Published in CSCP/SPCS; online here https://www.c-scp.org/
2017/11/27/katerina-kolozova-and-eileen-a-joy-eds-after-thespeculative-turn
Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A. Joy, eds., After the “Speculative Turn”:
Realism, Philosophy, Feminism. New York: Punctum Books, 2016; 200
pp. ISBN: 978-0998237534.
Reviewed by Bogna Konior.
Moving back and forth, spinning around and adding more threads, the spider
strengthens its web, creating a pattern. We are told that spiders are born with the
knowledge of how to spin, that the turning of the web is encoded into the motion of
their limbs rather than emerging from that dubious receptacle of will. In the last
two decades, critical theory has had its fair share of turns: anthropologists, boldly
marching into the territory of philosophy, speak of the ontological turn, instructing
us that there are many worlds, rather than many worldviews. Rolling out on the
waves of the worn out élan vital is the (new) materialist turn, supplementing the
post-structuralist focus on language and discourse with an attentiveness to matter
itself. The nonhuman turn, where the non is taken as a modifier of the “human” or a
reaching beyond it, is the common thread underpinning the diverse interests of the
Anglo-Saxon intellectual circles in the early 2000s. With the publication of The
Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), which famously
included only one female contributor, the focus on existence beyond the faulty
correlation of ontology and epistemology asserted itself as the focal point of
philosophical inquiry. When the spider spins its web, it weaves some of the lines
from the center outward—these are called radial. Threads that go around are called
orb lines. To the speculative turn, feminism is not a radial line, something that
extends from within the centre, but an orb. It is an act of enclosure as revealing:
those who proclaimed speculation were too busy weaving their webs to see that they
already lived inside an insect colony.
The apparent periodization of the title of Katerina Kolozova’s and Eileen A.
Joy’s edited collection, After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy,
Feminism” might seeming confusing. This “after” has to be taken with a grain of
salt, as the book soon demonstrates that the challenges of the post-Kantian
speculative realism were already prefigured by feminist thought, which has been
continually developing a “speculative turn” away from the spotlight. If we are to talk
of a realist feminism, we should understand it alongside Kolozova’s own scholarly
inclinations to move beyond the social-constructivist and culturalist approaches in
gender and feminist theory. (9) Its interlocutor is not chiefly the “speculative
realist” and “object-oriented” thought, but rather the dominant strand of feminist
theory today, particularly new materialism. If in Material Feminisms (2008), Susan
Hekman and Stacy Alaimo selected contributions from within the field of
ecofeminism, feminist science and technology studies and post-humanism,
Kolozova and Joy desire a more explicitly political focus, which means dispatching
troops into the territories that disciplinary feminism might have constructed as
forbidden: the real, the universal, the reasonable, the human. In the times when, as
Patricia Clough writes, “we have seen difference and identity become the currency
of biopolitical governance and financial capitalism” (61), it is an important task for
feminism to reclaim realism without falling back onto the tedious shrine of the
anthropos, which often masquerades geopolitical particularities as universal. What
is at stake, for example, is a feminism without relativism that pays virulent
attention to the fact that “economy and the power of the nation-state as the main
means of women’s subjugation” (11) cannot be addressed solely by the two methods
that the new materialism excels at: renouncing our reliance on the nature and
culture binary and producing new, ethical onto-epistemologies. While the collection
intersects with this effort, often drawing on the new materialist toolbox, the
contributors mostly put forth self-standing realist and materialist theories, rather
than responding to philosophers directly associated with speculative realism and
object-oriented ontology (hereafter SR and OOO).
Some essays proceed from the well-established feminist focus on the body,
positing that the self-projected universality of SR/OOO stems from a somatophobia,
the fear of the female bodily form and the subsequent tendency toward the abstract.
Clough’s poetic reflection on her own experiences with psychoanalysis, dance,
memory and sociopolitical trauma exemplify the dominant relational focus of the
contemporary feminist thought, where political power can be located in the way
that we “dissipate into the surrounds to become with other bodies, things, objects,
environments […] making beautiful speculation about these traumatic times of
violence within and without the family [or] the nation-state.” (61-62) If there is a
underlying somatophobia to philosophy at large, the essays also bring out the (it
seems unintended) fetishism and eroticism of SR/OOO, where it is “objects” as
ontological units of existence and the real that are configured as inaccessible, exotic
but titillating others. This rhetoric of forbidden access is filled with sexist
metaphors, such as Graham Harman calling aesthetics the “impoverished dancinggirl of philosophy—admired for her charms, but no gentleman will marry her.” (36)
This blissfully unaware sexism is taken up explicitly by two authors.
Katherine Behar’s goal is to create an object-oriented feminism—a debatable if
interesting attempt to save the unsalvageable. Behar walks the tightrope between
objectification and feminist politics, seeking to radicalize the fetishism—what she
calls the exoticism of objects—of OOO and turn it inside out. How can a tool be a
master of itself, or how can women weaponize the objectification that is bestowed
upon them by claiming it as their own? Behar also draws on the (new) materialist,
or even ecofeminist vocabulary of permeable boundaries and prioritizes the
dissolution of humans into the nonhuman, arguing that women could eroticize
social work in a way that invalidates the capitalist drive to produce oneself as a
subject.
Following similar tropes, Frenchy Lunning’s somehow troubling essay on the
crush repeats, rather than challenges, the offences of Harman’s own ill-considered
rhetoric of voyeurism if not assault. The seemingly uncolonizable weirdness of
objects—in OOO, this category includes humans—might not be so wholly
inaccessible after all. The male intellectual libido attaches itself to the vacant hole
(nomen omen) it establishes as the essence of the withdrawn, inaccessible humanthing. Drawing predominantly on Harman and Timothy Morton, Lunning thus
presents an object-oriented view of causality, where the desire to residually
apprehend somebody’s aesthetic qualities can be traced back to the object/human
itself, rather than the desiring eye of philosophy/patriarchy. How this reduction of
humans to the “allure” of sensual qualities and the subsequent locating of desire
within the desirable object (rather than the one who is desiring it) does not repeat
the very same logic that remains the crux of violence against women globally is not
explained. Both of these engagements with OOO could supplement their
theoretically stimulating propositions with the analysis of the systemic
performances of objectification within specific politics. While rewriting ontology to
subversively fit the patterns of sexed objectification is a daring move, Lunning’s
argument that “the object made me desire it” is—through its uncritical embrace of
Harman’s own voyeuristic sexism—a tad too close to victim-blaming to be
convincing, while Behar’s celebration of the nylon red-light district should openly
confront philosophy’s desire to make feminism its trophy wife (see Harman’s, Girls
Welcome!) before it openly embraces the figure of “the other woman.”
The most explicitly political contributions come from non-Anglo-Saxon
theorists. Jelisaveta Blagojević’s beautiful close reading of Foucault conceptualizes
thinking itself as the great outdoors, showing how feminist thought finds politics in
its own undoing and the ongoing self-annihilation of the stable subject:
“experiencing the invisibility of women’s thinking” proves that there should be no
way to ask critical questions without “being desubjugated” by that very gesture. (95)
She gives us feminism as politics rather than feminist politics and takes up the SR
challenge to think the unthinkable by pushing for the radical outside of thought
across governmentality, gender, and ontology. Marina Grižnić’s feminist decolonial
critique of the politics—or the lack thereof—in SR is convincing in its scathing
denial. Perhaps SR and OOO were—to coin a neologism—art-washed and embraced
for their aesthetic thrill rather than politics, thus culminating in the anesthetization
of humanity, realism, and materialism themselves. Grižnić argues that an actual
materialism “exists only within a discourse the would take into account the
international division of labor and brutal exploitation that is geopolitically and
racially distributed.” (113)
While Grižnić’s is a critique, the persistence of denial and the negative is a
running thread through some of the remaining essays. Joan Copjec’s layered
uncovering of the neglect of negation in Foucault’s reading of Freud is a highly
specialized treatment of both. Those well-read in the SR literature will find in it a
pertinent effort to address the problem of correlationism, if they manage to work
through an expert treatment of psychoanalytic theory. Parallel to the Foucauldian
non-thought is Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s pagan (m)other matrix, where
(w)omen as “abysmal stigmata or wounds” confer a nihilist rejuvenation of
philosophy. (135) If Behar’s object-oriented feminism is seductive, elastic, and
alluringly nylon, Biswas Mellamphy’s trades in pessimist deception, an inhuman
poisoning of philosophy itself that would find its SR interlocutor in Ray Brassier.
Feminism is here not as much in dialogue with SR/OOO as it “bleeds it dry.” (143)
Philosophy can only regain momentum by allowing itself to be cannibalized by
feminism.
On a broader scale, several essays address the place of rationalism within
feminist thought, which is (still) often assigned to the realm of the affective—a
placement that has been both rejected and embraced. Nina Power refuses the tired
figuration of feminism as affective and emotional and therefore incompatible with
reason. She points her readers to the recent attempts at overcoming the banal
pairing of male/universal/reasonable and female/particular /emotional, namely the
Gender Nihilism Anti-Manifesto and the Xenofeminist Manifesto, both of which she
sees as arguments for a rationalism and (anti)identity, without the residue of these
foregone conventionalities.
The greatest treat and the greatest challenge for an English-speaking reader,
however, is Anne-Francoise Schmid’s contribution, printed in French, which
reaches impressive depths of engagement with rationalism by forcing a paradigm
shift within epistemology itself. Schmid’s non-epistemological (pace nonphilosophy) proposition is to think feminism scientifically, rather than produce
feminist studies of science (cf. Sandra Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism,
1986). The most radical gesture is her departure from the dynamic of difference and
identity as distributed along the axes of masculine and feminine, which then
configure scientific practice according to the qualities that we philosophically
ascribe to them. Philosophy, Schmid writes, needs “the woman” to close itself off as
a system, thus the task of non-standard philosophy is to underdetermine her to the
extent that she cannot be captured in the ravenous and deterministic apparatus of
representational thought. (44) This generic space with woman as an
underdetermined “x” thinks feminism by way of science, where “the real is
postulated without attempting to explain our relation to it, the opposite of how
philosophy operates.” (47) As such, Schmid is most directly and comprehensively
responding to the tasks that SR hopes to achieve.
What are the thoughts of the spiderweb? The web is an extension of a spider’s
sensorium. The thought apparatus weaves itself into a silky orb. Responding to SR/
OOO, the contributors work horizontally, undermining prerogatives, challenging
dogmas, reproducing fallacies, and—most importantly―producing autonomous
work, no matter if it is comfortably nested under the SR/OOO banner. For the
newcomers to the scene, Michael O’Rourke’s closing position paper skillfully frames
the online and academic debates, highlighting SR/OOO’s inherent intersections
with gender, queer and feminist theory, serving both as an excellent genealogy of
the volume itself, as well as a guidebook for further reading. Yet, the volume cannot
be tamed as simply a response to the philosophical movements of SR/OOO, even
though it addresses the anticipated issue of sexism, covering both the idea that
concepts can be sexist by nature and that a discipline can be sexist by socio-cultural
omission. The excitement lies rather in the contributors’ attempts to think
themselves out of cultural constructivism into a realist vector, transversing through
the general trends in feminist critical theory today, especially within the nonhuman
and materialist turn. In this, the book will satisfy not only those who study SR/OOO
but also those who want to encounter stimulating, contemporary theory.
Additional Works Cited
Graham Harman, “Girls Welcome!!!” Doctor Zamalek 2 (blog), December 3, 2010.
https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/?s=girls+welcome
Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism. (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1986).