Recording of Graham Harman’s talk on Manuel DeLanda

A recording of Graham Harman’s ANTHEM seminar talk at the LSE yesterday, entitled “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda,” and the discussion that followed, is available here (1 hr 47 min). A PDF file of the PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from here.

Harman evaluated the ontological assumptions behind DeLanda’s realism, his notion of assemblage and his theory of causation, by tracing their origins in Deleuze and Bhaskar, among others. He then contrasted DeLanda’s ontology with that of Bruno Latour and concluded by presenting his own object-orientated approach to thinking about causation, objects, and emergence.

Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda

As announced earlier,  we are expecting Graham Harman to join us at Thursday’s ANTHEM seminar. Dr Harman has also very kindly agreed to give us a talk, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation, in order to summarise but also expand on the main points of the paper (“The Assemblage Theory of Society”) that he has shared with us. The title of his talk is “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda.” The main themes are realism, causation, emergence, assemblages, essence, DeLanda, Deleuze, Bhaskar, Latour, and Harman’s own (Heideggerian) object-orientated philosophy.

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.