2011-2012 Reading Group

::First Meeting::

We are planning to hold our first meeting on Friday October 21 from 3 to 4 p.m, just prior to the next Technoscience Salon. This meeting will be primarily administrative. We will have a chance to introduce ourselves and reach consensus on some details regarding the group going forward: frequency of meetings, dates, discussion format, etc. Most importantly, we will be discussing potential readings so please come prepared with suggestions. Some examples of readings that have already been suggested include Haraway, Companion Species; Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences; Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics[?]; John Law, After Method; Sloterdjik, Terror from the Air.

If you have any questions/comments/suggestions please contact us for more information.

Final Reading Group of 2010-11!

::Logistics::

Friday, March 11, 2011, 3-5pm – Featuring: Talk by Jake Kosek (UC Berkeley) on “Ecologies of Empire: the New Uses of the Honey Bee”

*Location: UofT Dept of Geography, Sidney Smith 2125*

Tying together our last two concepts – ecology and logistics – Jake is working on a social political history of the swarm, exploring how the flow of knowledge between bees and human collective behavior has remade discourses of modern citizenship and populations (http://www.jakekosek.com/).

Join us for drinks and discussion on “The Swarm: Ecology meets Logistics?” immediately following the talk, location TBD.

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“Management guru Peter Drucker (1962: 72) identified logistics and physical distribution as the economy’s “Last Dark Continent.” He said, ‘we know little more about distribution today than Napoleon’s contemporaries knew about the interior of Africa.’” ~ Deborah Cowen (2011)

“Preemption shares many characteristics with deterrence. Like deterrence, it operates in the present on a future threat. It also does this in such as way as to make that present futurity the motor of its process. The process, however, is qualitatively different. For one thing, the epistemology is unabashedly one of uncertainty, and not due to a simple
lack of knowledge. There is uncertainty because the threat has not only not yet fully formed but… has not yet even emerged. In other words, the threat is still indeterminately in potential. This is an ontological premise: the nature of threat cannot be specified… The enemy is also unspecifiable. It might come from without, or rise up unexpectedly from within.” ~ Brian Massumi (2007)

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Past Gatherings

::Experiment::

Friday, November 5, 3-5 pm

Readings by Hans Jorg Rheinberger and Astrid Schrader.

::Forgiveness::

Friday, October 15, 3-5 pm

Here is a provocative opening quote and two short statements from our guest speakers, Alice MacLachlan, Alexis Shotwell, who on October 22 will be addressing the concept of forgiveness.
::
“What forgiveness and literary activity share, then, is an act of
submission, an act of risk- taking insofar as one opens oneself up to
the possibilities brought into existence by the fact of contact with
another person. For just as in writing, where the author must
relinquish the desire to predetermine the reader’s comprehension in any
definitive way, so too in giving and offering forgiveness, participants
must make themselves vulnerable to the interpreting
activity of the other” – Julie McGonegal

“The question – or even the problem – of forgiveness
most often arises in the aftermath of some identifiable wrong or harm.
But not all wrongs do or can lead to forgiveness (forgiveness is
refused, or remains unasked for) – or even to the prior question
‘whether forgiveness?’ at all. In my remarks, I will explore when and
how the issue of forgiveness arises, or doesn’t arise- and the
conditions under which the questions of forgiveness (whether to seek it,
to bestow or refuse it) become the appropriate questions to ask. In
doing so, I hope to touch on the powers and dangers of forgiveness as a
response to suffering, and “unforgivable” in relation to the same” Alice MacLachlan. Alice MacLachlan.

“Is forgiveness a kind of response? In my remarks, I will open conversation about how we might think about nurturing the capacity to respond to wrongs, the question of responsibility, who “holds” the power to forgive, and the politico-ethical tangle of being involved with ongoing and systemic wrongs. How and who ought beneficiaries of racism, genocide, imperialism, and other forms of oppression relate with those harmed for our benefit? Is there someone we have the right to call on for forgiveness?” Alexis Shotwell.

::Propagation::

Friday, January 21, 2011, 3-5pm

Readings by Lee Edelman and Jocelyn Holland.

::Ecology::

Friday, February 4, 2011, 3-5pm

Readings by Deleuze & Guattari.