“The Modes of Existence project: an exercise in collective inquiry and digital humanities” – by Bruno Latour, 6 November 2012.
Understanding Society Lecture Series, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge
Video of “Conditions of Possibility” – 19 October 2012, CUNY (hat tip to dmf, who posts a lot of good stuff in the comments that I don’t always have time to re-post). Event starts at 34 min.
As part of the series Critical Theory Today, eminent theorist Slavoj Žižek joins Martin Hägglund and Adrian Johnston in a discussion about “Conditions of Possibility,” with respect to philosophy, literary theory, religion, and psychoanalysis. Drawing on such diverse and archetypal figures as Kant, Hegel, Freud, Derrida, and Lacan, the panel will explore the notion of philosophical critique and its transformation in contemporary theory.
For his “An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence” project:
For a philosophy that is empirical and not simply empiricist, investigation offers the only way to ferret out its concepts and then put them to the test before proposing a version that can be submitted to critique by its peers. And yet, even though investigation as a genre benefits from a distinguished and intimidating prestige in philosophy, it is fairly unusual for an author to propose to carry out an investigation with the participation of his readers. This is nevertheless what I propose to do in publishing a book titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, alongside a digital site that allows its visitors, who will have become co-investigators, to inspect its arguments and go on to suggest other fields to study, other proofs, other accounts. By means of this arrangement I invite my co-investigators to help me find the guiding thread of the experience by becoming attentive to several regimes of truth, which I call modes of existence, after the strange book by Étienne Souriau, recently republished, that features this phrase in its title.
More here. H/t AIME. The video is definitely worth watching: it provides a succinct and clear summary of what otherwise sounds like a rather complex project.
Somatosphere has posted several videos from the Science and Technology Studies: The Next Twenty conference that took place at Harvard on 7-9 April 2011. It includes the following:
Does STS Matter, and to Whom?
Theodore Porter (UCLA) and Andrew Jewett (Harvard) discuss the relationship of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to other academic fields, policymakers, and practitioners.STS and the Law: Reframing Rights
Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) and Douglas Kysar (Yale) discuss the recent edited volume “Reframing Rights.” The discussion centers on the biological sciences and their associated technologies as providing moments for society to ask fundamental questions about their “bioconstitutional” rights.STS, Economics, and Sociology: Do Economists Make Markets?
Pierre-Benoit Joly (Paris-Est and IFRIS) and David Stark (Columbia) discuss how STS research has affected work in economic sociology, and what other STS tools might be usefully applied.Defining the Boundaries
Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Chicago) gives a provocation for STS scholars to think again about STS’s close ties to post-colonial studies, with specific references to Indian life sciences in relation to the Western sciences. Discussants Javier Lezaun (Oxford) and David Winickoff (UC Berkeley) debate other “elsewheres” STS travels to, whether it could travel everywhere, and how best it travels.STS on Difference
Steven Epstein (Northwestern) delivers a provocation on whether or not STS has made a difference, arguing that it has not done as much as it could. Nelly Oudshoorn (Twente) suggests some productive ways forward, and Sherine Hamdy (Brown) argued that STS scholars have missed opportunities by ignoring the linkages between science, religion, and difference.Science and Technology Studies and the Public Sphere
Beginning with a provocation from Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) this session discusses how the public sphere is viewed from within STS, followed by reflections from Myles Jackson (NYU Polytechnic) and Brian Wynne (Lancaster).Opening the Black Box
Trevor Pinch (Cornell) provokes this session by looking at where STS has gone and where it is going. David Kaiser (MIT) continues the conversation by focusing on the problem of scale in “black box” studies. Antoine Picon (Harvard) pushes back by suggesting that perhaps STS hasn’t opened the black box after all.
Watch this news report from the Middlesex occupation site:
Sign the petition and join the Facebook group to protest against the closure of the Middlesex philosophy department.
A video recording (in six parts) of Bruno Latour’s lecture, entitled “What’s organizing? A Meditation on the Bust of Emilio Bootme,” delivered at the Université de Montréal on 21 May 2008, is now available on Youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. (H/t Sociologish.)
The video recording of the “Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization” talk with Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk at Harvard University on 17 February 2009 is available here (thanks to Archinet).
Update (12 May 2009): Photo via Object-Oriented Philosophy
ANTHEM 