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It is in this historical context that Speculative Realism has emerged – a holistic thought that humans and animals, plants and objects must be treated on an equal footing. Bruno Latour suggests a “parliament of things,” Levi Bryant a “democracy of objects.” Graham Harman proposes an “object-oriented philosophy” that attempts to free objects from the shadow of our consciousness, giving them metaphysical autonomy, and putting collisions between things on an equal footing with relationships between thinking subjects, so that these two types of relationships can only be distinguished by their degree of complexity.

Considering the world in terms of substance, when we invite advocates of speculative realism to join us here, we will naturally decline to view this as a network of relations. Beings take precedence over knowledge, the thing envisaged by consciousness. A recent essay by Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, “attempts to think an object for-itself that isn't an object for the gaze of a subject, representation, or a cultural discourse. This, in short, is what the democracy of objects means... The claim that all objects equally exist is the claim that no object can be treated as constructed by another object... In short, no object such as the subject or culture is the ground of all others.” ⁽¹⁾

(1)Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, p.19.