In this essay I bring Gregory Bateson together with Deleuze and Guattari (primarily with the latter) to show their ecological compatibility, especially with Guattari’s ecosophy. I do this against the backdrop of the Anthropocene which presents us not only with a ‘climate’ of post-truth and political corruption, but also with the so-called climate crisis. In the context of these two broad examinations, I ask what can an artisan-artist-designer do given this problematic context? My reply is to call on ‘speculative design’ (...) by an ‘avant-garde without authority’ to expose the symptoms of the Anthropocene era. (shrink)

Basing on the philosophers that are primarily associated with speculative realism, the author of the article examines the place of this phenomenon in the context of contemporary philosophy. The discourses concerning these thinkers are structured according to the central tendencies, or motives, of the philosophical thought that is close to speculative realism. The research shows that these tendencies are as follow: realism, anti-Kantianism, materialism, anti-anthropocentrism, and philosophical attention to mathematical and natural sciences. Speculative realism is an ontological realism that affirms (...) the possibility of human thought to know a thought-independent reality. Thus, it is anti-Kantian by its nature. However, for the most part, philosophers associated with speculative realism propose to transgress the Kantian frame through the radicalization of Kantianism itself. Speculative realism is often considered along with new materialism, but this concept is too wide and polisemantic today to provide considerable clarification concerning the nature of speculative realism. The latter is also characterized by its opposition to anthropocentrism, but this relation is not homogenous among speculative realists and, moreover, is somehow paradoxical, as their speculative stance reserves for humans the noblest ability: to know a thought-independent reality. Finally, the attempt to philosophically engage with natural and mathematical sciences plays a significant role in most of the examined philosophical projects. Speculative realism is inscribed in the speculative shift, or speculative turn, that is happening in the contemporary continental philosophy. This shift is a change in the attitude of the philosophical community towards the questions about “reality in itself” and about the “Great Outdoors.” The relevance of such problems is being restored, and they are becoming the subject of emerging realistic and speculative projects.Manuscript received 06.09.2020. (shrink)

In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines and landfills are intertwined; enacted sometimes as similar and in other cases as different types of (...) objects, thus shaping the paths of becoming for those bundles of relations that become enacted as either a ‘mine object’ or a ‘landfill object’. Mapping these practices generates openings for interventions suggesting how things could be made different in some specificity; in this case, for example, the appreciation of what constitutes ‘natural resources’. The overarching purpose of this article is to intervene in current debates regarding the potential merits of drawing upon Object-Oriented Philosophy as an inspiration in critical organizational studies. While we are highly sympathetic to calls for more experimental object studies, we are hesitant towards Object-Oriented Philosophy as a source of inspiration due to its specific metaphysical underpinnings. To clarify what we find to be at stake here, we conclude the article by situating After-ANT in a wider landscape of thought, discussing the contrast between broadly pragmatist research approaches, such as After-ANT, and Object-Oriented Philosophy. Finally, we try to spell out how we believe this contrast reverberates upon how we understand the purpose and potential of critical social science. (shrink)