Graham Harman: The Concept of Infrastructure

Hosted by Dominic Boyer, introduced by me. Audience over 100 which is extraordinary for the middle of Houston. Curators from Menil. Undergrads. Etc. etc.




Graham Harman is a human being, founder of a philosophical movement, an assemblage of cells, someone who lives in Ankara, a cosmonaut beyond anthropocentrism, a jolly good friend, a once Associate Provost, a collection of bones, a fan of Picasso, a champion sentence writer, a continental guy who knows his analytic from his left elbow, this person actually here right now, Distinguished University Professor, erstwhile sportswriter, a sound of laughter, chief architect of object-oriented ontology, editor of series at Edinburgh and Ann Arbor, troll hammer, two eyes, two irises within two eyes, employee of the American University in Cairo, The Radial contraction folds of Schwalbe within a host of tiny fibrovascular tissues within two irises within two eyes, someone who refers to Grand Moff Tarkin in scholarly prose, vegetarian since a nipper, guy who within 24 hours of reading my book on causality wrote me eight pages of notes about every aspect of it, chap who walked with me up to Paul Klee's Fish Magic and was entranced, a sort of joyful accurate diamond drill with a taste for comedy, this lad from Iowa, a host of books from numerous presses that seem to fly forth like golden Frisbees of righteous love of wisdom to the eager hands of his readers, eater of a pizza slice with me in a an uptown New York dive, shower-up everywhere on Earth, fastest blogger in the West.

But that's just the way this entity called Graham appears and relates to all kinds of other things that are him and aren't him. With such an encomiastic list, I haven't begun to exhaust his Grahamness yet. And that's because…oh well, he should explain. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Graham Harman, “The Concept of Infrastructure.”