Predictions and the Noble Prize

An interesting suggestion from Trevor Pinch, co-author of Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology and Technology Studies:

Let’s have a special Nobel Prize Clawback committee that tests all Nobel Prize winning research, say at ten yearly intervals. If the research doesn’t stand the test of time, they have to give back their Nobel prize!

New Metaphysics at OHP: Call for book proposals

And what better way to bid farewell to the old year and usher in the new here at ANTHEM, than with this announcement just in from Graham Harman:

New Metaphysics

Series editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical “sound” from any nation of the world.

The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Please send project descriptions (not full manuscripts) to Graham Harman, graham@rinzai.com. Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective. OHP was formed by scholars to overcome the current crisis in publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online through www.openhumanitiespress.org.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Best wishes to all!

Untitled
Pencil on paper
© 2008 Tammy Lu

Intentional Objects for Non-Humans from Toulouse

Toulouse was hopping this autumn. Hot on the heals of the “Performativity as Politics” conference in October another interesting gathering took place in Toulouse between 17-19 November 2008. It was the Pour une approche non-anthropologique de la subjectivité conference that among others included speakers such as Isabelle Stengers, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman.

The text of Graham Harman’s talk, “Intentional Objects for Non-Humans,” is available for direct download as a PDF from here (if you want to read the abstract first, click here).

Performativity as politics

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.

Bruno Latour and Graham Harman join OHP

Bruno Latour and Graham Harman have just joined the Editorial Advisory Board of Open Humanities Press. OHP is an exciting initiative aimed at shaking up the world of scholarly publishing in the humanities, by publishing online and for free. It is an interesting development to see these two spokespersons of non-humans and “weird objects” join the battle for the humanities!

Harman on DeLanda recording fixed

It appears that in recent days the audio file of Graham Harman’s talk on Manuel DeLanda has become corrupted on eSnips, the free data storage service we use for hosting the ANTHEM recordings. We are not sure if it happened because of the volume of downloads (over 160 in a few days) or because of a change in service quality at eSnips, which has been recently acquired by another firm. In any case, after a number of failed attempts we have managed to upload a fresh copy of the file, which seems to work fine for now. Here is the link to the audio recording once more. Apologies for these technical problems, and also for the overbearing advertising on eSnips. Up until now we were fairly happy with this service but we may have to look for an alternative solution if these problems keep recurring. Any suggestions for other free file hosting services would be most welcome.

Phenomenological and post-ANT objects

Another intriguing event laid on by CRESC is the forthcoming Materialising the Subject: phenomenological and post-ANT objects in the social sciences conference at Manchester Museum on 26-27 February 2009. This is very much along the phenomenology-ANT axis that we are interested in here at ANTHEM. The key themes and respective speakers are:

1. After Networks: spatio-temporal analytics – Robert Oppenheim, Matt Candei, Harvey Molotch;
2. ‘Not Networks Per Se, but Distributed Enactments’ – Martin Holbraad, Monika Buscher, Susanne Kuechler, Soumhya Venkatesan;
3. Is Phenomenology really an albatross? – Don Ihde, Michael Jackson, Nigel Thrift;
4. Skilled Practice: cognition as human-artefact-human orientation system – Christina Toren, Tim Ingold, Morten Pedersen;
5. Does it make any Sense to Say that Objects Have Agency? – John Law, Penny Harvey, Albena Yaneva.

Click here for a detailed description of the rationale, here for the programme, and here to register.

Objects – What Matters? Confirmed speakers

The list of speakers has been updated and confirmed on the CRESC website for the Objects – What Matters? Conference in Manchester on 1-4 September 2009. They are: Mario Biagioli (Harvard University); Patricia Clough (City University of New York); Avery Gordon (University of California, Santa Barbara); Graham Harman (American University Cairo); Annemarie Mol (University of Twente); Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds); Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin); and Michael T Taussig (Columbia University).