he’s the man of the hour

Michael wrote to inform me that all of the posts from the first incarnation of this blog are not lost in the void at all. And why would they be? We live on Google planet, after all. I’ll have to figure out if there’s a more systematic way to import all those posts, or at least the best of them. But for now, by popular request, here is the official history of Speculative Realism…

*****

THE MARKETING ANGLE
January 28, 2009

I’m back in Cairo after perhaps the easiest of all Europe-to-Egypt trips I’ve ever head… I hit the check-in at De Gaulle at the right time, got to the front of the passport line in Cairo, my luggage came out near the very beginning, and I got a fair price on a taxi faster than usual.

While in Paris I seem to have overlooked the following post from Thomas:

“As interesting as [Speculative Realism] is, what I’m really interested in is the self-styled-movement aspect of it. I like the idea that it is possible to game the system, to read the intellectual fashions correctly and ride them… It is the marketing that is the most interesting. The way you can invent a group, and a name, and a journal, and now it exists. I might be wrong, but I get the sense that it is Brassier who has the good marketing sense behind SR. This is not to discount the actual scholarship or the ideas.”

Brassier is a marketing genius. The following story is typical of him.

On one of my first visits to his flat in London, I found Brassier studying some 70 or 80 pages of statistical printouts. He looked up and greeted me warmly. There followed a dramatic pause, as Brassier folded his hands behind his head like someone who knows more than what he’s saying just yet.

After a brief pause he pointed at his watch : “see this watch ?”, he asked. I nodded naively while looking at the rather fine piece of work. Brassier stood up and walked to the garbage can. “This watch is rubbish,” he said. With a melodramatic flick of a single finger, he dropped the watch in the bin, and I heard it strike against what sounded like eggshells and plastic bags. “I deserve a Rolex. Studded with emeralds. Or rubies, depending on my mood that day.”

Brassier then looked me over with an air of theatrical surprise, before walking over to grab my sleeve : “Graham, what is this? Cotton?… A poetic soul like you should only be wearing silk. And we’re going to make it happen.”

He followed this declaration with a dramatic stroll to the window, where he opened the living room curtains to reveal a grey sky marred further by a languid London drizzle. “You call this the center of world philosophy today?” Another dramatic pause. “We’re all going to be living in the Bahamas ten years from now, driving Bentleys, lying on the beach all day long, fanned with palm leaves by certified Brazilian heiresses.”

“How ?!” I asked excitedly. Brassier responded with something a bit less than a nod— a gesture so slight that I might merely have imagined it. But I sensed (correctly, it turned out) that we were about to go on a field trip of the sort that Brassier often liked to stage. Like all marketing geniuses, he has something of the frustrated artist about him, and this trait is often manifested in moments of theatrical self-indulgence. Yet there is always a payoff for those willing to go along on his ride while playing the role of passive observer.

We exited Brassier’s flat and cut through the hedgerows over to the East Finchley tube stop. Exchanging not a word the whole way, except for his brief insistence that we smoke cigars (I had little choice but to go along with this idea), we took the Northern Line down to Camden Town, then walked another ten minutes in silence to a converted storefront that Brassier entered with an unmistakable air of familiarity.

We were greeted by a tastefully dressed and assertive redhead, her lipstick just a shade divergent from that season’s fashion– but with the air of being a season ahead rather than a season behind. Petra, she called herself, though her nationality was difficult to guess.

Brassier and I followed Petra into a room with a one-way mirror looking out upon a room full of some dozen young academic types, mostly male. Petra looked at Brassier as if seeking direction. He merely held up two fingers, still in full theatrical mode. Petra left the mirrored booth and went in among the dozen young academics.

“What is this ?” I asked Brassier.

“A focus group,” he said, grinning like someone with several surprises still in store, and fully in control of the pace with which they would be revealed. He reached into a drawer and produced another stack of printouts. “You’re probably wondering why I invited you to London again so soon. Well, there’s a real opportunity here. Look at this data… what do you notice ?”

Somewhat nervous, I shook my head in confusion.

Brassier burst out in mock contempt : “Realism, my friend ! Realism ! What pattern do you notice in these numbers?”

I scanned through the alphabetically arranged list until reaching the “R” words. But now I was more perplexed than ever. Next to the word “Realism” was the figure “24%.” Judging from the context, this was clearly the public approval rating of the term, and just as clearly not a good one.

“But it’s 24 percent !”, I protested to my friend.

“Graham!”, said Brassier with mock exasperation, “We need to send you to marketing school. Look at the crosstabs!”

And I did make a brief attempt to look at the columns to the right, but saw nothing but numerical gibberish. I shook my head again. Brassier exhaled loudly as if tolerating a five-year-old, then pressed a button and made a terse announcement by loudspeaker to Petra in the other room: “You may proceed!”

We could easily hear Petra in her inscrutable, vaguely continental accent, asking the focus group members what came to mind when they thought about realism. People shifted in their chairs in annoyance.

“Realism is philosophically naive!” said one.

“I think of it as sort of a philosophy for boring old Catholic guys,” said another, “not flashy like Derrida.”

Suddenly an aggressive, portly character with an unshaved look burst out angrily : “How can we talk about something that exists outside of our talking about it ? That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!”

An intelligent-looking younger woman in the group was even more dismissive : “P is for passé,” she sneered.

I must have looked dejected by these words, because Brassier simply raised a hand, as if telling me to be patient.

Once the focus group had finished what became a 15-minute collective harangue against realism, they seemed to have run out of epithets for the doctrine. With impeccable timing, Petra then stood up and casually strolled to the front of the room, as the focus group members waited spellbound for her next words.

“Pick up the handsets I gave you earlier,” she cooed. All obeyed without a sound. “We’re now going to play another little word association game. I will say a phrase, and you turn the dial up if it makes you feel positive, and down for a negative feeling.” Brassier was already chuckling faintly, as if knowing exactly what was about to happen.

“Naive… realism ?” Petra drawled smokily, sounding more like Marlene Dietrich every time she spoke. “But what if I said not naive realism, but rather… critical… realism?” While saying this, she clicked a remote control device, and a full-color slide of a smiling Roy Bhaskar appeared on screen, at the peak of his counter-culture look.

In the hidden booth, Brassier drew my attention to a luminous meter, as the readings shot up sharply. I began to utter my astonishment at this, but Brassier waved my words off abruptly as if they were a commonplace.

In the other room, Petra continued : “What about… Deleuzian… realism ?” Another click of the remote control, and a photograph of the ponytailed Manuel DeLanda appeared on the screen, looking like a genuine Mexican cinema idol. In the booth, the meter shot all the way to the top. My jaw dropped as I looked to Brassier, but he just nodded knowingly without even returning my glance.

Petra was now in total control of the mood in the other room : “And what if instead of just ‘realism,’ we said speculative … realism ?” The meter again shot all the way to the top, as Brassier chuckled aloud for the first time since entering the booth.

Petra then changed tack, showing a series of slides of different faces, while asking the focus group members to free-associate the first words that came to mind in each case. In all there were about 25 faces shown to the members, but two stood out as drawing the most positive reactions…

In one case, a photo appeared of an unknown person whom Brassier later identified as Iain Hamilton Grant. “Friendly,” said one member. “Humorous,” said another. And finally: “Imaginative. I’d like to drink a glass of wine with this guy if I ever met him.”

Three slides later came Quentin Meillassoux, whom I vaguely recognized from a German website image of some weeks earlier. “Charming !” said the lone woman in the group, the dismissive opponent of all realisms. “He seems cool and all,” said the portly, unshaven character. “He looks French,” said another, “and let’s face it, the French have been producing most of the new philosophy lately.”

Brassier chuckled knowingly once again.

Twenty minutes later, the group had been dismissed, and Petra returned to the booth. “Good work,” Brassier told her. She waved goodbye and exited into the London night.

“I think I get it now,” I interjected. “We invite DeLanda and those other two guys to join us, and we call ourselves ‘The Speculative Realists,’ right ?”

“Almost right,” said Brassier. “DeLanda was only included as a control. He’s too big already. He doesn’t need us, and he’d want more than his fair share of the cut. So we go with just the four of us.”

I nodded excitedly.

“There’s a new wave rising, my friend,” said Brassier with mock condescension. “And we’re going to ride this baby all the way to the bank.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out two more cigars. We took long drags while laughing uncontrollably.