“forthcoming events with Latour, Callon, et al.”

Courtesy of Peter at ANTHEM, the list is HERE.

1st Anniversary

Back in Egypt as of last night, and today is a national holiday: Revolution Day. The first protests last year were on January 25.

So far, everything seems relatively normal today.

LSE event

Courtesy of Peter at ANTHEM:

Workshop announcement:
“NO-THING PERSONAL? Drawing the frontier between persons and things in accounting, law and marketing

Time: Thursday 2nd February 2012, 14h-18h

Place: London School of Economics and Political Science, Graham Wallas Room (5th floor of the Old Building — behind the Senior Common Room)

Presentation:
After a few decades of increased interest in non-human things, it
seems like a good idea for the social sciences to now look again, with their renewed intellectual gaze, at the traditional objects of
anthropology that are human beings. What has the detour via things
helped us discover about men and women, about individual subjects,
about persons? More specifically, the question may be to understand in what ways humans are affected, and possibly redefined, by the non-
humans they cohabit with. This workshop proposes to explore this
question by confronting the point of view of three social scientists,
from three distinct disciplines: Franck Cochoy (University of
Toulouse, Sociology), Alain Pottage (LSE, Law) and Peter Miller (LSE,
Accounting). Each of them has already, in his personal works, explored the frontier between persons and things (Pottage), subjects and instruments (Miller), or dispositifs and dispositions (Cochoy). All three have, moreover, focused acutely on the sphere of economic
transactions, where persons aspirations intermingle constantly with
accounting, legal and marketing devices. Their dialogue — or
experimental trialogue, rather! — should help us see more clearly how
unexpectedly personal things can sometimes get.

Schedule:
14h00-15h00: Franck Cochoy — “Animating markets”
15h00-15h15: intermission
15h15-16h15: Alain Pottage — “Taking law literally”
16h15-16h30: intermission
16h30-17h30: Peter Miller — “Democratising failure”
17h30-18h00: wrap-up Q&A

For further information on the workshop, please contact Martin
Giraudeau, at m.l.giraudeau@lse.ac.uk.

Leslie Regan Shade interviewed by Laureano Ralon

HERE. It’s becoming quite a corpus of useful interviews.

surely the only time this has ever happened

Somehow I left London without purchasing even one book while there. There’s no chance that’s ever happened before. Not that I wasn’t tempted on a number of occasions, but my flat in Cairo is overflowing with books already. And besides, why am I not already in migration towards electronic books? I’m not yet convinced that the note-taking technology is convenient enough; it may be a few years before it’s truly just as easy to read a book electronically as on paper. But I don’t see why I should spend the rest of my life encumbered by however many paper books it is that I now own– 1500, somewhere around there. With a very small number of sentimental exceptions, I’d happily toss them all in a recycling bin if I could get electronic replacements and actually had a way to take serviceable notes on the e-versions.

[ADDENDUM: No sooner had I posted this than I realized it was a false post. I did in fact buy one book, and had simply forgotten about it.]

London wrap-up

Brief London wrap-up here, from the distant vantage point of Paris, where I’ve returned for a very brief time before Cairo.

The most remarkable thing about the Goldmsiths audience was their sheer attentiveness. That was a very long day, the topics were not always easy, but I had the sense that people were really paying attention. Normally when something is that long you’ll see lots of people checking their email and so forth, but not in that room.

The Barbican panel on Saturday was also nice. It was a good pair of papers, and along with Eyal and Susan it was nice to see Noortje Marres again, an old friend from Latourian circles and from many Amsterdam pass-throughs over the years.

One last full day in Paris tomorrow. Then I need to get back to Cairo to get things ready in my office for the start of the semester. But almost immediately I’ll be off to Berlin. Once back, there are two job search committees to deal with, plus usual business. Call me the Juggler.

nice day at Goldsmiths

Big and attentive crowd, and serious questions. Really enjoyed it. Barbican tomorrow.

how weirdly quaint

The CNN poll shows more and more support for captains going down with their ships. It was only 66% yesterday.

Should a captain go down with his ship?
Yes 71%
No 29%

Is it just me, or is it really bizarre that the public has this notion? Especially when the unstated context of this question is clearly cruise ships, not U-boats or Royal Navy frigates.

Yes, the recent captain seems pretty awful in his actions. But it seems weird to go to the other extreme and demand that he “go down with his ship.” And you know, despite the deaths this ship hasn’t even gone down. It’s lying on its side in shallow water just off the island. So I’m not sure where this romantic drama of the 71% of the public is coming from.

another puzzling headline

“What doomed Rick Perry’s campaign?”

Not much ingenuity is needed to answer this. Perry made a repeated series of ridiculous gaffes so beyond the ordinary that he just never seemed like Presidential material, despite the vasts sums of money behind his campaign.

Seriously, it’s time for me to send a check to Dublin and finally open an Intrade account. In early summer last year, the price on Perry jumping in the race was far too low. Obviously he was going to run.

And just as obviously, his chances of winning the nomination were overrated once he jumped in. So there would have been a short-sell opportunity once Perry jumped in and his stock price skyrocketed.

But best of all– Rick Perry is out of the race. I don’t like him. “A moody frat boy” is how one long-term Texas resident described him to me, and I don’t like the idea of moody frat boys existing anywhere, let alone in the White House. I suppose W. was a bit of a moody frat boy himself.

Telling students they could only vote if they were 21 or older was one of his more ridiculous blunders. In fact, I think that was worse than the more famous “oops” gaffe when he couldn’t remember one of the three federal agencies he planned to cut, wasted 53 seconds thinking about it, then saying “oops.” That’s merely ineptitude at a rhetorical performance for which a good debate coach could have prepped him. But thinking that only 21-year-olds and older can vote shows a basic lack of familiarity with Constitutional principles known to all high school students, even in the USA’s mediocre high school system.

returning to DePaul as visiting speaker

I defended my Ph.D. there on March 17, 1999. St. Patrick’s Day. Now I’ve just had an exchange with Michael Naas, and we agreed that I would give a visiting lecture there on January 11, 2013. That’s the first Friday of Winter Quarter at DePaul.

It’s also one week before I speak at my undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College, on January 18, 2013. (But I’ll speaking at the Santa Fe campus, where I was a freshman, rather than Annapolis where I graduate.)