Got Realism?

Over at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has recently posted an amazingly clear and succinct statement on the importance of a full-blown realism. On this issue, and everything else in that particular post, I couldn’t agree with Levi more.

After language what? Realism, that’s what. True significance is generated from the consequences of real action.

Here are the passages that resonate with me the most:

“Rorty famously said that a number of philosophical problems are never really solved, but rather we just cease asking these questions. No philosopher has yet refuted the solipsist, nor has anyone ever refuted Berkeley. If you’re worried about how we can escape language perhaps you should just stop asking the question and move on. More importantly, you should attend to the methodological consequences that follow…”

"Lacanianism and its linguistic idealist cousins needs to be castrated. We need forms of theory and practice capable of both talking about talk, signs, the signifier, narrative, and discourse capable of indicating the non-semiotic and approaching the non-semiotic on its own terms as best we can. Absent this we are missing a massive dimension as to why our social world is as it is."

“What we need is a realist rhetoric. For me, it’s not so much Kant that is the enemy, but the linguistic and semiotic turn. I wish to retain a place for these things, but to overcome the hegemony they currently have in the world of Continental theory. Reference to the real does not a realism make. It is only when you abandon the thesis that any entity constructs another entity that your position is deserving of the title of realism.”

Read the entire post yourself @ Larval Subjects

In commenting on Bryant's post Alex Reid remarks that,

…the rhetorical (and compositional) challenge isn’t to develop a discourse that reveals the real but rather one that allows us to speak in new ways about the world, to see new possibilities, to develop new relations (with both human and non-human others), and maybe invent a way of living (which is maybe humanocentric but given our impact on the planet, maybe not).

To which Bryant adds:

A realist rhetoric would minimally be two things: First, a realist rhetoric would not focus on speech and writing alone. There would, of course, be a place for the analysis of content or the semiotic in a realist rhetoric, it just wouldn’t be the whole story.

As a langauge game OOO just got a lot more compelling. Got realism? Indeed.