Postscript: ‘Art after experience’– Speculative Realism and the Sublime

Summary

It seems undeniable that in the last ten years or so continental philosophy has undergone a shift that could turn out to be epochal and that takes the name ‘Speculative Realism’. It would therefore seem negligent not to include some sort of account of it in a book that claims to pertain to contemporary art. Nevertheless, while the sublime is arguably a factor in the development of Speculative Realism, it is certainly tangential to its major concerns, which in large part rest upon a rejection of Kant. As a result, my discussion of Speculative Realism is brief and by no means sophisticated, but is offered here as an attempt to indicate what the sublime's future might hold, both philosophically and in the realm of art.

The introduction to the collection Speculative Aesthetics begins by outlining the natural attraction of, but also the uncomfortable aspects to the combination of Speculative Realism and contemporary art:

Given contemporary art's cultural privileging as a site of negotiation between the conceptual and the sensory, it is understandable that it should have played host to the convergence of SR [speculative realism] and aesthetics. Yet such an alliance is puzzling when one considers what SR might bring to this negotiation, in so far as its primary selling point (according to the popularly diffused credo) is its dismissal of the mediating role of human experience. Indeed, if this ‘movement’ is concerned with wresting attention away from the primacy of intuition and interpretation, it could be (and has been) construed as an anti-aesthetic tendency. (Mackay et al. 2014: 1)

The rejection of what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’ (‘by “correlation” we mean 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’ (2008: 5)2) unites, to a certain extent, the disparate group of philosophers (Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman) first gathered under and substantially defining the moniker ‘Speculative Realism’. The group, however, quickly diverges along various lines, the most important for us being whether they reject or privilege aesthetics in the task of thinking ‘the object in itself’ (Meillassoux 2008: 3).