Art Is Not What It Seems – Aesthetics And The Speculative Turn

Philosophy has for too long been regarded art as a threat, not only to itself, but above all to the vision of unambiguous reality and the classical definition of truth it has espoused (the necessary conformity of things to concepts). Idealistically inclined philosophers have often seen in works of art sources of falsehood, illusion and pretence – introducing dangerous chaos into the ordered structures of disembodied intellectual systems (hence Plato’s banishment of poets from his ideal state). For centuries, the only conceivable alliance between philosophy and art was to acknowledge the latter’s subservient role (ars ancilla philosophiae) and to regard works of art as imperfect – because material – bearers of ephemeral but universal and timeless ideas (sites of truth, according to Martin Heidegger)^[1]. This privileged position of philosophical thought in relation to art has two consequences. The first is the unjust recognition of works of art as examples, illustrations or representations of a particular school of thought. The second possible effect is a fetishistic veneration of philosophical ideas, which alone could justify the creation of certain works, giving them meaning, appropriate weight and the desired interpretation. The hermeneutic subordination of aesthetics to the category of ‘understanding’ (which reaches its climax in conceptual art) has led to the relationship between art and philosophy being described in similar dualistic categories as the classical relationship between the body and the always superior soul (Cartesianism).

^[1] See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger: The Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell, New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Philosophy Oriented Towards (Artistic) Objects

Postmodernism has proven to be one of those intellectual currents that not only sought to restore a genuine philosophical interest in artistic activity, but also aspired to become art itself. Postmodern thinkers wanted to be artists in the first place, which made classical philosophers quickly deny the validity of their assertions of value, treating them on a par with literary creations and relegating their reflections to the shelf labelled ‘fiction’. Postmodernists allied themselves with the art world, primarily to employ the aestheticization of reality to challenge and disrupt the reign of the single, hitherto unquestioned truth (logocentrism)[1], which, in their view, was only one of many plots available in the marketplace of ideas[2]. In the reality of many small, equally probable narratives about the world (micro-narratives)[3], philosophy, no longer capitalised (Richard Rorty)[4], has become an art form, thereby losing its absolute power, once used to maintain and polish the only correct image of the world.

At the beginning of the 21st century, speculative realism, an intellectual trend associated with a reinterpretation of Kant’s category of the thing-in-itself (noumenon), took a further step towards bringing philosophy and art closer together. Quentin Meillassoux, one of the proponents of this philosophical approach, pointed out that there was no necessary correlation between human thought and reality outside of it[5]. In this way, he enabled non-human beings to finally free themselves from the anthropocentric shadow[6] that had been cast over them for centuries, and to cease to be hostages of the human mind (phenomena) by separating themselves from the anthropocentric way of perceiving them. Inherited from Edmund Husserl and radicalised by the conviction that the reality inside our heads (consciousness) is completely identical to the world that exists outside it, consctructivism turned out to be postmodernism’s greatest mistake. Meanwhile, entities that actually exist often differ in many ways from their representations found only in human minds, and speculative realism acknowledges this difference – the fascinating distance between noumenon and phenomenon, the divergence of thought and being – at every step. Postmodernism shared the fate of many earlier idealistic philosophies which, too busy creating an alternative world, lost touch with material reality. In the 21st century, it is no longer possible to ignore this reality, as it is returning with renewed force, in part due to global warming and the disturbing objects and phenomena associated with it, independent of human will and consciousness.

^{[1] See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.}

^{[2] See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘How the “Real World” Finally Became a Fable’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 20.}

^{[3] See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.}

^{[4] See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.}

^{[5] See Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum, 2008.}

^{[6] See Andrzej Marzec, Antropocień. Filozofia i estetyka po końcu świata, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2021.}

Aesthetics as First Philosophy

Without doubt, Graham Harman is one of the most interesting speculative realists, the creator of object-oriented ontology, the most widespread speculative theory. He proposes recognising aesthetics (identified with sensuality in the broadest sense) as the most important and fundamental branch of philosophy, since it constitutes the universal language of all beings, through which they express themselves and interact with others in various ways. Thanks to this American thinker, art galleries (sterile white cubes) have become for contemporary philosophy what laboratories have been for the exact sciences – a space for endless experimentation, trial and error and, above all, a place for generating new knowledge about reality. Harman argues for the independence of art objects, which have often been overlooked and obscured by human interpretations[1]. Art objects can certainly engage in human affairs and form various alliances with people, but throughout their existence they maintain their autonomy – they are something different from the stories they tell, human ideas and language, or power relations. It is worth noting that it is not a matter of complete independence from relationships with others (formalism), but of the right to privacy, the ability to lead an independent existence, and the ability to evade interpretations that never reach the objects in their entirety, but only capture a part of them.

Why is art so fascinating to Harman that he calls aesthetics ‘first philosophy’ (a title traditionally reserved for metaphysics)? The founder of object-oriented ontology claims that participation in the world of art allows us to see that objects are not superficial, but possess a depth that is difficult to exhaust. In this case, aesthetics would be to objects what psychoanalysis once was to human subjects – something that reveals the dark, inaccessible interiors of objects, their inner space beyond our knowledge and control. Thanks to the aesthetic, speculative approach, we can acknowledge that images are never exactly what they seem, as they always shake off the human interpretations imposed on them. In this way, they indicate a loose relationship between the object and its properties, serving as a perfect example of Harman’s separation between the sensual object (phenomenon) and the real object (noumenon).

Objects in art galleries may seem completely accessible at first glance (we can look at them from any angle), but they often frustrate us by hiding more than they show, eluding our full understanding or comprehension (even curator-led tours will not help). No interpretation of works of art aims to understand them fully or to exhaust their meaning, but rather to show that artistic objects are deep, vast and independent of human way of thinking. W. J. T. Mitchell, who sought to answer the question of what pictures want, understood the depth and individual life of pictures in a similar way. He argued that pictures may not want anything from us, but posing this non-obvious question draws our attention to the independent existence of works of art[2]. Aesthetics presents works of art as deep and containing more than we can understand, while Harman extends this quality to the reality of all beings, making the attempt to reach things themselves (noumena) for him an aesthetic enterprise[3].

^{[1] See Graham Harman, Art and Objects, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.}

^{[2] W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.}

^{[3] It is worth noting the popularity and usefulness of Harman’s considerations in the field of contemporary architecture, which, in the context of his philosophy, gains independence from its functionality (the human vision of buildings); See Graham Harman, Architecture and Objects, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.}

Aesthetic Causality, or Action At a Distance

The turn to (artistic) objects in contemporary philosophy is successfully continued by Timothy Morton, who has been developing the project of aesthetic causality for several years[1]. Until now, causality has been described primarily in terms of mechanical categories. Billiard balls represent the most common example of mechanical interaction, where someone has to push the ball or hit it with a cue stick to achieve the desired effect and goal. This is why human motivation, when we think about it, tends to lag behind us – we need to be pushed forward, just as being promoted is colloquially called ‘getting a kick up the backside’. Morton strongly opposes the dominance of this mechanical view of reality, ironically calling this type of descriptive action ‘clunk causality’, which he associates with the world of mechanical toys, machines and robots (which make a specific sound when they move, like C3PO from Star Wars or a medieval knight).

Aesthetic causality assumes that the motive for our actions is in front of us (within sight) rather than behind our backs. The mechanical vision of causality had to deliberately deprive art of agency, otherwise it would have been forced to accept art’s action at a distance, something hitherto associated exclusively with magic. Artistic objects could indeed strike us, but, paradoxically, the aim was not to set things in motion but to induce perplexity (immobility, stupor and passivity). The aesthetic characterisation of the cause-and-effect relationship makes artistic objects not only capable of striking us, but also capable of engaging us, attracting us, provoking us to act, or simply interacting with other objects without human involvement. This allows us to think about art that acts, produces specific effects and changes in reality, and co-creates it on an equal footing with other beings.

John Langshaw Austin sought to answer the question of how to do things with words[2] by emphasising the agency of language itself, which had previously been seen as merely a passive representation of reality, a mirror of human thought. Meanwhile, Morton argues for the performativity of appearances, which had previously been associated with inactivity and identified with passivity – where to ‘appear’ meant to refrain from action, which was typically understood as mechanical. Only the concept of aesthetic causality allows us to think about how all objects (not only artistic ones) act at a distance through their appearance (to appear = to act). If we consider how much effort it costs us to build visibility on social media (our online, virtual images and identities), we will find it easier to understand a similar mechanism that applies to all objects that want to exist in sensual reality. Entering into a relationship with others is always through sensory appearance, which in itself is a creative act, an action (performance). This dependence also applies to the non-human world, for example the relationship between a lizard and a rock – the lizard chooses a particular rock to bask on, but the rock must allow itself to be found and revealed through its appearance, such as an attractive temperature (the lizard’s interpretation of the rock)[3].

Art is Thinking – Speculative Drawing

The speculative turn in posthumanism puts an end to the excessively long mediations between art and philosophy, whose relations over the centuries have often been more than complicated. This moment of entanglement between the two fields was aptly captured by the German philosopher Armen Avanessian, who invited the artist and illustrator Andreas Töpfer[4] to participate in this collective thinking. The result of their collaboration (speculative drawing) is a book in which text and image have equal status, each offering its own way of thinking. It is up to us, the readers, to choose which of these paths to follow, although it is best to pursue both simultaneously, as they support, penetrate and intertwine (one does not exist without the other). In 2022, the Pawilon in Poznań hosted a speculative workshop called Weird Realism, directly inspired by the work of Avanessian and Töpfer – based on a similar idea, as it aimed to present the relationship between art and philosophy as a dynamic, complicated and fruitful knowledge-creating process. This made it possible to bring together people who normally work in completely different fields of research (philosophical theory and art). We invited several pairs of theoreticians and artists who, during the workshop, worked together on hybrid texts that merged philosophical theory with artistic practice[5].

The experimental activities of Avanessian and Töpfer further emphasise that the speculative reflections of Harman and Morton cannot exist without art, which in their philosophical projects becomes not so much a tool (a means to an end) as one of the ways of thinking. It is only through art that objects cease to be flat. Finally, we can imagine them as deep and spacious, existing independently of human interpretations, which increases the effect of weirdness and alienation. By strengthening the position of aesthetics in philosophical considerations, speculative realism also allows us to think about how objects act through their appearances, thus creating the reality we always experience sensually (aesthetically).

Andrzej Marzec – philosopher, assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, film critic and editor at Czas Kultury magazine.  His research interests revolve around speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, environmental humanities and contemporary alternative cinema. He is the author of the following books: Widmontologia. Teoria filozoficzna i praktyka artystyczna ponowoczesności (2015) and Antropocień – filozofia i estetyka po końcu świata (2021).

^{[1] Timothy Morton, Realist Magic. Objects, Ontology, Causality, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013, p. 17.}

^{[2] See John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.}

^{[3] Here I am referring to the famous phrase (‘the lizard lies on the rock’) analysed by Heidegger – according to the philosopher, the lizard does not know the definition of the rock and does not know what it is lying on, so he suggests that the term ‘rock’ should be crossed out. See Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question Paperback, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 51–53. In turn, Donna J. Haraway provides an interesting example of performativity (aesthetic causality) and non-human creativity, referring to the symbiotic relationship between the bee and the orchid – see eadem, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2016, p. 101.}

^{[4] See Armen Avanessian, Andreas Töpfer, Speculative Drawing: 2011–2014, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.}

^{[5] The results of this collaboration were published in one of the issues of the quarterly Czas Kultury, no. 1, 2023, which is dedicated to weird realisms.}