Towards Speculative Realism

Graham Harman’s new book of old essays and lectures has just been published under the title Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures, by Zero Books. Its publication is a proper ANTHEM event, in the sense that this book deals with both actor-network theory and Heidegger, as well as Harman’s own attempt to build on both, through his object-oriented philosophy. Here are the contents:

1. Phenomenology and the Theory of Equipment (1997)
2. Alphonso Lingis on the Imperatives in Things (1997)
3. The Theory of Objects in Heidegger and Whitehead (1997)
4. A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit (1999)
5. Bruno Latour, King of Networks (1999)
6. Object-Oriented Philosophy (1999)
7. The Revival of Metaphysics in Continental Philosophy (2002)
8. Physical Nature and the Paradox of Qualities (2006)
9. Space, Time, and Essence: An Object-Oriented Approach (2008)
10. The Assemblage Theory of Society (2008)
11. Objects, Matter, Sleep, and Death (2009)

Algorithmic Allure

It is nice to learn from Graham Harman that his Bournemouth talk last year on Heidegger’s “origin of the work of art” essay has directly inspired this interesting forthcoming paper by Robert Jackson: “Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure.” That event was actually organised by Tammy Lu at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (since then  renamed as the Arts University College at Bournemouth), although I was the one who took this crazy photo of Graham:

Three days later Graham gave another talk on “The Greatness of McLuhan” at the Media School at Bournemouth University. We posted the recordings of both talks on this blog and they both became quite popular, however the Heidegger talk has the edge: it has been downloaded 1,027 times since 8 February 2008, as opposed to the 884 downloads of the McLuhan talk.

Strangely, both of these talks are more popular than Harman’s first lecture at the LSE  “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” on 29 November 2007, which has been downloaded 778 times, even though that was the event that launched the Heideggero-Latourian project most explicitly. I would have thought that the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Latour and the invocation of Latour’s concept of the plasma would be provocatively alluring (or alluringly provocative) enough to attract more attention. But the most popular Harman download (besides the respectable 1,688 downloads of the Harman Review itself) seems to be his “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda” from November 2008, with 1,385 downloads since then.

[Although I should hasten to add that these figures are somewhat misleading, as both the plasma talk and the Harman Review are also available on the LSE website, so probably just as many people if not more would have downloaded them from there. As for the DeLanda talk, it received a boost after being listed on Speculative Heresy.]

Jackson’s paper sounds very interesting though, so I’ll reproduce his abstract here:

Repetition and difference in organizing over time and space

The title of the 2010 EGOS call for sub-theme proposals sounds remarkably Deleuzian. Could it be just a co-incidence that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition? The call for proposals speaks of repetition and difference, the emerge of new organisational forms, the problem of the micro and the macro, globalisation, and the role of technology. The deadline for the submission of sub-theme proposals is 15 January 2009.

It would be interesting to have a track or two with specifically Deleuzian themes, e.g. with a focus on repetition and difference vis-a-vis routines and innovation, or on the Deleuzian notion of the assemblage in organising. The similarities and differences between the Deleuzian assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and the evocation of assemblages in Science and Technology Studies and economic sociology could make another interesting platform for discussion. We reproduce the call below in full, in case the link gets broken during the current overhaul of the EGOS website.

Harman on DeLanda’s ontology: assemblage and realism

Thank you to Nick at Speculative Heresy for alerting us to the online publication of Graham Harman’s article “DeLanda’s Ontology: Assemblage and Realism” in Continental Philosophy Review. Actually several of us from ANTHEM were at Goldsmiths on 20th April 2007 when Harman delivered the earlier version of this paper, which back then was entitled “Networks and Assemblages: The Rebirth of Things in Latour and DeLanda.” DeLanda and Latour were already an intriguing juxtaposition, and when the figure of Heidegger and the fourfold emerged, we knew that we were entering interesting territory. At the end of the Goldsmiths session Harman gave one of us the hard copy of his paper, which set off a series of events culminating in The Harman Review in February 2008.

Graham Harman’s abstract for Deleuze2008

The abstract for Graham Harman’s keynote address at the Deleuze2008 conference at Stavanger:

Graham Harman
‘The Assemblage Theory of Society’

This lecture considers the interesting ‘assemblage theory’ of society found in Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society (2006), which links up with some of the key issues of classical and present-day metaphysics, not to mention some of the central themes of this conference.

On the Horrors of Realism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The most recent issue of Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy has an interview with Graham Harman “On the Horrors of Realism.” Harman speaks to Tom Sparrow about object-oriented philosophy, phenomenology, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger’s fourfold, Meillassoux’s correlationism, Lingis, Derrida and Foucault, DeLanda’s realism and Latour’s relationism, speculative realism, Whitehead, Leibniz, Zubiri, H.P. Lovecraft and China Miéville, and of course metaphysics. Harman speaks of weird things, about the horror of the real.