What is an Apparatus?

Just a heads up on the English translation of Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? hitting the stands next month.

World-Information City

An interesting conference (h/t Cluster) on mobility, globalisation, urban spaces and networks coming up in Paris on 30-31 May 2009. Here are the topics and speakers:

World-Information City, Paris 2009: In/Visibility, Access and Urban Zoning

• Mobility Futures – John Urry
• Real Time City – Carlo Ratti
• Re-Assembling the Urban – Saskia Sassen
• The Porosity of Land, Economy, and Politics – Solomon Benjamin
• Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism – Stephen Graham
• The Endless Present – Eyal Weizmann
• Mobile Networks, Urban Swarms – Christophe Aguiton/ Dominique Cardon/ Zbigniew Smoreda
• Mapping Complex Networks – Bruno Latour
• Zoning VS Open Source City – Jose Perez de Lama

Further description here and detailed programme here.

Bruno Latour as Rush Limbaugh

What does it mean in the life of an intellectual movement (in this case actor-network theory or speculative realism) when it repeatedly gets the comedy treatment? Does it signify higher status and greater recognition? There certainly have to be enough people out there who get the joke for it to work. First there was the Latour-Sloterdijk comics series by KLAUS from Harvard. Then there was the hilarious album cover for the speculative realists by Mike Watson from Goldsmiths. And now here is a ‘Bruno Latour as Rush Limbaugh’ spoof from students at Brigham Young University. It is quite entertaining, while giving a pretty good summary of Latour’s book, The Pasteurization of France.

Listen to the “Rush Latour Show” here (19 min):

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Update (29 April 2009): And we could add to this collection the Bruno Latour action figure from the thing theory blog (which, by the way, contains some great reflections on the whole Heidegger-Latour relationship and some rave reviews of Harman’s Prince of Networks manuscript) by Columbia University students.

Recording of Graham Harman in Dublin

The recording of Graham Harman’s talk at University College Dublin (UCD) yesterday, entitled “A New Theory of Substance“, with Dermot Moran as discussant, is available here (1 hr 45 min). Thank you to Peadar Ó Scolaí for sharing the recording with us.

Dictionary of Non-Philosophy

Many thanks to the good people at Speculative Heresy for making available Taylor Adkins’s translation of François Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy [3.7 MB PDF]. Cover art by Tammy Lu.

Speculative realism in Bristol

Mike Watson has this funny poster up at the Logical Regression blog for the forthcoming speculative realism event in Bristol on 24 April 2009. For further details see this announcement at the infinite thØught blog. Speakers: Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut), Iain Hamilton Grant (University of the West of England), Graham Harman (American University in Cairo), and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London) with a paper by Quentin Meillassoux (Ecole Normale Supérieure).