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Postmodern pessimism has been newly expressed by Mark Fisher as capitalist realism: the sense that one can't even imagine an alternative to capitalism. Fisher's use of the term realism points to the subjective content of the contemporary capitalist life-world. In contrast, a new brand of realism as assemblage theory has become prominent through Manuel DeLanda: that is, a complex ontology of interwoven networks of immanent unfolding that operate on multiple scales of size. DeLanda supplies a basic ontology of society that, combined with Fisher's sense of realism, elaborates a new potential for socio-economic change. This paper will examine Fisher and DeLanda's views and add the speculative materialist economic work of Benjamin Lozano as a means of bringing the two together.
Over the last decade or so, the term realism has become increasingly pervasive in philosophical circles and in neo-Marxist theory. Specifically, there are two fundamentally different senses of realism, one oriented toward an examination of capitalist culture and the psychological effects of this culture, the other a philosophy that seeks to explain emergence and ontological becoming by excluding all anthropocentric intrusions. The former concept of realism has been espoused recently by Mark Fisher and details the way in which capitalism has become so ubiquitous and deadly that it appears to be an unstoppable juggernaut leading us toward an apocalyptic end; the latter concept of realism, which I will call speculative realism, (although it has gone by such diverse names as, or used in tandem with, neo-materialism, continental materialism, non-philosophy, flat ontology or object-oriented ontology) eschews subjective oriented approaches for a strictly de-anthropic inquiry into a mind-independent reality. While there are numerous shades of speculative realism-most notably in such figures as Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier-it is the Deleuze (and Guattari) inspired Manuel DeLanda and his conception of emergence and assemblage [End Page 426] theory that will be the focus here. While Fisher's brand of realism finds its roots in postmodern theory and leads to a pessimism concerning effective political or socio-economic change, DeLanda's brand of realism argues for the inevitability of change at the level of ontology. However, one charge leveled against most of the speculative realists is that these ontological considerations are often so abstract and consciously...
