ARTICLES

THEANTI-POLITICALAESTHETICSOFOBJECTSAND
WORLDSBEYOND
By Svenja Bromberg , 25 July 2013
Politics / Philosophy / Art
Image: Sanna Marander 'Solid Objects', installation view of The Return of the Object, at Invaliden1, Berlin, curated by Stefanie Hessler
Now that immaterial and affective labour seem to be waning as subjects for art, a fascination with the
radical contingency of the material world has grown to take their place. Through close readings of the
speculative realist philosophy that so inspires contemporary aesthetics, Svenja Bromberg pinpoints the
anti-politics inherent in this turn

What do we see when we linger for a moment on what is now celebrated as the turn towards objects in the
overlapping spaces of art and philosophy? At first glance, a colourful potpourri of theories that have gained wide
recognition in an extremely short time span, especially through their presence in both the blogosphere and the
classical academic sphere.
1
The thinkers featuring most prominently are Graham Harman with his Object-Oriented
Ontology, and Quentin Meillassoux, who became best known for coining the critical term correlationism in his first
major work After Finitude.
2
In this term Meillassoux summarises the generalised antirealist stance of all of
continental philosophy in its understanding of all perception as being always already correlated with a human, and
therefore subjectivist, perspective. But first I want to touch on something that I started to consciously acknowledge
in relation to the publicity around the dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012, before going deeper into these theories
as such in order to disentangle and clarify their positions.

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The exhibitions curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev left no doubt as to the enormous impact object-oriented
ontology had had on the development of her aesthetic. Since dOCUMENTA there has been a real explosion in art
exhibitions that explicitly centre around objects and articulate a relation to the philosophical strand of Object-
Oriented Ontolgy (OOO) / Speculative Realism (SR). Within this same cultural turn to the object we should also
include a large conference entitled Aesthetics of the 21st Century held in Basel in September 2012, at which
Harman gave the keynote and an international array of artists, curators and theoreticians met with the shared
objective of clarifying and discussing these philosophical currents.
3
What has really motivated me to undertake this
inquiry is the fact that, while the continental philosophy scene seems to have retreated a bit from the initial frenzy
around these theoretical strands, it is now the art world with its artists, curators and critics that upholds a fidelity to
the promises of object-oriented theories. But what does it find in them and what do the theories themselves deliver
in terms of an aesthetics?


The Turn Towards Objects: The hero is dead Long live the thing
4

There is at first a very material sense in which its advocates justify the turn to objects. We are at a point where our
faith in the powers of the subject to critique and subvert reality, as grounded in Enlightenment theory, has been truly
defeated, not least by capitalisms now much discussed ability to demand precisely subjective emotional or
affective investments in its exploitative machinery.
5
Thus, it is not only the fact that subjects are always already
subjected, which we have learned from Foucault, Butler and other poststructuralists.6 But if capitalism wants us to
be ever more alive, happy and truly engaged in shaping our own lives on the basis of the endless possibilities this
world has to offer, then the critique offered by vitalist theories, aesthetic modes such as Bourriauds relational
aesthetics and more critical forms of emancipated spectatorship against an objectifying and alienating capitalist
reality appear assimilated and defused.
7
As Diedrich Diederichsen outlines in a recent e-flux article, it is precisely
what was still antithetical to the Fordist assembly line different modes of dreaming dangerously or living authentic
or alternative lives that seems to have become part of the post-Fordist imperative to produce a perfect self as a
perfect thing.
8
Smiles or grins, day-dreams and ways of being that could formerly help alleviate or escape the
alienated existence of the labourer have themselves become reified as part of the requisite service we are
compelled to provide.
9
Diederichsen describes a sense, similar to the German theatre director Ren Pollesch in his
play Love is Colder than Capital in which all relations have become toxic and emotions have been rendered cold
objects for capital.
10
Thus, the primary concern seems to be with oppressive, exploitative and reified capitalist
social relations and how to break out of them but the solutions were confronted with from the diverse strands of
the new materialisms no longer lie in the critique of these relations, but rather in a nonrelational and un-dialectical
gesture that posits the world of matter against the man-made disaster of a neoliberal existence.
11

The search for what Diederichsen calls de-reification ventures towards that which evades representation, which is
not rendered object qua instrumental reason but qua its own force, the dark, the mystic, the animate but soul-less
something that is more truly cold and yet not cold at all. This line of argument, however which is echoed in Hito
Steyerls emphatic call for us to finally accept the death of the subject and embrace the forces of construction and
destruction, of violence and the possibility stored within things problematically sidelines the classed, racialised
and gendered oppressions of capitalist reality. Within this, masses of people have never been granted any subject
status in the first place and are, instead, rendered mere objects or even superfluous, because not productive, for
capital. From the point of view of these relations, the move towards accepting or even embracing objectification as
in itself emancipatory can be nothing more than a bad joke.

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Image: Brian Jungen, Dog Run, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012

This sentiment, which shares its focus with the new materialisms, tends to uphold a mind-body dualism in which the
subject is associated with the mind and the bad effects of Enlightenment rationalism, whereas the physical body
with its pre-cognitive responses and movements is often, and rather miraculously, able to maintain a certain
independence from worldly subjections. Even if there is an investment in overcoming this dualism and a certain
caution against glorifying nature as the unchanging outside of the human world to be called upon when attempts to
elevate culture fail, the new materialisms emphasis on pre-cognitive affects, feelings and touch in the realm of the
natural, or as moments of matter receiving form, cannot escape the bodys prioritisation.
12
This tendency towards
an aesthetics through embodiment
13
, which finds its theoretical anchor in Brian Massumis work and other thinkers
in the field of Affect Studies, is still very much entangled with the human body and its ability to be drawn into new
relational and animate fields through or as part of an artwork.
14

Under the influence of similar theoretical influences, especially Spinoza and Deleuze, paired with a Latourian notion
of the actant, Jane Bennett pushes this aesthetico-materialist investment one step further towards properly
inorganic, nonhuman bodies. Interested in the material agency of natural bodies and technological artefacts,
Bennett does not rest at a transindividual(ising) capacity of the vital forces that she finds in these things (thing-
power), but thinks of them as impersonal, as being for themselves.
15
Her project here is political, since she hopes
to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality in order to give the nonhuman its
proper, equal place in the realm of the political in order to make possible a greener, more sustainable human
culture.
16
Politics must be thought, here, as an ecology that is made of human and nonhuman agents, which can
equally shape and disrupt the common ground of existence. It is at this point that a vitalist-materialist aesthetics of
affects and vibrations is paired with an overwhelming concern for a working environmental politics. This step from
an ecology of human and non-human objects to the formation of a new political public that, together with worms,
trees and aluminium as equally potent actants, is suddenly able to tackle formerly irresolvable problems such as
climate change, amounts to a nave attempt at redefining politics. One that sees its main challenge as defining the
right means and institutions of communication. While Bennetts fundamental assumption is that our current
democracy fails because of an imbalance between nature and culture, or non-human and human participation, she
fails to see that any such horizontal relationship is foreclosed from a democracy that exists within a capitalist state
in which humans, with their powers and needs, are necessarily divided from a relationship with nature and the
political realm that is not mediated by capital and class.
17

What then are the specific contributions and promises of artworks that deal with the intersections between the world
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of matter and the human world, as demonstrated by the Blowup: Speculative Realities exhibition in Amsterdam,
Kassels dOCUMENTA (13) and several other recent exhibitions?
18
It is their radical inquiry into nature, non-human
matter and life-forms that first strikes the eye. In these inquiries, whose serious concern for a re-opening of the
dead-end of contemporary politics is often paired with an element of humour, nothing about natural objects such as
clouds or trees, or the life and communication of animals, or different lifeworlds and body parts is taken for
granted.
19
Christov-Bakargiev defined this form of art, that has clear crossovers with the spheres of physics, biology
and philosophy as basic research [Grundlagenforschung]; artists describe their activity as an inquiry into
processes beyond human control, into fields of possibility that have to do with poetics, wonder and mystery as
opposed to mere reality.
20
What matters is no longer that artworks have any direct critical or political meaning, as
we have plentifully encountered in the different forms of conceptual and explicitly political art of the last century, but
that the assemblages and constellations of matter and worlds themselves might, as a progression, create discursive
signification.21 The gesture of object-oriented art is clearly one that does not allow for nature to remain the
eternally excluded other of human existence, but makes it into something that art can investigate, situate, question
and multiply re-imagine.22 This also challenges any straight-forward environmentalist approach that calls for the
conservation of the what is, and renders questionable any easy translation into politics of the assemblages
presented by the artwork, such as those found in Bennetts work. In their partly humorous, partly sincere way, these
artistic ecologies call into question what really is and thus challenge any realist politics that is merely concerned
with an immediate reality of subjects or objects. Moritz Gansen captures this artistic impetus sharply, when he
names it an aesthetics of the strange art of cosmic dreaming.
23
It is an aesthetics that is invested in exploring
potentialities of singular objects and assemblages and in creating fundamentally new spaces of possibility.

While Bennett is a well-established reference point for thinking the intersection of art and object-centered ecologies,
it is, more than anyone, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, who have been referenced in relation to the
various object-oriented art projects possibly based on their more openly speculative endeavours. This makes it
timely to investigate the space and quality of an aesthetics within Harmans and Meillassouxs own philosophical
theories that allows us to speculate on how their theories intersect at a theoretical level with the art and aesthetics
they have induced.
24
Both start by fundamentally rejecting the consensus within continental philosophy to treat
being and thought as one and the same.
25
They thereby re-open the Kantian question What can I know? and the
associated grand ontological inquiries into the real that lies beyond its representations by the human mind, which
Kant importantly named the in itself, to which the human transcendental subject has no direct access.
26


Harmans Object-Oriented Aesthetics

In his object-oriented philosophy, Graham Harmans first step is to eliminate any Kantian gap between the world
and the subjects that perceive this world. Instead, all that exists are real objects as autonomous realities or
individual substances. Humans themselves become objects, alongside fire, cotton and a tree. The real, as the
realm of real objects and therefore the realm of proper depth, exists independently for Harman. But, in contrast to
many other speculative realists, it is simultaneously divided absolutely from any image or knowledge of it. The real,
and therefore real objects and their qualities, cannot be accessed or known directly. There is no direct relation but
an absolute rift between knowledge of the real and the real as such, which leads Harman to call his ontology a
realism without a materialism. Part of his definition of objects as individual substances is that they do not stand in
any direct relation with each other. The main question thus becomes how relations between objects occur at all and
of what quality they are.

With and against his main interlocutors Latour, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, Harman develops the answer of
vicarious causation.
27
Initially, real objects have no linkage and instead they withdraw from each other that is
why causation reappears as a question for philosophy in the first place. The only way objects can touch each other
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is by not really touching, by developing a proximity that is close but never fully fuses with or exhausts the other
substance: a vicarious relationship. They somehow melt, fuse, and decompress in a shared common space from
which all are partly absent.
28
Besides real objects and their qualities, there is a second category of objects
sensual objects that rather than existing in a withdrawn state, lie directly in front of the perceiving agent as a
unified whole: they are surface appearances, the phenomena. But again, these sensual objects, even though they
exist plentifully and in a shared perceptual space, do not fuse into each other, but endure a buffered causation.
29
On the ground of this metaphysical plane, no intentional agent, human or non-human, can ever exhaust an objects
reality, neither through theoretical elaborations nor through practice. In his publication for the dOCUMENTA (13),
Harman illustrates this non-relationship by utilising the image of Eddingtons two tables. But instead of siding with
either a reality of the physical, scientific table or the second table of everyday culture, Harman argues that [t]he real
table is in fact a third table lying between these two others, as it exists as an autonomous reality beyond any of its
scientific or cultural qualities.
30

Interaction, relationship, causation, linkage are finally the names for a complex process that can be initiated
between two real objects or two sensual objects only by a third intentional agent of the opposite type (in the first
case sensual, in the second case real). Because, while real objects cannot touch each other, sensual objects
always touch real ones, as they only exist for real objects.
31
Causality unfolds only on the interiority of minds,
never in between the real objects. That means, relations can only ever exist on the surface and never reach the
depth of the real object; an operation in Harmans ontology that renders the surface the decisive realm, in so far as
a sudden (mediated) appearance of a real object in between the many commonly residing sensual objects is always
a potential for change. Making the sensual realm the necessary mediator for any object relations is the step that
renders aesthetics [] first philosophy
32
, because only the realm of aesthetics allows for the establishment of any
relations between substance and causation, which are divided by an ontological fission. Similarly, politics or ethics
become for Harman questions of a specific form of coupling and uncoupling between real and sensual objects and
therefore a question of the creation of new objects, which it is only ever possible to talk about on the level of
aesthetics.
33

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Image: Sarah Ortmeyer, SAD EIS, installation view of The Return of the Object, at Invaliden1, Berlin

The concepts that allow us to understand the specific position of art and artworks within Harmans metaphysical
aesthetics are sincerity and allure. Sincerity generally refers to the moment when a real and a sensual object
enter into a relation, when the former gets absorbed by the latter in order to reach a connection. As Harman shows
with the example of a person getting absorbed by the sensual object tree through an encounter with a tree, on the
street or in a forest, these kinds of relations occur all the time. But as this connection occurs within the general
space of intention, where several sensual objects and related qualities exist besides each other, the moment of
sincerity, which seems to be temporally located before an accomplished connection, bears the chance of a real
object piercing through the cloud of sensual objects and establishing a new relation, a new object.
34
With the
concept of the allure, Harman describes a way in which such a new connection, which is still to be understood as a
relation, not as an encounter with the real object itself, can be actively triggered:
35

The only way to bring real objects into the sensual sphere is to reconfigure sensual objects in such a way that
they no longer merely fuse into a new one, as parts into a whole, but rather become animated by allusion to a
deeper power lying beyond: a real object. The gravitational field of a real object must somehow invade the
existing sensual field.
36

This means, the allure has the ability to separate an encountered, sensual object from its immediate qualities, and
therefore create an opening for a different level of reality to enter, a reality in which sensual qualities are not directly
presented as the necessary part of sensual objects, nor sensual objects as unified wholes.
37
The examples
Harman offers for understanding allures are poetic metaphors, beauty, cuteness (of children or recently born
animals) or more generally failure, hypnotic experiences, names and love encounters, which he sums up under the
categories the comic and the charming. Now, while he explicitly states that allure is not merely a theory of art, but a
theory of causal relations in general, he nevertheless has clearly pointed to art and artworks as ideally equipped to
activate forms of allure, because of the way that the real object (while partly removed) and the sensual qualities
are fused within the work of art:
38

But a similar cutting of the bond between an agent and its traits occurs in beauty, in which a thing or creature
is gifted with qualities of such overwhelming force that we do not pass directly through the sensual material
into the unified thing, but seem to see the beautiful entity lying beneath all its marvelous qualities,
commanding them like puppets.
39

This space that is opened up, for example, by beauty is for Harman a critical space that allows for new relations to
emerge, rather than for any elevated critique. While the spectator does not access the real object that is the
artwork outside the intentional space of his or her mind, the spectator and the artwork can fuse within the intentional
space and can produce new relations that are always also new objects. On the side of the artwork, the
responsibility seems to then lie with its creator, the artist, to find allures that forge new relations in interesting ways.

It remains unclear though what kind of allures would count as better or worse, worthy of being created or not,
because judgements do not exist in Harmans world of objects. Relations are either brought into existence or not.
Objects exist anyway in their withdrawn states. Above anything else, this conceptual weakness is grounded on
Harmans fundamental distinction between the real and the sensual, which reminds one of Bennetts political
idealism in which the sole problem of democracy has become a question of the equal access and participation of
the non-human. While Harman overcomes Bennetts division of human and non-human actants by rendering
everything objects, he creates a different fission the gap between the real and the sensual and thereby remains
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faithful to an idealisation of the now inaccessible and truly real as that which can interrupt and reconfigure its
sensual representations in the objects intentional spaces.

There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or
object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects
might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations or in which relations might bind objects to conditions
of extreme suffering, of suffocation, of death and we could here speak of relations between people and their
means of subsistence as much as of the relation between a company that emits toxic fumes and its surrounding
biosphere. For Harman, real objects, whose materiality is entirely removed from our sensual images of it, exist in
their individualised, withdrawn states in which they can be touched by sensual objects without ever really being
affected.

Philosophy and simultaneously aesthetics have thus become extremely impoverished, as they have lost any
concepts that could allow judgements that go beyond the question if a new relation has been forged or not. With
respect to the spectator, Harman seems to remain extremely Kantian, in the sense that for him art is fundamentally
about the encounter between the artwork and the spectator and the emerging aesthetic reaction or judgement.
Even though he makes clear that his conception in which the spectator becomes part of the artwork (of course only
in the intentional space) is opposed to Kants necessary moment of disinterestedness when encountering the
beautiful, Harman remains close to Kants conception in that he is interested in a moment of awe and an
expression of delight that the encounter between artwork and spectator can cause.
40
But, instead of aiming at a
Kantian differentiation of the possible aesthetic judgements and their potentially universal reach, Harman is mainly
interested in the slightly misty and oblique discovery on the side of the spectator that the subjective sensual world,
which he-she-it had taken for granted, has actually many different facets, in so far as real objects do not exist in any
unity. Disappointingly, this sounds like a new form of relational aesthetics that has exchanged people for objects
41
and now contents itself as being just another, maybe slightly more potent, form of wine-tasting.
42
Any sensual
reaction of awe or delight potentially holds the same value which, triggered by a different representation of the real,
can forge a new relation, a new object.


Meillassouxs Inaesthetics

Lets then turn our focus now to Meillassoux, who leads us away from objects and towards an ontological
discussion of worlds beyond. While Meillassoux has not actually developed an explicit aesthetics, he has recently
published the monograph The Number and the Siren, on Stephane Mallarms poem Un coup de ds jamais
nabolira le hazard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) that will help me ground my explorations.
Meillassoux, in contrast to Harman and many other new materialists, fundamentally rejects any differentiation
between the realm of being of ontology and the realm of sense perception (the aesthetic realm or aisthesis).
Because he not only also rejects the correlationist claim that thinking and being is one, but wants to refute it from
within, his project becomes a demonstration of the possibility of accessing the in itself or absolute, a reality
absolutely separate from the subject.
43
After Meillassoux has demonstrated the aporia of the correlationist
approach and the scientific truth that can be reached via something like the arche-fossile, which was in existence
long before any human species, he concludes that what a non-correlationist philosophy needs to concern itself with
is a reality beyond our given reality for which there is no natural law, no ultimate cause, no reason and also no
necessity: that is the meaning of absolute facticity, which is simultaneously absolute possibility and absolute
contingency. The worlds of the real are non-totalisable.
44
No necessity, as Meillassoux shows, implies the
impossibility of contradictions, as we know them from Hegelian dialectics, because a contradictory entity always
necessarily implies its other side, and therefore contradicts absolute contingency. To end the purely conceptual
recapitulation, what exists in Meillassouxs real is superchaos (or formerly called hyperchaos) about which it is
possible to speculate rationally. Following his teacher Alain Badiou, to speculate rationally means for Meillassoux
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to re-absolutis[e] the scope of mathematics.
45

The link between this theory and Mallarms poem is introduced by Meillassoux as follows:

[P]hilosophy is concerned with a real and dense possible which I call the may-be [peut-tre]. This peut-tre
[] is very close to the final peut-tre of Mallarms Un coup de ds.
46

By Mallarms final peut-tre, Meillassoux means the attempted, but forever suspended, toss of the dice of the
drowned Master that now remains undecided in the eternal circumstance of a shipwrecks depth.
47
The question
that Meillassoux understands Mallarm to be asking with Un coup de ds and earlier poems is the question of if and
how poetry could become a truly great or configurative art that is able to open up human existence towards a
future salvation. This grand question, which Meillassoux sees residing in a wager for poetry as an absolute and the
source of a new religion, and which also includes Mallarms unpublished project The Book [Le Livre] as one of its
sources, is combined for Mallarm with a further pressing question. That of remaining faithful to the old
collectivising metric verse as against a truly modern and individualised free verse poetry.

Against his master Alain Badiou, Meillassoux sees these questions not resolved in Coup de ds in relation to an
evental configuration of the poem towards a newly emerging truth, but as precisely eternalised in a hypothetical
perhaps, by means of a metre that simultaneously exists and in-exists: the activity of fixer linfini. Meillassoux
argues this on the grounds of the unique Number that we can find alluded to but finally suspended in the line of the
poem it was the number were it to have existed, but that nevertheless has an, albeit questionable, hidden
existence via a code within the poem.
48

Without wanting to engage further in an interpretation of Meillassouxs extraordinary and not at all undisputed
reading of the poem, I will end by reflecting on the status of numbers and art that Meillassoux attributes here.
49
Whereas in Meillassouxs philosophy mathematics can directly access the absolute without any detour via reason,
Mallarm eternalises his poetry on the ground of a number whose existence is undecidable. The eternity lies then
not merely in the metre of the poem, not in the number itself, because that would give the poem a finite meaning
and existence. Via its proximity to both, language and numbers, the poem allows the reader to gaze into the space
of hyperchaos that is simultaneously the void, but only if he is attentive enough to discern the rather complex layers
through which this telescope is constructed. If as readers of Badious treatises on art as inaesthetics we have
remained disappointed by his strange formalism in which the artwork itself became the subject of the event and
therefore the bearer of an eternal truth, which was then charged with the ability of emancipating humanity into new
sensible relations with the world, it seems that Meillassoux may have delivered a possible answer to how this
formalism could play out.
50
This occurs via the route of mathematics as the access to the absolute, the worlds that
exist beyond our reality. In his review of The Number and the Siren, Thomas Ford calls Meillassouxs interpretation
a hazeof numbers that he opposes to the 20
th
century haze of signification.
51
And even though we might be
sceptical of binding art in this way to mathematical formulas and turning it into a highly intellectualised, yet
simultaneously mystic inquiry into a shadowy depth of being, it is difficult not to be intrigued by this idea. Of course
Rancires critique that this understanding affirms an old modernist belief in the autonomy and specificity of the art
object is here as much valid as when it was posed against Badious project.
52
But if we were to embrace an art of
the inaesthetic, i.e. an art that itself, and independent of the philosophical subject of aesthetics, can alert and direct
the spectator to a truth that fundamentally differs from the subjective human reality, without trying to couple it to our
political ambitions for art to be directly invested in our anti-capitalist struggle
53
, it could perhaps become a source of
dreams, desires and comportments that might help us to understand this very world as contingent and therefore
open to being altered.
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Image: Pierre Huyghe, Colony Collapse, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012

At the same time the aesthetics of hope Meillassouxs philosophy offers us is not a Blochian not-yet-being that, in
its utopian sense, is nevertheless directed in a very concrete way against the oppressive material conditions of
existence under capitalism, and which is itself only generated by the participation in that very same struggle.
Meillassouxs real of superchaos, which art might help us to access is, whilst radically contingent, also absolute,
containing in itself the equal contingency of order and disorder, of becoming and sempiternity.
54
Whereas this form
of hope seems to offer us a new way of dreaming, the dreams themselves make capitalist social relations and our
human struggles appear equally petty, inane and merely from this world. It is a hope of the last resort that is no
longer invested in change, but in alleviation of the pain that comes with resignation.

* I would like to thank Stephanie Hessler, Jenny Nachtigall and Moritz Gansen for their contributions and links along
the way as well as Josephine and Ben from Mute for their encouragement to write this article in the first place and
for their careful readership and great editorial care.

Svenja Bromberg <svenja.bromberg AT gmail.com> is a PhD student in the Centre for Cultural Studies at
Goldsmiths College, London. She works on Marxist political philosophy, aesthetics and politics, and
feminist theory.


Footnotes

1In the Philosophy Department at the Free University Berlin, there has just been an entire Hauptseminar dedicated
to Speculative Realism during the past academic year.
2 As well as Bruno Latour for Harman the most important philosopher of the 20th century and Levi Bryant, Ray
Brassier, Steve Shaviro and others. But Meillassoux and Harman are the figures I will concentrate on in this article
due to their prominence in philosophical and artistic movements. A more general overview of thinkers and positions
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can be found in Levi R Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: re.press, 2011.
3 See: The Era of Ojbects (Blowup Reader 3) and the exhibitions it is based on, Speculative Realities, (Blowup
Reader 6), V2_: Institute for the Unstable Media, ed., Rotterdam, 2013, http://v2.nl/archive/articles/speculative-
realities-blowup-reader-6/view.; a lecture series in Berlin organised by Armen Avanessian and Melanie Sehgal
http://www.spekulative-poetik.de/speculative-philosophy.html, and many more informal gatherings.
4 See: Hito Steyerl, A Thing Like You And Me, 15 April 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-
and-me/.
5 See for some attempts to remain faithful to a modulated form of that subject in contemporary continental
philosophy: Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Who Comes after the Subject? (London:
Routledge, 1991); I have elsewhere written on the notion of affective labour and its problematic application in Hardt
and Negris work.
6 Steyerl, op. cit.
7 See Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative : a Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics ([Paris]: Les Presses du
Rel, 2002).
8 Diedrich Diederichsen, Animation, De-reification, and the New Charm of the Inanimate, 36 July 2012,
http://linkme2.net/tt . I am taking the definition of post-Fordist labour from Hardt and Negri as well as from Lazzarato
as meaning intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
Cambridge, Mass ; London: Harvard University Press, 2000, 29; Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour, in Radical
Thought in Italy A Potential Politics, Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Eds.), Minneapolis, Minn. ; London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.132146.
9 See A.R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart : Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, Calif.; Los Angeles;
London: University of California Press, 2003).
10 Ren Pollesch, Liebe Ist Klter Als Das Kapital : Stcke, Texte, Interviews, C. Brocher (Ed.), Reinbek: Rowohlt
Taschenbuch, 2009.
11 See for a general overview of the field for example, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds.), New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, 2010; Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism:
Interviews & Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, 2012.
12See, e.g. Timothy Mortons The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, for a rejection of this notion
in favour of ecology; V2_: Institute for the Unstable Media, op. cit., p.42.
13See ibid., p.30.
14 See Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, MIT Press, 2011, p.105.
15 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p.xiii.
16 Ibid., p.x.
17 See: Karl Marx, Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1975, p.390. See also Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature
in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, New Left Books, 1971.
18 For example, The Return of the Object at the Berlin gallery, Invaliden1, curated by Stefanie Hessler in January
2013.
19See V2_: Institute for the Unstable Media, op. cit., p.26 and Kia Vahlands, Documenta-Leiterin Carolyn Christov-
Bakargiev: ber die politische Intention der Erdbeere, sueddeutsche.de, 8 June, 2012, sec. kultur,
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/documenta-leiterin-carolyn-christov-bakargiev-ueber-die-politische-intention-
der-erdbeere-1.1370514.V2_
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20 Vahland, ibid., p.15.
21 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, p.91.
22 See V2_: Institute for the Unstable Media, op. cit., p.40.
23 Moritz Gansen, Cosmic Dreams: The Ecological Aesthetics of dOCUMENTA (13), presented at the Aesthetics
of the 21st Century, Basel, n.d.
24See V2_: Institute for the Unstable Media, op. cit., p.37.
25 Graham Harman, On Vicarious Causation, Collapse 2, Speculative Realism, March 2007, p. 189.
26In Hegels idealism there is of course something such as absolute knowledge.
27 Harman, On Vicarious Causation, op. cit.
28 Ibid., p.190.
29 Ibid., 195.
30 Graham Harman, The Third Table = Der dritte Tisch, vol. 85, 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts /100 Notizen - 100
Gedanken (Ostfildern, Germany: dOCUMENTA 13/ Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012).
31 See also Harman, On Vicarious Causation, p.219.
32 Ibid., 221.
33 Here there seems to exist a certain proximity to the aesthetic politics that Jacques Rancire conceptualises on
the ground of his analysis of different distributions of the sensible, with the important difference that Rancire first
of all explicitly focuses on the aesthetics of art and that he further refuses to allow art as well as politics to have any
material reality beyond the subjectively perceived forms, practices and relations. For Harman on the contrary,
materiality does influence the level of the sensual, but never directly, i.e. not in an unmediated way.
34 See ibid., p.213.
35 See especially Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago,
Ill.: u.a.: Open Court, 2005, but also Harmans various recent talks on art.
36 Harman, On Vicarious Causation, op. cit., p.220.
37 See Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, op. cit., p.179.
38 See Graham Harman Art and Paradox, 2012, http://vimeo.com/53793807; Harman, The Third Table = Der
dritte Tisch.
39 Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, op. cit., p.142.
40 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Oxford University Press, 2007, 2.
41 See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p.85.
42 A connection Harman himself suggests, see Graham Harman - Art and Paradox, 2012, http://vimeo.com
/53793807.
43 See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency , London: Continuum, 2009,
Chapter 1-2, and Meillassouxs, Time Without Becoming / Zeit Ohne Werden, SPIKE 35, 2013, p.92.
44 Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p.159.
45 Meillassoux, After Finitude, op. cit., p.204.
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46 Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming / Zeit Ohne Werden, 102.
47 Mallarm, Un coup de ds
48 Quentin Meillassoux, Le nombre et la sirne: un dchiffrage du Coup de ds de Mallarm ([Paris]: Fayard,
2011), pp.16.
49 For discussions of the book see: Michael Reid, Ex Nihilo, Mute, August 2012, http://www.metamute.org/editorial
/articles/ex-nihilo; Thomas H. Ford, Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren, The Canadian Society for
Continental Philosophy, January 2013, http://www.c-scp.org/en/2013/01/06/quentin-meillassoux-the-number-
and-the-siren.html;; Adam Kotsko, Quentin Meillassoux and the Crackpot Sublime, The New Inquiry, May 2012,
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/quentin-meillassoux-and-the-crackpot-sublime/.
50Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, Lacanian Ink 23, 2004, http://www.lacan.com
/frameXXIII7.htm; Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005.
51 Ford, Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren.
52 Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics, in Think Again : Alain Badiou and the Future of
Philosophy, Peter Hallward (Ed.), London: Continuum, 2004, p.218.
53See Alberto Toscano on the problem of converging speculation and materialism in Meillassouxs philosophy:
Alberto Toscano, Against Speculation, or, a Critique of the Critique of Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassouxs
After Finitude (after Colletti), in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi R Bryant, Nick
Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: re.press, 2011), 8491.
54 Quentin Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming / Zeit Ohne Werden, 102.
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JJ Charlesworth ! 10 months ago
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The sleep of subjects begets objects. Sort of.
This is a welcome start to a proper critical examination of the Object Oriented Ontology-Speculative Realism
are-up. But what Bromberg doesn't recognise is that the disintegration of the subject as a political and
theoretical perspective is itself the grounding problem. If one takes the post-structuralist critique of subjectivity
for granted - as Bromberg seems to - I'd argue that it can only lead to a prioritisation of objects. Bromberg
doesn't have much to say on this - the shift from the discourse of the reied subject to the empowered object is
only a matter of degree. Nor does Bromberg seem to know where she stands on environmentalism, and her
commitment to 'anti-capitalism' is merely reactive; it doesn't question why OOO-SR should chime so readily at a
time where the desire to transcend capitalism appears confused with a desire to transcend - or negate - being
human. I'd argue that the political conservatism at the core of OOO-SR is only the logical progression of the
post-structuralist degradation of the Subject.
The initial concession that Bromberg makes is not to seriously question the credibility of the two 'totalisation'
discourses she points to: the Foucault-Butler lineage that distrusts subjectivity as something which is only ever
the 'e"ect' of subjection, on one hand; and the Immaterial/a"ective labour critiques which see Capital as
all-encroaching on subjects, who are always, for some reason, totally incapable of generating any distance from
its operations.

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Diogenes Search Injun ! 10 months ago
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> JJ Charlesworth
Mr Charlesworth's comment is much more interesting than the article.
In my view, so-called 'new' materialism looks more like, materialism ante-Marx, or even animism:
http://ualresearchonline.arts....
I would say that it isn't just art, that is accorded exceptional capacities in an otherwise undi"erentiated
human objectivity. The very activity of academics' use of language to develop these ideas, discussing
them, Ms Bromberg's writing this article, and metamute choosing to publish it, are all subjective, AND
objective acts.
I'm sure that numerous people, particularly those outside the artworld/academic theory racket, could
readily name many other exceptions.
The notion of 'post-humanism', associated with these ideas, is premature - not least as ANTE-humanism
might be more tting - given that so much theory/philosophy is an ongoing obstacle to understanding
what is specically human animality, namely, a psychophysical unity that uses language.
Marx and Wittgenstein are much more useful for that.

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the57bears ! 9 months ago > JJ Charlesworth
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