Workshop announcement:
“NO-THING PERSONAL? Drawing the frontier between persons and things in accounting, law and marketing
Time: Thursday 2nd February 2012, 14h-18h
Place: London School of Economics and Political Science, Graham Wallas Room (5th floor of the Old Building — behind the Senior Common Room)
Presentation:
After a few decades of increased interest in non-human things, it seems like a good idea for the social sciences to now look again, with their renewed intellectual gaze, at the traditional objects of anthropology that are human beings. What has the detour via things helped us discover about men and women, about individual subjects, about persons? More specifically, the question may be to understand in what ways humans are affected, and possibly redefined, by the non-humans they cohabit with. This workshop proposes to explore this question by confronting the point of view of three social scientists, from three distinct disciplines: Franck Cochoy (University of Toulouse, Sociology), Alain Pottage (LSE, Law) and Peter Miller (LSE, Accounting). Each of them has already, in his personal works, explored the frontier between persons and things (Pottage), subjects and instruments (Miller), or dispositifs and dispositions (Cochoy). All three have, moreover, focused acutely on the sphere of economic transactions, where persons aspirations intermingle constantly with accounting, legal and marketing devices. Their dialogue — or experimental trialogue, rather! — should help us see more clearly how unexpectedly personal things can sometimes get.
Schedule:
14h00-15h00: Franck Cochoy — “Animating markets”
15h00-15h15: intermission
15h15-16h15: Alain Pottage — “Taking law literally”
16h15-16h30: intermission
16h30-17h30: Peter Miller — “Democratising failure”
17h30-18h00: wrap-up Q&A
For further information on the workshop, please contact Martin Giraudeau, at m.l.giraudeau@lse.ac.uk.
In the latest issue (Vol. 2, No. 2) of Tecnoscienza (requires registration, but otherwise free):
Introducing “La fabrique du droit”: A Conversation with Bruno Latour (Paolo Landri and Bruno Latour)
Abstract: Bruno Latour talks with Paolo Landri about his book on the Conseil d’Etat (La Fabrique du droit). The conversation was held in 2006 at the time of the Italian translation of the book and illustrates the research project and the difficulties the author had in the field. At the same time, it clarifies the trajectories of Bruno Latour’s work and theoretical framework of his program of study with respect to sociology, anthropology, and philosophy of law. The conversation helps to understand the open-ended character of Bruno Latour’s research and reflection including STS as well as sociological, anthropological and philosophical themes.
Keywords: biology; law; after-ANT; anthropology; sociology
In addition to the seminar in Dublin, here is another call for a reading group (by Adam Greenfield at Urbanscale) around the themes of The Prince and the Wolf and The Prince of Networks, within the context of design, computing and urban planning:
Thanks to Anil Bawa-Cavia for pointing me at The Prince and the Wolf, a transcript of Graham Harman’s 2008 conversation with Bruno Latour at the LSE. This and Harman’s book on Latour, Prince of Networks, are the first things I’m reading in my attempt to reconcile the objects of object-oriented ontology with Latour’s actors, which endeavor is what sparked all of the above in the first place. (If anyone’s interested in forming a reading and discussion group around these and related issues, by the way, please do let me know.)
While the new Bruno Latour website is mainly a reorganisation of the content that was already there, there are a few new features that are worth mentioning. First, the list of books has been updated and translations are more easily identifiable. Second, tags have been added to at least some of the books and articles, making it easier to find and identify works that have a common thread running through them. Check out for example the “modes of existence” tag. And third, there is now an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to notifications, every time a new item is added to the website.
I might be behind the times but I’ve only just discovered that Amazon had introduced some innovations. Reviews posted on Amazon USA are now copied over directly to other English-language sites, such as Amazon UK. Also, not being a Kindle user, I have only just realised that Amazon lists the most popular sentences readers had highlighted on their Kindles. Here are the most popular highlights for The Prince and the Wolf. Try to guess which ones are by Latour and which one are by Harman :)
“Because if substance is excluded as the way to experience existence, then how many ways are there to subsist? That is what I am interested in.”
Highlighted by 6 Kindle users“Things oversimplify each other just as much as we do. It’s not a special property of human consciousness to distort the world. Entities will distort each other ipso facto by the mere fact that they relate.”
Highlighted by 6 Kindle users“Philosophy is not in the business of explaining. This is not at all the same thing. Philosophy is in the business of allowing the explanation to go far enough, to help the explainers to move in the explanatory trajectory but not to provide an explanation.”
Highlighted by 6 Kindle users“…that any artifact is a form of assembling, of gathering, of ‘thinging’ entities together and that it is absurd to forget the mortals and the gods when describing a piece of hardware, even the most hyper-modern ones.”
Highlighted by 6 Kindle users“Individual actors for Bruno create time by doing something irreversible.”
Highlighted by 5 Kindle users“Everything is completely cut off in its own self, and as we will see in a moment, it can’t possibly endure from one instant to the next because it’s so utterly concrete that even the smallest change essentially makes it a new actor…”
Highlighted by 5 Kindle users“Anything that has an effect on other things is an actor, and hence there’s no difference between physical and non-physical actors. Each actor is a black box containing other actors ad infinitum, and all actors are equally real.”
Highlighted by 4 Kindle users“Empiricism means that the details of the actual occasions are the important theoretical features that we want to detect.”
Highlighted by 4 Kindle users“All relation for Latour requires a mediator. Any two things can be linked, but only if something links them.”
Highlighted by 4 Kindle users“Latour is not distinguishing between substance and aggregates the way that Leibniz did, where a circle of men holding hands cannot possibly be a substance because it is merely an aggregate of many individuals. For Latour every individual is already an aggregate to begin with.”
Highlighted by 3 Kindle users
Economy and Society special issue on “Materials and Devices of the Public,” edited by Noortje Marres & Javier Lezaun (h/t STS Oxford):
This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.
Call for papers by the journal Qualitative Sociology (hat tip Installing (Social) Order):
“Reassembling Ethnography: ANT beyond the Laboratory”
Deadline for Submissions: 31 March 2012.
Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) was literally developed in the laboratory, but it is an approach that proclaims usefulness to all arenas of social life. In recent years, ANT has been actively taken up in neighboring fields, such as Anthropology and Geography, but has only experienced slow and uneven interest within sociology. An upcoming edition of Qualitative Sociology aims to discuss ANT in relation to sociological ethnographic and qualitative methodologies. ANT’s call to ‘follow actors,’ its principle of symmetry, and its skepticism toward taken-for-granted categories in some way harkens to revered sociological traditions of ethnography, but at the same time challenges some of our existing conceptualizations and traditions of ethnographic research. This Special Issue brings together cutting-edge empirical articles that deploy/expand and dialogue with ANT’s ‘sociology of associations’ in various arenas of the social world.
The edition will be published in 2013. Edition articles will explore the usefulness of ANT as a method and as a theory to inform qualitative research, and ethnography in particular. We are interested in articles that will examine how ANT enriches our theoretical and empirical understandings of social phenomena, beyond its familiar domains in science and technology. Contributions are welcomed on a range of themes. The list below is not meant to be exhaustive and we encourage contributors to be creative in their application and engagement with ANT.
- Civil Society and civic associations
- Cities and urban life
- Policy-making and statecraft
- Sociology of knowledge
- Race, ethnicity, gender, and class identities
- Politics and social movements
- Inequality and stratification
In keeping with the tradition of Qualitative Sociology, we seek theoretically-rich, high-quality empirical studies that will push us to reflect on the limits of ANT, and devise ways to harness its benefits.
SUBMISSION PROCEDURES
The Special Issue will be edited by Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Diana Graizbord, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (Brown University). The Editors welcome contributions engaged from doctoral or early career to established academics. The papers will undergo the usual peer-review procedure as established by QS.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2012 submitted directly to the journal.
Word Limits: 10,000 words (maximum) including bibliography
Queries:
- Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Gianpaolo_Baiocchi@Brown.edu)
- Diana Graizbord (Diana_Graizbord@Brown.edu)
- Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (Michael_Rodriguez@Brown .edu)
Full submission instructions are available on the QS website (http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/journal/11133), on the ‘Instructions for Authors’ page. All manuscripts will be subject to the normal double-blind peer review process, but potential authors are welcome to discuss their ideas in advance with the Editors.
Readers in the past have requested an alternative way to download recordings from this site, as there were apparently some problems with downloading them from eSnips. I’m happy to report that Modestos Stavrakis has now very kindly rehosted the recordings on his blog, alongside a variety of recordings from other sources as well. See his Speculative Realism Recordings. Thank you, Modestos.
The Occupy London movement is a fabulous case study for the actor-network theory notion of translating and aligning interests and enrolling new allies. The anti-capitalism protesters in front of St Paul’s Cathedral managed to enrol Jesus himself, at least in the way he is incorporated by the Church of England. Suddenly even the mighty City of London (the British Wall Street, as it were) had to back down.
“St Paul’s and Corporation of London halt legal action against Occupy camp” – The Guardian
Cathedral announces U-turn and initiative to ‘reconnect financial with the ethical’ – but corporation qualifies its move as a ‘pause’
“The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call,” said the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, who was called in to help the cathedral change course after its dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, resigned on Monday following heavy criticism of the decision to close St Paul’s for a week and cut off all contact with the protest camp.
In a statement that drew repeated cheers as protesters read it aloud at their daily assembly, Chartres said the doors of St Paul’s were now instead “most emphatically open to engage with matters concerning not only those encamped around the cathedral but millions of others in this country and around the globe”.
