If you want to get to grips with this event, I suggest you start with reading the Provocation Piece [PDF] first, then read the Report [PDF], and then listen to the talks. I found particularly interesting Will Davies’ talk, who used the example of the change of the UK “sick note” form to a “fit note” to illustrate how the boundaries between the “economic” and the “social” get reconstituted; Fabian Muniesa’s talk on how marketplaces can be described in terms of “trials of explicitness”, drawing on Sloterdijk, Deleuze and ANT; Emmanuel Didier’s talk on the mechanics of how assemblages decompose, suggesting that the STS tradition in its focus on innovation neglected the issue of decay; and Linsey McGoey and Noortje Marres’ paper in which – similarly to Didier – they focused on “experimental failure,” presenting a typology of the ways in which experiments can fail.

Download and listen to recordings of the symposium presentations in MP3 format. Each file includes the talk and the discussion/Q&A that followed it.

• Jay Telotte and Ian Bogost: Welcome
• Graham Harman: American Objects vs. Austrian Objects
• Steven Shaviro: The Universe of Things
• Levi Bryant: Being is Flat: The Strange Mereology of Object-Oriented Ontology
• Ian Bogost: Cakes, Chips, and Calculus
• Barbara Stafford: Concluding Remarks

Three days later Graham gave another talk on “The Greatness of McLuhan” at the Media School at Bournemouth University. We posted the recordings of both talks on this blog and they both became quite popular, however the Heidegger talk has the edge: it has been downloaded 1,027 times since 8 February 2008, as opposed to the 884 downloads of the McLuhan talk.

Strangely, both of these talks are more popular than Harman’s first lecture at the LSE  “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” on 29 November 2007, which has been downloaded 778 times, even though that was the event that launched the Heideggero-Latourian project most explicitly. I would have thought that the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Latour and the invocation of Latour’s concept of the plasma would be provocatively alluring (or alluringly provocative) enough to attract more attention. But the most popular Harman download (besides the respectable 1,688 downloads of the Harman Review itself) seems to be his “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda” from November 2008, with 1,385 downloads since then.

[Although I should hasten to add that these figures are somewhat misleading, as both the plasma talk and the Harman Review are also available on the LSE website, so probably just as many people if not more would have downloaded them from there. As for the DeLanda talk, it received a boost after being listed on Speculative Heresy.]

Jackson’s paper sounds very interesting though, so I’ll reproduce his abstract here:

Abstract for “Heidegger and the Work of Art History”

Session at Association of Art Historians (AAH) Annual Conference, April 15-17, 2010,

Glasgow, UK.

“Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure”

Robert Jackson BA (Hons)

School of Computing, Communications and Electronics

Art and Social Technologies

Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth.

In recent years the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has surfaced with a “realist” re-reading of Martin Heidegger‟s Tool-analysis, pushing it to its logical limits (Tool-Being – 2002). Dismissing Dasein as the root of truth for human beings, Harman instead argues that “Readiness-to-hand” and “Present-at-hand” are qualities available to all entities in the cosmos even if humans created such objects.

In January 2008 Harman‟s paper “On the Origin of the Work of Art (atonal remix)” attempts to perform an “object-oriented-philosophy” reading of Heidegger‟s influential essay on aesthetics, identifying Heidegger’s “strife” as a philosophical idea which escapes into the qualities of all objects and not just privileged artworks. But the extension of Heidegger’s strife hints to the idea of aesthetic “allure,” which Harman describes as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” “Allure” occurs when objects are split from their qualities, exhibiting tensions between its essence of “Being” and the way it has been described. Artworks, metaphors and jokes turn out not to be affecting features of human literary culture, but primordial constructions of the universe itself.

The paper will argue that these rich conceptualisations offer insightful commentary on technological artworks which utilise computational algorithms. I claim that artists such as John F Simon and Antoine Schmitt create generative and emergent aesthetic objects which display “allure” in all of their partial opacity, leading to the idea that technological artworks can propel vigorous independence, worlds away from superficial artificiality.

Listen to the “Rush Latour Show” here (19 min):

Update (29 April 2009): And we could add to this collection the Bruno Latour action figure from the thing theory blog (which, by the way, contains some great reflections on the whole Heidegger-Latour relationship and some rave reviews of Harman’s Prince of Networks manuscript) by Columbia University students.

Yet at the same time there was a sense of inevitability to it, as the organisation of it gathered pace. As any actor-network theory head knows, projects are born in multiple places and can die multiple deaths but there is one thing certain: technology had a lot to do with the birth of this one. Facebook and Google Groups exerted their agency in bringing some of the key actors together, and there was one critical moment, when two Palm Pilots were put side-by-side and the realisation was born that Bruno Latour and Graham Harman would be in London and at the LSE on the same day, by pure chance, if there is such a thing.

Of course once one digs a bit deeper it becomes clearer that the Information Systems and Innovation Group (formerly Information Systems Department) at the LSE was not such an unlikely host after all. Latour himself spent time there as visiting professor and its former head, the late Claudio Ciborra, was one of the first people if not the first one to contrast actor-network theory and Heidegger in relation to the question concerning technology. The PhD students who formed the ANTHEM reading group in November 2006 in  a way just carried on with this questioning, being puzzled by Latour’s rejection of Heidegger on the one hand, and by his embracing of some of Heidegger’s notions (such as the thing as gathering) and concerns on the other.

As it turned out, there were a few other people interested in this conundrum (see our little bibliography). Doll Jr. and Petrina for example said this as early as 1999: “In someways it is possible to see Latour’s own views on technology and society not only being influenced by but being an extension of Heidegger’s provocative and seminal, 1950s, essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1997/1954).” So to have the author of Tool-Being, Guerilla Metaphysics, and Heidegger Explained on hand to interrogate Bruno Latour about his metaphysics, and not just in casual conversation but on the basis of his manuscript on Latour’s metaphysics, was just a godsend (or shall we say godheadsend?) for us, information systems PhD students grappling with the philosophy of technology.

It was indeed our great pleasure to be able to play a small part in facilitating this debate and we are looking foreward to seeing Harman’s forthcoming book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, in print later on this spring. Over this past year, the recording of the symposium hosted on our eSnips site had been accessed 883 times, which must be only a fraction of the number of downloads of the file hosted at the LSE site, the latter being the top Google search result for all things Harman/Latour/Heidegger. The circulating manuscript in the meantime has inspired some spirited discussions on blogs too many to name here. What better way to end this post than by referring you back to Graham’s own blog, where just a few days ago he posted an excellent summary of the main concerns of his forthcoming book on Latour.