ANTHEM

The socializing finance blog has a very informative summary of the “Performativity as Politics: Unlocking economic sociology” conference that took place in Toulouse in October. The conference explored the political dimensions of the actor-network theory approach to performativity that has developed within economic sociology, by bringing it together with alternative conceptualisations of performativity and politics from other fields. A 10-page document with the abstracts (PDF) of the talks is also available.

A recording of Graham Harman’s ANTHEM seminar talk at the LSE yesterday, entitled “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda,” and the discussion that followed, is available here (1 hr 47 min). A PDF file of the PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from here.

Harman evaluated the ontological assumptions behind DeLanda’s realism, his notion of assemblage and his theory of causation, by tracing their origins in Deleuze and Bhaskar, among others. He then contrasted DeLanda’s ontology with that of Bruno Latour and concluded by presenting his own object-orientated approach to thinking about causation, objects, and emergence.

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Graham Harman will speak about “Forceful and Non-Forceful Images” as part of the “Force: Images in Action” panel at the Pleasure and Persuasion of Lens-Based Media conference at Tate Britain in London on 28 November 2008. The conference will explore the politics of lens-based media art in contemporary media-culture. The schedule of the conference is available at the Tate Britain website, where tickets can also be booked.

Update (16-Nov-08): Urbanomic has a more complete list of speakers.

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.

A very interesting call for papers started making the rounds yesterday on various blogs and mailing lists, emanating from the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) at the University of Leicester. “The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts” conference is to take place between 29 April and 1 May 2009 at Leicester. It brings together the concerns of modern and classical forms of political economy regarding the nature of the capitalist mode of production with recent object-orientated inquiries into economic ordering that draw on actor-network theory, especially within economic sociology and science and technology studies. The deadline for proposals is 28 November 2008. The full call for papers is reproduced below.

Update [18 July 2008]: A nice PDF flyer is now also available.

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Click here to listen to (1 hour 33 minutes) or download (43.2MB) the recording of Noortje Marres’s talk “Devising Affectedness: Eco-Homes and the Making of Material Publics” delivered at the Information Systems Research Forum at ISIG, LSE on 24 January 2008. The slides and a video recording of the talk are available on the ISRF page.

On Thursday 24 January 2008 from 12:00 to 13:30 Noortje Marres will be giving an ISRF talk at ISIG at the London School of Economics and Political Science entitled “Devising Affectedness: Eco-Homes and the Making of Material Publics.” (more…)