Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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A comprehensive list of data sources and services

Reblogged from Thinking Culture:

Via Rob Kitchin on Twitter, the Visualising Data blog has an entry that is described as ‘A big collection of sites and services for accessing data‘. The post contains a comprehensive list of the data sources, and analysis tools, that are available. These are also helpfully categorised under headings. This is a really important development that could prove to be a key resource for researchers and students who are looking to use digital or ‘big’ data in their research. Here is the description of the list from the post:

‘This collection presents the key sites that provide data, whether through curated collections, offering access under the Open Data movement or through Software/Data-as-a-Service platforms.‘

Read more…

As David suggests, this looks very handy.

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Marx Reloaded, in its entirety

Stuart Elden recently posted the YouTube video of the film Marx Reloaded, by Jason Barker, which concerns a reappraisal of the idea of communism in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. It includes interview snippets from, amongst others: Michael Hardt, Jacques Ranciere, Toni Negri, and Slavoj Zizek (with subtitles).  As a means of  engaging with contemporary debates around what left-oriented politics can and might do and how Marx’s work has been adopted and transformed it is worth watching…

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Arts and techniques for living – Paul Rabinow experiments

I stumbled across a website for the project Bios Technika, led by Paul Rabinow, a few days ago and have dipped in and out between doing other things. Its not the easiest site to navigate but there are some interesting questions posed and conceptual paths followed. In particular the project concerns ‘synthetic biology’, which appears to be a cause for concern for Rabinow. It resonates with some of the work being conducted at Exeter in our NAMBIO research group, within Geography, and more broadly in the Science Technology and Culture cross-university theme. The project itself is described thus:

Our experiment concerns the relations among and between knowledge, thought, and care, as well as the different forms and venues within which these relations might be brought together and assembled. Our commitment is anthropological, a combination of disciplined conceptual work and empirical inquiry. Our challenge is to produce knowledge in such as way that the work involved enhances us ethically, politically and ontologically. The curve of Western philosophy has been to place more and more emphasis on deciding whether or not something is true while practices of spirituality have been delegated to religion. The challenge of contemporary anthropology is to invent and experiment with new forms of relating truth and spirituality. Said more generally: What are the reflected modes and forms for conducting life: the bios technika–the arts and techniques of living? In short: what is a worthwhile philosophic and anthropological practice today?

There are several sections to the site, which include: ‘concepts‘, ‘diagnostics‘, ‘pathways‘ and ‘cases‘. Each of these is described from the ‘about’ page as different aspects of a mode of ‘inquiry’, which is broadly genealogical. The definition given is quite resonant of Stengers’ articulation of  cosmopolitical ‘mapping into knowledge’:

Inquiry is… experimental in its form giving. Inquiry does not represent a pre-existing situation, nor construct an entirely new one. It consists in reiterated and controlled adjustment.

It is a rich mix of conceptual and pathway-oriented genealogical engagements with various themes around the production of knowledge, particularly concerned with synthetic biology. There are various ways of getting at the ‘experiments’ through the different sections and you sort of have to poke your way around. I would encourage people interested in Rabinow’s Foucault-inspired work; in biopolitics and in STS-type investigations of contemporary biosciences to root around for themselves.

Also: the subheading, at the foot of the page, is ‘discipline and flourish’. Nice pun.

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Annemarie Mol – cultivating bodies [video of talk]

Professor Annemarie Mol gave one of the keynotes at this year’s Emotional Geographies conference entitled: ‘Feeling, wording, eating. On cultivating bodies’. I did not attend the conference so it is great to see a video made available, and so swiftly:

The talk offers an expansive understanding of embodied subjectivity, with the extension of the senses that are cultivated and extended through the various material, economic, medical practices. A complex entanglement of spatial configurations thus constitutes the embodied subject Mol offers. Her challenge to the audience is how one might formulate methods not only for studying but also engaging in ‘cultivation’.

I came to this video thanks to Rebecca Sandover.

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Tom Roberts on Parisi’s Contagious Architecture

Luciana Parisi’s Contagious Architecture: Computation, aesthetics and space is a book that I have been meaning to read for a little while. Tom Roberts has offered an informative and insightful commentary on Contagious Architecture over on his blog  Machinic Matter, which confirms my interest in what seems like a fairly substantial work.

Tom identifies Parisi’s principal concern as identifying a non-anthropocentric understanding of thought, with a particular engagement with the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Quite Deleuzian then. He suggests that

The key question for Parisi is thus: can we conceptualize thinking “without having to prove that thought is an expression of the functional neurophysiological evolutions of the brain-mind?” (2013, page 235).

For Tom, the book poses some important questions for the debates around ‘new materialisms’. In conclusion, he suggests that, in particular, Parisi’s use of Whitehead asks:

how to affirm a reality of thought that, whilst being material, is not ‘explained away’ by material processes? As Parisi puts it, Whitehead’s non-anthropocentric understanding of mentality “is not intended to liberate thought from matter, but rather to suggest that there are material modes of thought that cannot be subsumed under the totality of neuroarchitecture” (2013, page 219).

Parisi’s book offers a rather different version of contagion, perhaps, from another prominent engagement with the theme, namely Tony Sampson’s recent study of contemporary digital culture through Tarde and Deleuze in Virality: Contagion theory in the age of the internet. It will be interesting to contrast these two projects.

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Simondon – the technical object and the transindividual

Following on from the excellent biography of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon to which I linked recently, here he is, in his own words, in a short interview:

I came to this thanks to the Politics and Matter research group (Geographical Science, University of Bristol) blog.

In the interview, the subject of individuation is touched upon and briefly articulated. This is central to Simondon’s philosophical project as a theorisation of a metastable and pre-individual “more-than-one”, as explained in the aforementioned biography.

Muriel Combes excellent introduction to Simondon’s work “Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual“, recently translated for MIT Press, has been reviewed by David Scott on NDPR. It is a detailed and useful review and offers some insights into Simondon’s work in its own regard, well worth a read if you’re interested.

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Living Thought by Esposito reviewed

Stuart Elden points to an interesting review at NDPR of Esposito’s recent book Living Thought.

There are some striking passages in the review, which mark the book out as provocatively interesting:

Turning Deleuze’s judgment of Italian philosophy upside down, Esposito sees it as being intrinsically geophilosophical since it developed within a geographical space that only took the shape of a nation much later than most other European countries. Rather than an indication of backwardness, the absence of a unified national context now becomes one of the motives for the international resonance of Italian thought.

And perhaps of particular interest to colleagues interested in non-representational theories:

According to Esposito, the major traditions feeding contemporary thought — Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, French deconstruction, German critical theory and hermeneutics — albeit seemingly opposed to each other, all share the same transcendental horizon that assigns a dominant role to language. It is precisely through its tight connection with the sphere of language that philosophical experience appears today to wear itself out in the negation of its own ambitions. The possibility of breaking the current deadlock and developing an affirmative thought thus implies questioning the transcendental primacy of language.

The book appears to be a rather forceful acclamation of (Esposito’s version of) Italian philosophy, no doubt with Esposito himself at its contemporary vanguard. Should make for interesting reading!

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Economies of Contribution, RGS-IBG 2013 session

Along with Matt Wilson and James Ash, I am co-convening (and chairing) a session at the RGS-IBG annual conference concerning the ways in which we might theoretically and empirically address what Bernard Stiegler has called the economy of contribution. Following James’ post, I thought I’d post the blurb and the running order here.

Economies of Contribution, Paper Session

‘Rather, a pathway to genuine growth must be refound, a growth running counter to the mis-growth [mécroissance] that consumerism has become, and a growth which would consist in a renaissance of desire. Such a rebirth would be achieved by implementing an economy of contribution, an economy for which “to economize“ means “to take care,“ and an economy within which care cultivates associated milieus.’ Stiegler 2010, For A New Critique of Political Economy, p. 108, original emphasis

How might growth be re-imagined as a ‘taking care’? What are the particular spaces and spacings in which such economizations are already occurring? How are re-imaginings of value, consumption, contribution and production re-configured through networked and spaced activities, communities, and infrastructures? We invite papers and other provocations exploring emerging social, political, cultural, economic and biophysical geographies with a particular focus on shifting conceptualizations of technological-mediated consumptions and productions.

Taking an impetus from the work of Bernard Stiegler, this session concerns the rapid changes brought about by networked technologies within economic arenas and how such changes demand broadened and/or revised understandings of consumption, production and value. Of course, a number of economic commentators and theorists have raised the advent of the internet, and particularly the world wide web, as a socio-technical phenomenon that demands that we rethink our understandings of economics. The conjunction of consumption and production, the distribution of the means of production, and the growth of positive externalities have all been raised as benefits of a new technically enabled economy (Benckler, Lessig, Shirky). Equally, the effectively infinite reproducibility of digital media has troubled the economic models of established creative industries, from newspapers to record producers and film studios (Leadbeater, Lessig, Zittrain). New modes of technical interaction between consumers, service providers and industry also ask questions about the bases of value and cost of products and services (Beller, Marazzi, Stiegler).

Novel forms of economic model and activity are active in a range of settings, but it is also important to note these economic paradigms, practices and social theoretical accounts do not always or easily gel. By inviting a range of positions to be collected together in this session we aim to interrogate their geographies and promote not so much a revision of economic geography, but rather a sense of opportunity for an expansive and inclusive engagement with the political economy.

Papers:

Enforced Flexibility: The Opportunities and Challenges of Changing Models of Distribution and Contribution Daniel Cockayne (University of Kentucky)

New economies of residential energy demand reduction Heather Lovell (University of Edinburgh), Martin Pullinger (Lancaster University / ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group / ARCC-Water Project), Nigel Goddard (University of Edinburgh)

Contributing urban space: a genealogy of the High Line Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Online Artmaking and Community Building Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield)

 

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“Save the technical object” – Gilbert Simondon interview, 1983

Andrew Iliadis has translated what seems like a really interesting interview with Simondon from 1983, originally in the magazine Esprit. Simondon covers creativity, novelty, alienation (in technics as the originary relation of the human-technical) and invention. There are, as one might expect, obvious resonances with Stiegler’s work, e.g.:

“Technics are never completely and forever in the past. They contain a power that is schematic, inalienable, and that deserves to be conserved and preserved.”

I recommend reading it.

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Gilbert Simondon biography

Jussi Parikka has highlighted the translation of a biography of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon [the original was written by Nathalie Simondon], who was a key influence, of course, on the work of Bernard Stiegler and also Gilles Deleuze. In his post, Parikka highlights the hands-on nature of Simondon’s practice – the fact that he built a television in the basement of his school – and the resonances with Friedrich Kittler’s building of a synthesiser. This is also a link, as Phillipe Petit highlights in his introduction to the book of interviews Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir, with Bernard Stiegler, whose father worked for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the French national broadcaster between 1939-64, and built their first TV. Parikka picks out the neologism of ‘thinkerer’ (commingling ‘tinkerer’ and ‘thinker’) coined by Erkki Huhtamo to describe Simondon, a term that might also be applied to Stiegler for his various means of practising philosophy.

The biography demonstrates what an extraordinary, and, sadly, relatively short, career Simondon had, including a fairly meteoric rise from teaching at a lycée in Tours (1953-55) to being appointed Chair of Psychology B at the Sorbonne (1965). Simondon worked with Barchelard and Hyppolite, as a postgraduate, and his thesis was examined by Jean Hyppolite, Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricoeur and Paul Fraisse. Quite something!

The biography also includes very interesting quotes from letters to Bachelard and Hyppolite as well as fantastic summaries of Simondon’s key works. The experimental spirit of Simondon’s work is strongly evoked throughout, with a clear commitment to a collaborative methodology (across and between science and philosophy):

[He] chose a path of reflection where philosophy might inform science. Such collaboration between science and philosophy, he wrote in 1954 to his future supervisor [Hyppolite], must be carried out not in the results, which would be “an invasion of thought by unworthy followers, as shown in scientistic time,” but in the method: “At the level of method, science is never a feudal lord ruling over a vassal philosophy; rather, it is a relation between the spontaneous and the reflective. The spontaneous governs the reflective, as in scientism, only when the reflective activity is not contemporaneous with the spontaneous activity.”

The biography makes for essential reading for those interested not only in the philosophy of technology and technics, but also for those with a broader interest in the history of ideas, in particular related to the development of what we call continental philosophy.