ANTHEM

The most recent issue of Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy has an interview with Graham Harman “On the Horrors of Realism.” Harman speaks to Tom Sparrow about object-oriented philosophy, phenomenology, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger’s fourfold, Meillassoux’s correlationism, Lingis, Derrida and Foucault, DeLanda’s realism and Latour’s relationism, speculative realism, Whitehead, Leibniz, Zubiri, H.P. Lovecraft and China Miéville, and of course metaphysics. Harman speaks of weird things, about the horror of the real.

On 6 June 2008 Bruno Latour will be giving a lecture entitled “Can Modernity be Modernized?” at the University of Bologna, on the occasion of receiving the ISA Medal for Science from the Institute of Advanced Studies.

A lot seems to be going on in Canada next week… In addition to the objectivity conference in Toronto there is also the “What is an Organization? Materiality, Agency, and Discourse” ‘preconference’ (to the ICA’s 58th annual conference) on 21-22 May 2008 at the Université de Montréal, in, you guessed it, Montreal.

Keynote Speakers:

• Barbara Czarniawska (U Göteborg, Sweden)
• Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris, France)
• Haridimos Tsoukas (ALBA, Greece, University of Warwick, UK)
• Linda Putnam (U of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

The main conference page with the detailed programme is here. During the conference Bruno Latour will be awarded an Université de Montréal honorary doctorate.

If you happen to be in Canada and near Toronto next weekend, you might be interested in this conference on the nature of objectivity organised at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto: “Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity,” 23-25 May 2008. The keynote speaker is Bruno Latour. The programme is available here [PDF] and some abstracts and papers can be downloaded from here.

Those of you who have read Graham Harman’s manuscript Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics will know that Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of correlationism features prominently in Harman’s assessment of Latour’s philosophy. Meillassoux will be speaking in London on the topic of “Time without Becoming” on 8 May 2008, at 5:30 pm at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency is now also available in English in Ray Brassier’s translation and with Alain Badiou’s preface from Amazon UK. Further details about the event including directions available here.

Audio and video recordings (mostly in French) of the “The Tarde/Durkheim Debate” with Bruno Karsenti as Emile Durkheim, Bruno Latour as Gabriel Tarde, and Simon Schaffer as the Dean are now available from the CRASSH website. The English translation [PDF] is available from Bruno Latour’s website. Photos of the event can be found on the Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the Social conference website.

And here are a couple of videos from YouTube:

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Click here to listen to (3 hours 24 minutes) or download (94.4MB) the recording of the symposium “The Harman Review: Bruno Latour’s Empirical Metaphysics” at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 5 February 2008. Speakers are Bruno Latour and Graham Harman. The panelists are Lucas Introna and Noortje Marres. The event is introduced by Leslie Willcocks and chaired by Edgar Whitley. There are also audience questions and comments. This event was organised by members of the ANTHEM Group and hosted by the Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) of the Department of Management, LSE.

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Click here to listen to (1 hour 23 minutes) or download (19.7MB) the recording of Bruno Latour’s lecture “Another European Tradition: traceability of the social and the vindication of Gabriel Tarde” at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 4 February 2008. The event was introduced and chaired by Nikolas Rose.

Bruno Latour plays Tarde and Bruno Karsenti plays Durkheim in the re-enactment of a debate held in 1903 between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim, at the Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the Social conference at the University of Cambridge on 14-15 March 2008.

Abstracts are due on 25 February for papers for the 3-6 September 2008 conference of the Design History Society, hosted by University College Falmouth in Cornwall. Actor-network theory and the work of Bruno Latour in particular underlie the main theme of the Networks of Design conference. Latour will be one of the keynote speakers. The thematic strands are the following:

• Networks of texts, including images, documents & databases
• Networks of ideas, including theories, disciplines & concepts (among them ANT)
• Networks of technology, including mechanical & virtual technologies
• Networks of things, including material & technological artefacts
• Networks of people, including collectives & individuals.

More information at the Networks of Design conference website.