Bruno Latour

The Securitization of Memorial Space argues that the National September 11 Memorial and Memorial Museum is a securitized site of memory—what Foucault called a dispositif—that polices visitors and publics to remember trauma, darkness, and victimage in ways that perpetuate the “necessity” of the Global War on Terrorism.

Contributing to studies in public memory, rhetoric and argumentation, and critical security studies, Nicholas S. Paliewicz and Marouf Hasian Jr. show how various human and nonhuman actors participated in complicated argumentative formations that have mobilized political, performative, and militaristic practices of anti-terroristic violence in other parts of the world. While there were times that certain argumentative stakeholders—such as local New Yorkers—questioned the necessity of securitizing this site of memory, agentic factions including the families of those who died on 9/11, public supporters, security agents, and politicians created an ideologically oriented security assemblage that remembers 9/11 through counter-terroristic performances at Ground Zero.

In chronological order from the 2001 “dustbowl” to the present popularization of 9/11 memories, the authors present seven chapters of rich rhetorical analysis that show how the National September 11 Memorial and Memorial Museum perpetuates grief, uncertainty, and angst that affects public memory in multidirectional ways.

LITERARY WORKS ARE NEITHER autonomous, transcendent objects nor mere by-products of historical circumstance, but rather co-actors that exhibit a certain degree of agency. They cannot be easily extricated from the network of relationships in which they are entangled, nor can they be reduced merely to the context of their production. Even the variety of methods that have dominated academic criticism in the last decades, usually gathered under the label “critique,” reveal the passionate attachments and affective investments that animate and motivate them. This is what Rita Felski argues in her brilliant 2015 book, "The Limits of Critique."

Felski, who is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (where she leads a large research project on “The Social Dimensions of Literature”), has brought the conceptual tools of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) into literary studies. Such re-orientations in critical and creative vocabularies are becoming increasingly visible in academic discourse, and Felski has been at the forefront of these transformations, a position that will only be further cemented by her new book, "Hooked: Art and Attachment," forthcoming in fall 2020.

This conversation, which took place via email, addresses the main arguments and aims of Felski’s scholarly work in the context of current trends in literary and cultural criticism.

The article is a "critical continuation" the constructivist theory of interpretation a literary work. The basic tool used for this purpose was an empirical analysis - a "reading study" three different interpretations of one work Żywot człowieka poczciwego by Mikołaj Rej. As a result, it turned out, that although the fundamental statements of constructivism are adequate to interpretation,  the conclusions drawn from these claims are formulated too hastily.

Presented at the 12th International Whitehead Conference in Brasília. In this I criticize Bruno Latour's scheme of the modern constitution, as described in We Have Never Been Modern, for not taking into consideration the governmental aspect of the bifurcation of nature. Through a reading of Hans Kelsen, I discuss law as an example of the complex articulation between non-human objectivity and human subjectivity in modernity.

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.

In tijden van klimaatopwarming, massa-extinctie, de dramatische afnames van biodiversiteit en andere ecologische crises ligt angst voor het einde op de loer. Maar over wat voor einde(s) hebben we het dan precies? Wiens eindtijd is het? Wat voor wereld eindigt er? Moeten we zowel ‘de wereld’ als ‘het einde’ niet veel minder alomvattend denken? Is het tijd voor het einde van het einde van de wereld?

This article centres on Pierre Bourdieu's conception of social critique and its political potential. It first examines important objections to his view of the way in which critique works, particularly from those scholars who claim that it implies an objectivist notion of people's cognition and agency. It continues by clarifying that this objection rests on a misplaced understanding of Bourdieu's idea of the levels at which critique takes place. It then explores his understanding of the semantic struggle that social critique requires and what it takes to change the dominant configuration of the social. The analysis finally claims that this conception of critique, although far from objectivism, still retains an intellectualist inclination.

The word “propaganda” originates from biology, literally referring to the reproduction and duplication – the propagation – of plants and animals. In this time of catastrophe on earth and corporate and nationalist schemes to export that very same catastrophe to other living worlds, Donna Haraway’s rethinking of propaganda offers a precondition for collective survival and the perseverance of new socialist forms of living. Neo-constructivist, cosmist, and assemblist training camps and biospheres: these are the terms for a morphological vocabulary of a hyperempathic propaganda art that makes living worlds of comradeship in deep past, deep present, and deep future imaginable and realizable.

Latour's notion of immutable mobiles relates the circulability of certain objects to, among other features, their immutability, readability and combinability. As such it does not distinguish between, say, hand-drawn maps and machine-generated graphs. How, though, does the medial 'microstructure' of immutable mobiles matter to socially shared uses? Would, for example, digital images as bounded grids of nonoverlapping square pixels, each representing a numerical value, shape how distributed scientific work unfolds? In this article, I begin with reviewing attempts to link the microstructure of media to their communicative uses, focusing on Luhmann's relational account of media as loosely coupled substrates in which more rigid forms can become manifest. Drawing on an ethnography of astronomical research, I then inquire into how the scientists involved reasoned about their uses of media from within their practices. They used digital photographic exposures as 'workable objects' whose usefulness was not guaranteed initially. Local work was oriented to potential reuses of images (as processed exposures) by researchers elsewhere, as demonstrated by concerns over the integrity of images, the possibility of describing their work with reasonable efforts, as well as by negotiating acceptable elements in calculations so as to reveal stabilized phenomena. In doing so, scientists insisted on the need to play or experiment, suspending sequential work for explorations oriented toward deciding which action among alternatives to make consequential. This was part of a more extended 'calculative game' that points, through its orientation to reasonable agreement and delimitations of legitimate efforts, to the social order of this work. The medium, here conceived as images deemed accountable to reuses elsewhere, is a social achievement. Recognizing this may help to better understand the reusability of scientific data and its challenges.

Política y animalidad en el fin de la historia El animal humano en el Antropoceno 1 Antonia Viu y Pedro Moscoso (eds), Lenguajes y Materialidades: Trayectorias Cruzadas, Santiago: RIL (en prensa) Diego Rossello I. Introducción La denominada cuestión del animal ha tomado una importancia creciente en la academia contemporánea. Desde ámbitos distintos como la filosofía, la sociología, la ciencia política, los estudios literarios y la teoría del arte, los aportes realizados en la investigación sobre la cuestión del animal van configurando un nuevo y vibrante campo de estudios 2. Al interior de dicho campo, y en particular al interior del debate sobre la ética animal, se ha venido configurando lo que podría denominarse un giro epistémico hacia la teoría y la filosofía política 3. De este modo, si bien el campo de la ética animal había sido monopolizado por el debate entre utilitarismo y kantianismo, el nuevo "giro político" introduce en la discusión cuestiones centrales para la teoría política como la ciudadanía y la soberanía, ahora re-pensadas a la luz de la cuestión del animal 4. Desde mi perspectiva, el giro político al interior de los estudios sobre ética animal debe ser bienvenido. Por un lado, porque amplía los horizontes del debate, pero principalmente 1 Este trabajo se enmarca en el Proyecto FONDECYT Regular