Karl Schroeder - Relationship To The 'Speculative Realist' School of Philosophy

Relationship To The 'Speculative Realist' School of Philosophy

Two of Schroeder's novels, Ventus and Lady of Mazes, explore themes that have recently become central to the self-identified speculative realism movement in philosophy. Although speculative realism was not labeled as a movement until 2007 both Ventus (2000) and Lady of Mazes (2005) ask questions that are very similar to those posed by speculative realists such as Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Timothy Morton. Speculative realism places ontology at the center of philosophical inquiry, and Ventus and Lady of Mazes both interrogate ontology, inventing new forms of relationship both between subjects and objects, and between objects in the absence of subjects. A primary example of this form of invention is the idea of thalience explored in Ventus.

Thalience is a concept invented by Schroeder to explore a realm of entities that are not quite subjects, but not entirely objects either. As presented in the novel, the concept sometimes refers to a form of inquiry, specifically an attempt to determine whether non-human sentient systems are truly independent minds, or whether they are merely "parrots" that give back to human researchers what the researchers expect to hear. The novel says that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. However, Ventus also more consistently refers to thalience as a state of being. Entities are considered "thalient" if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world.

Lady of Mazes contains a critique of what Quentin Meillassoux has labeled correlationism. By constructing a potentially solipsistic world of privately-constructed virtual realities, Schroeder is able again to create ambiguities in the relationship of subject to object that undermine both categories.