Harman interviews Bryant

Harman interviews Bryant on the latter's new book. Some excerpts follow. The first reminds me of the goal of political enaction, for by so participating we are changed. And it is a form of rhetoric, or as I call it, rhetaphor.

"I think it’s worthwhile to recall Ian Bogost’s concept of performative rhetoric. As I understand it, a
performative rhetoric is a rhetoric that persuades not through language, but through situating an
audience in an activity. The audience’s understanding is transformed through the activity of doing.
In this regard, games are a form of rhetoric. They change us through their play" (5).

This one highlights my perpetual preoccupation with real and false reason. He's discussing Marx on capitalism but applies him more broadly.


"The splendor of Marx, I think, was to have turned Hegel upside down. [...] The idealist sees the social world as issuing from the concept, mind, signifier, norm, etc. It is the idea, the idealist contends, that forms the world. [...] Marx, by contrast, was something of a speculative realist and even an actor-network theorist [...] He shows how relations and conditions of production, the physical activity of transforming the matters of the world, inform all dimensions of social relations. He also shows how the various tools and technologies we use condition us, affording and constraining certain forms of affectivity, cognition, bodily capacities, and so on" (6-7).

In this one he comments on materialism, and why many oppose it because it confronts us with our death. Hence to deny it we create idealistic conditions beyond our embodiment, which is the genesis of much of our idealistic philosophies and religions.

"Perhaps at the most basic, existential level, materialism forcefully confronts us with death, aging, and the fact that we are not sovereigns of our of bodies; that our bodies can do horrible things to us as in the case of serious illnesses such as cancer and that we suffer from fatigue and there are limits to what we can do on any given day. In this respect, I think a cross-cultural tendency to erase materialism can be discerned in all the world’s great religions and philosophical traditions, and that variations of a fantasy of liberation from the constraints of the body can be witnessed in all of these traditions. Whether we’re talking about the concept of a disembodied soul and cogito found throughout the western philosophical and religious traditions, or ideals of bodily mastery liberated from the constraints of physics found in many eastern traditions, these spaces of thought seem premised on a repression of materiality" (7).

In this excerpt he comments on how blogging has opened him through dialog to vistas he would likely never have encountered otherwise in academia. And that its social aspect is indispensable to thought itself, indicating the more extended mind thesis of assemblages.

"As time passed, blogging increasingly came to be the center of my thought. I believe that despite the fact that interactions in that medium can often be incredibly unpleasant, I’ve benefited from it tremendously because it’s exposed me to all sorts of people outside the world of philosophy, as well as texts and lines of thought I would not have otherwise encountered. This has led me on adventures of thought that I don’t think I would have otherwise had. Additionally, I’m put together in a way that I really can’t think without encountering others as a provocation for thought. The dialogical dimension of social media isn’t something ancillary to my thought, but is a necessary condition for me thinking at all" (9).