Levi’s historical sketch of SR

Here is a VERY INTERESTING POST by Levi giving the part of S.R. history that he knows much better than I do: the blogosphere back story. I didn’t know either Levi or Nick until they contacted me for some assistance with the anthology, back in July 2008, right around the time of my rabid dog attack (speaking of tykhe).

Here’s my favorite part of his post:

“Like inverted amoebas, Accursed Share and Fractal Ontology merged, creating a new blog, Speculative Heresy. Part of the success of these three blogs was the tone they employed in presenting the thought of the Speculative Realists. Fractal Ontology was busily churning out translations, while in their original posts they were developing their own ideas in a non-polemical way, presenting them according to the standard Continental philosophy model that characterized lit theory and Continental philosophy departments during the 90s, SPEP, and the major Continental philosophy journals. These were the days– 2007 and 2008 –where Continental philosophy in the blogosphere was still driven by the SPEP/American university Continental philosophy department model of ‘figure driven’ philosophy where philosophy is driven by commentary on figures rather than problems, questions, and positions that debate amongst these positions. It was the philosophical environment driven by hermeneutics of some sort or another that has driven so many bright minds out of philosophy departments and into other fields in the humanities where thought is not merely a reflection on the tradition. At the same time Nick was churning out all sorts of reviews and posts on the major figures in the SR movement.”

I like this for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s part of a nice story containing information mostly new to me. Another reason is that I like the following line: “These were the days– 2007 and 2008 –where Continental philosophy in the blogosphere was still driven by the SPEP/American university Continental philosophy department model…” On its face this could look absurd, speaking of 2007 and 2008 as though it were ancient history, but in some ways it is ancient history. Things can happen quickly, and in fact I think most worthwhile things do tend to happen quickly.

He’s also right about the role of the blogosphere in cranking things up to a higher volume. As fun as the S.R. group was, it was still working in an “old media” idiom… We did communicate by email, of course, but otherwise we were scheduling a conference every 2 years and publishing at the usual slow pace (Ben Woodard complained once about this, and I sort of got annoyed at him for it, but in retrospect he was viewing us from a place that moves more quickly, and S.R. really was a bunch of slowpokes by comparison with how Ben et al. work, and we were missing opportunities that Ben and his friends probably sensed given the medium in which they work). Collapse deserves a lot of credit for breaking the mold of what a philosophy journal should be like, but of course it only appeared every so often.

My first and very enjoyable experience with faster-paced new media philosophy was in the “old days” of 2007-08 with Peter Erdélyi and ANTHEM, a group based at the London School of Economics. Even though I barely ever posted to that list, the entire LSE discussion between me and Latour was literally possible only because of the technologies used to conceive and arrange it (Erdélyi has written a wonderful foreword to The Prince and the Wolf that tells the whole story well).

Many moments of this blog have not been very fun, but in the past 8 months I have never again been tempted to shut it down. This is where things are going to be happening in philosophy to some extent, from here on out, and I think those who aren’t participating in that are making a mistake. It’s also an interesting opportunity to get involved at “pioneer” stage when the ground rules aren’t quite set as of yet. The various stock human characters that one finds in any milieu (crusty old newspaperman, silver fox recording company exec) are not yet etched in stone in the blogosphere, though they’re getting there.

And as I’ve told some of the younger guys in the vicinity, especially Nick and Reid, they are extremely lucky to be able to pursue philosophy in a medium like this, which has granted an immediate niche to their talents. The long enforced apprenticeships of universities past may have had a certain value, but they could also be spirit-crushing tyrannies, and I have no wish for any of the young people reading this to have to spend their twenties in the same way I spent mine; it’s hardly necessary, and many didn’t survive it with their inspiration intact.

I suppose it’s true that Levi was the final prod to push me into blogging; I’d have to go check my old messages. But the first person to plant that seed in my mind recently, once again, was Erdélyi. For some reason I resisted, though I’d again have to go back to my emails of the past to find out why.

And, I did also take a very early stab at a blog, which was orange and black and may still be out there somewhere. I think it was called Tool-Being, and it was some time in the 2002-04 period. But for some reason the software wasn’t responding to my actions, and I gave up after one boring post. (The same thing almost happened to this blog, incidentally. Here too I couldn’t get the software to work initially.)

By the way, Levi, I never called Deleuze (or anyone else) a “vitalist.” That word is not in my vocabulary of epithets. You’re thinking of Brassier, most likely. My own objection to Deleuze is that he grants insufficient respect to individual things. But I still like Deleuze. His tone is emboldening.

[ADDENDUM: As another chapter in my blog pre-history, I should also cite Mark Fisher/K-Punk’s efforts to get me involved with a multi-person blog whose name I no longer remember. Dominic Fox was on there, maybe Nina Power, and a few others. That must have been Fall 2006. What I remember from the time is feeling totally unable to keep up with the speed of it, and I soon drifted away. One of the first threads I started was about Ian Bogost, in fact; I had just discovered his Unit Operations.]