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Charisma

21 February 2012

Charisma among others means ‘a special magnetic charm or appeal’ according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and it comes from the Greek kharisma, ‘divine favour’ or ‘gift,’ from kharizesthai, ‘to favour,’ which comes from kharis, ‘grace’ or ‘favour.’ And now it is also the name of a new research network focusing on interdisciplinary consumer market studies. See the announcement below. You may notice that a lot of the people involved have been active at the intersection of economic sociology and science and technology studies (STS), which one of the organisers once described as the “‘new’ new economic sociology.’

CHARISMA: CONSUMER MARKET STUDIES

We are pleased to announce that Charisma: Consumer Market Studies, a new online research network, is now live and can be accessed here: http://www.charisma-network.net

In collaboration with CRESC and the Journal of Cultural Economy, the site acts as a resource hub and network for researchers interested in consumer markets. It features a range of material including news items, events and announcements, commentaries and working papers as well as photo essays and data visualisations. At the moment, this includes recent posts from Franck Cochoy, Bill Maurer, Paul Langley, Linsey McGoey, Daniel Weinbren, and Liz McFall.

Charisma takes a robustly interdisciplinary approach to consumer market research since we believe that properly understanding the mix of devices and desires that drive markets means being open to experimental, visual, digital, as well as more traditional techniques, methods, theories and perspectives.

We invite interested researchers to participate and contribute to the site. Charisma is designed to allow the production of content amongst a diverse range of participants. Members of the research network will be issued with an account enabling them to upload content ranging from publication or conference announcements, photos, blog entries or research briefs.

With this in mind, if you or your colleagues are interested in being part of this research network, please send a request to admin@charisma-network.net.

Please feel free to distribute this email widely.

All the best,

The Charisma Team

Joe Deville, Goldsmiths, University of London
Liz McFall, Open University

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/charismanetwork
Join our mailing list: http://www.charisma-network.net (sign up at the bottom of the page)

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Economic sociology, Organization studies, STS | Leave a Comment »

A nice ANT story

20 February 2012

Enemies of ANT should beware of their opponents’ collective memory: “Ants remember their enemy’s scent.”

Ant colonies – one of nature’s most ancient and efficient societies – are able to form a “collective memory” of their enemies, say scientists. When one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy’s odour: passing it on to the rest of the colony. (…) Lead researcher Prof Mark Elgar explained to BBC Nature that all of the ants in the colony were able to draw on the experience of one worker. He described this as collective or “corporate wisdom”.

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, animals | 3 Comments »

Isabelle Stengers on progress

20 February 2012

Isabelle Stengers visits Halifax, Canada for a series of conversations as part of the “To See Where it Takes Us” series during March 5-9, 2012. Her keynote will be streamed live.

Professor Stengers’ keynote address will examine sciences and the consequences of what has been called progress. Is it possible to reclaim modern practices, to have them actively taking into account what they felt entitled to ignore in the name of progress? Or else, can they learn to “think with” instead of define and judge?

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Posted in philosophy, STS | Leave a Comment »

Toscano on capitalism and panorama

18 February 2012

Alberto Toscano’s forthcoming lecture at Simon Fraser University on 6 March 2012, among others deploying Latour’s concept of the ‘panorama:’

Capitalism and Panorama: Staging Totality in Social Theory and Art

Can, or should, social theory try to ’see it whole’? This paper addresses the representation of social totality along theoretical, political and aesthetic axes. It considers the demand for orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society present in the programmatic notions of ’sociological imagination’ in C. Wright Mills and ‘cognitive mapping’ in Fredric Jameson. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience and systemic constraints, knowledge and action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand.

This lecture will contrast these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. It will explore this contrast through the ‘panorama’, both as a theoretical metaphor and as the object of different visual and artistic practices.

Bio: Alberto Toscano teaches in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism (2010) and The Theatre of Production (2006). He is an editor of the journal “Historical Materialism”.

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, philosophy, politics, Social theory, Sociology | 3 Comments »

Когда вещи продолжают тренировки

14 February 2012

My Russian is quite rusty, so I didn’t manage to decipher it all, but this short review of The Prince and the Wolf in the Russian Journal seems to be saying some rather nice things about the book. I think the title of the article translates as “When things continue to act.”

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman | 2 Comments »

Enemies like Bruno Latour

8 February 2012

Two recordings of talks in the “My Best Fiend” series at Goldsmiths discussing Latour (among others), by David Oswell from Goldsmiths and Steve Fuller from the University of Warwick, have now been made available at the CSISP blog.

  • David Oswell: ‘Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us’ (December 6th, 2011) [The first part of the title in fact alludes to the "wolf" metaphor that emerged from The Prince and the Wolf debate]
  • Steve Fuller: ‘Bruno Latour and Some Notes on Some Also Rans’ (December 13th, 2011)

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Social theory, STS, Talks | 1 Comment »

Picture Editing After Bataille

8 February 2012

In reference to my earlier post on Critical Dictionary, here is the invitation to the show and a conversation with the editor:

Join us on Wednesday 15 February, 6.30-8pm for the next in our series of AfterWORK events:

One Plus One: Picture Editing After Bataille
David Evans and Patrizia di Bello In Conversation

David Evans and Patrizia di Bello will discuss radical picture editing by historical figures such as Georges Bataille, Bertolt Brecht and Guy Debord, as well as contemporary resonances. The event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Critical Dictionary, which will be open for viewing prior to the discussion start time.

David Evans teaches at the Arts University College at Bournemouth. He is the editor of the anthology Critical Dictionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2011) and curator of the exhibition by the same name currently showing at WORK. Patrizia di Bello teaches at Birkbeck College and is the co-editor of The Photobook (IB Taurus, 2012).

The event is free but seating will be limited. RSVP to press@workgallery.co.uk to reserve a place.

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Posted in art | Leave a Comment »

CfP: Making the World Happen

7 February 2012

Making the World Happen: International Events and the Logistics of Globality

111th AAA annual meeting, Borders and Crossings, November 14-18, 2012, San Francisco, CA

Paper abstracts are invited for this panel to be submitted to the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA).

International events (Olympic Games, World’s fairs, World cups, transnational meetings and conventions) play nowadays a significant role in the creation and densification of global connections for the flow and circulation of people, materials, capital, technologies and ideas. Whereas anthropologists have often paid attention to the symbolic and ideological dimensions of international events, analyses of the institutional, managerial and logistical frameworks of these events have predominantly been economic in orientation with a focus on their overall costs and benefits. Conversely, the recent surge of publications in event management tellingly displays a new corporate interest towards the discipline of cultural anthropology as ethnographic insights are being valued as useful toolboxes in the ongoing management of conflicts and controversies in the context of international events. This panel will bring together ethnographic investigations into the organizational layers of these short-lived global hubs in order to explore in comparative guise their complex assemblages of material and infrastructural configurations that allow for the effectivity of transnational operations.

Submitted proposals for presentations should address one of the following topics:

1. Following controversies: Opening the black box of international events sheds light on the debates and conflicting concerns that emerge between various stakeholders (individual, institutional, international, non-human, etc.) around issues such as design, themes, orientation, outsourcings, public safety, legal harmonizations.

2. Assembling atmospheres: Events designed for the fostering of global connections and the development of international exchange rely on the manufacture of breathable spaces, that is the constitution of artificial climates, spheres of immunity, air-conditioned globalities (Sloterdijk) achieved through an ecology of devices and infrastructures.

3. Spatiotemporal attunements: International events are also anchored upon the existence of “grooved channels” (Geertz, Bestor) that support the engineering of a “ready-made” globalization in order to facilitate the enactment of the daily operations of global connectivity. These include the creation and enforcement of standards that accompanies the transnational extensions in the circulation of materials, people and commodities, the constitution of “obligatory passage points” (Callon), and the establishment of hourly schedules for deliveries, inspections, maintenance, accounting activities, etc.

Please submit the following information to Van Troi Tran (vantroitran@fas.harvard.edu) by Friday, March 16, 2012 for consideration:

Name, Institutional affiliation, Paper title, 250-word abstract, Contact information

Organizers: Van Troi Tran, Sophie Houdart

For more information:

American Anthropological Association: http://www.aaanet.org/

AAA 2012 Annual meeting guidelines and rules for participation: http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm

Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology: http://sunta.org/

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Conferences, Michel Callon, Peter Sloterdijk, STS | Leave a Comment »

T for Thing

29 January 2012

Under the letter “T” in David Evans’s Critical Dictionary, “Thing” is represented by Tammy Lu and Katherine Gillieson’s cover design for Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects book, accompanied by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s prospectus for the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press. Hat tip to Tammy Lu.

Abandoning the conventional format of the dictionary, Critical Dictionary is an ambitious cornucopia of ideas, images, and illustrations, that emphasise the open-ended, provisional and unfinished nature of language, communication and meaning. Inspired by the mock dictionary Georges Bataille edited for ‘Documents’ in 1929 and 1930, Critical Dictionary is an adventurous title, aiming to puncture pretension, and declassify terms in a playful, humourous manner. Bringing together newly commissioned work, material gathered from online art magazine criticaldictionary.com, and featuring elements such as a retrospective assessment of the ZG magazine by former editor Rosetta Brooks, one of the seminal products of the art scene in the 1980s, and catalyst to the development of the so-called ”Pictures Generation”, Critical Dictionary is a rich exploration of ideas and language in all its forms.

Update: 

The Critical Dictionary exhibition had just opened at the WORK Gallery in London and will be on until 25 February 2012.

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Posted in art, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, philosophy, speculative realism | 1 Comment »

Hatch by Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert

27 January 2012

If you happen to be in the resurgent boomtown of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, Canada between March 30 and June 10 this year, and have an interest in the intersection of art and urbanism, check out Hatch, Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert’s show at the Mendel Art Gallery:

Artists by Artists: Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert

Hatch
March 30 to June 10, 2012

Hatch is an exhibition of parallel investigations into notions of path finding and city building. Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert’s research and drawings address historical and imagined narratives of Saskatoon by tracing and layering events, characters, infrastructures and geography.

Using human and architectural characters of Saskatoon as a narrative code, Lu proposes a process of city planning that involves a continual personal re-configuration of local stories. Bueckert renders collected images into hybrid maps that explore the evolutions and revisions of city building. Employing a non-linear book format, the artists splice their imagined urban spaces to form permutations of possible mapping schemes.

Lu and Bueckert’s collaborative image immediately reminded me of this Sloterdijk passage:

Life is a matter of form–that is the hypothesis we associate with the venerable philosophical and geometrical term “sphere.” It suggests that life, the formation of spheres and thinking are different  expressions for the same thing. Referring to a vital spheric geometry is only productive, however, if one concedes the existence of a form of theory that knows more about life than life itself does–and that wherever human life is found, whether nomadic or settled, inhabited orbs appear, wandering or stationary orbs which, in a sense, are rounder than anything that can be drawn with compasses. (pp. 10-11)

Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume I: Bubbles. Microspherology

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Posted in art, Peter Sloterdijk | Leave a Comment »

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