Archive for the ‘Bruno Latour’ Category
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)
Tags:David Oswell, Goldsmiths, My Best Fiend, Steve Fuller
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Social theory, STS, Talks | Leave a Comment »
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.
Tags:Critical Dictionary, David Evans, Katherine Gillieson, Levi R. Bryant, OHP, Tammy Lu, WORK Gallery
Posted in art, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, philosophy, speculative realism | 1 Comment »
16 January 2012
Hat tip to Graham for bringing attention to this book on Sloterdijk: it turns out there is also an open access version, downloadable from here:
Schinkel, W. and Noordegraaf-Eelens, L., Eds. (2011). In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [PDF]
The book also includes Latour’s “Cautious Prometheus” lecture.
Sloterdijk has in recent years grown into one of Germany’s most influential thinkers. His work, which is extremely relevant for philosophers, scientists of art and culture, sociologists, political scientists and theologists, is only now gradually being translated in English. This book makes his work accessible to a wider audience by putting it to work in orientation towards current issues. Sloterdijk’s philosophy moves from a Heideggerian project to think ‘space and time’ to a Diogenes-inspired ‘kynical’ affirmation of the body and a Deleuzian ontology of network-spheres. In a range of accessible and clearly written chapters, this book discusses the many aspects of this thought.
Posted in Books, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, philosophy | Leave a Comment »
10 January 2012
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
Tags:Conseil d'Etat, Paolo Landri, Tecnoscienza
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Books, Bruno Latour, Sociology, STS | Leave a Comment »
6 January 2012
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.)
Tags:The Prince and the Wolf, The Prince of Networks, Urbanscale
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, design, Graham Harman, information systems | Leave a Comment »
20 December 2011
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.
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Sociology, STS | Leave a Comment »
19 December 2011
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
Tags:The Prince and the Wolf
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Martin Heidegger, Object-oriented philosophy, STS | 1 Comment »
7 November 2011
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.
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Audio recordings, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, philosophy, Recorded ANTHEM sessions, STS, Talks | 1 Comment »
25 October 2011
Bruno Latour – “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the common world through arts and politics”
5.00pm, Monday 21 November 2011 (free entrance)
French Institute in the UK
17 Queensberry Place
London SW7 2DT
There is no single institution able to cover, oversee, dominate, manage, handle, or simply trace ecological issues of large shape and scope. Many issues are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests. We have problems, but we don’t have the public that goes with it. How could we imagine agreements amid so many entangled interests? Bruno Latour will review several attempts to tackle ecological problems by connecting the tools of scientific representation with those of arts and politics and present the program of Experimentation in Arts and Politics running at Sciences Po since September 2010.
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Ecology, politics, STS | 2 Comments »
21 October 2011
I heard it through the grapevine that there will be a seminar series discussing The Prince and the Wolf at at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. More details at the Art in the Contemporary World blog and A Little Tag End of the World blog, where apparently some of the discussion will be posted.
Tags:Dublin, GradCAM, Ireland, National College of Art & Design, The Prince and the Wolf
Posted in Actor-network-theory, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism | 1 Comment »
