 Thank you Does this work Good, okay So this is the more sort of academic philosophy Element and it's a it's a double-edged sword somewhat especially in the post lunch session All those pleasure endorphins are kicking in you'll either think this is the best paper you've ever heard in your life or You'll go to sleep Either is fine We're running a little bit Behind schedule. I'm going to try and keep this to 45 minutes if not a little bit Shorter so here we go So in brief recent months I've been thinking about the art of literary criticism and some of the challenges made to it by the fairly Recent school of philosophical thought known as speculative realism To my mind at least it is an encounter that encourages us to think in different ways About the practice of reading literature Why because a literary criticism that respects the basic tenets of speculative realism Encourages to question the inheritances by which literature has become an academic discipline In doing so I want to suggest that speculative realism births a new kind of literary criticism one that is radically egalitarian and Therefore one that ushers in a grand democratization of literature proper Jason's earlier paper has already explained to us why this is an important particularly important avenue in this context of Hong Kong It is one way for the common reader of course as Virginia Woolf put it To take ownership of the literature that surrounds us But simply it is one way by which our students can begin to understand that that foreboding body of writing known as English literature Belongs to them as much as it does to that middle-class gent Who reads a few lines of words worth while sipping on a gin and tonic as the bowler returns to his mark on the village cricket green On a Sunday afternoon, of course, and that's my attempt at giving you the English idyll So what is this thing called speculative realism? Interestingly and unlike most philosophical and literary forms Speculative realism was born at a very specific time and place on Friday the 27th of April 2007 Goldsmiths College, I probably could give you a time as well, but Goldsmiths College in London held a one-day workshop Dedicated to showcasing and discussing the merits of what was described in the abstract of the event as a variety of research programs committed to upholding the autonomy of reality The workshop was titled Spectative realism and in this moment a new movement was born Or it would have been if not For what one of the speakers called a ferocious disagreement amongst its participants Although as the abstract of the event had signaled those gathered maintained some kind of belief in a material reality that existed in its own rights beyond the human mind None of the speakers could agree about either the significance of such an observation Or how one might even talk of such a world For some of the participants the human was not and could never be in a position to know the world as it is The human world relationship they argued was always mediated through something be that through language thought perception something else Other participants championed the idea that the world did indeed give itself up to the inquiring mind under certain Circumstances one example being the rule of mathematics Even those who initially seem to do to agree with each other Eventually discovered over the course of the day that they had radically different readings of the same Philosophical works that took their ideas in fundamentally different directions As such those who led the workshop and I'll give you some faces so you don't have to keep looking at mine Ian Hamilton Grant Close but no relation Ray Brasio Quentin Mila Sue and Graham Harmon Those these people who led the workshop Demonstrated perfectly well that a shared commitment to the autonomy of reality Was not enough to sustain an entire philosophical movement At its very beginning speculative realism had exploded into a vast number of splinter cells That ultimately bore little similarity to each other Ian Hamilton Grant for example is a noticed noted British philosopher from Bristol Well, he went off to explore the nature philosophy of the 19th century German thinker Shelling Ray Brasio The Maverick American philosopher based in the American University of Beirut He dived into nihilism The French philosopher Mara Sue concerned himself with the notion of human finitude Which as we all know is the extent to which a human or human existence is a bounded existence And then we have Graham Harmon another American philosopher who at the time of At the time of this conference was working out of Cairo and he put all of his energy into developing what was perhaps the most visible result of those conversations at Goldsmiths some ten years ago Object-oriented philosophy it may be something you've stumbled across recently in fact Harmon Has been so prolific in promoting his object-oriented philosophy that I think it's fair to say that whenever you hear somebody talk about speculative realism today what they are most likely talking about is Harmon's object-oriented philosophy Very briefly Harmon's Philosophy object-oriented is the way of thinking about the world that takes seriously the notion of the object as an object in itself And that's it However, it turns out that if you're willing to think about the objects of the world in this way Then there are huge repercussions The main problem it seems is that as far as Harmon and in this case actually all the other Spectative realists as far as they're concerned Contemporary Western philosophy has been a philosophy of the subject rather than of objects And by contemporary here, I mean pretty much everything since Renny Descartes most noted a separation I Think therefore I am It is a famous statement because it indicates the significant shift that we see in philosophy after Descartes That is the move away from the concerns of trying to identify the core reality of something that is to ask ontological questions of something Towards asking epistemological questions of the world How do I know about the world? Importantly is this shift in inquiry that leads Emmanuel Kant. You knew he would be in here somewhere To finally cleave the world in two for Kant There is a world of objects which he will call the numinal and This is the realm of those ontological questions In addition to this there is our perception of that numinal world, which he will call the phenomenal and This is the realm of those epistemological questions Significantly Kant says that of these two worlds the numinal and the phenomenal We can only know the phenomenal Why because we can only interrogate the world by interpreting it That is to say we must transform the world into a human world And we do that by using our senses We see the world we touch it we smell it and so on and then we talk about it using language Put simply we respond only to the phenomena that That greet us as we encounter the objects of the world However, if we understand our interaction with the world in this way Then we are forced to conclude that we can never really touch the world itself Just as our words float above the world never really making contact with it Every engagement we can have with the world is also removed from it Since our engagements can only be made through some kind of mediation our senses our language thought so So although the real world exists for kent It is a world that we can never grasp directly We are fated to experience the world as humans and for that reason there will always be an aspect of the world That escapes us Simply by virtue of our being human. It is this conclusion that interests Graham Harman By and large he agrees with Kent, but he is unwilling to pick humans at the center of things that is He is unwilling to make man the measure of all things as he was For early humanism for example Harman relativizes kent's conclusions and says Why only think of the human world relationship in this way? Surely every object of the world encounters every other object of the world in precisely this way Of course we experience the world in a human like way But surely this means that the tree must experience the world in a tree like way and the dog a Dog like way and so on That is to say Just as surely as humans translate the objects of the world through the senses and language so too must trees and dogs and flies and rocks and everything else you can imagine To this extent the human is just like any other object in the world And this is where things get controversial and because of that fun If humans are objects Then our traditional ideas of what constitutes an object must be wrong For Harman objects are not just lumps of inner matter This is what he says To be an object does not mean to be physical material without dignity But simply to be a unified entity Which is irreducible to its component pieces or To its effects on the surrounding environments. I'm gonna unpack this a little bit in a minute But first the observation You think about this description It's the image of that much contested notion of the Individual that comes into being as a feudal economy gives way to a capitalist one But Harman's point is that it is an image that we have never Extended into our sense of the natural world But simply we're happy to think of people as individuals But not quite so willing to think of everything else that we encounter on a day-to-day basis As an individual Think here of the solitary ant on the floor that we step over The unassuming tree that we walk past without the merest hint of recognition The bird whose song we ignored on the way to this conference Harman I think wants us to acknowledge the individuality of every object trees, ants and humans included Now the temptation is for me to carry on explaining the finer details of Harman's philosophy But for the purposes of today I think you've probably had enough of the philosophy to at least get a sense of the challenge that Harman's ideas Make to contemporary Western thought I'll summarize them for you His philosophy insists that the objects of world of the world exist and Importantly they do so independent of our ability or willingness to perceive them His philosophy claims that humans are objects just like any other entity of the world and Because of that he Relativizes human experience By saying that our experience of the world is no more vital than any other objects experience of the world What we're being introduced to then is a great flattening out of The hierarchies that have dominated Western thought for centuries Harman's world is one in which objects encounter other objects and No, one object has a more privileged experience of the world than any other Every object simply has its own inexorable interpretation of the world But it is an interpretation that can never quite capture the full richness of being So what has all of this to do with literature? Well, we can take this way of thinking about the world and apply it to the realm of literature For example, we can ask what happens if we treat the literary text as one of these harmonium. I'll coin it harmonium objects Let's remind ourselves quickly of Harman's short definition of the object to be an object Does not mean to be physical material without dignity but simply to be a unified entity Which is irreducible to its component pieces or to its effects on the surrounding environment The assertion that an object is irreducible to either its component parts or its effect on the surrounding Environment is central to the way in which Harman asks us to rethink all the objects that we encounter By and large school has trained us to conduct one or both of these operations On an object in order to try and reveal or formulate a more profound account of its being Think here of the literary text First we're encouraged to search beneath the surface Beneath the surface reading We're encouraged to excavate the text until we reach that rich subtext That is what the text supposedly is all about And in order to judge its Literariness we dive further into the innards of a novel or a poem to find its formal elements Its images symbols metaphors rhyme meter. You know all of this if these things work together to produce a creative tension or pleasing Sympathy then we can be sure we are told that we're in the realm of the literary That's what happens if you excavate a text Second we have been taught to contextualize the texts. This one is more obvious That is to situate it within a chain of relations the political the social The literary of course and so on but for Harman Both these operations ultimately result in the destruction of the text Understood as an object in and of itself We're either excavating into it and destroying it or putting it into a chain of relations and understanding it by those relations Prefigured myself one reaches into the innards of a text because one believes that a more profound reality can be found there This was the belief of the new critics for example or the structuralists Or one contextualizes a text because one believes that it is the relationships in which it is involved that ultimately determine it And that of course was the modus operandi of the romantic humanist tradition and new historicism The question is then what do we do with a text if we want to retain its integrity as an object in itself if we read it as a text And this is where the debate begins. I think I'm sure each of you will have your own sense of how one might preserve the literary text as a Unified entity irreducible to its component pieces or to its effects on the surrounding environment to quote Harman again But to my mind at least all endeavors to think the text in this way must begin with the simple recognition That the text is not Chasing The critic sorry is not chasing an apodictic truth or meaning of the text This is the last fallacy of literary criticism that post structuralist thought has been working away at but it remains stubbornly in the critics mind at last the critic exclaims I'm discovering the real meaning of the book Literature simply isn't like that And I take my mark on this from Delores and Gutierrez. This is what they say a Book has neither object nor subject It is made of variously form matters and very different dates and speeds to attribute the book to a subject Is to overlook this working of matters in a book as in all things There are lines of articulation or segmentarity Strata and territories, but also lines of flight movements of de-territorialization and de-stratification Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity or on the contrary of acceleration and rupture All this lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage a book is an assemblage of this kind and as such is Unattributable and this is a conceptually demanding Description of a book that it's full of the kind of exotic language that characterizes the work of Delores and Gutierrez But the point they make I think is perfectly clear a Text is never about anything It hides no transcendent truth or meaning to search for it is therefore to engage in a fool's errand Don't mistake you can hear Delores and Gutierrez say Don't mistake your personal interest with some of the issues encountered in this text As something that exists in a realm of objective meaning Once we've abandoned the search for the truth or the meaning of a text We can concentrate on what Delores and Gutierrez are making visible here Which is to say the significance of the reader in the event of literature It is us readers who animate literature Without its readers literature would never be anything other than a kind of potential energy stories and ideas that are remain that remain bounded Pressing image of the truly undead Given this our predominant question should be how does this literature affect me What do I mean by affect here well to invoke Delores and Gutierrez again affect here is the recognition of the way in which the literary text changes the ideas and feelings of its reader and The way in which those changes in the reader's dispositions attitudes and behaviors as one critic puts it link up with other forces affecting the reader particularly the social and political as Such considering the effect of literature on its reader is not only a question of Detailing a changing way of thinking It is also a question of detailing where such changes eventually lead the reader in her encounter with the world This means that the object oriented literary critic is primarily interested in tracing the private products of reading And one does this by asking of the reading experience. Does it work for me? Does this text work for me? It's a simple question, but one that belies the profound implication that one should take away from it Because if we are to take seriously the question this question then we also have to take seriously the idea of private evaluation and That means Chaucer Shakespeare and Dickens No longer enjoy the status they do just because of what other people think about them The very point of asking whether a novel works for me is to take responsibility for one's own Engagement with literature Something which is immediately lost when we choose to defer judgment by citing the work of others or employing the standard measures of contemporary literary criticism Once the literary critic turns away from the pursuit of uncovering a universal textual meaning In favor of one that concerns itself with the products of a very particular reading Then a remarkable transformation of the landscape of literary studies occurs if readings of literary works are profoundly private affairs which Is not at all the same as saying that they are closed off from the world If they're private affairs then that traditionally important secondary work that accrues around the literary work and Also, therefore those inherited reading practices that direct the way in which we engage with the text Well, they must lose gravity and eventually give way to our own readings That is to say those authoritative essays and books that have traditionally focused on readings of say Shakespeare Cannot retain their position of influence in the realm of private reading Private reading simply has no need for such writing Although the desire to hear the thoughts of others may still persist Every private reading is an original or unique way of thinking about the possibilities of a particular literary text And it is this uniqueness of our own response to literature that an object Oriented literary criticism looks to capture at this moment That is when we are satisfied by simply charting our own responses to literature What we witness is the radical democratization of literature the moment in which literature is no longer a province dominated by the university professor Or the professional literary critic Given this arrangement of things literature is either that which works for me To the extent that it increases my power to act in the world in somewhere other Or it doesn't Either way though we are shown clearly We are showing clearly enough that literature itself is not some rarefied form of expression That exists other to this world in which we live But is rather something that is part and parcel of the very fabric of the world How then to talk of this style of literary criticism that Abandons contemporary ways of handling literature in favor of one directed towards personal invention and creation Well, I think our key term here is experimental What this private criticism of effects gestures towards is an experimental form of reading In order to understand that what this means it is worth reminding ourselves of the etymology of the term experiment Experiment comes into the English language through the Latin expireree which means to try The first dimension of our experimental form of reading is therefore marked by the impulse to try That is to try things out to improvise to create to invent responses to situations But interestingly this Latin term is also the root for our word experience and it is this that gives us the second dimension to our experimental form of reading of Course experience also means to observe to encounter but also to consider Stressed in this way towards the act of Contemplation our style of criticism cannot be satisfied with making simple observations on or about the effects of our reading Rather it is incumbent on us to reflect on our creations and inventions and in so doing make something of them In this way our experimental form of reading is concerned first and foremost with pragmatics That is to relating our speculations on the world to the fact of acting within it Jason's previous lecture, okay And for this reason it's quarry is always what's coming into being what's new what's tape taking shape in our reading In this sense then the conversation we hold with literature as we read it is one that is inevitably directed towards the act of creation or invention To read as Deleuze says is to read as a series of experiments for each reader Of course, this does not mean that we throw away our rational brain in pursuit of the infinitely outrageous Although we could do if that's the ground for our experiment Nor does it mean as one Deleuze and scholar puts it that we can only hope to discover that the same work means different things to different people How tiresome would this conclusion quickly become once we've read it two three times What it does mean is that we encounter a text without anticipating what the result of that encounter might be We read a text and we leave ourselves open to what is produced in that reading. We don't anticipate the end result Remember experiment Means among other things to try out to improvise and to create So our experimental reading Never just simply aims to detail why Or where a text eventually leads us It compels us to answer the question of what new concepts and ideas have evolved from our reading thinking of literary criticism as experimentation in This way does away with interpretation and Heads the critic towards something like a creative criticism Something I'll characterize here as a style of literary criticism that is defined by a genuine recognition of The creative moments by which the reader Becomes writer in the act of critique The reader becomes writer in the act of critique It's gone by many names in the past Is a fewer dug up But regardless of the guises it has adopted over the years as Steven Benson and Claire Connors make clear in the introduction to their recent edited anthology on the subject Creative criticism has always been concerned with its own form and with its own writerliness For this reason one could argue that creative criticism has always been a more honest form of criticism than those other forms pursued in the 20th century in its commitment to restore the passion and Lossness and wonderment of reading Creative criticism absolves itself to act in a way that appeals to the scientific mind That is to say it does away with the pretense of objectivity that other forms of criticism have claimed for themselves To one degree or another and it is in this abandonment that we should recognize the honesty of creative criticism for Every form of literary criticism has always been has always been an exercise in personal Creativity every time you've written an essay you have been creative That is to say literary criticism has always been about personal engagement and inventiveness It is just that it is looked to sublimate this private aspect of reading in the hope of talking to the universal or the transcendental Who though can read Derrida or Deleuze or Michel says Without noting the innovative use of language that colors their work To my mind at least the way in which creative criticism acknowledges and embraces a creative innovative inventive and Experimental private reading marks a return of the essay the essay genre to its roots Which to my mind is this chap Montaigne's essays were always wayward affairs personal anti dogmatic idiosyncratic pieces that revealed the tentative and exploratory nature of his intellectual engagement with the world But that is not to say that they were things of whimsy For Montaigne's essays captured both senses of the way in which the word is employed in French essay In French essay means both to try to attempt something But also a trial a test As Benson and Collins note this means that for Montaigne Here it is the word essay had a bolder sense than that of an Abashed attempt at something had to do with a sense of toughening it out Running the gauntlet Seeing how far you could go like a test your strength machine at the fairground It is this steel of purpose demanded by taking on a truly exploratory task that much Contemporary scholarship lacks and upon which the very best creative criticism rests. I would argue If such criticism leads to the essay form then it must be an essay freed of convention To do justice to the idea of the concept being explored or invented by the critic the essay genre as it is practiced today must give way if necessary The point is to allow criticism the opportunity to open up or open out onto texts in whichever way it is thought That best explores the ideas that the critic wants to chase In short it is to make every kind of reading possible Even if that reading is expressed in other ways to the world than on the page I'm showing my age, but I refer to Radiohead the band anybody don't make me feel really old good Radiohead song two plus two equals five. Well, I'm counting that as an essay on George Orwell's 1984 You will all know Mila's Ophelia the painting. I'm calling that a visual essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet Understood like this the aim of experimental reading or creative criticism is to make real real Michel Foucault's dream of a better species of criticism in a famous Interview in which the infamous French philosopher questions the very idea of the contemporary philosopher Foucault says of the art of criticism be it literary or otherwise I Can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge But but to bring an idea to life an essay that doesn't judge but brings an idea to life It would light fires Watch the grass grow listen to the wind and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it It would multiply not judgments, but signs of existence. It would summon them Drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes Perhaps criticism can invent concepts sometimes all the better all The better in this short passage Foucault maps out perfectly the markers of the kind of Experimental reading practice that I've been gesturing towards in this talk the death of judgment as a universal or transcendental schema The proliferation of passion and private engagement and the celebration of imagination and invention The result as I see it is not only a democratization of literature, but also a grand egalitarian view of our response to it Last paragraph well done. You're doing well It is this kind of essay then that we should demand of our students a Criticism that explores their own reaction to a text that Traces the connections that the student makes between literature and the world that at its best In vents concepts or new ways of seeing the world This is not a task that can be carried out honestly I feel if the specter of an end-of-term grade haunts the process to this extent and Just for one task on every module perhaps the students should be freed from the strictures of the discipline Let us not forget that in Middle English. That's Chaucer's English the word discipline meant mortification through the scourging of oneself or put a little bit less poetically the suppression of bodily desires by self-flagellation whipping discipline My point in promoting creative criticism is to enliven again in our students a passion for literature a passion for the literary world Perhaps we do this best when we give them the freedom to explore their own readings. Thank you