Introduction

doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421041.003.0001

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Introduction

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https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421041.003.0001

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1–10

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01 October 2017

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THIS BOOK EXPLORES some of the implications of and opportunities within the speculative turn in continental philosophy from the perspective of art history. Speculation? Besides its only legitimate domain today, that of finance, is this not a thing of the past, when metaphysicians were used to making unverifiable claims about the nature of God, the World and the Self? From Kant to Wittgenstein, critical philosophy has taught us to remain silent on that of which we cannot speak. Likewise, art history has come a long way in establishing itself as a positive human science independent from its metaphysical beginnings. In both cases, enlightened, self-critical and self-reflective thought has worked hard on closing the door to ontology, on reducing the Ideas of reason to ideology and on limiting the domain of knowledge to phenomenal objects. Speculation, it seems, has not been en vogue for quite some time.

Quentin Meillassoux has recently labelled the anti-speculative status quo as ‘correlationism’: the conviction that there can be no access to a reality that is independent of human subjectivity and its mediations through the senses, the unconscious, language, technology or, indeed, art and aesthetics.¹ If, by contrast, new speculative philosophies realign themselves with pre-critical philosophy, this is not necessarily because they cultivate a dogmatic belief in the powers of human reason, but because the inherent limitations of the critical (i.e. relativist) stance become more apparent by the day. We urgently need to get over ourselves. Just as the financial crisis teaches us that the future must be reclaimed from those speculative investments whose only aim is to cancel it out, the slow awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene forces the humanities to resituate themselves with a much less anthropocentric and much more inclusive perspective. As Peter Sloterdijk writes, the problem with the grand narratives of metaphysics was not that they were too big, but rather that they were not big enough.² The problem of philosophy is no longer the contradictions to which every attempt to find first principles necessarily falls victim, just as the problem of the humanities is no longer the losing out of facts to theoretical illusion. On the contrary, the facts themselves appear in a new light and with new depth, which involve the future of life and the cosmos. It is time for a new, speculative realism, which treats human beings, science, and social relations as things having no more status than neutrinos or jellyfish. It is time for a bio- or even a geo-art-history. Whereas art history is a fetishist, even the fetishist, historical discipline, Adi Efal in her contribution to this book develops the concept of habitude as a tool through which speculative art history can understand the work of art as produced thing, and therefore as inseparable from its mesh of conditions of production and duration. The same goes for art itself. Paraphrasing from the chapter by Elisabeth von Samsonow: if ours has been the age of ‘archiheresy’, a period characterised by the dissimulation of the ontological tie between architecture and the earth, architecture itself should learn to overcome the fetishisation of its objects and become a para-geology.

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