Michael Lynch: Seeing and imagining atomic landscapes in nanotechnology

Catherine Malabou: Epigenetics and Plasticity

“In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses the mechanization of life.”

Latour’s philosophical denial?

https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/stiegler-and-latour-on-philosophical-denial/

The Device: The Social Life of Method

Keep an eye out for this forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert: “The Device: The Social Life of Method.” Two articles seem to be already available: “Provocative Containment and the Drift of Social-Scientific Realism” by Javier Lezaun, Fabian Muniesa & Signe Vikkelsø, and  “Anticipating Failure: Transparency devices and their effects” by Penny Harvey, Madeleine Reeves & Evelyn Ruppert.

Object-oriented sociology and the material turn

Pierides, D. and Woodman, D. (2012). “Object-Oriented Sociology and Organizing in the Face of Emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the Material Turn.” The British Journal of Sociology, 63 (4): 662-679. H/t Ecology without Nature.

This paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by the Royal Commission into the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires during which 173 people died in the Australian State of Victoria. Often inspired by Bruno Latour’s material-semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. In Latour’s approach no object is reducible to something else – such as nature, the social, or atoms – it is instead a stabilized set of relations. A Latourian approach allows us to highlight how the Royal Commission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations. Graham Harman, in his object-oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a ‘relationist’ metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of ‘objects’ to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements of Harman’s ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material-semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.

Time and Temporality, After Phenomenology

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/12/time-and-temporality-after-phenomenology/

Catherine Malabou, Peter Osborne (CRMEP) & Jean-Michel Salanskis (University of Paris X) carry out a workshop on Time and Temporality, After Phenomenology

François Laruelle – The Degrowth of Philosophy: Towards a Generic Ecology

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/12/francois-laruelle-the-degrowth-of-philosophy/

Between Deleuze & Foucault conference videos

Between Deleuze & Foucault conference videos

via FigureGround

brief talk by Latour to EASA on the ‘end’ of critique in the anthropocene.

http://webcast.in2p3.fr/videos-martin_holbraad_plenary_a

Lucy Suchman: Restoring Information’s Body