Diversifying Speculative Realisms

Today I came across a great post by Christopher Vitale asking theorists in the Speculative Realism orbit to begin thinking more and more about the political implications and possible applications of their work.

Vitale is an assistant Professor of Media and Critical/ Visual Studies at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Vitale's blog Networkologies is a sophisticated exploration of media, ontology, politics and culture within the post-modern West. Vitale describes his overall project as an attempt “to articulate a new philosophy of networks for our hyperconnected age.”

Below are a few excerpts lifted from Vitale’s original post which you should go read immediately (here). Chris writes:

“Let’s even look at the Speculative Realist movement, or the bloggers associated with it. Am I the only one who is ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ (more on my use of these terms below)? Is there anyone who doesn’t get white privilege on a regular basis? Even though I’m Sicilian-American, I get white privilege on a continual basis. Are there any women who regularly blog on philosophy, speculative realism (I can only think of Nina Powers, and yet she doesn’t really deal with issues related to speculative realism that much . . .)? And let me be clear about this: I don’t think its a sin to be born a man, or to be hetero, or to have whitish skin. But I do think its important that if you get a certain type of social privilege, you fight against it. And that means, I think, trying to dissect the way this produces epistemological privilege of various sorts. So, I do think that if the speculative realist movement is predominantly white, male, hetero, we need to not only ask ourselves why this might be, but how it impacts our thought, and what we can do about this…

But I think these issues are really, really important, and need to be, for speculative realism to really be a philosophy that speaks to the needs of our current age. Isn’t that what philosophy is supposed to do? I really do believe Nietzsche when he argues that the philosopher is or should be a cultural physician, and that philosophy is “a culture’s collective struggle against depression.” Of course, it is more than just these things. But I believe it must also be these things…

Epistemology and ontology, the current focus of speculative realism, aren’t enough. We need a politics and an ethics from this movement, yes? Does SR have something to say about race, gender, sexuality, or global capitalism? Something that comes from a particularly SR approach to the world? It’s my sense that unless philosophy develops all these sides of itself, it isn’t complete…

Or is there something about philosophy as a discipline, perhaps, that continually makes us in ‘love with the concept’, so to speak, too tied to the universal to see difference? Has Deleuze helped us unwork that, or is this only in theory? Why don’t more people who are not white, hetero, men go into philosophy? What about the ways in which first Althusser and now Badiou are being read as revolutionary texts in various parts of the world? Can philosophy change the world again, or was the Marxist experiment in this too dangerous?

I think Chris’ questions are fantastic. And I couldn’t agree more with continued attempts to politicize theory and academic discourses in order to address the dark legacies of privileged speculative activity in general. As knowledge-producers academics (and other ‘experts’) should always seek out and interrogate the imbalances and inadequacies inherent in their discourses in order to mitigate its resultant negative effects. This is the responsibility of all intellectuals who are privilaged enough to spend their energies in a profession of 'thinking'.

But I want to briefly address his specific question with regards to 'queering speculative realism'.

Overall, I believe we will begin to see a lot more diversity creep into the general thrust of Speculative Realism (SR) when it begins to get picked up by artists, radicals and other non-institutional intellectuals. That is to say, the issue of queering and engendering diversity is more a problem with institutionalized intellectuality as such than with SR specifically. Academia in general is still very much a white-boys club. The issues of privilege, access and univocality – and even aesthetic-ideological preference and distinctions – are deep class issues at the heart of Western society and deeply embedded within our institutional education systems. And I don’t think we can expect SR to diversify and become overtly political if it remains entangled in the academic/blogging/philosophy assemblage.

In less words, we can’t expect SR to treat the symptom without its adherents (for lack of a better word) first, or also attacking the root causes of a much larger dis-ease at the core of their disciplines. SR will simply perpetuate the problems existent within the institutions that SR thinkers and bloggers are entangled with. Again, diversity will come when SR is ‘contaminated’ from outside the academy and taken up by non-philosophical modes of intellectuality

I personally like the label because it is broad enough that it is inclusive of all my leanings and projects – although I am not a philosopher. But I don’t think it is productive for anyone to seek to keep SR tucked nicely into institutional philosophy or academic circulation.

One quick personal example: I will be using the term Speculative Realism in a presentation to technocrats on innovation in designing and implementing health clinics and programs in rural Canada. The presentation will be delivered in a room with about 90 people, half of whom are non-white and about 60% female.

But we could even go further in our critical reflections and foreground linkages between the existence and emergence of SR and the techno-economic networks within which it arose. If global capitalism wasn’t what it is could those four horsemen of the philosophicus have traveled from their respective locations and positions of privilege to deliver their talks and increase the intensity of rapport and the networks of eager grad students? The whole system/network in which SR came into being and is perpetuated can be analyzed and questioned.