Destroying Contemporary Art and Rationalist Speculative Realist Art

In the first three pieces in this series (one, two, three), I examined, through Suhail Malik’s arguments, the way the meaning and value of contemporary art depend on the interaction between subjects (human or otherwise) and objects.1 For Malik, even the reverberations of object-oriented ontology and new materialism within the art field eventually fall back on human experience and interpretation, that is, on a kind of “access” model, in order to validate the artwork. For this reason, merely criticizing contemporary art is not enough; it must be questioned at its roots as a paradigm, even “destroyed.” Malik treats contemporary art’s reliance on aesthetic experience, however minimal, as a fundamental flaw, a capitulation to correlationism. Proposing a sharp break from this understanding, he floats the idea of an art that does not depend on being received by a human or any other kind of recipient, an art not defined through being experienced or presented to anyone. Not a different aesthetic or a different mode of presentation, but an art with no tie whatsoever to experience or presentation. This is a far more radical idea than simply demoting the viewer, because it describes an art that is indifferent to all possible recipients, human or otherwise.

The rationality of “rationalist speculative realist art” concerns the structure of art more than its content. What matters is not that art depicts rational systems or scientific truths (though it can), but that art itself is rationally constructed. These need not amount to “scientific” methods in the sense of experimental findings. They may also take the form of different kinds of rational and systemic organizations. Sol LeWitt, for example, is not a scientifically minded artist, and he once remarked that conceptual artists are a kind of “mystic.” Even so, his instruction-based art is extremely rational. In an interview, Malik asks Ray Brassier,2 one of the key thinkers of realism, whether non-linguistic practices can also be rational. Brassier, in reply, unpacks the music of Mattin Izkue in this context. For this reason, rationalist art need not be language-based.

Why speculative, then? The term does not mean being open to many different interpretations (that is precisely what the program wants to tear down). It refers to the effort to reach the absolute through reasoning. Because the real is independent of all forms of access, the only way to speak about it is through speculation. This, though, should not be confused with spinning arbitrary fantasies. Even if we cannot directly perceive the real or experience it in full, it may still be possible to approach it through speculations guided by reason and logic.

Another important point is that the rationalism at stake here is not human-centered. Given that the struggle is against correlationism, this seems like a natural consequence, yet it took me some effort to grasp, because we are used to thinking of rationalism together with the human. The rationalism at issue here differs from the traditional rationalism that posits a “privileged” link between human reason and the structure of reality. It is therefore not confined to humans. There is no reason it cannot also be present in other rule-based systems (could future AI models meet these conditions?). Other intelligent entities or structures may exist that focus on grasping the objective structures of reality as they are, without regard to whether they fit human desires, expectations, or cognitive capacities.

Other Ways of Encountering the Real

So far I have addressed contemporary art’s human-centered reliance on experience and interpretation, Malik’s proposal, and how speculative realism relates to an understanding of reason not bounded by the human. But some thinkers argue that our relation to the real need not be established only through rational systems.

Is there a way to affirm a mind-independent reality without sacrificing the critical role of aesthetics and experience in life? Does a realist position require rejecting experience?

To look for answers, I’ll return to Maurizio Ferraris, whom I’ve drawn on at various points in this series. Ferraris is also a realist philosopher and criticizes idealist systems that entangle human interpretations with reality. At the same time, he reserves a special place for experience and perception in his philosophy.

Post-Kantian philosophy, phenomenology, poststructuralism, and contemporary art theory have all been closely invested in the concept of experience, and have tended to emphasize its subjective, interpretive, and mediated character. Malik’s reaction is largely against these tendencies, or more precisely, against the consequences these tendencies have produced within art. Ferraris, for his part, tries to define experience in a way that avoids the pitfalls of subjectivism and relativism.

The philosopher of course does not deny the importance of reason, concepts, or scientific knowledge, and in his book he examines these kinds of knowledge in detail. But he rejects the exclusivity of reason and conceptual thought as the sole route to reality, because they are not the only ways of relating to the world. In fact, for him they may rank behind aesthetics.

Experience and Unamendability

Ferraris argues that perception and embodied experiences are a fundamental and irreducible mode of access to reality, not a “secondary” form of knowing but the primary way we encounter the world. At the heart of this argument is the concept of “unamendability.” We cannot change the world through our thoughts, desires, and interpretations, because objects and events in the world resist our attempts to alter them by thought or intention alone. This resistance shows up as a kind of stubbornness or insistence that is independent of our mental states or conceptual schemes.3

The world’s resistance to our thoughts and actions, the fact that we cannot change it simply by thinking differently, shows that there is a reality independent of our minds and concepts.

The most important point in our context is that we meet this resistance in experience. Our feet touch the ground, we bump into things, we dodge obstacles, we feel the air, we are surprised, we feel pain. These are encounters with a reality independent of our minds. We do not merely “think” about this resistance; we feel it, we meet it in daily life. Nor is this resistance simply a matter of physical impenetrability; it is a broader ontological principle. Things have a kind of “inertia.” Whatever our ideas about them, they go on being what they are.

Meeting the world’s resistance is not unique to us. Even with different bodily and cognitive equipment, a cat, the ivy beside the table, the pen on the table, and I all confront the same reality and its unamendability. This does not rule out the fact that different beings can have different perceptions. Clearly we do not see the world as the ivy does, but beyond perception and interpretation, even if our modes differ, we all interact with a “shared reality.” In the radically relativist climate of today’s art world (the idea that there is no truth or reality outside individual or cultural perspectives), I know it sounds odd to say so. Yet, interpreting Ferraris a little, what I want to emphasize here is a “shared reality,” not a “shared experience.” Unamendability, for this reason, supplies a basis for objectivity, limited though it may be. We can be wrong about things precisely because there are things to be wrong about. That we can be surprised, that our expectations can be thwarted, that things can break or resist our actions, is not merely a product of our minds. This is not a matter of reaching perfect, absolute knowledge, but of acknowledging that there are constraints on our knowledge and experience that come from outside us. The world can often surprise us, because the world is not merely a product of our minds or expectations: “That the same object may bear such a wide variety of descriptions does not decompose it, but defines it: the disc in the sky remains the same, what changes are the conceptual schemes and interpretations regarding its true nature.”4 And further: “unamendability is an ontological character, not an epistemological one.”5

Aesthetics

Traditional ontological approaches have focused on abstractions about the nature of being. They have typically searched for a “fundamental” level of reality “beneath” things (atoms, monads, and so on) or a unifying principle (God, the Absolute, and so on). This has led to a split between the world itself and the way we experience it. Ferraris, as a realist philosopher, rejects such approaches. He is not interested in a fully abstract universe detached from our everyday experiences, in the idea of a “hidden, underlying reality” inaccessible to our senses. Instead, he speaks of aisthesis, that is, of concrete, sensory relations with the world. The aesthetics at issue here concerns the domain in which we encounter the unamendable aspects of reality at the most basic level. (The narrow view that, since Hegel, has tied aesthetics solely to the philosophy of art has largely collapsed today, yet it bears repeating that aesthetics is not just a field concerned with beautiful and ugly works.)

Aesthetics stands in a negative relation to ontology. We cannot see a red object as blue simply by thinking differently, nor feel a hot surface as cold. This unamendability is evidence of the external world’s resistance to our minds, of the existence of a reality independent of us. Aesthetics, then, is a primary domain in which ontology shows itself, in which the external world discloses itself.

This, of course, is no “pure” or “unmediated” experience. Our perceptions are obviously shaped by our bodies, our past experiences, and our language. Such shaping, though, does not do away with the existence of a resistant world that we meet. We have no direct, flawless access to the external world, yet we can also interact with the world without resorting to concepts or conscious judgments. Pain, colors, and our encounters with obstacles are not “raw data” waiting to be preconfigured by our minds, but encounters with an already structured and resistant reality. For this reason, experiences should be thought of not as a construction or projection of the world, but as a form of “encounter” or “interaction” with the world.

The encounters and interactions at issue here will probably recall the interaction- and experience-based art that we have criticized at length throughout this series. I’ll return to that subject later, but for now I’ll simply note that the issue is not experience itself but what contemporary art understands by experience and how it handles it.

The Ecological Character of Experience

When I read Malik (even if this isn’t exactly his aim), what came alive in my mind was a universe independent of all forms of access or manifestation, one that surpasses the limits of human experience and perspective. Ferraris, though, insists that all experience, including all knowledge, takes place “within a specific environment.” Ecology is a term that refers to this region of existence, to the concrete, embodied, and “situated” context in which we encounter the world. It is a place where we feel the resistance of reality, where things are unamendable, and where our actions have consequences.

We are not disembodied minds looking at the world from some height, floating in a void, but embodied beings in interaction with a concrete world that shapes our perceptions, constrains our actions, and supplies a context for our understanding. This embodied, sensory interaction is also informative; it tells us something about the world.

The question we must now ask is what kinds of possibilities Ferraris’s approach can offer for getting free of the “contemporary art” paradigm. In the end, the goal is not to keep a collapsing system going, but to investigate alternatives. In the next piece I’ll look for an answer to that question.

Footnotes

  1. Suhail Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 185–190. ↩

  2. Ray Brassier and Suhail Malik, “Reason is Inconsolable and Non-Conciliatory,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 213–230. ↩

  3. Maurizio Ferraris, Hysteresis: The External World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). ↩

  4. Ibid., 72–73. ↩

  5. Ibid., 223. ↩