Latour needs project manager

He’ll also need a web designer later, he says. But this is for the project manager. He received a very generous grant for this project late last year.

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Bruno Latour, professor at Sciences Po in Paris, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) grant for a project called AIME starting the 1er of September 2011 to the end of August 2014. This project (see http://www.bruno-latour.fr/expositions/AIME-short_summary.pdf ) connects philosophy, anthropology of modernism with digital methods in order to organize, on the one hand, an ”augmented publication” using state of the art technology and, on the other, the collective negotiation of its content with interested parties selected and facilitated by a team of mediators. For this endeavor, he is looking for a project manager with financial skills (if possible a knowledge of European accounting processes) and with experience in managing complex projects involving artists, or/and scientists, or/and programmers. Carried most of the time in English, the project manager will have to work closely with the principal investigator, unsuring the smooth running of the financial aspects of the project, the overseeing of the small team of designers and mediators as well as the organization of the various phases of the negotiation to take place in the last phase of the project. The job is based in Paris, it is a full time job for the three years of the project. Please find enclosed the job description.
For inquiry on the suitability of the application, inquire directly to myself or to Biljana Jankovic biljana.jankovic@sciences-po.fr. Tél: +33 (0)1 45 49 50 93.
Application should be sent before the 15th of May 2011. The decision will be made June 30th at the latest.
Bruno Latour

we were all locked in

The backup doorman was on duty. He decided to padlock the only entrance to the building, and then to sleep in a different place from usual so he couldn’t be found. For one hour I looked for him, until finally a neighbor woke up and somehow found him.

Being locked *into* your residence is worse than being locked out. Thankfully, it’s a rare experience for obvious reasons.

The only other time it happened to me was in Germany. I was traveling through the country, and accepted an offer to spend the night in Gießen, where my first graduate school roommate was staying with a woman he knew. She left for work before we left the house in the morning. We left her apartment, went downstairs, and found that you needed a key to get out of the building. (?!) (I love Continental Europeans, but they often do clinically insane things with locks and keys in their buildings.)

We didn’t have a key to get back into the woman’s apartment, since we didn’t expect to need it; we thought we’d return in the evening when she was back from work. And none of the neighbors were home to help us. So, we had to open the window upstairs in the stairwell and jump out. When you’re 22 you can jump from windows like an action hero and not be injured. Do it when you’re a bit older and you’ll be in back rehab for two years.

In any case, I’m not happy with the backup doorman today. If there had been a fire, we’d all be dead. It was a heavy padlock, and the iron bars over the front door might as well be found at the Florence supermax prison.

just read Tim’s and Levi’s posts on blogging

Both give us much to chew on.

Tim’s aphoristic post is HERE.

Levi’s essay-length meditation is HERE.

I’m not sure I have much to add to what either of them say. But in simplest form, I suppose traditional academic journals have the following selling points:

1. They force you to give semi-definitive form to your present thoughts on an issue (whereas on blogs you can shoot from the hip, try experiments, even make mistakes).

2. They are recognized by the disembodied entity known as academia. That is to say, they can enhance (or possibly detract from) one’s status in academic culture. They can also be incorporated into a list of achievements known as a c.v. This can lead to being hired by a university, attaining tenure, being promoted, transferring to a different position, etc.

Blog posts don’t do either of those things at this point. But otherwise (and #1 is important, and #2 still an inescapable fact) I tend to find that the really stimulating intellectual discussion is happening right here in this new medium.

Levi mentions the threat to hierarchies posed by blogs, and that seems to be true. It also explains why blog culture is often so violent.

Here’s an analogy. In the U.S., there was long a pattern where the “murder capital” would shift every few years to some new city. The murder capital would not necessarily be the city with the most criminals, or the most drug business. Rather, it would be the one where the drug business was most new. Namely, a city where the rules were not yet clear, where there was no established gang hierarchy or territoriality. When I was an undergraduate in Annapolis, nearby Washington D.C. went through this phase, with new Jamaican gangs just brutalizing each other: people killed by being scalded to death in bathtubs, that sort of thing. A decade or more later, though hardly a “murder capital,” I remember humble Cedar Rapids, Iowa going through a particularly vicious phase when the drug trade was being systematically organized for the first time. This previously sleepy small city went through a wave of drive-by shootings, certain neighborhoods became “do not go” areas for the first time in city history (including the previously charming area where the aviator Wright Brothers once lived and where I used to attend preschool in the early 1970’s). And then after a few years, it seemed to settle down. The turf was now carved up, and the various gangs reached a certain modus vivendi.

What I would expect to happen over time is some combination of the following things.

1. The blogosphere will calm down a bit.

2. Some way will be found to replicate the “monumental” character of academic publishing. What I mean here is that when you write a book or article, you’re creating a sort of monument to your ideas on a topic at a given moment (though unfortunately, it often takes 2-5 years for that monument to be unveiled to the public once you’ve finished it). I see this aspect of academic publishing as partly positive, incidentally. It allows for slow reflection and a discernible rhythm of movement in one’s field, whereas the blogosphere can sometimes be a sort of paranoid chaos.

On the downside, however, it is often a colossal bore to look at an issue of a journal. Not always, but often. As Tim said in his post, it can be like going into a chain record store, with a very conservative array of offerings. You were never going to find the cutting-edge music in Sam Goody unless it was no longer cutting-edge. By the same token, it’s tough to get certain unfamiliar ideas past most established editors. But there are two “tricks” here that can help, if you want to do that:

a. Publish in journals that aren’t “philosophy journals” strictly speaking. They won’t care as much about the current layout of the field, and will care only whether the ideas you have to offer shed some light on their own disciplines. This is one reason why the non-philosophy humanities are often the source of much of the innovation in philosophy itself: people in geography or archaeology simply don’t know or care if Manuel DeLanda or Bruno Latour are not yet viewed as serious established thinkers in philosophy.

b. Mask your most unusual ideas as commentaries on already established thinkers. Tool-Being is about Heidegger because I was really fascinated by Heidegger and got most of my ideas at a young age by twisting, pulling, and pressing Heidegger’s ideas in my mind. But let’s say I had written the book simply as a series of my own ideas. Obviously, it wouldn’t have had a ghost of a chance to get published. But package it as a commentary on Heidegger, and suddenly it becomes familiar enough to be marked as “not crazy.” (And to repeat, that’s not what happened in my case. The book actually did grow out of a commentary on Heidegger.)

I’d have more to say, but need to catch the bus.