1 The Problem of the Real
In his book After Finitude, the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux draws a new departing point for contemporary philosophy. His work marks the beginning of what it is now known as Speculative Realism. In fact, many of the forms this Realism has taken (transcendental, object-oriented, etc.) all start from an inaugural critique of what Meillassoux calls correlationism. By correlationism he means «the idea according to which we have access only to the correlation of thought and being, and in no way to one of those terms taken separately» (Meillassoux 2008: 17). According to this definition, then, he calls « correlationism any current of thought which establishes the insuperable character of this correlation» (Ivi).
Accordingly, the Realist move to get rid of correlationism has to do with the (often) hypertrophied importance that twentieth-century philosophers gave to language, language games, discourses, etc. It seems that much of what we call philosophy became trapped in the idea according to which, due to our inevitable finite and linguistic nature, we can never have a knowledge of a real beyond our language games or our mortal minds.
The Linguistic Turn , Kantâs transcendentalism, post-structuralism, (etc.), all seems to have merged into the idea that everything that exists is always correlated to the knowing mind, that is, to the subject. The correlationist is doomed to live a claustrophobic reality in which the Real an sich is structurally and inevitably forbidden. This is because we can never escape the subject-to-world relation; we can never say something about the world as an independent reality because we have language (Foucault, Lacan, etc.), because we have access only to phenomena (Kant), or because life is a co-product of matter itself (Deleuze).
Meillassouxâ plea is then to reengage with the possibility of a thought which is capable of saying something true about the Real before (and independent from) the human-to-world correlation. A thought which is then devoid of correlationism in all its forms.
Accordingly, realists have put Lacanian psychoanalysis among the descendants of correlationist thought. Shaviro, for example, asserts that «Lacanian psychoanalysis [âŠ] fails to make enough of a break with correlationism. Indeed, it posits a Real that cannot be correlated with thought» (Shaviro 2014: 7). Even Lacan is unable to escape the claustrophobic cage of correlationism, because «even when correlationism does posit some sort of âexteriorityâ to thought»âas the «Lacanian Real»â«this exteriority still remains ârelative to usâ[âŠ]» (ibid.: 109). Even if Lacan envisages psychoanalysis as a having the «encounter with the Real» (Lacan 2003: 52) as its object, it is always nonetheless a Real from the perspective of a human subject.
Levi Bryant has made a similar point as well when he states that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a «variant of correlationism», because in focusing on the relation between «language and being» it implicitly defends the idea that «being cannot be thought apart from a subject» (Bryant 2015: 46).
One point is to made clear. What Meillassoux is advocating is not a strict denial that our ordinary access to the world is more or less carried through linguistic categories or that language does have an agency in shaping human activity as such; rather, his anti-correlationist position stands for the idea that there are some type of (scientific) enunciates that are capable of saying something true about the world even before the advent of any knowing subject. Meillassoux calls this Ancestrality: «Thinking ancestrality is equal to thinking a world without thought: a world without the giving of the world» (Meillassoux 2008: 43). Thinking about the truthfulness of scientific enunciates implies the idea that «thought can have access to the non-correlated, to a world capable of existing without being given» (Ivi). The aim of (realist) speculation is therefore to think of an Absolute . The idea of a state of affairs with is not dependent on human thought or on the phenomenal giving of it to a human subject.
What I would like to suggest is that: (1) although Lacan (and psychoanalysis more generally) may fall into the category of correlationism, he envisages correlational thought as a trap to be overcome rather then a mere state of affairs, (2) Realisms can easily fall prey of a subjectless account of history and may, therefore, consider the real effects that language plays on subjectivity formation as irrelevant, (3) Speculative Realism and Lacanian psychoanalysis do share a lot of their respective fundamental ideas if properly examined, and, finally, (4) both Speculative Realism and Lacanian psychoanalysis can work as correctives of each other.
Now, a point which is worth underlying here is that both the concept of ancestrality and the absolute explicitly aim at the problem of historicity. When Meillassoux underlines the capacity of science to say something true about a pre-human (i.e. not-yet-human) world, he is thinking about the reality of «Arche-fossils». These are, in turn, pre-historic materials; that is, real traces of a materiality of being before the advent of a knowing subject. To be more precise, arche-fossils are even witnesses of a world in which there was no precondition of life itself. Scientific knowledge tells us something about a pre-historic history. Or, to put it in another way, it tells us a history before history.
It is at this exact intersection that contemporary realism is split into two. For one part we have Meillassouxâ Being as Absolute , for anotherânamely the object-oriented philosophersâhistory (and human history in particular) is made part of the philosophical investigation as such. In this second scenario it is objects (rather than Being with capital âBâ) which are investigated in their own regards. It is their independency from a knowing subject and their capacity to exert concrete agencies which are made subject of investigation. Hence history is often portrayed as made up of assemblages (such as in the case of Manuel De Landa) or machinic concatenations (Levi Bryant).
Now, far from denying the agency of materiality as such in shaping history (both human and non-human), I would also like to pinpoint that against the background of objects and their flows thereâs still room (and necessity) for the idea of subjectivity portrayed by Jacques Lacan.
Moreover, I will suggest that Being qua Absolute (or qua objects) falls into the category of fantasy (in the psychoanalytical sense) if it is not able to account for the role and place of subjectivity. I will now sketch out a fantasy of historicity. Although Iâm not opposed to this general account, I will also suggest that Lacanâs idea of subjectivity counterbalances this materialist picture. Nonetheless, I also find that Lacanian psychoanalysis can re-join the realist philosopher when it comes to the necessity of scientificity.
2 History and the Fantasy of the âMaterial Swarmingâ
Since Meillassouxâ realism involves a problematization of historicity, I would like to sketch out an idea of history which takes materialism and object-oriented thought as its theoretical starting points. I will call this general picture the âmaterial swarmingâ account of history. I will then argue that although Lacan sticks to some extent to this idea, he nonetheless counterbalances it by introducing the idea of the split subject. Also, I suggest that without introducing the split subject the whole picture falls into a mere fantasy.
If we look back at the history of the world, we find ourselves compelled to choose between two types of history. Thereâs an official one which is made of great names, influential figures, national narratives, wars, revolutionary turning points, etc. Parallel to this official history we can find an unofficial one. If we follow this second type of history, we find out that (official) history is rather sub-determined by the sibylline dynamics of material flows, capitals, technologies, discourses, molecules, and so on. That is, once we abandon the official character of names and nations, we find out that thereâs a deep historyâto use Smailâs parlanceâmade of material assemblages and the microscopic/macroscopic organizations they allow for. History is, in this sense, conceivable as a continuous material swarming . Itâs the swarming of objects and subjects alike, the swarming of linguistic and discorsive entities, semblants and immaterial entities. Sometimes, a compound organization emerges as a local vortex of stable synergies, synergies that may in turn give rise to more complex emergent entities.
In the exchanges and compounds which make up this material swarming, subjectivities, desires, fears, and relationships arise. Grammars and linguistic objects such as âIâ, âWeâ, etc., are already at work in this swarming, carrying out moral and anthropogenic operations upon us in every stage of our lives. From the birth on, we are already caught in these hybrid flows and organizations made of discorsive, moral and material entities.
History-as-swarming already comprises in itself the continuous production of a thermodynamic entropy, a living and uncanny Real which psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. If we were able to take the position of an all-seeing Laplace demon we could somehow trace out a map of the swarming, but we would nonetheless recognize the presence, at each step, of a subtle remainder which follows its own logic and structures.
Moreover, this unaccountable remainder of unconscious formations is nonetheless a key element in humanization, and it also plays a key role in the welcoming of the infants into social realities.
That is, the human environment presented to the newborns is already (and necessarily) made of demands and linguistic entities, without any clear-cut distinction between vital needs and recognition by the other human peers.
In the swarming, objects do exercise a modeling operation upon human organization. Objects are not mere inert entities, but they act upon human lives in all sorts of manners. For instance, Levi Bryant envisages âriceâ as a type of «bright object», an object which inevitably shapes the lives of the humans harvesting it: «The rate at which it develops, how it is planted, how it is harvested, [âŠ], all contribute strongly to the organization of peopleâs lives that rely on rice» (Bryant 2014: 203).
Rice is an example of an object which shapes the lives and habits of a local community. People have to organize their lifestyles according to the rates of growth and necessities of a given object.
The historian Fernand Braudel described rice as a «tyrannical» plant (Braudel 2006: 118). By ascribing real «responsibilities» to itâBraudel underlinesâ, for example, how the relations between country and city in China increased due to the farmersâ need to get fertilizers from the city markets. In short, a given objectârice, in this caseâmanages to shape the concrete lives and habits of a given context,...