possibly the *initial* advice post

possibly helpful remarks on writing productivity
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

Since the last post I sat down and wrote a 7-page conclusion to the upcoming lecture on causation, and think that the pages are good. My point in announcing this is the opposite of what you might think– my point, namely, is to talk about the humble fragility of all productivity, and to reflect on some sheer practical accidents that helped a naturally self-destructive procrastinator like me become someone who can occasionally write 25 good pages in a single sitting, and usually half a dozen on demand with no trouble at all. A surprising number of readers wrote to thank me warmly (and sometimes even emotionally) for the previous tips about how to make effective notations in books. For this reason, I suspect that a large part of my readership is made up of Angst-ridden graduate students. I was there myself not so long ago. (March 17, 2009 will be the 10th anniversary of my doctoral defense.)

Why do I enter upon this topic, in a genre somewhere between confession and advice column? Because people in the intellectual sphere generally do not help each other enough. This blog has occasionally taken a personal turn, and may as well do so again here. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve met in academic life were unproductive for a time, and many of them remained thus forever without end. We’ve all seen the toxic strategies in play in such cases… an odd mix of insufficient focus, self-doubt, commitment to “perfect” work serving as an alibi for avoiding merely excellent work. (Along with the “getting away with” theory of ethics, alibis stand near the core of my thoughts on ethics. We all tend to self-destruct by creating alibis more than through any other means. This deserves a lengthy post of its own, and will receive one at a later date.)

The doctoral dissertation is almost designed to provoke catastrophes of this sort. Take a group of highly ambitious and intelligent young people, ask them to pull off a single gigantic piece of theoretical work as an initiation rite, and place them quite often in a competitive and unsupportive environment. What do you think will occur? (I happen to think it’s a necessary ritual, and am just conceding that it’s a very dangerous one.)

By no means would I give myself high marks for progress on my own dissertation. I’m still very happy with the quality of it (Tool-Being is it, except for stylistic revisions and the last-minute additions of the Zizek and Dreyfus sections two years later). It took me nearly 8 years to defend the dissertation from the time of the Master’s Degree, and though I left the Chicago area twice for various personal stuff, I wasn’t exactly “taking time off” either. The material was always on my mind, I was constantly reading Heidegger and other things in preparation for it, and though I suppose our graduate program was uncommonly warm and friendly on the whole, there was a general feeling of being in constant strife with all of those professors– much of which was probably sheer illusion. Those years now feel in retrospect like a tableau of thrilling intellectual discovery, and I guess they were, since they can be mapped almost month by month due to my diligent record-keeping. But the general emotional background radiation of the era, at least vis-à-vis the written work, was misery.

I do want to help, if you are one who needs it. It is painful to watch others postpone assignments, dump dissertations, lose faith in themselves, and not follow up the projects that would overjoy the rest of us if completed. Furthermore, those who do not get to where they meant to go can become not only suicidally melancholic (a wretched thing to observe or endure) but also sadistically aggressive and belittling toward the rest of us, which is simply unjust.

Having already spoken last night about the need to reverse weaknesses into strengths, let me give a bit more unsolicited advice, because I’m sure some people will want it even if we’ve never met. I’m trying to write the sort of thing I wish I could have read online some time during the mid-1990’s. Stonewall Jackson, the eerily effective Confederate general during the US Civil War, always said “be prepared for sudden opportunities to turn defeats into victories,” and though I like everyone still need help on plenty of fronts, writing productivity is no longer one of them– though it used to be the deepest smoldering crater of them all. I don’t remember ever writing a paper before the last minute until I was well over 30.

Now I’m going to change tone a bit and become ruthlessly practical, because that’s what worked for me. To repeat, whatever horrible hole you’ve dug for yourself with written work– whether it’s countless incompletes, a never-ending dissertation, a feeling that there is absolutely no one who will care about the work, I’ve been in all those places before. So, you can get out of it. And just as importantly– I and others *want* you to get out of it. I can’t read the work of every one of you, but some of that work may hit me or my friends on the right day and rock our worlds. The old cliché holds good: if these words help even one reader, then I don’t mind baring part of a soul in this fashion.

The following steps, I repeat, are purely practical. But that’s all you really need.

1. Seek models. You first have to want to be productive. I did want it; I was simply self-destructing by getting too tightly-wound about it. The best writer known to me was and is DR. ALPHONSO FRANK LINGIS, a haunting stylist and peerless correspondent. The questions I would ask him were about his daily routine. The Lingis Rule, which you need not follow (I don’t do it myself) is not to leave the house until he’s written a certain number of pages. In the early years he had to force himself, he says, but now it’s simply like breathing for him. Having split a few conference hotel rooms with Lingis over the years, it is always his quiet typewriter that awakens me after dawn in those rooms. In my own generation, not to embarrass him, Peter Hallward is shockingly productive, and once in awhile I’ll catch myself thinking that I can’t pack it in for the night, because he’s probably going to cut me down with a massive relational ontology one of these days. (Just like Bobby Kennedy turning around and going back to the office whenever he saw Jimmy Hoffa’s office light still on. I can’t see Hallward’s window from Egypt, but his “chess-piece” objections will ring forever in my ears.)

2. Try to hang out with productive people. I suppose this is like trying to break alcohol or drug addictions… You have to make a choice between hanging out with people who are looking for good alibis, and those who are really looking to close the deal. To repeat, everyone has times of life and areas in life where they are in “alibi” mode, so there is nothing arrogant or cruel about avoiding them for this reason. Maybe they are energy sources in other areas of life even if they are energy-suckers when it comes to intellectual work.

We all instinctively know the signs of the energy-sucker: procrastination, passive-aggressive changes of the subject of conversation without explanation, lukewarm contrarian rebukes to every idea you ever share with them, and a general feeling in their presence that they are trying to keep you on the defensive in tiny subliminal ways. You can avoid these people without condemning them to hell; it is your right– the right of survival. And you can even do so without guilt: they will still be your betters in some area or another, and you can learn from them in those areas, provided you’re able to linger in their presence without feeling like you have lymphoma. Just don’t deal with them on the level of intellectual work. If you’re sure that you want to be productive, then you must avoid the alibi-makers.

A few relevant quotes here… WIlliam S. Burroughs saying “if someone make you feel like you’re losing two pints of blood every time you speak with them– avoid that person.” And recently I was reading another classic author, I don’t remember which, who said that we already instinctively know who will give us energy and who will suck it, yet we seek out the energy-suckers anyway through a kind of “imprudent curiosity.” (Who said that? Anyone remember? I was reading it within the last few weeks.) It strikes me as well-put. There is an odd grain of masochism in the human character that prods us to seek the darkness that sucks the energy. Try to fight such inner masochism, which can be reduced to harmless trace elements with a bit of work.

3. Even more practically speaking…Write from an outline. I think I’ve mentioned this before in a different post. There is a kind of self-correcting tendency that spoils our writing… We often assume that our thoughts on a topic are the natural thoughts of any old human on that topic. Thus, it seems too obvious simply to put our thoughts down in order, given our natural assumption that we’ll simply be producing “clone” work in that case. So, you might start to jazz things up and overwrite, and the resulting product has lost its voice despite/because of the overwriting.

Like any rebellious high school student, I despised outlines. The first time I really used one was out of panic. I was nineteen years old and had my annual Sophomore Essay due the next day. I had 13 pages written and needed at least 20 total, and at that age 7 pages can feel like a mountainous task for a single day. It was getting late into the night and I was procrastinating. Ironically, the outline was an “alibi”, to the effect of: “actually, I can sleep after all– I’ll just outline the rest of the paper and write from it starting tomorrow morning.” But I wasn’t really sure if I believed it; it was a form of escapism in a way. However, I did stay up long enough to do the outline, with 3 points per paragraph covering the rest of my argument. And incredibly enough, I woke up early the next day and got an adrenaline rush from seeing all the points in the outline. I then had 18 additional pages written by 6 PM when the essay was due. In the end it was a 31-page paper, the longest I had ever written at that age, and it even won a prize. (The subject is Dante, read from sort of a Husserlian angle. Lots of Ortega y Gasset in there too; in fact, I aped his style a bit too much, but I still think it’s a hell of an essay for a kid.)

There have been even more surprising things of that kind in later years, such as writing the whole Zizek section in Tool-Being without leaving my chair, while waiting for a delayed Cairo visitor’s airplane to arrive. I’ve known others capable of far more than I am in this respect, but perhaps they didn’t start from such a deep pit.

But back to the main point… the outline is where the personality is. Your personality doesn’t come in through flourishes and clever words, but through the way each step of your thinking fits together with the next. There is nothing dry or abstract about logic. Each person’s methods of rhetorical transition and logical inference are almost bizarrely idiosyncratic; no one breaks the world into exactly the same parts as you do. Just stick to the outline and your personality will shine forth, and it will even be able to withstand bad sentences and paragraphs (which are the mere surface-qualities, where the style is the thing itself!). It is not always on the sentence-by-sentence level that we find good writing, but often on the level of structure.

Also… if you force yourself to do the outline, you are forced to confront your ideas in their nakedness, and will start to see the gaps where you don’t really have as much to say yet as you thought. It’s important to be aware of those moments, if possible.

4. If possible, you should also write in genres that are not the most important to you. You may have heard the story about how Borges primarily saw himself as a poet, and tried short fictions while recovering from illness, knowing that he would not be too traumatized if illness hindered his work in this less beloved genre. And now, how many people view Borges primarily as a poet?

In retrospect, my first taste of high productivity was my brief sportswriting career, from roughly ages 28-30. I love sports, and respect sports, but it’s not my real calling (despite a few flirtations with more permanent offers at the time), and hence there wasn’t too much at stake. In academic writing there is a feeling of having to overcraft each and every sentence, but you just can’t afford to do that when you’re writing for payment on time-sensitive topics such as the preview of tomorrow’s Cowboys-Packers playoff game. You have to do it quickly and colorfully so that people are willing to spend their time and money reading it– after all, no one owes you the time to read a damn thing you’ve written. There is so much to do in the world besides read someone’s article or book, so if you want people to read yours, make sure it’s interesting. None of us would dare bore anyone at a party or dinner or on a date, so why take the liberty of boring readers?

5. Once you’re past the potential catastrophe stage of life, it can also be good to fall by dumb luck into a high pressure situation. In my own case, my current employer initially had an utterly strangling tenure quota that had already been exceeded. I loved Egypt and wanted to stay, but had approximately 0% chance under normal conditions of being allowed to apply for tenure– without utterly blowing down the door on publications and thereby getting a special chance directly from the Provost. So that’s what I did, for the primary reason of staying longer in Egypt. If not for that unpleasant but lucky pressure… well, maybe I would have played the “perfectionist” game a bit more and tinkered with things too much. But now that game is on the floor in pieces, completely unmissed. No one does perfect work; excellent is the goal.

Also… don’t compare your productivity to that of established people in your field. There’s a reason that they’re doing 15 articles and 1 book every year, and it’s not because they’re working 20 times harder than you. It just means they’ve reached 20 times your reputation, and with reputation people start asking you to do stuff. No one ever asked me to write anything for them 5 years ago, and now every week someone is asking, and on paper it seems (falsely) as though I’m working much harder now than then. Writing articles or lectures because people asked you to do so is an absurdly effective prod, because you don’t want to let them down.

It’s no longer any mystery to me how the Zizeks and Derridas churn out three books per year. Not there myself; not enough time on my hands. But if you were that famous, and had that many requests for material, you’d get it done too.

But I don’t want to bore anyone now either, and hence will bring this to a close. There are many other possible hints for saving your life, but these are the first to come to mind. If you follow the spirit of these ideas seriously, or related ones, you will start seeing projects to the finish line, and you’ll start treating yourself and others much better than in the past.

an early advice post

supplementary advice
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

Late start today, and I mostly plan to let myself and others catch up. I was hoping to post that whole Leibniz carnival fragment for morning entertainment, but it’s not on my hard drive anymore. I now remember that it was way back in 1996 when I typed it out for my friend, and for reasons I no longer recall, my current hard drive has nothing on it before `97. (I think there’s a Zip drive somewhere with the earlier stuff, but I’m too tired to look through boxes for it.)

I have a few pieces of supplementary advice, related to the long post on writing. The first is actually well-known, and constantly offered by professional writing coaches.

1. Get something on paper immediately. The source of anxiety is nothingness. If you’re afraid to speak before an audience, it’s on some level the fear of being completely destroyed by it, when in fact you’ll still have plenty of things going for you even if you make a total fool of yourself. Even a catastrophe will be finite, and that’s important to remember. The analogous insight in writing is that the anxiety comes from a fear of having *nothing at all* to say. Even getting one or two paragraphs down on paper will embolden you to do the rest. Zizek described this process quite movingly in the conversations with Daly… how he has to trick himself into writing books, pretending that he’s only going to write one paragraph, then that paragraph has a loose end that forces him to write another, and so forth. I wouldn’t say I trick myself in this way, but do find it important to merely posit the opening of an article by fiat, soon after the idea comes to mind. I’ll be writing that review of Brassier’s book, for instance, and have no time to review my homework on it right now. But the very moment I was asked to do it, I sat down and wrote the first three pages. That was important, because now it’s not a terrifying burden of nothingness in the back of my mind, but is already the stub of a finished article. Most likely when I go back those pages will be a little scrappy, but there’s no question that it will be an effective nucleus of a paper. Also, immediately after being asked to write something is usually the moment when you get most excited about it, so it’s good to do an outline right then. There will come a later time when the article is almost due, but you’re feeling tired and no longer think you even have one thing to say about the topic. I’m confident that my basic reactions to Brassier’s work are already contained in those first 3 or 4 pages, and for this reason it feels (probably correctly) like something I can polish off with two days of reviewing his book and two days of writing the rest of the article. It’ll be a rewarding long weekend project, not a burden. Also, there’s a real pleasure in creating a chain of ideas out of nothing.

2. Write first, edit later. I hated this advice as a student, because it seemed like what all the dull teacher’s pets were doing. Seemed too much like a busywork tactic. But it’s not. If you stop and edit yourself while writing, you’ll become your own enemy. Lingis told me something similar… he said that every student he knew who had problems finishing a dissertation sank into a sort of staleness with their project. In order to avoid that staleness, he finds it necessary to write with a certain speed. He even has a theory that all the great ideas books in philosophy were written surprisingly quickly. I’ve since thought of a few counter-examples, but the basic idea turns out to be powerful. Lingis said that of course he goes back through and polishes his drafts many times, but the things he wrote down quickly and unthinkingly always turn out to be the most valuable.

3. “Always delete your first paragraph– especially if you’re proud of it.” I was given this advice by my former music teacher at St. John’s, Mr. Elliott Zuckerman. As time goes by you start to internalize the rule and hence you never even write that delete-worthy first paragraph. But the opening paragraph will generally be the site of excessive hesitation, self-undercutting excessive modesty, self-undercutting excessive cockiness, and general overwriting.

I’ll give one example from my favorite fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft. Though I think the first two pages of “The Dunwich Horror” are among the finest prose in the English language (the critique of excessive adjectives misses the point in this particular case), there is another case where I think Lovecraft should have followed the Zuckerman Rule: always delete your opening paragraph, especially if you’re proud of it. The story in question is “The Whisperer in Darkness,” where I usually just skip the first paragraph and pretend that it doesn’t exist.

I wouldn’t say that it’s horribly written or anything. It begins: “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual shock near the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred— that last straw which sent me racing out of the Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night…”

What bothers me is the somewhat forced gimmick of the in media res. A frantic narrator has obviously emerged from a horrifying situation (in this case, crab-like winged fungi from the planet Yuggoth who want to remove his brain from a skull and take it through outer space in a metal cannister).

But the story is more controlled, and in my view more sinister, if allowed to begin with the second paragraph:

“The whole matter began, as far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in the swollen rivers…”

It would be hard to top this as the opening to a story. It’s lucid, conveys lots of information that situates us in time and space, gives some sense of the personality of the narrator, and moves quickly through a natural disaster to hints of something far more sinister. Lovecraft is a master, but if I could go back in time and tell him one thing (other than, “don’t worry, you will be appreciated one day”) it would be to excise the first paragraph of that story.

This bolsters a point I made earlier when speaking of outlines. What makes this second paragraph better, I believe, is that the drama is coming from the sheer structure of the thing. The reader is unprepared for the opening screams of the true opening paragraph, which may provoke a mood of alarm, but offer no anchor for this alarm to take on concrete form. Quite the opposite with the second paragraph, where a gentlemanly professor anchors the story in the calendar and in geography (even though Arkham and Miskatonic do not exist, which is another part of Lovecraft’s technique related to Miéville’s observation.) The heavy Vermont floods, unusual but not unknown, then push us one step further– to strange objects in the river. The reports of the objects describe them as monstrous, humanoid-looking things, and to soften the innate incredibleness of the reports, the Lovecraft professor character fends them off with a wryly skeptical anthropological critique. And so forth. One thought leads to the next, until finally you have moved from some rather banal initial statements about dates on the calendar and academic positions to the wildest conclusions about alien races and the structure of space-time. That’s why the opening paragraph is so flawed, in my view– it merely posits unnatural events before preparing us to believe them.

A work of metaphysics ought to function as the same way as “The Whisperer in Darkness,” but you have to get rid of that opening paragraph.

Remember, it’s not boring to start by stating the facts, like his second paragraph did. No one sees or states the facts in the same way, and your opening statement of the outlines of a philosophical problem will be drenched with personality even if you don’t realize it– as long as you’re just speaking in your own voice, and not trying on all sorts of affectations.

Of course, it can take years to separate the affectations from one’s own voice, since we all learn at first through imitation.

Leibniz/Des Bosses

Jeremy will be glad I put this one back up…

Leibniz and Des Bosses: almost 300 400 years
by doctorzamalek
January 19, 2009

There’s still time to start up a jubilee foundation of some sort… 2012-2016 will be the 300th 400th anniversary period of the important correspondence on the metaphysical status of body between Leibniz and the Jesuit thinker Batholomaeus Des Bosses. Samples should be available in any basic collection of Leibniz essays… on my desk right now is Hackett’s useful Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, in which excerpts from the correspondence run from pages 197-206.

This is where the end-of-life Leibniz tries (and fails to some extent) to develop the idea of body as a substantial chain, or vinculum. As more people turn to assemblage theory, the metaphysical question of how objects build up into larger objects is worth raising anew, and Leibniz is one of the godfathers of the problem.

It would be nice to commemorate the anniversary in some fashion, and we still have three years to figure out how. Normally an anniversary marks a discrete date rather than a period, so I’m not sure how this would be done… perhaps a collective Vinculum blog devoted to finding new ways to attack the problem. Or perhaps even a book series with an expiration window, publishing only in that small stretch of years, with all monographs dedicated to that problem.

Actually, as a NEW METAPHYSICS series editor now for OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS, I suppose I could just arbitrarily decree that all books published between 2012 and 2016 must come to grips with the Vinculum problem in some fashion. I’ll think it over, and will also field ideas.

But just read those 9 pages of sample correspondence, and you’ll already be somewhat up to speed.

Heidegger dead at 40

HEIDEGGER DEAD AT 40
blog post of January 20, 2009

*****

Heidegger dead at 40
by doctorzamalek

An interesting thought experiment has long fascinated me. If we wanted to make a great change in the course of twentieth century philosophy, one way to do so would be to have Heidegger killed off in some sort of accident during the summer of 1930.

“11 August, 1930. Stuttgart. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, age 40, was confirmed among the dead in yesterday evening’s terrifying rail accident just outside the city, authorities said…”

Let’s look briefly at some of the things this would change.

1. There would be no “Heidegger’s politics” issue. Though one or two students report having been surprised to hear Heidegger voice pro-Nazi sympathies in the late 1920’s, those reports are not widely known even now. If not for the Rectorate period under Hitler, they might be altogether unknown, or if known then excused as some sort of casual reaction against Weimar that would never have continued as the Nazis rose to power.

Statements like this would become possible: “Unfortunately, Heidegger was no longer alive to make an undoubtedly loyal defense of his honored mentor Husserl…”

So, the political problems would be largely missing. What about the rest of the picture?

2. Under this scenario, Heidegger’s recent work would have been among his most interesting. “What is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground” are extremely important works (though the latter is less widely read).

The 1929/30 lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, would have been a tantalizing note on which to disappear. This is well known as Heidegger’s “sexiest” course… The analysis of the three forms of boredom is superb, the most literarily skilled treatment of any mood that we find in Heidegger.

The discussion of animal life doesn’t really move the ball. Heidegger says that the stone is worldless, the animal is world-poor, and the human is world-forming, but then he doesn’t really shed any light at all on world-poverty or world-forming. He just keeps repeating his old mantra that animals encounter world, but not “as” world, which is more a placeholder for a pre-philosophical intuition than an actual philosophical insight. Nonetheless, even the animal parts of the book are exciting, filled with interesting anecdotes drawn from the sciences. Also, in the Leibniz lecture course a few years earlier, Heidegger had called for a “metonotology” to deal with such themes as ethics and sexual difference.

I think it’s safe to say that at that point in time, we would have been expecting Heidegger to take a far more concrete turn. He was getting into metontology-type particular topics, and was also starting to write more like a good novelist.

3. We would all still be haunted by the specter of “the unpublished second part of Being and Time.” Heidegger was able to make this a non-issue during his lifetime by effectively renouncing the project of completing the book. But if he was dead in 1930, we would still have expected it to get done, and we would be mourning its loss even now.

Under this scenario, my reading of Heidegger would pay a price, but so would that of mainstream Heideggerians.

My loss would be the great works from the 1949 Bremen “Einblick in das was ist” through the 1950’s. The fourfold is the core of my reading of Heidegger, and though I’ve argued you can find it in germinal form in 1919 and 1929, admittedly I only looked for it there because of its later full-blown appearance. My thought process was really pretty simple: “Wait a second, Heidegger talks about the fourfold all the time in those later works, and the scholars just ignore it because they don’t know what to do with it. Heidegger can’t just be pulling four poetic terms out of a hat for the fun of it– the man is an ontologist. They must be derivable from some basic structure he sees at work in the world, and people are just afraid to try to find it,” etc. etc.

So, my own life would be different. Presumably I would still have been drawn to the tool-analysis, but without the fourfold to chew on I probably would have been obsessively rereading the 29/30 course looking for traces of some way to get a “metontology” out of there.

However, I also would have been surrounded by different people. The mainstream Heideggerian is, by and large, a 1930’s Heideggerian… The endless appeals to veiling and unveiling… The dead-end wanderings in the Hölderlin crypt… The only moderately fruitful attention to his readings of Nietzsche.

So, the mainstream Heideggerian would be more of a Being and Time Heideggerian. Given the upsurge of concreteness just before Heidegger’s “death,” I suppose the more concrete passages from the magnum opus might retroactively take on greater significance– I refer to the analysis of everydayness, of course.

And incidentally, if there is one way in which my reading of Heidegger has changed since Tool-Being, it is probably my renewed appreciation for that part of Being and Time. I still think Max Scheler is better on those “anthropological” issues, but Heidegger does them better than I thought. In particular, I’m more delighted than ever by the observation that every Dasein chooses its hero, and some choose “das Man” as their hero.

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.