Readers in the past have requested an alternative way to download recordings from this site, as there were apparently some problems with downloading them from eSnips. I’m happy to report that Modestos Stavrakis has now very kindly rehosted the recordings on his blog, alongside a variety of recordings from other sources as well. See his Speculative Realism Recordings. Thank you, Modestos.
Archive for the ‘Audio recordings’ Category
Speculative realism recordings
7 November 2011After Markets recordings
19 May 2010The organisers of the 23 April 2010 “After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements” workshop at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, have now posted the recordings of the event as well as a report summarising the talks. You could characterise this event as “Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies” (to borrow the subtitle of Pinch and Swedberg’s Living in a Material World book, some of whose contributors were also present), although there were plenty of people there from the wider reaches of sociology and anthropology, as well as business school academics. See photos here. This event followed in the now well-established tradition of stimulating inter- or cross-disciplinary encounters organised by the Oxford STS group (see e.g. Scalography, A Turn to Ontology, and the Does STS Mean Business workshops).
If you want to get to grips with this event, I suggest you start with reading the Provocation Piece [PDF] first, then read the Report [PDF], and then listen to the talks. I found particularly interesting Will Davies’ talk, who used the example of the change of the UK “sick note” form to a “fit note” to illustrate how the boundaries between the “economic” and the “social” get reconstituted; Fabian Muniesa’s talk on how marketplaces can be described in terms of “trials of explicitness”, drawing on Sloterdijk, Deleuze and ANT; Emmanuel Didier’s talk on the mechanics of how assemblages decompose, suggesting that the STS tradition in its focus on innovation neglected the issue of decay; and Linsey McGoey and Noortje Marres’ paper in which – similarly to Didier – they focused on “experimental failure,” presenting a typology of the ways in which experiments can fail.
Volunteer needed
25 April 2010A number of Apple and Linux users have contacted me recently to say that they are unable to download the recordings that are hosted on the eSnips site, as apparently eSnips now require that you install their software first, which is only compatible with Windows. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to look for another file hosting service and upload all these files once more. However, if a kind volunteer could be found who wouldn’t mind downloading and then re-posting these files on another service, I would be very grateful and would be very happy to link to that site. Thanks.
A few issues in cosmopolitics
15 March 2010
Algorithmic Allure
19 December 2009It is nice to learn from Graham Harman that his Bournemouth talk last year on Heidegger’s “origin of the work of art” essay has directly inspired this interesting forthcoming paper by Robert Jackson: “Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure.” That event was actually organised by Tammy Lu at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (since then renamed as the Arts University College at Bournemouth), although I was the one who took this crazy photo of Graham:
Three days later Graham gave another talk on “The Greatness of McLuhan” at the Media School at Bournemouth University. We posted the recordings of both talks on this blog and they both became quite popular, however the Heidegger talk has the edge: it has been downloaded 1,027 times since 8 February 2008, as opposed to the 884 downloads of the McLuhan talk.
Strangely, both of these talks are more popular than Harman’s first lecture at the LSE “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” on 29 November 2007, which has been downloaded 778 times, even though that was the event that launched the Heideggero-Latourian project most explicitly. I would have thought that the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Latour and the invocation of Latour’s concept of the plasma would be provocatively alluring (or alluringly provocative) enough to attract more attention. But the most popular Harman download (besides the respectable 1,688 downloads of the Harman Review itself) seems to be his “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda” from November 2008, with 1,385 downloads since then.
[Although I should hasten to add that these figures are somewhat misleading, as both the plasma talk and the Harman Review are also available on the LSE website, so probably just as many people if not more would have downloaded them from there. As for the DeLanda talk, it received a boost after being listed on Speculative Heresy.]
Jackson’s paper sounds very interesting though, so I’ll reproduce his abstract here:
Bruno Latour as Rush Limbaugh
27 April 2009What 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):
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
18 April 2009The 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.
ANTHEM 