Do you have any idea about "speculative realism" or that "object oriented onthology" thing - I was too young to be present when that was supposedly popular on the blogosphere or whatever so I still am not sure how big it was and how much it is a niche community just writting a wikipedia article about themselves.
The only really big name is Nick Land, but if I know my "lore" , he was big way before. Otherwise there is that Cyclonopedia book, but it's author seems to have rejected his previous ideology.
Anyways, I know this is a random question and probably irrelevant, but I dunno, guess its sad to feel out of the loop (a more funny example is "the summer of chillwave" which also supposedly was super big in music but somehow nobody talks about it, while everyone remembers way older trends with both more nostalgia, critcism, and documentation)
Would also say that I think it had some other links with NRX, but the modern Thielbux meta seems to not jive with it, when he is obssessed with that Girard guy and LoTr stuff lol
It was big on the internet and made a brief splash in academe circa 2008-2010—I remember a friend in grad school trying to collate it with literary realism, trying to do a speculative-realist reading of Sister Carrie or a Jack London novel or something—but in that context in had no NRx-ish connotation, was rather part of a broader suite of "realist" anti-humanisms representing a new generation's exhaustion with the linguistic turn, the idea being to discuss the thing-it-itself as itself after all and not as linguistically constituted or socially constructed, except that the critical intent was still to decenter the oppressive subject. There was "thing theory," "affect theory," the "vibrant matter" new materialist feminism, etc., leading up to the anthropocene discourse that came later. I never got too into any of this, I hate reading theory, though I did end up doing something with affect theory in the least persuasive section of my dissertation. But I was sufficiently impressed with Harman's manifesto for "object-oriented literary criticism" (apparently just an old-fashioned formalism) to quote it twice on here 12 years ago! The summer of chillwave totally passed me by since that was the summer I had to read all the books for my oral exams. Trying to plow through The Death of the Heart and The Dialectic of Enlightenment in a few days and at the same time was not chill at all. I barely listened to any pop music in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I remember "Paper Planes" and then nothing until I was finished with grad school, when Lorde and Lana woke me from my dogmatic slumber. Anyway, yes, Girard vs. Land is the high-theory corollary of the split between the Christian populists and the tech right; Land's "realist" autonomy of capital formalized as technology is exactly what Girard's method wishes to unmask as vectors of immanent desire that ought to be pointed toward God instead. (It's funny that the two leading right-wing ideologies at the moment are just different forms of Marxism: Land the progressive eschatological futurist variant, the Marx of the opening of the Manifesto or Russia in the first years of the revolution; Girard the critical variant devoted to the debunking of ideologies, the redescription of cultural fetish objects as occluded forms of social relation, from the Marx of the critique of commodities to the Frankfurt School... But, as I said, I hate theory, and am in over my head here.)
