Overland literary journal

Return of the real, part three: The Speculative Turn

Renewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that we need to move beyond our obsessions with language and semantics, and the critique of ideas. For this to happen we need a radical change in intellectual climate; a change that may, at last, be underway.

The anthology The Speculative Turn (available in paperback or for free download) brings together essays from many different and sometimes opposing materialist and realist positions, that nonetheless reject what speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, ‘correlationism’, in which reality appears, as the introduction puts it, ‘only as the correlate of human thought’. That such philosophy is ill-equipped to understand science may be a problem only for philosophers; that it enables the erosion of public confidence in the very real and dangerous facts that threaten our existence, and undermines the arguments for emancipatory politics and ecological sustainability, is a problem that affects us all: ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 19-01-2011, 13 user comments

Return of the real, part two: ‘Keeping ’em honest’

In yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse?

Sloterdijk proposes that ideology critique is the heir to a rich satirical tradition dating back to Diogenes, which he calls kynicism, to differentiate from modern cynicism. Kynicism is a form of critique that ‘goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it’. Rather than constructing counter-arguments to Platonic idealism, Diogenes would respond with lewd physicality, smearing faeces and masturbating in public. His answer to Socrates’ definition of humans as ‘featherless bipeds’ was to bring a plucked chicken to the academy and announce it as a man. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 18-01-2011, 3 user comments

Return of the real, part one: ‘Enlightened false consciousness’

In the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status quo; equal and opposite political will is required to effect the radical change needed. Climate change deniers have no serious arguments against the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, but all they need to do is to muddy the waters sufficiently to undermine public trust in the science, and thus sap that necessary political will. For any less politicised topic, they would be rightly ignored as cranks and green-inkers. The fact that they are not, and routinely given access to the media in the interests of ‘impartiality’ represents something not only disheartening but deeply unsettling. Clive Hamilton, writing in Overland last year, describes the problem: ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 17-01-2011, 6 user comments