There are a few blogs that over time I have come to visit almost daily. Graham Harman’s is one of them. Last fall he gave a talk at NYU, titled “What Causes Space?”. At the time I stumbled upon the flyer advertising the event, I scarcely knew his work. The title intrigued me deeply. I was hoping to hear someone discuss space outside the Marxist paradigms, i.e., Harvey, Lefebvre, and De Certeau among a few others whose work continue to inform part of my thinking. Upon googling his name, I discovered his blog. What an incredibly priceless find! Since then, I have learned a great deal not only about the brand of realism his philosophical work advances, but also about academic writing and writing in general. In his blog I have found the professional kindness and intellectual generosity that sometimes faculty physically near you cannot find the time to extend. I have learned a great deal from his blog, perhaps even more than from seminars I took at the beginning of my doctoral program. Today, for instance, he posted a link to a draft of an article by Latour, “Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence.”
I would like to include two fragments from the article that resonated with me quite strongly, though the entire spirit of the piece is one I can appreciate because I too feel that intellectual endeavor is the ongoing arrangement of intuitions (that sometimes refuse to be articulated immediately and all that clearly) and reasoned led investigation. For long, I have been severely skeptical of my intuitions, partly because I afforded them no trust, but also because I believed that inquiry was strictly a rational affair stripped of any inclinations that found no verbal representation. Over the past few years, I have grown to be kinder toward my intuitions, more receptive to them. Thus I have come to understand that some of them can prove to be portals into productive directions of inquiry and thought.
Now, the two fragments below do not particularly discuss what I have just noted. Instead, they remind me of why I find Harman’s work to be incredibly compelling:
1. This is a part in which Latour records the impact that Stengers’s unrelenting critical queries had in Latour’s own thinking: “…. still didn’t offer, in Stengers’ eyes, a sufficient guarantee that we had pulled ourselves away from the text, the social, the symbolic. To manage that, we would have had to grasp the world without draggin through it human subjects and their obsession with knowledge conceived as the relation between worlds and thing” (15).
2. Here Latour recounts that at the age of 41 the blueprint for what would become We Have Never Been Modern appeared to him with unprecedented clarity: “A few of the regimes or modes were still missing, but the essentials were in place, especially the principle of comparison on the basis of a metalanguage that has no goal but to keep ontologic pluralism from being crushed by the subject/object schema. In particular the litte framework – call it semiotic, theoretical, philosophical, whatever – was no longer opposed to the deployment of fields of inquiry” (16).
The kind of literary critique that I am trying to engage stems from such forms of understanding realism, reality and the real. How does realism in fiction (a modality of representation) recreate a world in which the real is not subject to the imaginings of the I? How to probe literary realism without perpetuating the 20th century classic binary of realism versus formalism (i.e., modernism or avant-garde)? I believe that to do so instrumental tools can be found in Harman’s and Garcia’s works. And I am slowly heading, led by my intuitions and inquiries, in that direction.
About two months ago, I noticed how in his blog Graham Harman engaged one of the posts in this blog. For a quick second I found myself thinking that some other blogger had come up with a name uncannily similar to mine. No uncanny similarity there. What a thrilling surprise. Moreover, he confirmed that the particular comparison I was working out between his philosophy and that of Meillassoux was in the right direction. Kind and generous indeed!
Realism 