Ian and I got the opportunity to talk to Professor Graham Harman about his new book “Waves and Stones”. I was particularly pleased because the question Professor Harman deals with in the book is one that I have been writing about in my own book about the evolution of life. So it was a treat to talk to someone who has thought as carefully about the question as Prof. Harman has.
Is our universe most profitably understood as being made of things or processes? To some this surely seems like the most esoteric of questions that only people with way too much spare time would ever get enthusiastic about. However, one of the many things I loved about “Waves and Stones” is how Prof. Harman shows that this seemingly esoteric question is central to the way we consider our own lives.
He does this by reframing the question as one about continuity versus discreteness. As he asks right at the outset are our lives best thought of as discrete and pivotal moments or are they a long, slow, unbroken and gradual evolution?
Having posed the question in such a personal way he then goes on to show how the same tension, between gradual and continuous on the one hand and the discrete and revolutionary on the other, has shaped beliefs and arguments in everything from politics, to psychology and even architecture.
There was something in the book and our discussion which to me felt like it was of our present political and historical moment. A moment when the old world with its familiar assumptions is dying, but before the new has yet been born. An anxious, fractious and difficult moment.
