulty, it seems to me that
there could be three solutions, although this list does not claim to be exhaustive.
The first solution consists of introducing just one rupture without cause or
reason, a sort of unique physical catastrophe, that at once plunges the protagonist
into a world where some inexplicable physical phenomenon has been produced on
a massive scale. The standard novel of XSF catastrophe is Ren Barjavels Ravage,
in which electricity suddenly no longer exists, without the slightest explanation
provided for this. It has certainly been said more than once that this novel, pub-
lished in 1943, recalls disagreeably the return to the earth promised by Philippe
Ptain at the time. What is nevertheless interesting about this story, whatever else
one thinks of it, is that it transposes into nature a historical catastrophethe
debacle of May 1940as one of the consequent ordealsthe extinguishing of
lights, the blackout imposed in occupied Paris for sixteen hours. This reiterates
the comparison I sketched between Type 2 worlds and the radicality of unforeseen
historical events.
4 I must thank Tristan Garcia, to whom I owe many pointers for research into this matter that
I have not been able to pursue here as thoroughly as I would have liked.
384 Speculation
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
The second solution: nonsense. One can accommodate oneself to multiple
arbitrary events rather than reducing them to one unique event, if the author plays
about, producing absurd and unexpected situations. In fact, worlds of Type 2 possess
a certain vis comica, a certain burlesque potential, that could be exploited. One might
think here of Douglas Adamss Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in which a machine
that generates extremely improbable events transforms some missiles into a whale
and a bowl of petunias. But here it is still a matter of a machine obeying the laws
of chance and susceptible to probabilisticif perfectly deliriousreasoning.
Finally, the last solutionthe one that expresses most faithfully the XSF
genrestories of uncertain reality, those in which the real crumbles gradually and
ceases to be familiar to us from one day to the next. I have not yet found any novel
that is, in this domain, properly XSF, that is to say, one that gives no explanation
whatever for the lawless decomposition of its environment and characters. But we
might think of one of Philip K. Dicks masterpieces, Ubik, in which the real ages,
or regresses, without any apparent logic: the atmosphere is close to XSF-2 worlds,
if one leaves aside the explanation given by the author, namely, that it is a question
of the psychic world of a cryogenically-frozen body slowly devoured by a comatose
child with monstrous mental powers.
Three solutions for possible XSF novels: the catastrophe, nonsense, and the
dreaded uncertainty of an atmospheric novel. Undoubtedly not quite enough to
constitute a genrein which respect XSF, which possesses a certain metaphysical
interest, probably possesses less potential than science-fiction from a literary point
of viewat least, that is, unless some talented authors prove me wrong.
Translated from the French by Robin Mackay
Speculation 385
 Technology of the Future
Elie Ayache

Contingency

The future doesnt consist of future possibilities. The future is real but possibility
is not real. Possibility is a fabrication made up after the real. The real future (as
opposed to our toy-idea of a future) is made up of events, which emerge out of
nothing that may anticipate them. Such events create the possibilities that will
have led to them.1 Nassim Nicolas Taleb calls this the backward narrative and
these history-changing events Black Swans.2
Reality always exceeds fiction. We encounter the real without previous
warning. We are made aware of the event and of the world that this event brings
about, and then go looking for a partition of that world into states of affairs or
states of the world. This conceptualization of the real is only a model that is
derivative from the real itself. Only after the states of the world are identified do
we call them possibilities and retroject them into the past so as to narrate a nice
story about how the event might have come about or about the possibilities that
will have led to it. By extrapolation, we project those possibilities into the future
and imagine that the future world will be no more than a variation of those identi-
fied possibilities.
Contingency is real. Even though the present world is actual and is no longer
a possibility, it is definitely still contingent, that is, it could have been otherwise.
The future world is no different in this regard. It is as real and contingent as the
present world, except that it is not yet actual. Essentially, it too could have been
otherwise, except that we dont actually know otherwise than what. The future
world lacks the actual reference against which its contingency can be measured
and therefore relativized. The whole trick is to be able to perceive its contingency
before distinguishing the different possibilities or even identifying its future state.
Only in this way could the future be real.
The change of perspective I am calling for here is that we be able to appre-
ciate the fact that the future world can be different before perceiving different from
what. Because it is not yet actual, it lacks the partition of states that would allow
us to frame its difference as a variation of states. This contingency, which is not
measurable relative to states, is called absolute contingency. The passage of time and

1 See Henri Bergson, The Possible and the Real, in Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and
John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002).
2 Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House,
2007).

Speculation 387
 TECHNOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
our temporal recognition of possibilities are incidental to it. That contingency
should come first as ontology, before the recognition of the state and the reference
class, has been proposed by Quentin Meillassoux in a work that has inspired mine.3
Possibility, Probability
Astounding as it may sound, reality is not exhausted by actuality. Reality is stronger
than possibility because possibility is derivative. So the part of reality that is not
covered by actuality cannot be populated by possibility. Statistics is real and, in those
cases in which the contingencies that produce the deviations of the population from
the deterministic law do average out, the statistical regularity that is consequently
observed is also real. Possibilities are okay when they merely signify, in a given
model, the different members of the statistical population that are deemed open
to an event because the model has recognized it as a member of that population
and referred it to that class. Possibility is okay when it is merely the ex-ante refor-
mulation of an ex-post phenomenon.
What is not okay is that possibility should earn the full-blown ontological
status of a potentiality (or power, or propensity) that brings about the real. The
realizations of a statistical random draw are brought about by the possibilities
the model has recognized because this is just a language the model has invented
for itself. But there is no effective agency in those merely semantic possibilities.
What is not real is then the random generator that we subsequently imagine lying
behind the scenes and drawing each individual following an ex-ante probabilistic
law that is made up to accord with the ex-post statistics. If it is agreed that the
random generator is just a shorthand and a way of speech, or in other words, that
it is just a model and for this reason should be granted no more and no less reality
than the statistics of which it is only a relabeling, the distinction between what is
real and what is not real should concentrate on the notion of possibility that we
have accustomed ourselves to associating with the random generator.
The real question is: What brings about the real event, if not a possibility?
If you agree that we should reserve the term possibility for probability theory, that
is to say, for the restrictive framework in which states of the world have been identified
and enumerated and can subsequently be assigned a probability weighting (regardless
of whether this weighting is subjective, or is a shorthand for statistical frequency,
or will be updated as we conditionalize on new evidence, and so on); if, in other
words, we understand possibility as derivative from the real and for this reason
incapable of bringing about the real and of qualifying as real, then we need a term to
designate the reality that brings about genuine events. Philosophers of the event such
3 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2008).
388 Speculation
ELIE AYACHE
as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have adopted the term virtual to designate
the real that is not yet actual. They repeatedly warn us not to confuse the virtual
with the possible. More radical thinkers of the event, such as Alain Badiou and
Meillassoux, dont believe in a reality that predates the event. To them, events emerge
literally out of nothing. The event is rejected by the ontology, according to Badiou.4
So the first predicament of probability theory lies in identifying the possible
states, not in their subsequent probabilistic weighting. The reason why it is difficult
to assign a nonsubjective probability to the event that is one of a kind is that this
event is not identified as a member of a population or set of possibilities. In math-
ematical ontology, to be is to be a member of a set. How to assign a probability to
an event that is not a possibility? Even more radical is the event that is itself not
identifiedthe genuine Black Swan. There is literally nothing of which this event
is a member before it occurs. Badiou goes so far as to relax set theorys axiom of
foundation (according to which sets should not be members of themselves) to define
the event, precisely, as that which can only be a member of itself. While Deleuze
speaks of the virtual and Badiou speaks of the void as the media of the event, neither
of them describes the event as improbable, for that would presuppose a set of
possible states and a scale on which probability is measured.
Objectivity, Reality
The Black Swan takes place in a realm that precedes the construction of probability.
(Probability requires a preliminary set of possibilities and these, in turn, require a
preliminary reality after which they are modeled.) Black Swans are not extremely
improbable events, because they are literally immeasurable. There is no meaning
to the word extremely here, because there is no scale and so no extremes. Even
Taleb is confused here. A genuine Black Swan event (Taleb cites the example of
9/11) triggers a much more severe revision of our model of reality than a revision
of probability. It changes the whole universe of possibilities, obviously expanding
it. Crucially, however, this expansion is not additive; Bayesian theory is of no help.
It is not that the new states of the world are a subset of the existing set of possible
states that initially received zero or very low probability. Indeed, the new range of
states of the world may be incompatible with the previous one. This means that the
set-theoretic union of the old and new ranges of states of the world makes no phys-
ical sense. The whole context changes. After the event, the world is fundamentally
different than before.
Possibilities are not just abstract elements that we may enjoy grouping anyway
we like. Recognizing possibilities is the first step of objectivation and for this reason
it is constrained by its purpose. Our language and science, as models of reality, are
4 See Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 116.
Speculation 389
 TECHNOLOGY OF THE FUTURE
such that we extract invariants from the flux of experience, and thus form the notion of
an object and its properties. In so doing, we start forming expectations about the object
and its propertiesfor example, how the object might look if seen from another angle.
We invent experimentation. Most importantly we imagine counterfactuals: how an
object would behave if, contrary to fact, it were subject to such and such experiment.
As many philosophers of science and metaphysicians (Nelson Goodman, Bergson, Bas
van Fraassen) have observed, modalities and dispositional terms reside in language,
not in reality. This doesnt make them less objective, mind you, as it is precisely the
construction of the object that we are talking about. However, they might not be real.
Reality is not necessarily coincident with objectivity. The most famous coun-
terexample is quantum mechanics. Quantum reality is a patent refutation of the
claim that nature has to conform to our objectivist language or that realism is
exhausted by objectivist realism. To experiment and measure in quantum mechanics,
the sentient beings that we are have no choice but to set the stage of objectiva-
tion. Experiments have to be designed in such a way that the possible states of
some observable will obtain with the known quantum probability. However, the
irreversible steps that we take in setting up this procedure make it impossible to
concomitantly measure a conjugate variable, or an observable whose range of pos-
sible states is incompatible with the present one. It is not as if we were photographing
an object from different angles. Because the ranges of possibilities are not conjoin-
able within a comprehensive range of possibilities, there is no subsistent object
lying behind, of which it could be said that it would behave in such a way if a dif-
ferent experiment were conducted. The quantum violation of Bells inequalities
is independent of theory or formalismit is perfectly real and empiricalyet it
challenges our ingrained view of the existence of an object, which is supposed to
be subject to our gaze and experimentation. The notion of object may, after all,
just be theory. And we may have to recognize that objectivist reality is an invention.
Yet there is definitely a mind-independent reality out there that quantum
mechanics is addressing. There is something going on at the deeper level where it
is not yet decided what observable shall be measured and what objective behavior
(i.e., acquiring a certain state or exhibiting a certain property with a certain prob-
ability) shall be manifested. The formalism that deals with this reality in quantum
mechanics is the wave function. Unsurprisingly, the wave function is a meta-
probabilistic predictive tool, that is to say, it articulates whole ranges of possibilities
that are incompatible with one another.
Materialism
The case of quantum mechanics is a criticism of the notion of possibility and a
proof of its limitation vis--vis reality. The existence of a level of reality in which
we have to conceive of such a thing as incompatible ranges of possibilities is, to
390 Speculation
ELIE AYACHE
me, a pressing indication of the existence of a level of reality in which we might
conceive of no range of possibilities at all. If it is not with probability that reality is
predicted in quantum mechanics (because probability is apparently too local and
parochial a notion), why should we insist that reality be predicted by probability
in other domains of realityfor example, the Black Swan or the financial market?
Maybe prediction is no longer an adequate word here.
What misled us into using probability in the markets is the fact that markets
possess a single metric. Prices are numbers that can either go up or down and that
form time series. This made it irresistible to invoke stochastic processes. By con-
trast, nobody would think of history as a stochastic process, if only because history
consists of history-changing, or context-changing, events, and stochastic processes
can only make sense within a given context at a given time. Yet the market is an
integral part of history, and I, for one, believe that there will always be a market as
long as there is history or contingency in the world. Instead of applying stochastic
processes to the market, based on the illusion that prices behave like numbers and
that the market behaves like a random generator; instead of downgrading the market
to the lower form of probability (Maurice Blanchot), we should set our sights
in the opposite direction and think of the market as a special form of history
which happens to be quantitative.
And what makes the market historical and real, that is to say, incommen-
surate with a random generator? What is the generator of the market if not possi-
bilities and probabilities? It is the exchangethe material exchange of contingent
claims. The contingent claim is written on a material sheet to which anything can
happen, due to its materialitycontingencies that were not necessarily part of its
intended schedule, such as its total destruction. At the other extreme, all the market
can happen to it, or the simultaneous trading of contingent claims of all grades of
complexity. As a consequence, no total set of possible states can ever be laid down,
which amounts to saying that the corresponding level of reality is precisely free of
all ranges of possibilities. The material medium is thereby created through which we
can communicate, in the future event, with the fact that it is contingent before the
fact that it is. Thus the reality of the market is the same as the reality of the future,
and contingency is mediated as it should be: absolutely, and not relatively to states.
The exchange is not a slight thing. You have to think that 1) the capacity to
capture different payoff clauses on a single sheet of paper, or the invention of writing;
2) the simultaneous and even automatic translation of this register into a material
contract binding writer and buyer; 3) the invention of money, which guarantees the
homogeneity of medium between the later contingent payoff and its earlier translation
known as the price; and 4) the market, which offers the place where the price takes
place ahead of the event triggering the payoffthat is to say, it takes place instead of
this event, in its placethat these are all different facets of one and the same material
procedure, the technology, which we have put together in order to deal with the future
event and produce a material process that is adapted to history.
Speculation 391
 List of Figures
Jenny Jaskey and Alicia Ritson
1. Rosemarie Trockel, What it is like to be
what you are not, 1993
What it is like to be what you are not repro-
duces a series of images from scientific
experiments documenting webs spun by
spiders under the influence of various psy-
chotropic drugs. These photogravures
and their title establish a parallel between
human and spider experience, pointing to
the possible interiority of both while at the
same time alluding to thinking about some-
thing which one can never really access. In
so doing, these images undermine a priv-
ilege granted by and to humans based on
the notion of an exceptional interiority or
cognitive dimension.
2. Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile
(10 Kg), 2010
Nina Canells installations bring into focus
forces and processes that are hard to
perceive, rendering visible such things
as electromagnetism and sound. How-
ever, Canell is most attentive to how these
and other materials interact within vari-
ous assemblages. What is important are
the physical and energetic encounters that
occur between each installations objects: in
Canells arrangements her objects exist for
and in light of one another.
3. Robert Smithson, Asphalt
Rundown, 1969
Asphalt Rundown attempted to give a
physical form and presence to entropy. As
the asphalt flowed down the side of a dirt
quarry in Rome, it followed the forms of
the earth, eventually coagulating and com-
ing to stillness, making entropic forces vis-
ible. Smithson valued entropy in his prac-
tice as counter to a mechanistic world
view and as a reminder that all human
artistic products are mere temporary coag-
ulations of material flows that, at the scale
of cosmic time, will dissolve and over-
whelm them.
4. Ian Cheng,Baby ft. Ikaria,2014
Ian Chengs videos use self-learning algo-
rithmic software that produce emergent
unscripted behavior, cinematically model-
ing the evolutionary processes found in pri-
mordial biological systems. Cheng trained
as a cognitive scientist before becoming an
artist; his work explores technology as an
outgrowth and mutation of human develop-
ment, an agent changing bodies, percep-
tions, and judgments over time.
5. Human embryonic stem cell, scanning
electron micrograph image, 2006
One of the key characteristics of stem
cells is their ability to self-generate by
means of division while retaining the same
undifferentiated form. With special condi-
tions, these yet-to-be-differentiated cells
can also be prompted to develop into
specialized cells of any number of dif-
ferent tissues or organs. For these rea-
sons, research into stem cells has led to
major changes in how the bodys self-heal-
ing is understood: unstable matter can be
affected to produce an emergent healthy
organism or body part.
6. Venuss Flower Basket
(Euplectella aspergillum)
The deep sea sponge Venuss Flower Bas-
ket creates its main body through a slow,
methodical process of biomineralization.
Minerals are extracted from the seawater
by the animals cells, and bind to a thread
of collagen protein in a highly complex con-
figuration, ultimately forming a three-dimen-
sional body that is almost entirely glass.
Recently, Venuss Flower Basket has been
studied alongside machine-made fiber
optics. Its fibers have been found to be at
least as capable of transmitting information
as synthetic versions, and may revolution-
ize information transmission technologies
because of their abilities to self-assemble
and their much greater flexibility.
395
 LIST OF FIGURES
7. Benot Mandelbrot, exploration
ofanonstandard Mandelbrot set,
computer-generated print
To the right side of this print are scribbled
notes detailing the magnification of detail that
was the basis of this fractal geometry. Man-
delbrots insight was to examine the chaos
and irregularity of the world around him rather
than the ideal forms that exist as concep-
tual abstractions. With the aid of computers
Mandelbrot produced a theory of roughness:
regardless of the scale of magnification, frac-
tal shapes are equally rough. His Mandelbrot
set is a set of points the boundary of which
forms an irregular two-dimensional shape
withinfinite surface complexity.
8. Alisa Baremboym,
Untitled, 2012
Guided by an understanding that the bound-
aries between the body and its inorganic
appendages are increasingly less certain,
Alisa Baremboyms works put materials
that have corporeal allusions into contact
with others that are decidedly technological.
Striving for conservation and maintenance,
as well as to extend our physical reaches,
Baremboym conceives of the body as an
industrious machine, and yet one that
remains porous and leaky. The conceptual
distinctions between natural and machine-
made are intentionally confused by Barem-
boyms choice of materials (gelled emol-
lient, ceramics, steel, silk), the properties of
which sometimes shift and react.
9. Particle Collider
Particle colliders such as the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) allow physicists to study the
structure and laws of the subatomic world.
High-speed collisions are facilitated between
particles, creating short-lived or unstable
by-products that are rich as scientific evi-
dence. Built between 1998 and 2008 with the
involvement of some ten thousand interna-
tional scientists, LHC is housed beneath the
ground in a tunnel about twenty-seven kilo-
meters in diameter, in the area near the bor-
der of France and Switzerland. LHC may help
find answers concerning the properties of ele-
mentary particles, the relationship between
quantum mechanics and general relativity,
and the deep structure of space and time.
396
10. Image of cells in the hippocamus
formation of a mouse that has been
genetically engineered to express the
brainbow transgene. Each neuron has
aunique color.
In efforts to better understand cognitive pro-
cesses, neuroscience has increasingly relied
on scientific imaging to map brain activity.
Scientists at Harvard University were able
to get this image by genetically engineering
mice whose individual neurons light up in dif-
ferent colors. This allows researchers to map
actual connections within neural networks,
providing a degree of detail to the obser-
vation of brain activity that is significantly
higher than identifying generalized regions.
11. John Latham and Ian MacDonald-Munro,
Is There a Black Hole [],1988
Artist John Latham (19212006) was com-
mitted to developing a theory-of-everything,
integrating scientific and philosophical dis-
coveries into his visual work. His early spray-
gun paintings were explorations into time
and event-ness, a topic that fascinated him
throughout his career. Latham corresponded
regularly with leading astronomers and phys-
icists about quantum cosmology and event
structures; eventually his work took the form
of lectures and articles in which he invented
a new vocabulary for discussing the relation-
ship of time to objects.
12. David Horvitz, Sad, Depressed
People, 2013
The artist David Horvitz collected an inven-
tory of stock images of sad, depressed peo-
ple taken from the Internet. The publication
slows down these images and isolates them
like photographs. Viewing the set in this way
directs the focus to the tensions between the
generality and the specificity of the images,
to the staged experience against the authen-
tic one, and to the triangulation between
information, interiority, and material.
13. Sol Lewitt, Squiggly Brushstrokes, 1996
Sol LeWitt famously wrote: The idea
becomes the machine that makes the art.
LeWitts wall drawings are executed by
teams of draftspeople following succinct
instructions. And yet LeWitt often left open
the possibility for a variety of interpretations
LIST OF FIGURES
or outcomes; he was also clear that errors
would be absorbed and become part of the
work. His gouaches, most of which were
executed by his own hand, amplify these
elements of chance, irregularity, and emer-
gent forms.
14. Arthur Schopenhauer
Human existence must be a kind of error.
[] It may be said of it, it is bad today and
every day it will get worse, until the worst
of all happens. Arthur Schopenhauer
(17801860)
15. Google data center: Hamina server
floor
There are views of the Internet other than
lines of connection drafted across maps of
the Earth. For instance, the Internet some-
times looks like an entire building stocked
with cabinets of electronic equipment,
LEDs, fans, routers, and switches. The
Internet occupies a lot of room, and requires
efficient power and a reliable cooling sys-
tem, among other things, as is the case in
one of Googles major data centers in Ham-
ina, Finland. There, the change in the build-
ings use, from a former paper pulp mill to
data center, mimics the shifts of the infor-
mation age and also aptly demonstrates
how impalpable flows of information are in
fact still bound to the most clunky kind of
materials and physical effects.
16. Eileen Quinlan, Top Down, 2013
The gelatin silver photographic process uses
a series of chemical baths to produce a per-
manent visible image from film. The careful
timing of every stage ensures that the final
negative will accurately capture the photog-
raphers shot. Yet in producing this image,
artist Eileen Quinlan turns the photographic
process back on itself, inadvertently docu-
menting the apparatus in an act of creative
destruction. The artist simply leaves unex-
posed film in the darkroom acid bath to rot,
then develops and presents these accidental
compositions of photographic decay.
17. Manfred Mohr, P112a (Lady Quark),
plotter drawing, ink on paper, 1972
Lady Quark is one artwork in an oeuvre
constituted entirely of images produced by
the digital computer, and most with the aid
of algorithms. From as early as the 1970s,
artist Manfred Mohr stated his interest in a
calculable and demystified art: As it is pos-
sible to conceive the logic of a construction
but not all its consequences, it is nearly an
imperative to rely on a computer to show
this large variety of possibilities; a proce-
dure which may lead to different and per-
haps more interesting answers, lying of
course outside of normal behavior but not
outside of the imposed logic.
18. tienne-Jules Marey, Le Vol des
Oiseaux
(The Flight of Birds), 1890
In the late nineteenth century, pioneer
chronophotographer, tienne-Jules Marey
devised a way to record several images
within a single photographic print. This
assisted his research into the locomotion
of animals and humans. It also contributed
to early developments in cinematography.
These images are distinct in their unique
reorganization of space and time within the
single frame.
19. NetLogo Daisyworld model,
1999, 2006
Daisyworld is a geophysiological model
designed to illustrate the Gaia hypothe-
sis, which proposes that the earth is a sin-
gle self-regulating system made up of liv-
ing and nonliving parts. It simulates the
interactivity between populations of black-
and-white daisies (living) and climate (non-
living). In this isolated system, the light and
heat energy the two different kinds of dai-
sies can absorb or reflect based on being
either black or white directly affects and is
affected by their microclimates. The study
has shown that even with a wide variety of
parameters, the populations of the two dai-
sies will come to equilibrium.
20. Hiroshi Sugimoto,
Conceptual Form, 2006
Kuens Surface is a mathematical pseudo-
spherical form whose discovery in 1826
disproved one of Euclidean geometrys fun-
damental axioms concerning parallel postu-
lates. The existence of this surface makes
tangible a mathematical truth unavailable
397
 LIST OF FIGURES
during the two thousand years in which
Euclids principles prevailed over geometry.
Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto monumentalized a
small, stereoscopic model of Kuens Surface
in a series of photographs of mathematical
models used as teaching aids in Germany
at the turn of the twentieth century.
21. Jules Janssen, image from LAtlas de
photographies solaires, 1904
LAtlas de photographies solaires, Jules
Janssens seminal book in which this image
appears, comprises over six thousand pho-
tographs of the solar surface. Taken from
an observatory in Meudon, France starting
in 1876 by a specially designed photohe-
liograph, these images record the surface
changes of the sun, in particular its spots.
At the time of their publication, Janssen
declared: we have entered a new period of
solar activity which will lead to an increase
in the influence that the spots have on the
climate and the changes in the Earths mag-
netic field.
22. Anisotropies of the cosmic microwave
background (CMB), as observed by the
Planck space telescope.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB)
is the relic radiation believed to be the oldest
light in the Universe, dating back to the big
bang. From 2009 to 2013, the Planck sat-
ellite analyzed CMB and relayed the most
precise maps to date of anisotropiesdif-
ferences in temperature of remnant radi-
ant heat throughout various parts of the sky.
Cosmologists can use these pictures to bet-
ter understand the conditions under which
the Universe formed.
23. Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of
Crystals), Mexico
For around half a million years, giant crys-
tals have been growing deep below the sur-
face of the earth within the closed cham-
bers of Mexicos Cueva de los Cristales.
The caves have supported stabilized condi-
tions for minerals in the table water to trans-
form into selenite molecules, which over
millennia have accumulated into some of
the worlds largest crystal forms. Separated
from climatic and ecological shifts above
ground, the crystals have grown at a steady
398
pace, subject to a time that is not human.
Their discovery in 2001 promises to alter
their potential for continued growth by the
sheer fact of disturbing their exquisitely reg-
ulated nonhuman environment.
24. Glacier National Park, Montana
Stromatolites are layered rocks formed by
the accretion of binding sediments cemented
with the help of films of microbacteria. They
provide the best material statement about
the earth prior to terrestrial life, with ancient
stromatolites tracing life as far back as 3.5
billion years. As arche-fossils they provide
empirical evidence against correlationism.
25. Llama in the Laguna Colorada,
Potos, Bolivia
In 2010, Bolivia followed Ecuador by pass-
ing into law the rights of nature. In Bolivia,
nature is personified as Mother Earth and
is considered to be a collective subject of
public interest that also includes human
communities (social, cultural, and eco-
nomic) and ecosystems. This law recon-
figures personhood, elevating the rights of
nature to the rights of humans.
26. Thomas Bayrle, (b)alt, 1997
(b)alt is a computer animation in which
Thomas Bayrles superform or superstruc- interview from the present with his still liv-
ture is made up of innumerable cells, each
embedded with the same animated baby; the
superform then switches to the baby com-
prised of cells of the artist. As with his other
non-computer aided imagery, Bayrle here
negotiates between constitutive parts and the
objects they form. For Bayrle this oscillation
usually implicates individuals with the social,
cultural, and political entities they bolster. In
(b)alt, Bayrle toys with the individual consti-
tuted across generations as the artist and his
grandson alternate in being the fabric of each
others image.
27. Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Liegender
Frauenakt), 2012
For his contribution to documenta 13, art-
ist Pierre Huyghe dropped artifacts, psy-
chotropic plants, a roaming dog, bees, and
other elements in a Karlsruhe park, seting
in motion a living tableau. The immersive
environment, which utilized the emergent
LIST OF FIGURES
behavior of living organisms, extended 31. Alain Riazuelo , Simulated view
the artists engagement with sociality as a of a black hole
dynamic beyond the human. As the artist Since 2012 physicists have been perplexed
described it, in the compost, "physical, bio- by what happens at the boundaryor event
logical and mineral grow without us, vary horizonof a black hole, coining the term
and change in intensity. [] There is no firewall paradox to describe the incom-
organization, no representation, no exhibition." patibility of general relativity and quantum
mechanics at the black holess threshold.
28. Dodger Uses Sea Sponge, Shark According to theories of relativity, a body
Bay, Australia should be subject to the laws of physics in a
One of the first nonhuman subcultures has uniform way regardless of where in the uni-
been found in a colony of bottle nosed dol- verse they are, whether falling through a
phins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, black hole or standing on the Earth. Quan-
where a select group of the mammals share tum theory, by contrast, determined that a
a practice of using sea sponges as tools to black holes boundary produces a highly
better forage for more nutritious fish. This energetic zone that would instantly set fire
practice is passed down between select to a body falling through it; further: noth-
females in the area, and is only occasionally ing could escape. This problem continues to
taught to males. be debated, with questions about whether
the event horizon is as sharp a boundary
29. nova Milne, Xerox Missive, 1977/2011 as once imagined. In early 2014, Stephen
Artists nova Milne reimagine the struc- Hawking attempted to solve the quandary,
tural possibilities for narrative in works that suggesting that, taking into account that
experiment with alternative constructions space-time fluctuates too much around a
of time and space. In Xerox Missive, the black hole for a sharp boundary to exist, the
late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is threshold is less dramatic than once imag-
the perfect conduit, having himself experi- ined. The debate continues to reassess the
enced the physical world as fractured and laws that have governed our understand-
nonlinear. Through augmenting historical ing of the physical world for over one hun-
footage of Dick, including interpolating an dred years.
ing fifth ex-wife Tessa, nova Milne fabricate
an encounter between the two former lovers
across fiction and reality, giving an account
of what radically intersecting realities might
produce at the level of the individual.
30. Philippe Henrotte, SPX options implied
volatility smile as of July 5, 2012, calibrated
with a regime-switching model
This model, developed by the quantitative
finance group ITO 33, shows the calibrated
volatility surface of an equity index, as com-
puted by the firms proprietary technology.
The blue points correspond to market quotes,
and the red lines describe the calibrated
model that seeks to fit the market quotes as
best as possible. ITO 33 was cofounded by
Elie Ayache and Philippe Henrotte and works
in the complex space of risk management
and financial modeling. Ayache, a contrib-
utor to this volume, has written extensively
about the end of probability and its relation to
Meillassouxs notion of absolute contingency.
399
 IMAGE CREDITS CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

15. Courtesy of Google. Photo by ARMEN AVANESSIAN founded the DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN is Professor
1. Edition 9, III. Helga Maria Klosterfelde
Connie Zhou Speculative Poetics research platform of Theory, Practice, and Communication of
Edition, Hamburg. Rosemarie Trockel,
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013 in 2012 (www.spekulative-poetik.de). Coauthor Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art
16. Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu with A. Hennig of Metanoia (2014) and Prsens: History & Cultural Studies at the Academy of
Gallery, New York Poetik eines Tempus (2012). Editor of Aesthetics Fine Art, Vienna. Books include The Sopranos
2. Courtesy of the artist, Konrad Fischer
Galerie, Mothers Tankstation and Galerie and Contemporary Art (2011, with L. Skrebowski), (2012), On (Surplus Value) in Art (2008), Kritik
17. Courtesy of the artist Realismus Jetzt! (2013), and the book series des Auges (2008). Editor of The Whole Earth:
Wien/Lukatsch
SPEKULATIONEN (Merve). California and the Disappearance of the Outside
19. Courtesy of Uri Wilensky, Michael Novak, (2013, with A. Franke), and Utopia of Sound
3. Estate of Robert Smithson/licensed
andCenter for Connected Learning and ELIE AYACHE traded options in open outcry (2010, with C. Ruhm).
by VAGA. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery
Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern markets from October 19, 1987, until 1995.
New York/Shanghai
University, Evanston, IL Cofounded the derivative pricing technology TRISTAN GARCIA is a writer. Books include
4. Courtesy of the artist firm ITO 33 (1998). Author of The Blank Swan: Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (2014),
20. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery The End of Probability (2010). Six Feet Under: nos vies sans destin (2012), Nous,
5. Photo: Annie Cavanagh. Courtesy of animaux et humains (2011) and the novels Faber:
21. Courtesy of Bibliothque de lObservatoire AMANDA BEECH is an artist and writer, and Le destructeur (2013), En labsence de classement
Wellcome Images
de Paris Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts. Exhibitions/ finale (2011), Mmoires de la Jungle (2010), and the
7. Courtesy of Aliette Mandelbrot and Bard publications include Final Machine (2013), novel Hate (2010).
22. Courtesy of the European Space Agency Sanity Assassin (2010), Predators and Pests (2010,
Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design
and Planck Collaboration with D. Bauer), and Statecraft (2008). IAIN HAMILTON GRANT teaches philosophy
History, Material Culture, New York
at the University of the West of England. Author
23. Photo: Carsten Peter/Speleoresearch & RAY BRASSIER teaches philosophy at the of Idealism: The History of a Philosophy (2011, with
8. Courtesy of 47 Canal, New York. Photo:
Films/National Geographic Creative American University of Beirut. Author of Nihil J. Dunham and S. Watson), and Philosophies of
Nudashank, Baltimore
Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). Nature after Schelling (2006). English translator
24. Courtesy of US Geological Survey of F. W. J. Schellings On the World Soul
9. THE CERNEuropean Council for
Photographic Library. Photo: P. Carrara MIKKO CANINI is an artist and writer. (forthcoming).
Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland,
2006. CERN/REX Exhibitions include Urbancide (2012), Jet
25. Photo: Phil Whitehouse Black White Noise (2011), and Spike (2013). ELIZABETH GROSZ teaches in the Womens
10. Courtesy of Livet, Sanes, and Lichtman, Editor of The Domination of Fear (2010). Studies and Literature Programs at Duke
26. Courtesy of Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin University. Books include Becoming Undone:
Harvard University
DIANA COOLE is Professor of Political and Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Life
27. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Social Theory at Birkbeck College, London. (2011), and Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the
11. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery
Gallery, New York Author of Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics Framing of the Earth (2008).
12. Courtesy of the artist and New Documents after Anti-Humanism (2007), editor of New
28. Courtesy of the Shark Bay Dolphin Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010, BORIS GROYS is Senior Fellow at the
Project, Department of Biology, Georgetown with S. Frost), and associate editor of Blackwell International Center for Cultural Studies
13. 2013 The Lewitt Estate/Artists Rights
University. Photo by Eric Patterson Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2012). and Media Theory at the Bauhaus University,
Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy
of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Weimar, and Professor of Russian and Slavic
29. Courtesy of nova Milne CHRISTOPH COX is Professor of Philosophy Studies at New York University. Books include
14. Image source: Hans Wahl, Anton at Hampshire College, and Visiting Faculty Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (2012),
30. Courtesy of Philippe Henrotte and ITO 33 at CCS Bard. Author of Nietzsche: Naturalism An Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012), Going
Kippenberg: Goethe und seine Welt,
Insel-Verlag, Leipzig,1932 and Interpretation (1999), and coeditor of Audio Public (2010), and History Becomes Form: Moscow
31. Courtesy Alain Riazuelo Culture (2004, with D. Warner). Conceptualism (2010). Cocurator of the Biennale
of Shanghai (2012), curator of the Russian
MANUEL DELANDA is a writer, media artist, Pavillon, Venice Biennale (2011).
programmer, and software designer. Books
include Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of GRAHAM HARMAN is Distinguished
Synthetic Reason (2011), A New Philosophy of Society: University Professor at the American University
Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), in Cairo. Books include Bells and Whistles: More
and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002). Speculative Realism (2013) and The Quadruple
Object (2011). Coeditor of The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism (2011, with
L. Bryant and N. Srnicek).

400 401
 CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
TERRY HORGAN is Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Arizona. Author of
The Epistemological Spectrum (2011, with
D. K. Henderson) and Austere Realism:
Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology
(2008, with M. Potrc).
JENNY JASKEY is Director and Curator of
The Artists Institute, NYC, where she has
worked with artists including Pierre Huyghe,
Lucy McKenzie, and Haim Steinbach. Other
exhibitions include The End(s) of the Library
(201213) and Jutta Koether: Mad Garland, Continental Philosophy (2013, with B. Lord) and
2008 thesis exhibition, CCS Bard (2012).
KATERINA KOLOZOVA is Director of the
Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities,
Skopje and teaches at the University American
College, Skopje. Books include The Cut of the
Real (2014), The Lived Revolution: Solidarity with
the Body in Pain As the New Political Universal
(2010), and The Real and I (2006). Editor
in chief of Identities: Journal in Politics,
Gender and Culture.
JAMES LADYMAN is Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Bristol. Books include
Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized
(2009, with D. Ross, D. Spurrett, and J.
Collier). Coeditor of Scientific Metaphysics (2013,
with D. Ross and H. Kincaid).
FRANOIS LARUELLE is Emeritus Professor
at the University of Paris X, Nanterre. Books
in English include Anti-Badiou (2013 [French:
2011]), Principles of Non-Philosophy (2013 [1996]),
The Concept of Non-Photography (2013), From
Decision to Heresy (2013), Struggle and Utopia at
the End Times of Philosophy (2012 [2004]), and
Philosophies of Difference (2011 [1986]).
NATHAN LEE is a critic and curator.
Contributing editor of Film Comment and
former New York Times and Village Voice film
critic. PhD candidate at Brown University,
and Curatorial and Program Associate at
CCS Bard (201113).
SUHAIL MALIK is Program Co-Director of
the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, and Visiting Faculty at
CCS Bard (2012-15). Coeditor of The Flood of
Rights (2015, with T. Keenan and T. Zolghadr).
402
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX is Professeur Agrg
in Philosophy at the University of Paris 1,
Panthon Sorbonne. Books include The Number
and the Siren (2011) and After Finitude (2008
[French: 2006]).
JOHN MAOILEARCA is Professor of Film
and Television Studies at Kingston University,
London. Books include Philosophy and the
Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010) and
Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006).
Coeditor of The Bloomsbury Companion to
Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (2012, with A. P.
Smith). In 2014, Maoilearca reverted his
name from the English Mullarkey to the
original Irish, which ultimately translates as
follower of the animal.
REZA NEGARESTANI is a philosopher.
Author of The Mortiloquist (forthcoming) and
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
(2008). Coeditor of Culinary Materialism,
Collapse 7 (2011, with R. Mackay).
TREVOR PAGLEN is an artist and writer.
Projects include Nonfunctional Satellites
(2013), The Last Pictures (2012), Limited
Telephotography (2012), Untitled (Drones)
(2011), and The Fence (2010). Publications
include InvisibleCovert Operations and Classified
Landscapes (2010), Blank Spots on the Map: The
Dark Geography of the Pentagons Secret World
(2010), and Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIAs
Rendition Flights (2006, with A. C. Thompson).
LUCIANA PARISI is Reader in Cultural Studies
and directs the PhD Program at the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College,
University of London. Author of Contagious
Architecture. Computation: Aesthetics and Space
(2013) and Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology
and the Mutations of Desire (2004).
MATTHEW POOLE is a curator and writer.
Exhibitions include Further Notes Regarding
Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock (2013-), Wayne
Lloyd: Blow Up (2012), and The Mortar
of Distribution (2010). Co-organizer of the
conference The Politics of Parametricism
(2013, with M. Schvartzberg), editor of
Anti-Humanist Curating (2011) and Episode:
Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
(2008, with A. Beech and J. Joseph-Lester). NICK SRNICEK is author of Folk Politics (2015,
Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for with A. Williams) and coeditor of The
Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and
(200113). Realism (2011, with L. Bryant and G. Harman).
MATJA POTRC is Professor of Philosophy ACHIM SZEPANSKI founded the
at Ljubljana University, Slovenia. Author of electronic music label Mille Plateaux in
Austere Realism (2008, with T. Horgan), coeditor 1994. Compilations include Modulation &
of Challenging Moral Particularism (2008, with Transformation (1994), In Memoriam Gilles
M. N. Lance and V. Strahovnik). Founding Deleuze (1995), and the Clicks & Cuts series
editor of Acta Analytica. (2000-). Books include KapitalisierungMarx
Non-konomie (2014) and the novel trilogy Pole
JOO RIBAS is Deputy Director and Position, Saal 6, and Verliebt ins Gelingen (201112).
Senior Curator of the Serralves Museum of
Contemporary Art. He was previously curator EUGENE THACKER teaches at The New School
at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (200913), for Social Researchin in New York City. Books
and curator at The Drawing Center, New York include the series Horror of Philosophy (2011-) and
(200709). Exhibitions include Chris Marker After Life (2010).
(2013), In the Holocene (2012), Cheney
Thompson (2012), Joachim Koester (2012), MCKENZIE WARK teaches at the New School
and Stan VanDerBeek (2011). for Social Research in New York City. Books
include The Spectacle of Disintegration (2013),
MATTHEW RITCHIE is an artist and writer. Telesthesia (2012), The Beach Beneath the Street
Projects include Remanance (201314), The (2011), and The Hacker Manifesto (2004).
Temptation of the Diagram (2013, curator),
The Long Count (2012), The Likeness of ANDY WEIR is an artist and writer. Exhibitions
a Crown (2011), A Time to Keep (2011), include, Weaponising Speculation (2013),
Hypermusic (200910), The Morning Line and Deep Time Contagion (2012). Lecturer in
(200811), and The Evening Line (2008 Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts.
11). Publications include the series Incomplete
Projects I-VII (200006).
ALICIA RITSON is a curator and writer, and
Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art, NYC. Curatorial
projects include Kelly Nipper: Circle Circle
(2013) and A Sudden, Sharp, Hot Stink of Fox
(2012), both at CCS Bard.
SUSAN SCHUPPLI is an artist and writer.
Projects include Material Witness (2014), Forensic
Architecture (2014), and Furtive Media (2012).
Senior Lecturer and Acting Director of the
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
College, University of London.
STEVEN SHAVIRO is the DeRoy Professor
of English at Wayne State University. Books
include: The Universe of Things: On Whitehead
and Speculative Realism (2014), Without Criteria:
Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009),
and Post-Cinematic Affect (2010). Blogs at The
Pinocchio Theory (www.shaviro.com/Blog).
403
 COLOPHON
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
(CCS Bard) was founded in 1990 as an exhibition
and research center for the study of late twentieth-
century and contemporary art and culture and
to explore experimental approaches to the pre-
sentation of these topics and their impact on
our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial
Studies and its graduate program have provided
one of the worlds most forward thinking teach-
ing and learning environments for the research
and practice of contemporary art and curator-
ship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encour-
ages students, faculty and researchers to question
the critical and political dimension of art, its
mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard
cultivates innovative thinking, radical research
and new ways to challenge our understanding of
the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS
Bard provides an intensive educational program
alongside its public events, exhibitions, and pub-
lications, which collectively explore the critical
potential of the institutions and practices of exhi-
bition-making. It is uniquely positioned within
the larger Centers tripartite resources, which
include the internationally renowned CCS Bard
Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum
of Art, with its rich permanent collection.
CCS Board of Governors
Marc S. Lipschultz (Chairman)
Leon Botstein (Ex Officio)
Amy Cappellazzo
Lori Chemla
Martin Eisenberg
Marieluise Hessel (Founding Chairman)
Marguerite Hoffman
Maja Hoffmann
Audrey Irmas
Ruth Lockwood Keating
Melissa Schiff Soros
Michael Ward Stout
CCS Bard Staff
Tom Eccles, Executive Director
Paul ONeill, Director of the Graduate Program
Tracy Pollock, Director of Administration and
Development
Marcia Acita, Director of Exhibitions and Operations
Ann E. Butler, Director of Library and Archives
Ramona Rosenberg, Director of External Affairs
Sarah Higgins, Graduate Program Coordinator
Karlene King, Administrative and Development
Coordinator
Mark DeLura, Preparator
Bronwen Bitetti, Associate Librarian
Ryan Evans, Archivist
Susan Whiteley, Administrative Assistant
George Acker, Security Manager
CCS Bard publications are made possible with
support from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation,
the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, the
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of
Governors of the Center for Curatorial Stud-
ies, the CCS Bard Arts Council, and the Centers
Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Acknowledgments
The editors would especially like to acknowledge
Johanna Burton, who commissioned this book
under the auspices of the Center for Curato-
rial Studies, Bard College; Molly Whalen, for
her keen editorial work that brought the book to
completion; and Jaime Baird, for deftly manag-
ing its production. They would also like to thank
Karen Kelly and Barbara Schrder.
2015 Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College, Sternberg Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems,
or transmitted in any form by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the
copyright holder.
ISBN 978-3-95679-126-0
Center for Curatorial Studies
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
www.bard.edu/ccs
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78, D-10243 Berlin
www.sternberg-press.com
Design: Zak Group
Managing Editor: Jaime Baird
Copyeditor: Molly Whalen
Copyright Permissions: Orit Gat
Proofreading: Niamh Dunphy
Printed by: MM Artbook print & repro
 Coole: From Within the Midst of Things
Ladyman: Things Aren't The Way They Used to Be

Diederichsen: Is Marxism a Correlationism?

Grosz: Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom

Groys: Entering the Flow

Poole: The Idiot Paradigm

DeLanda/Cox: Possibility Spaces
Lee: Unnatural Participations

Laruelle/ Maoilearca: Artistic Experiments with Philosophy Harman/Cox/Jaskey: Art and OOObjecthood
Thacker: Pessimism and Realism

Cox: Sonic Thought

Malik: Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art Shaviro: Non-Correlational Thought

Ontology Schuppli: Law and Disorder
Vitalism

Horgan/Potrc : Blobjectivism and Art

Grant: Suprematist Ontology and the Ultra-Deep Field Problem

Brassier/Malik: Reason Is Inconsolable and Non-Conciliatory Bodies

Ecology

Garcia: In Defense of Representation

Srnicek: Computational Infrastructures and Aesthetics Agency

Science
Kolozova: Concepts that Surrender to Materiality

Canini: Real Noise Acts

Time

Reason
Paglen: Geographies of Time Ritchie: The Temptation of the Diagram

Noise
Finance

Weir: Thick Dia-Chronic Crash

Negarestani: Synechistic Critique of Aesthetic Judgement Szepanski: -non-music-non-stop-
Complexity
Beech: Concept without Difference

Ribas: What is it that Makes Todays Realism so Different, so Appealing?

Meillassoux: Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction

Avanessian: Speculative Poetics

Ayache: Technology of the Future

Parisi: Automated Architecture
Armen Avanessian Nathan Lee
Elie Ayache Suhail Malik
Amanda Beech Quentin Meillassoux
Ray Brassier Reza Negarestani
Mikko Canini John Maoilearca
Diana Coole Trevor Paglen
Christoph Cox Luciana Parisi
Manuel DeLanda Matthew Poole
Diedrich Diederichsen Matja Potrc
Tristan Garcia Joo Ribas
Elizabeth Grosz Matthew Ritchie
Boris Groys Alicia Ritson
Iain Hamilton Grant Susan Schuppli
Graham Harman Steven Shaviro
Terry Horgan Nick Srnicek
Jenny Jaskey Achim Szepanski
Katerina Kolozova Eugene Thacker
James Ladyman McKenzie Wark
Franois Laruelle Andy Weir