There is no terrestrial globe

Bruno Latour quote of the week:

“JEAN-CHRISTOPHE ROYOUX: It’s precisely at a time when we’ve never spoken so much about globalization that the account of the dislocation of the Cosmos as natural unity appears. Isn’t this paradoxical?

BRUNO LATOUR: It’s bizarre but it’s not a paradox: before, we had the Globe and no globalization, but now we have globalization and nothing but blogs!”

From a delightful little volume called Cosmograms by Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (2005), Lukas & Sternberg, New York (p. 215).

Heidegger at Harvard

It was interesting to observe that Heidegger was very much present in both Sloterdijk and Latour’s talk during their recent joint appearance at Harvard. For Sloterdijk, it was a matter of building on Heidegger positively, by “explicitating” Heidegger’s notion of being-in. As Latour quipped, for Sloterdijk “Dasein is design,” and explicitation means rendering the material aspects of being human visible. Thus Sloterdijk shows that being-in for humans means living in bubbles, in a world that looks like foam — marvellously refreshing metaphors for facilitating a new way of imagining sociality. A host of biological and evolutionary themes were also evoked, often resulting in startling observations, such as describing women’s bodies as “architectural units” and “apartments” for “interiorising the egg.” Sloterdijk drew parallels between evolutionary biological processes and architecture, claiming that “humans are pets,” i.e. “the effects of the space they create.” He did have a few very funny lines, aided by his deadpan delivery.

Video recording of Latour and Sloterdijk at Harvard

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

Latour and Sloterdijk at Harvard University

Many thanks to Trevor Patt for alerting us that there is going to be a joint Latour-Sloterdijk event after all, on 17 February 2009, at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (6:30pm – 8:00pm, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall). It will be entitled “Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization.”

Repetition and difference in organizing over time and space

The title of the 2010 EGOS call for sub-theme proposals sounds remarkably Deleuzian. Could it be just a co-incidence that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition? The call for proposals speaks of repetition and difference, the emerge of new organisational forms, the problem of the micro and the macro, globalisation, and the role of technology. The deadline for the submission of sub-theme proposals is 15 January 2009.

It would be interesting to have a track or two with specifically Deleuzian themes, e.g. with a focus on repetition and difference vis-a-vis routines and innovation, or on the Deleuzian notion of the assemblage in organising. The similarities and differences between the Deleuzian assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and the evocation of assemblages in Science and Technology Studies and economic sociology could make another interesting platform for discussion. We reproduce the call below in full, in case the link gets broken during the current overhaul of the EGOS website.