Grant’s idealist turn?

Iain Hamilton Grant, Jeremy Dunham, and Sean Watson are about to publish a 140,000-word anthology of idealist writings. This suggests that Iain may be about to take a Speculative Idealist turn, and that would surely be the most unorthodox of all post-SR splinter groups.

We’ll have to see the book to be sure, but it sounds to me like Iain really is taking a more idealist line now, including on nature. It’s his vast Schellingian side, I would guess, that is at the root of this possible development.

If true, it might also leave me stranded as the last of the original Speculative Realists (a term I still love) since Meillassoux and then Brassier both distanced themselves from the term for different reasons in each case.

But I happen to think it’s been one of the most effective intellectual brands of the past decade: just look at how clearly it has organized discussions and allegiances. Some people scoff at the term “brand,” since after all it seems to be mandatory to scoff at anything (even good things) that have some sort of business connotation. But Speculative Realism has done exactly what a brand should do. It has cut through the information clutter of our time and clearly and justifiably announced a new intellectual orientation in a manner that people can generally come to understand pretty quickly.

There are concert promoters, boxing promoters, and other such figures with which we have become familiar. These people take promising but confusing possibilities and turn them into realities by linking together various participants, venues, funding sources, and the like. What we need more of is intellectual promoters. If Latour teaches us anything, it’s that the rearrangement of concepts in one’s head is no different in kind from negotiations with a publisher or appearances on a talk show. In both cases you are rearranging actants, and there is no reason to view the former as an honorable act of virginal intellectual purity and the latter as a corrupt dirtying of one’s hands in the mire of the marketplace. If you don’t promote the ideas that you think are important, then who will?

One of the things with which I am most satisfied about the past decade, along with simply doing my own work, is the chance to have labored on various fronts as a kind of intellectual promoter. Only because Speculative Realism is a good idea is it worth setting up real-world professional infrastructure to support it. But only because that infrastructure has been built is Speculative Realism an increasingly well-known philosophical orientation today.

Building a philosophy is more like trying to build the world’s best subway system than like trying to be an ascetic monk —or revolutionary, for that matter— standing in a lofty tower and bemoaning the filth and disease of the world. We should want more coverage for the subway network but also faster trains, better monthly plans for users, safer brake systems, more environmentally sound fuel consumption, and even aesthetically superior design in the tunnels. We also need better geological studies of the composition of the soil through which the future lines will be running.

This is all on my mind because Infrastructure is the title of my larger work in progress at the moment. As explained before on this blog, an infrastructure is meant as an alternative to the notion of a system in philosophy, and equally as an alternative to the notion of a philosophy as a set of disconnected fragments (“the will to system is a will to falsity,” etc.). I tend to like systematic work, but it does open the door to intellectual falsity by demanding that people speak even on those topics where they have no ideas other than the usual banalities. And we all have those areas. No one is capable of innovating everywhere in their minds.

In short, avoidance of banality is perhaps more important in philosophy than avoidance of error. That will be one of the key points in the Infrastructure book, which is where I’ll also be turning back in a more classical direction…

I’ve said more than enough about Husserl and especially Heidegger by now, and it was shocking to look at my c.v. and see that pretty much all of my publications are on 20th and 21st century philosophy, which would be OK if not that it’s a complete misrepresentation of how I view my own work and the chief influences on it. I’m not a modernist, but an innovation-loving classicist.

In other news, I’m just about to teach Meillassoux for presumably the first time in the history of Egypt.