Graham Harman - Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism

Late in 2010, Zero Books published my collection Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. The chapters in that work consisted of material arranged chronologically from 1997 through 2009: from my latter years as a doctoral student at DePaul University through the earliest years of the Speculative Realism movement. Towards Speculative Realism proved to be a greater success than anticipated. Whatever inherent philosophical interest the book may have had was clearly augmented by its Bildungsroman structure, with the struggling graduate student of the early chapters replaced by an internationally visible author in the final pages of just a dozen years later. The chronological feel of the book was further enhanced by an italicized introductory paragraph at the head of each chapter, often referring to failures or human dramas of the sort that most authors suppress during triumphant recaps of their careers. This structure was meant to encourage the legions of depressed and demoralized graduate students in our midst, as if to say: your current invisibility, your enfeebled productivity, your rejection by conferences and publishers, and your struggles with tyrannical advisors could well mean nothing a decade from now. Judging from the often poignant quality of reader mail since 2010, the book has had considerable benefit in healing the wounded.

Bells and Whistles is a book in much the same vein as Towards Speculative Realism, but it covers the period from 2010 through early 2013: a time of public battles rather than obscure student futility. By the last two chapters of the book, we were entering a period of significant change. The Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology movements had fragmented, their original members busied with mutual articulation of disagreements. Tristan Garcia, a young French thinker of great promise below), was on the verge of appearing in English and shaking up the battle lines among Speculative Realists. Other significant changes in my work environment were afoot.

Since the chapters in this book were written as standalone pieces and not as organic parts of an integrated book, the reader can expect a certain amount of repetition: Heideggers tool-analysis continues to appear frequently, as does Husserls transformation of Twardowski, the distinction between under-mining and overmining assaults on objects, and lingering complaints about Bruno Latours 1999 assertion that entities are no more than whatever they transform, modify, perturb, or create. Quentin Meillassoux is a frequent target of disagreement; Levi Bryant a bit less so. And since many of the chapters of Bells and Whistles were either oral presentations, interviews, or blog posts, an informal style permeates the whole. In my 2011 book on Meillassoux, I proclaimed the benefits of studying a living philosopher in the midst of public emergence.Bells and Whistles, much like Towards Speculative Realism, allows readers an inside look at my own recent career, with continued glimpses of success, failure, and conflict. In this way they will be able to see each of these chapters as embedded in a wider human life, and perhaps will come to appreciate the obstacles in their own lives as elements of an intellectual drama rather than as biographical distractions from antiseptic theory.

With age it becomes much easier to write (though somewhat harder to find the time to read). The calming rhythm of routine, the natural decrease of youthful anxiety, the waning nervous energies of middle age with their newfound indifference to imaginary threats, the fresh flood of invitations for lectures and written work, concrete professional incentives, a more settled personal and financial life, and growing self-confidence in ones own intellectual footingall these factors can add up to a staggering productivity. The Derridas and the ieks with their multiple books per year are not thirty times more energetic than you are, but simply three times as old and ten times more welcomed. Avoid affectation, scorn the transient pressures of your era, stay close to what you care about most, and someday you may find your thoughts ripe and in demand.

In order to pre-empt any trollish queries as to which of these chapters are the bells and which are the whistles, we can agree to use the term whistle for the brief : a blog post, an unpublished fragment, and a pair of interviews. The other chapters are lectures or essays of a more traditional sort, and here the metaphor of bells can be replaced at will by the figures of pipe organs, tom-toms, bassoons, or any heavier instrument of the readers choosing.