Reality is Aesthetic and Political: Editor’s Preface

Reality is Aesthetic and Political: Editor’s Preface

2012

In The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, by micha cárdenas, eds. Zach Blas and Wolfgang Schirmacher, Atropos Press.

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities

The Transreal arrives amidst a whirlwind of renewed philosophical interest in realism. Notably, the popularity of speculative realism has spun out across blogs, books, collected anthologies, and Facebook posts. This so-called philosophical turn has taken up not only realism and reality but also proffered critiques of worlding, materiality, and the subject. Although it might seem off-topic to begin this preface by engaging with speculative realism, its growing body of theoretical and cultural production–which now includes self-identified speculative realist artists–is an unavoidable interlocutor for this book. Crucially, Micha Cárdenas delivers an implicit refutation of speculative realism’s “reality” in the following pages.