• 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)

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.

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/

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.

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

]]> http://anthem-group.net/2012/01/27/hatch-by-tammy-lu-and-crystal-bueckert/feed/ 0 PE Hatch by Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert http://anthem-group.net/2012/01/25/the-ontological-turn-in-contemporary-philosophy/ http://anthem-group.net/2012/01/25/the-ontological-turn-in-contemporary-philosophy/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:09:23 +0000 PE http://anthem-group.net/?p=2722 ]]> Third Annual International Summer School in German Philosophy: “The Ontological Turn in Contemporary Philosophy” (July 2-13, 2012) at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Organizer: Professor Dr. Markus Gabriel, Chair in Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (Bonn University)

Keynote Addresses/Visiting Professors:

• Prof. Ray Brassier (American University, Beirut)
• Prof. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bristol)
• Prof. Martin Hägglund (Harvard/London Graduate School)
• Prof. Graham Harman (American University, Cairo)
• Prof. Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljana, NYU, Birkbeck, European Graduate School)

Course Description:

What is the world? What do we mean when we speak of the world in philosophy and claim things such as true thought being about the world? Is the world “out there,” as Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore’s “absolute conception of reality” suggest or is it a horizon or regulative ideal guiding our epistemic practices?

In metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology it is common to speak of the world without bothering to explicate what this term means. Even though it features in debates concerning our access to the external world and even in book titles like Mind and World, it usually does not seem to express more than the vague realist assumption or platitude that not all objects or facts are made up, hallucinated, or in some way or another constructed by thinking subjects. Much of the 20th century’s linguistic turn, both in the analytical and in the hermeneutical/phenomenological traditions, assumes that the world is what we have access to with truth-apt thought, yet also is that which might be distorted by our attempts to grasp it as it is in itself. Over the last decade, many voices (such as Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Boghossian, to name a few) have urged that the overall territory of the debate regarding the position of thinking in a world of facts is fundamentally confused by missing the very facticity of the world. This has triggered a thoroughgoing return to realism, prominently figuring in the thought of the avant-garde movement of “speculative realism” or “speculative materialism,” as it has been labeled. Interestingly, the debates often associated with Badiou’s ontology and the critique of all transcendental philosophy in Meillassoux’s After Finitude have, in a recent turn, led to a reassessment of German idealism, for example in the work of Markus Gabriel, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Slavoj Zizek. On a closer look, it turns out the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel’s criticisms of Kant can be read as attempts to overcome transcendental epistemology and themselves motivate an ontological turn.

This year, we will discuss an array of perspectives on the ontological turn developed by the organizer and visiting professors in recent work. In particular, we will address the concepts of speculative philosophy, the relation between transcendental philosophy and ontology in general, the issue of contemporary forms of realism and materialism, and the prospects for a suitably realist or materialist reading of figures such as Schelling, Hegel, and Derrida. The philosophers assembled will present and discuss their recent work in the form of a lecture followed by a seminar. Everyone admitted to the Summer School will receive a reader with texts to be prepared before arrival.

More details here. H/t Graham Harman.

• Feb 7:  Alex Taylor | Microsoft Research – Executable biology: at the borderlands of technoscience
• Feb 21: Matt Fuller and Graham Harwood | Goldsmiths – Database as Funfair
• Feb 28: Evelyn Ruppert |Open University – Doing the Transparent State: Methods and their Subjectifying Effects/Affects
• March 7: Bruno Latour | Science Po, Richard Rogers|University of Amsterdam – Digital Societies: between ontology and methods
• March 20: Javier Lezaun | University of Oxford – Cinematography and the Discovery of Social Kinetics
• March 27: ECDC | Goldsmiths – Energy Communities and Design Interventions

7 March 2012, 16:30 – 19:00 -  Bruno Latour & Richard Rogers:  “Digital societies: between ontology and methods,” at Goldsmiths, London

30 March 2012 – 12:30 – 16:30 – Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams: “How Methods Move in Markets,” at Open University, Camden, London

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.