lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.
Like zombies? How about real-world multiplayer games? And how about apocalyptic narratives like those seen in the film 28 days later?
Coming to a UK city near you soon, it seems. This city-wide ‘zombie chase game’ (at only £24 a pop!) challenges participants to negotiate the half-dead world, racing from bolt-holed survivor to bolt-holed survivor. All in the hope of reaching the zombie disco on your successful completion. That is, of course, if you avoid exposure to ‘zombie gore’…
Mark Paterson’s edited title Touching Space, Placing Touch with Martin Dodge is to see print this August. Ashgate’s page on the book is here, and includes an eclectic mix of touch-based spatial narratives.
French geographer Anne Volvey’s chapter ‘Fieldwork: how to get in(to) touch’ and Hannah Macpherson’s ‘Guiding visually impaired walking groups’ are of particular interest, and all chapters engage with topics otherwise neglected, or dealt with through standard visual approaches (art, toilets and elephant captivity as themes!).
I’ve tried my best to track down Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), a fantastic historical analysis of touch. Chapter 5 entitled ‘Tangible Play, Prosthetic Performance’ sounds promising, and from reading some of Paterson’s other work in Human Geography journals, I’m convinced he’s got some approaches that might well tessellate with a Stieglerian approach. I also notice his PhD supervisor was Nigel Thrift, so there’s a definite link. His blog Senses of Touch is worth heading over too, with Haptic, Blindness and Technology the fulcrum of his research interest.
Another quick link; this time to a video of Bruno Latour’s lecture on digital societies at Goldsmiths. Available here.
This is how the future looks; domestic robots in 2020 anyone? Here.
Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies is one of a few academic blogs I return to on a near-daily basis. Surfing from personal insights into the academic work process to book releases, video links and conference details, Elden provides a rich stream of content across Political, Geographical and Philosophical spheres. There are recurring figures most weeks; Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant and Peter Sloterdijk pop up frequently. As does Graham Harman; a feverish blogger himself over at his Object-Oriented Philosophy page. Elden’s latest post is a re-blogged interview with Harman over at The Loyal Opposition to Modernity that can be read here. As Harman is a big reader of Bruno Latour, he brings his name up in conversation, alluding to his appeal to anthropologists, geographers and sociologists over philosophers. Harman also talks of his lethargy with purely relational concepts (in metaphysical terms and then political arenas). In particular Harman says;
Now that relations and events have become king in continental philosophy, these battles have largely been won. Rather than endlessly using these theories to beat up the decreasing number of reactionary holdouts, we ought to take a closer look at the problems with relationality itself.
‘Metaphysical essentialism’, he says later, ‘is politically harmless, but epistemological essentialism is not’. So two problems with essence? The idea that it can be directly known (rather than obliquely), and is eternal (a-historical).
Another great quote is on Deleuzian thought within Continental Philosophy:
We are well into the “Deleuze is compatible with everyone and foresaw everything” phase, the lack of a challenging outside, which always announces the closing decadence of any philosopher’s vogue; Derrideanism got this way by the early 1990’s. And now the Deleuze industry is finally on the point of overheating and excess inventory, and soon there will be layoffs and plant closures.
Latour, as Harman argues, is certainly no Deleuzian (too much flux not enough formation). Harman’s Prince of Networks, from 2009, is a good starting point for thinking about Latour as a philosopher, and how Harman’s own Object-Oriented Philosophy can work with Latour’s Actor-Networks. It’s available as a free pdf from here, but also well worth buying.
Sam Hind 