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Architecture on Harman, Harman on Architecture – The Architecture Exchange, London, May-June, 2013

1 May 2013

From Joseph Bedford and Jessica Reynolds:

The Architecture Exchange, a new platform aimed at fostering serious debate between architecture and newly emerging ideas in other fields, founded by Joseph Bedford (doctoral candidate at Princeton University) and Jessica Reynolds (director at vPPR Architects). The Architecture Exchange will begin as a public lecture-based and on-line institution with the aspiration to become a gallery/event space in London in the future. The format for each series is that a carefully selected group of architectural thinkers are invited to discuss the ideas of a contemporary thinker in relationship to architecture, with a final talk by the thinker him/herself responding to the architectural papers previously presented. These presentations are filmed and uploaded on to the website, and the papers are compiled into a new publication series.

We are excited to announce that the first series focuses on the philosophical work of Graham Harman, the leading figure in the Speculative Realist movement, as we believe that his object-oriented philosophy offers a new and vital framework that might stimulate thought in architectural discourse around the topic of the real and the sensual. Responding to the series’ question, “Is there an Object-Oriented Architecture?” Graham Harman’s radical reading of Heidegger is discussed in relationship to architecture during three events in May by six eminent architectural thinkers: Peg Rawes (UCL), Patrick Lynch (Lynch Architects), Jonathan Hale (Nottingham University), Adam Sharr (Newcastle University), Lorens Holm (Dundee University), and Peter Carl (London Met). The fourth and final event of the series invites Graham Harman to respond to the speakers, concluding with a round-table debate with all the participants. All talks are free and hosted at the Swedenborg Society (20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH) on the dates listed below.

7pm, Wednesday 1 May 2013

Peg Rawes – Nonhuman Architectural Ecologies
Patrick Lynch – The Resistance of Things

7pm, Wednesday 15 May 2013

Jonathan Hale – Coping without noticing?: Buildings as Tool-Beings
Adam Sharr – A House With One Wall

7pm, Wednesday 29 May 2013

Lorens Holm – Architecture and Its Objects
Peter Carl – A Punkt in Spice

5.30pm, Saturday 22 June 2013

Graham Harman – What Objects Mean for Architecture
+ debate with Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch, Jonathan Hale, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm and Peter Carl

Venue:
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH

Free entry
Doors open half an hour before the start time

In Collaboration with the Swedenborg Society

Refreshments available

Tags:architecture, The Architecture Exchange, The Swedenborg Society
Posted in Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism | Leave a Comment »

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, by Timothy Morton

14 February 2013

Timothy Morton’s new book, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, is the latest in the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press. The open access HTML version is now available here. PDF and paperback to follow.

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, OOO, is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.

Cover art by Tammy Lu, cover design by Katherine Gillieson.

Tags:Katherine Gillieson, Open Humanities Press, Tammy Lu, Timothy Morton
Posted in Books, Ecology, Object-oriented philosophy | Leave a Comment »

On Latour and Simondon’s Mode of Existence – fragments of a fictional dialogue yet to come

4 February 2013

On Latour and Simondon’s Mode of Existence – fragments of a fictional dialogue yet to come.

Yuk Hui, intervention given in a Workshop on Latour@ Denkerei, 28 Jan,2013

This intervention from its outset searches a dialogue between Simondon and Latour, a fictional dialogue, that nevertheless exists though it hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, or should I say it was once about to happen, when Latour praised Simondon’s Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques, and commented that it is a work that didn’t yet find its successor. But it does exist, this fictional dialogue, or at least we can talk about its mode of existence if you prefer since being fictional is also a mode of existence. We cannot draw a squared circle but we can think of a squared circle, it has meanings, this was an example given by Husserl as a critique of Frege’s logism. The secrete philosopher of Bruno Latour, Étienne Souriau hold a similar idea in his Les différents Modes d’existence. A fictional object or character doesn’t occur in time and space as a physical object, or a historical event, but it does exists in works, in the socio-psychological life and the imagination of their readers and witness. Modes of existence is always plural, it doesn’t follow the rule of contradiction, it is rather key to what Latour calls ontological pluralism.

Tags:Gilbert Simondon
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, philosophy, Sociology | 1 Comment »

Noortje Marres' Material Participation: technology, the environment and everyday publics reviewed by Mark Johnson

5 January 2013

Reblogged from Thinking culture:

Mark Johnson reviews Noortje Marres' Material Participation: technology, the environment and everyday publics for Information, Communication & Society.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

LARB review of Latour’s Enquête sur les modes d’existence

5 January 2013

By Stephen Muecke: “‘I am what I am attached to’: On Bruno Latour’s ‘Inquiry into the Modes of Existence.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 28th, 2012.

His new book, Enquête sur les modes d’existence (An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence), sold out of the first print run of 4,000 in 10 days. But it is not just a book; it is also a project in interactive metaphysics. In other words, a book, plus website. (Unheard of! A French philosopher using the Internet!) Intrigued readers of Latour’s text can go online and find themselves drawn into a collaborative project (so far only in French, but the English web pages will be up soon, and Catherine Porter’s translation of the book will be out from Harvard University Press in the spring). Simply register on the site, and you are free to offer commentary, counter-examples, snippets of movies, images, whatever. You may possibly graduate to the status of co-researcher, and even be invited to a workshop in Paris down the line, to thrash out the thornier problems.

Tags:An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, LARB, Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Muecke
Posted in Books, Bruno Latour, Ecology, philosophy, STS | 1 Comment »

Object-oriented sociology and the material turn

14 December 2012

Pierides, D. and Woodman, D. (2012). “Object-Oriented Sociology and Organizing in the Face of Emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the Material Turn.” The British Journal of Sociology, 63 (4): 662-679. H/t Ecology without Nature.

This paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by the Royal Commission into the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires during which 173 people died in the Australian State of Victoria. Often inspired by Bruno Latour’s material-semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. In Latour’s approach no object is reducible to something else – such as nature, the social, or atoms – it is instead a stabilized set of relations. A Latourian approach allows us to highlight how the Royal Commission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations. Graham Harman, in his object-oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a ‘relationist’ metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of ‘objects’ to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements of Harman’s ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material-semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.

Tags:The British Journal of Sociology
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, Organization studies | Leave a Comment »

METAphorisms

4 December 2012

Berlin-based META Magazine presents METAphorisms by Tim Morton and Tammy Lu. Aphorisms by Morton, drawings by Lu.

META asked artist Tammy Lu and philosopher Tim Morton to meditate on classical metaphysical vocabulary, by means of philosophical musings, color, form and motion. (…) Here, she takes on Morton’s philosophy by providing visual, topical and poetic maps, objects of all shapes and sizes, growing and enmeshing, and so it dawns on us that we are objects ourselves, entangled with other objects, no matter if these are bees or coffee machines.

Tags:META Magazine, METAphorisms, Tammy Lu, Tim Morton
Posted in art, philosophy, speculative realism | Leave a Comment »

Gilbert Simondon’s transindividual

17 November 2012

Speaking of Henning Schmidgen, I encountered his name once again this week: this time on the back cover of an interesting new book (new in English, that is), Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual by Muriel Combes (translated by Thomas LaMarre). There is also a substantial afterword by LaMarre entitled “Humans and Machines.”

Here is what Schmidgen says about the book:

This book is highly recommended to all of those wishing to better understand the radical importance of Simondon in current debates about networked affectivity, nonhuman agency, and the politics of nature. (…) Combes constructs an innovative form of multiplied materialism.”

Other endorsers include Eric Alliez:

Published in 1999, Muriel Combes’s succinct book remains to this day the best introduction to Simondon’s opus. But it does better: it introduces through Simondon the most contemporary stakes of an ontology of relation turned toward a politics of individuation.

…and Robert Mitchell:

With remarkable concision, Combes covers the entirety of Simondon’s work, from his breathtaking theory of individuation to his philosophy of technology and technical objects, while LaMarre’s afterword helpfully links Combes’s account of Simondon to the work of authors such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, and Isabelle Stengers.

…and Didier Debaise:

Gilbert Simondon was one of the most ambitious and inventive thinkers of twentieth-century philosophy but has for too long been unjustly neglected. Muriel Combes’s insightful book unquestionably ends this phase.

Tags:Didier Debaise, Eric Alliez, Gilbert Simondon, Henning Schmidgen, modes of existence, Muriel Combes, Robert Mitchell, Thomas LaMarre
Posted in Books, philosophy | Leave a Comment »

Latour video on The Modes of Existence project

16 November 2012

“The Modes of Existence project: an exercise in collective inquiry and digital humanities” – by Bruno Latour, 6 November 2012.

Understanding Society Lecture Series, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

Tags:CRASSH, University of Cambridge
Posted in Bruno Latour, Talks, Video recordings | 1 Comment »

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