conference in Segovia

Some of my more ANT’ish readers will be interested in the following conference (I won’t be able to go, unfortunately, due to an already too busy year).

2nd WORKSHOP ON IMAGINING BUSINESS “Reflecting on visuality, performances and materialities in practices of management, organising and governing” – Details

Segovia, Spain – May 19-20, 2011
Submission Deadline : November 15, 2010.

Keynote Speakers: Nigel Thrift; Mario Biagioli & Jacques Fontanille

This workshop seeks to examine ideas and approaches which go
beyond a focus upon text in order to explore the impact of images,
pictures, signs, sounds and passions underlying organizational life.
The backdrop of this workshop is Segovia, near Madrid, which is
described as one of the most beautiful, monument-filled cities in
Spain. The city, with medieval structures, narrow streets, and a
mixture of Muslim, Jewish and Christian cultures provides a
wonderful environment to examine the assemblage of different
visions, ideas and perspectives. By bringing together academics
from a wide range of disciplines and approaches (e.g. organizational theory, accounting, anthropology, geography, art,
sociology, communication studies, architecture, archaeology,
philosophy, social studies of technology, etc…), this event will
provide an arena in which to discuss and debate different ways of
imagining the complex process of organizing.

The workshop will be held at the medieval campus of IE university
in Segovia click here for a virtual tour.
http://www.ie.edu/university/location.php?seccion=campus
Call for Papers
http://www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/event_announcement.asp?event_id=747

We look forward to meeting you in May.

a good passage from DeLanda

I’m teaching Chapter 2 of DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society tonight, and came across a very good passage on page 38 that for some reason I hadn’t marked as heavily as I usually do with passages this good (and since I wrote an article on the book, my copy is pretty heavily annotated):

“The fact that in order to exercise their causal capacities, internally as well as externally, [large assemblages such as cities] must use people as a medium of interaction does not compromise their ontological autonomy any more than the fact that people must use some of their bodily parts (their hands or their feet, for example) to interact with the material world compromises their relative autonomy from their anatomical components.”

There is a certain compulsion on the part of many people to think that unless something is tiny or basic, it can’t be real– as if strawberries revealed their truth only when tossed into a blender, and the resulting juice then vaporized in a furnace, and the smoke of the berries then put through a centrifuge, and then even the resulting particles called “derivative” of some sort of non-physical mathematical quasi-structure. The fact that medium-sized entities aren’t everything does not mean that they are nothing. In my opinion it is really a rather stupid dogma to think that humans encounter nothing but nullities that need to be crushed (whether into powder or into numbers) in order to yield some trace of reality.

again Onion-like, but real

This would have fit perfectly in The Onion this week, but it’s from CNN:

Study: 82 percent of kids under 2 have an online presence