Book(s) Session at APA-Pac

I am very much looking forward to the author-critics session at APA-Pacific tonight on my Pragmatism and Genealogy books.  It’s quite an honor to have a chance to open both books up to public scrutiny together (in part because the two books were really written together as ‘one idea’ as it were).

I owe an enormous thanks to Brad Stone, Noelle McAfee, and Paul Patton for being my scrutinizers.  There are, of course, many others to whom much gratitude is owed in addition.  Both books are products of a series of ongoing conversations in which I am just one locale of many — the books are thus in may ways not entirely of me though I am of course the site at which these specific interventions have been articulated.  They are both not ‘mine’ but also mine.  In any event, the occasion tonight will be a welcome opportunity to have a chance to submit these locales in the conversation to criticism, in the sense of that word according to which it is an achievement.

I am trying to think of a funny joke as part of my response but nothing good is coming to me.  Perhaps the tone will just have to be very ultra-serious.

(By the way, if you happen to be at apa-pacific and can’t make the session, which will be in the kent room of the conference hotel, but want to come out after for a little book-criticism celebrating, then just send me a txt or an email to find out where some of us are heading.)

Ars Synthetica Conference

Ars Synthetica: The Anthropology of the Contemporary took place this past Friday at UC Santa Cruz.  I organized this event to bring Paul Rabinow, some of his students in UC Berkeley Anthropology, and other colleagues working in collaboration in recent years, down to UCSC to present their work.  At the center of the event as we envisioned it was Rabinow’s newest offerings under the auspices of the Ars Synthetica web forum.  My thanks to all participants (both presenters and audience) for making this such an engaging, inspiring, and generative event.  It is exactly what I needed as I prepare to dive into a solid two weeks of revision and polishing before I send my Foucault manuscript off to the publisher for review.  Following is a short summary of the day’s three sessions.

Online Deliberation Conference

I presented last week at a conference over at the Berkeley iSchool entitled ‘Tools for Participation’ on the subject of ‘Online Deliberation and Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing’ (DIAC/OD 2008).  There were a number of interesting projects, papers, and technologies presented, all of them focused around online participation, collaboration, and deliberation.  My experience at the conference reinforces my hunch that now is the time (for me) to take up cross-disciplinary collaborations in the context of internet research.  These should be collaborations amongst theorists and empirical inquirers (but also with practitioners, users, and developers).  One of the best ways of doing this is collaborative concept work – since concepts face both theory and practice at once.  Conceptualization need not aim for theoretical system-building nor empirical fact-collecting, but can rather aim for articulating our practices in the sense of both explicating their theoretical commitments (articulation as explication) and drawing out their empirical interconnections (articulation as linkage).  A guiding thought for me in this context is that we currently lack concepts adequate to the emerging internet practices that take an increasingly prominent place in our lives.  These practices demand the labor of conceptualization.