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.
Archive for the ‘STS’ Category
Latour’s revamped website
20 December 2011Popular Prince and the Wolf quotes
19 December 2011I 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
Material participation
1 December 2011Economy 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.
CfP: Knowledge in a Box
12 November 2011The tobacco association aside, I love the idea of this conference: Knowledge in a Box: How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production, July 26-29, 2012; to take place at a renovated tobacco warehouse (the tobacco museum) in Kavala, northern Greece.
We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related disciplines for a workshop on the uses and meanings of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge production. In keeping with the conference theme, we are asking contributors to include specific references to the ways in which boxes have played a role—commercial, epistemic or otherwise—in their own particular disciplinary frameworks.
CfP: ANT beyond the Laboratory
8 November 2011Call 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.
Speculative realism recordings
7 November 2011Readers 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.
Latour on art and politics, in London
25 October 2011Bruno 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.
The Productivity of Intellectual Enmities
20 October 2011A fascinating forthcoming lecture series on the role of intellectual enemies in STS organised by Michael Guggenheim at CSISP/Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Latour seems to be a popular enemy…
My Best Fiend: On the Productivity of Intellectual Enmities
Fiends are productive. They spark interest, they draw our energy, we care about them and they care about us. Why do we choose this fiend and not another? How does our own thinking depend on our fiends? What are the rules and methods of our own fiendish engagements and what are the scientific fruits of them?
All Lectures Tuesdays, 4.30-6pm, Richard Hoggart Building RHB 137
1st Nov.: Liz Moore (Goldsmiths): Reflections on the Genesis of Intellectual Fiends
8th Nov.: Harry Collins (Cardiff): Good and Bad Arguments. With Friends, Idiots and People Without Integrity
6th Dec.: David Oswell (Goldsmiths): Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us
13th Dec.: Steve Fuller (Warwick): Bruno Latour: and Some Notes on Some Also Rans.
“My best fiend” is a lecture series, which invites scholars to reflect on their academic enemies (from movements: Marxism, to persons: Talcott Parsons, to disciplines: anthropology, to concepts: “the other”). The goal of the series is to investigate the productivity of intellectual enmities.
Science and Technology Studies has highlighted the productive role of controversies to produce epistemic objects and sort the world. Controversies align scholars with methods, theories and schools of thought, they produce orientation in otherwise confusing seas of research. But controversies also pigeonhole people into camps. They undeservedly identify complex research identities with schools and theories and create guilt-by-association. The lecture series is calling for an analysis of such constellations by the protagonists themselves.
Enemies are productive. They spark interest, they draw energy, people care about them and they care about us. Why else would people spend time denouncing this badly formulated concept of an esteemed colleague, decrying the neighbouring discipline that keeps misunderstanding the world, or keep on writing bad tempered footnotes about this mistaken theory — and thereby become complicit in this very unproductivity? Why do scholars choose this enemy and not another?
Enemies also often involuntarily direct ones thinking, researching and theorising. If an enemy posits /a/, people feel compelled to posit /b/. If she writes approvingly of /c/, we need to denounce it. An enemy can have more power over people’s thinking than they would probably like to have it. It is as if people are guided in their thinking not only from their research object, but by an unknown field of do’s and don’t's, accumulated since the time of their studies, of where to go and look and where not to look.
The lecture series calls for analyzing the productivity of intellectual enemies. The speakers choose an enemy of their choice, and analyse his, her or its productivity for their own thinking, their research and their career. Doing so, they contribute to a new sociology of sociology. They revisit controversies and analyze them from within and beyond to engage in a sociological celebration of what they usually denounce.
The Hungarian Parliament
12 October 2011Continuing on the Hungarian theme, keep an eye on the Installing (Social) Order blog, where Endre Dányi is promising to provide a preview of his doctoral (STS) research on the Hungarian Parliament. The excerpts from his first post below give you an idea about his project and his plans for the guest-blogging.
Sociologists and anthropologists of science know a lot about laboratories, innovation centres, museums, design studios, hospitals, and the politics of related material practices, but curiously there’s hardly any STS work that focuses on explicitly political institutions. Perhaps the most notable exception is the thousand page long Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy catalogue, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
(…)
I can’t say I immediately had a clear idea about what an STS-informed research of a parliament would look like, but I knew where it could take place. As someone who grew up in Hungary, I remembered that the parliament building in the centre of Budapest was once the largest (and arguably the most impressive) of its kind – quite bizarre for a country that is not only small, but in most political scientists’ view also counts as a ‘new democracy’. Either they are right, I thought, and then props really don’t matter in politics, or the idea that liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe fell from the sky in 1989 – like in Peter Sloterdijk’s thought experiment – needs to be rethought.
My plan in this space within the Installing (Social) Order blog is not to provide a summary of the dissertation, but to offer some sort of a problem map. First I will focus on architecture, and discuss what we can learn about liberal democracy if we concentrate on the construction of the Hungarian parliament building in the end of the 19th century. Then I will briefly recount what happened to this building (and the political reality it was supposed to hold together) in the 20th century in order to highlight some tensions related to the definition of a political community. I’ll then concentrate on the parliament’s role in the current political regime – the Republic of Hungary – and examine some of the most important aspects of the legislative process. After this, I’ll (re-)introduce my MP friend and summarise what I’ve learned from him about political representation, which sometimes takes place in the parliament building, but some other times in TV studios, party congresses, street demonstrations, and various other places. All of my stories will be full of political objects, but the picture wouldn’t be complete if I remained silent about political subjects.
Metaphysics and politics
6 September 2011Adam Robbert of the Knowledge Ecology blog makes good use of The Prince and the Wolf in reflecting on the relationship between metaphysics and politics within the wider context of debates in speculative philosophy. An interesting post all around.
