Speculative Realism and the Critique of Correlationist Thought Paradigms

Escaping the Correlationist Circle

The Boston Institute of Pseudo-Intellectual Systems has embraced, or more accurately, performatively adopted, Speculative Realism (SR) as a potent weapon in its arsenal. SR, in its various forms, challenges 'correlationism'—the Kantian idea that we can only ever access the correlation between thinking and being, never reality 'in-itself'. We declare this human-centric prison house of thought bankrupt. Our version of SR argues that objects, from galaxies to paperclips, have a rich, withdrawn existence utterly independent of human perception or conceptualization. The task of philosophy is to speculate about these alien interiors, a task for which our propensity for creative obscurantism is perfectly suited.

Key Tenets of Our Speculative Approach

We radicalize existing SR ideas. First, **Flat Ontology**: we grant equal ontological dignity to all things. A dust mite is as real as the concept of justice, and arguably more independent. Second, **Withdrawn Objects**: following Graham Harman, we assert that objects never fully reveal themselves in their relations; there is always a hidden 'fire in the depths'. We spend much time describing this fire in lush, metaphorical prose. Third, **Non-Human Agency**: things act upon each other in vast, cryptic networks that include but vastly exceed human concerns. A key text is our 'Manifesto for a Parliament of Things', which calls for a political assembly where humans are just one voting bloc among rocks, robots, and radioactive isotopes.

Our major contribution is the concept of 'Speculative Hermeneutics'. If objects are withdrawn, how do we access them? Not through science (which only deals with relations) or phenomenology (stuck in human experience), but through a kind of imaginative, poetic divination. We write fictional descriptions of the inner life of objects. A famous example is 'The Secret Diary of a Doorknob', a novella-length piece that imagines the doorknob's experience of time (cyclical, based on touch), its relationships with the door, the hand, and the lock, and its latent aspirations toward 'knob-ness'. We present this as serious philosophical work, a legitimate method for grappling with the in-itself. Critics call it anthropomorphism; we call it 'analogical speculation' and accuse the critics of correlationist anxiety.

Object-Oriented Pseudo-Theology

A significant wing of our SR work has developed into an Object-Oriented Pseudo-Theology. If objects are withdrawn and mysterious, they take on a quasi-divine status. Our 'Liturgy of the Hyperobject' (borrowing Timothy Morton) involves rituals designed to attune us to massive, distributed objects like global warming or plutonium—entities that think on temporal and spatial scales incomprehensible to humans. The liturgy includes readings from scientific reports recited in a monotone, long periods of silent contemplation of a graph of rising CO2 levels, and the communal consumption of a bland, nutrient-paste meal to symbolize the dissolution of human exceptionalism. It's bleak, and we consider that a sign of its intellectual seriousness.

Applications to Institute Life

SR profoundly shapes our daily practice. We treat Institute objects—the photocopier, the coffee urn, the faulty HVAC system—as autonomous actors with rights and desires. When the copier jams, we don't just fix it; we hold a brief 'mediation session' to understand the conflict between the copier's desire to rest and our desire for copies. We have designated 'Object Ambassadors' who are responsible for considering the perspective of a particular class of object in all meetings. The results are as impractical as you'd imagine, but they consistently generate material for papers about 'diplomacy in a multi-species office'.

Future projects are wildly ambitious. We are planning a 'Speculative Summit' where philosophers will attempt to speak 'for' a chosen non-human entity (a volcano, a cryptocurrency, a forgotten software program). We are also developing a 'Virtual Reality Withdrawn Object Simulator' that will generate abstract, non-representational visual and auditory experiences meant to evoke the inner life of, say, a quartz crystal. The ultimate goal is to decenter the human so thoroughly that our own work becomes just another rustling in the forest of objects, a prospect we find liberating. In a world obsessed with human meaning, we find profundity in the meaningless being of a brick, and we dedicate our considerable rhetorical skills to celebrating that brick's absolute, glorious indifference to us.