ANTHEM

The thing things (to cite Heidegger) and objects matter. The 2009 CRESC annual conference, Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change, will review the object turn in social theory by focusing on the relationship between objects and value. The conference will take place in Manchester between 2-4 September 2009. Read the full call for papers and panel proposals here. According to the socializing finance blog keynote speakers will include Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara), Graham Harman (American University Cairo), Annemarie Mol (University of Twente), and Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin).

Religion has figured in unusual ways in recent days. Tony Blair (as announced on the Daily Show [video]) started to teach a course on “Faith and Globalisation” at Yale last week. The archbishops of the Church of England were commenting on the financial technique of short selling earlier this week. And on Thursday, Bruno Latour - connecting the ecological crisis, science, and religion - asked: “Will Non-humans be Saved?” Read the text of his lecture here [PDF]. Latour addresses the standoff between creationism and neo-Darwinism by redefining what science and religion do on the basis of three ontological categories or “modes of existence:” reproduction, reference, and religion.

Thank you to Nick at Speculative Heresy for alerting us to the online publication of Graham Harman’s article ”DeLanda’s Ontology: Assemblage and Realism” in Continental Philosophy Review. Actually several of us from ANTHEM were at Goldsmiths on 20th April 2007 when Harman delivered the earlier version of this paper, which back then was entitled ”Networks and Assemblages: The Rebirth of Things in Latour and DeLanda.” DeLanda and Latour were already an intriguing juxtaposition, and when the figure of Heidegger and the fourfold emerged, we knew that we were entering interesting territory. At the end of the Goldsmiths session Harman gave one of us the hard copy of his paper, which set off a series of events culminating in The Harman Review in February 2008.