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.

The draft programme for the 2008 4S/EASST Conference in Rotterdam is now available from the 4S website [1MB PDF]. There are just too many interesting talks here for us to be able to even begin to list them, so we will stick with highlighting just the one session that is most closely in line with the ANTHEM theme: Session 1.3.16 “Actor Network Theory meets (Post)Phenomenology,” between 13:30-15:30 on 21 August 2008 in Room T3-31. Session organisers: Jack Post and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The talks:

• “I have never been Modern - nor has Postphenomenology been so,” by Don Ihde, State University of New York at Stony Brook
• “Posthuman Perceptions: on hybrids and human-technology relations,” by Peter-Paul Verbeek, University of Twente

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The 2nd Triangular Post-Graduate Conference, “Challenges for contemporary research on technology and organisation,” will take place on 4-6 June 2008 at UCD Business School. The conference is jointly organised by Lancaster University, University of Cambridge and University College Dublin, and is chaired by Séamas Kelly, Lucas Introna, and Matthew Jones. The call for papers invites doctoral students from information systems and organisational studies to present preliminary research findings and/or challenging theoretical and methodological issues concerning their research. (more…)

The 4th Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF) will take place on 23 and 24 April 2008 at the Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) at the LSE. At ISIG there is a long tradition of research interest in both actor-network theory and Heidegger, as approaches to the study of technology. This event may be of particular interest to PhD students and junior researchers who would like to discuss their research with other PhD students and leading IS academics in this area. The deadline for registration has been extended to 30 March 2008. Register here.

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 15 minutes) or download (34.9MB) the recording of Graham Harman’s lecture “On the Origin of the Work of Art (atonal remix)” at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth on 1 February 2008. Read the abstract here.

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On 6 February 2008 Graham Harman will be giving a talk on the metaphysics of Bruno Latour at 4pm in room C91 at Lancaster University Management School. Harman will be focusing on Latour’s Irreductions (Part II of The Pasteurization of France) in order to evaluate the key tenets of his metaphysics, while also contrasting it with Heidegger’s philosophy. Read the abstract here.

Depending on which part of China you come from, the number 4 for you is either auspicious or inauspicious. For Graham Harman it certainly must be his lucky number. Readers of Harman’s Tool-Being or Heidegger Explained will know that retrieving Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold is of crucial importance to him. There is however yet another intriguing quadrate Harman has (re)discovered for philosophy: Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s concept of the tetrad. In the coming weeks Harman will give three lectures on these fourfold structures: at the University of Twente on 17 January, at Bournemouth University on 4 February, and at the Open University on 7 February 2008. (more…)