OOO-symposium@georgia tech: audio now available.

Levi Bryant just announced that the recordings made at the Georgia Tech symposium are now online here.  don’t you just wish this could become common practice in academia? kudos to the speakers and all that made the publication possible.

Judith Butler goes Whitehead, Latour and Stengers.

you heard right: welcome Judith Butler into the pragmatist no-longer-humanist science studies fold! thinking with Whitehead she makes some big concessions in regard to her earlier work, perhaps especially concerning that no-longer-tenable centrality of language. I find that move truly admirable, considering her standing as a scholar. there is something sublimely beautiful about openly giving oneself to new thought, maybe even more so when such strong intellects can still do it. there is no doubt in my mind that thinking with Butler will enrich cosmopolitical debate. I won’t go into detail, but she seems to move into the vicinity of Donna Haraway’s recent work in When Species Meet.

thanks to Working Notes for posting the lecture. you will need iTunes for this.

edit: I also strongly recommend the recordings named Public Lecture 1 and Giving Account of Oneself Reading Group Discussion. as a relative newcomer to Butler I am surprised by how well her (re)thinking connects with recent work in STS on bodies and more-than-human-relationalities. happy locomotion of ideas!

so what am I (we) in the process of doing?

we (I) are working with articulating cosmopolitics in the middle of things. I am currently finishing a master’s thesis, so posting might be highly infrequent until June. but more on the actual work later. for now I only wish to mark my presence and the desire to entangle myself with others, in thought and writing, by the gathering-technology that is this blog. I have a hunch this will make quite a few things easier.

like responding to the many mindful people that are out there, thinking with things.

like cultivating my thinking-through-writing habits.

becoming more pragmatic (read: faster, clearer, differently convoluted) in writing is a huge goal at the moment and blog-communication might just be the practice to cultivate that. I look forward to things to (be)come.