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(129)
Reception speech for the Holberg Prize
2013

Speech for the reception of the Holberg Memorial Prize, Bergen, June 2013. (Unpublished).

Abstract
Minister, Excellency, Officers of the Ludwig Holberg Memorial Fund, Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, friends and family. There is something slightly reassuring in having people like me receiving an award such as the one you have decided to bestow on my work tonight. Through sheer labour, ordinary people may achieve something that no one could have predicted from the way their mind works or from their personality. Having worried all my life about the fact that a white provincial male of bourgeois extraction and of limited intellectual skills could not possibly be the real target of the thoughts that had traversed his desk since he was sixteen, I am now totally reassured: everyone is able to tackle problems of vastly disproportionate size and even have the good fortune, if not to solve them, at least to give them a more reasonable shape. Reassured that it is not me but those slightly reshaped problems that are rewarded tonight, it is to them that I may now safely turn.
Translations
No Other Translations Available
🔗
(128)
Agency at the time of the Anthropocene
2013

"Agency at the time of the Anthropocene", in New Literary History Vol. 45, pp. 1-18, 2014. (Originally written as lecture given at the occasion of the Holberg Memorial Prize Symposium 2013: “From Economics to Ecology”, Bergen, June 4th, with the title « Which Language Should we Talk with Gaia?».)

Abstract
In an academic setting such as this symposium, I don’t need to review with you those new emotions with which the Earth is now agitated in addition to its usual motions. Nor do I need to explain why facts of geology have become news and why a piece of information about Charles David Keeling’s data at Mauna Loa has shifted from the “science and technology section” of the newspaper to a new section reserved for the damning tragedies of the Earth. We all agree that, far from being a Galilean body stripped of any other movements than that of billiard balls, the Earth has now taken back all the characters of a full-fledged actor. Indeed, as Chakrabarty has proposed to say, it has become once again an agent of history, or rather, an agent of what I have proposed to call our common geostory.
Translations

Language: Hungarian
Translator: Keresztes Balázs
Title: “Agencia az antopocen koraban”
Journal: Prae
Reference: pp. 3-20, 2017

Italian translation
in Nicola Manghi
« L’agency al tempo dell’Antropocene »
Essere du Questa Terra Guerra et Pace al tempo dei conflitti ecologici
Rosenberg& Sellier, 2019, pp. 97-120.
Rosenberg& Sellier, 2019, pp. 97-120.

[traduction en japonais Japanese translation in "Gendai-Shiso (The Contemporary Thought)" ]

Ecology & Political Ecology, Semiotics & Literature Studies 🔗
(126)
Biography of an Inquiry - About a Book on Modes of Existence
2012

(126) « Biography of an Inquiry - About a Book on Modes of Existence", (translated from the French by Catherine Porter), Social Studies of Science Vol. 43 n° 2 pp. 287–301.

Original Article
Biographie d'une enquête - à propos d'un livre sur les modes d'existence
Abstract
Since the project on Modes of Existence has been long in coming and has connection with all the successive field works done by the author, the paper tries to retrace the main steps that have led to the project. It shows that this project precedes the work done in actor-network theory and explains the link between philosophy and anthropology through the peculiar notion of mode of existence.
Translations
No Other Translations Available
Modes of existence, Philosophy 🔗
(124)
Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through art and politics.
2015

in Albena Yaneva & Alejandro Zaera-Polo (eds.), What is Cosmopolitical Design?, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 21-33, 2015

Abstract
Initially written as a lecture at the French Institute for the lauching of SPEAP in London, in November 2011. There is no single institution able to cover, oversee, dominate, manage, handle, or simply trace ecological issues of large shape and scope. Many issues are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests. We have problems, but we don't have the publics that go with them. How could we imagine agreements amid so many entangled interests? We will review several attempts to tackle ecological problems by connecting the tools of scientific representation with those of arts and politics and present the program of Experimentation on Arts and Politics which has been running at Sciences Po since September 2010.
Downloads
124-GAIA-LONDRES-DEpdf.pdfapplication/pdf icon
124-GAIA-SPEAP-SPANISHpdf.pdfapplication/pdf icon
124-GAIA-SPEAP-SPANISHpdf.pdfapplication/pdf icon
Translations

Language: German
Date: 2013
Translator: Joachim Schulte
Reference: « Warten auf Gaia. 
Komposition der gemeinsamen Welt durch Kunst und Politik » in Michael Hagner (editor) Wissenschaft und Demokratie, Editions Unseld, p. 163-188.

Language: Spanish
Date: 2012
Translator: Sylvina Cucchi « Esperando a Gaia. Componer el mundo común mediante las artes y la política »
Reference: in Cuadernos de Otra parte. Revista de letras y artes, N° 26 Ivierno 2012, p.67-76, 2012.

Language: Polish
Date:2015
Titre: « Katarzyna Sloboda Czekajac na Gaje. Komponowanie wspolnego swiata poprzez sztuke I opilityke »
Traduction: Katarzyna Sloboda
Reference: Ekologie pp. 157 174

Language: Portuguese
Reference: « Esperando Gaia. A composiçao de un Mundo em comum per meio da Arte e da Politica » ‘Brainstorm’ catalog of an exhibition.
Date: May 2013
Place: 9eme Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre

Language: Dutch
Het Parlement Van de Dingen, 202
Boom, Amsterdam. pp 43-66

Traduction: Chinese
TDAIC (Taiwan Digital Art and Information center)

Ecology & Political Ecology 🔗
(123)
The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts’ A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads
2012

British Journal of Sociology Vol 63 n° 4 pp. 591-615, 2012 (this paper has received the BJS annual award for 2014)

Abstract
In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows one to revisit Gabriel Tarde’s (1843-1904) social theory that entirely dispensed with using notions such as individual or society. Our argument is that when it was impossible, cumbersome or simply slow to assemble and to navigate through the masses of information on particular items, it made sense to treat data about social connections by defining two levels: one for the element, the other for the aggregates. But once we have the experience of following individuals through their connections (which is often the case with profiles) it might be more rewarding to begin navigating datasets without making the distinction between the level of individual component and that of aggregated structure. It becomes possible to give some credibility to Tarde’s strange notion of ‘monads’. We claim that it is just this sort of navigational practice that is now made possible by digitally available databases and that such a practice could modify social theory if we could visualize this new type of exploration in a coherent way.
Translations

Translation: Français/French
Date: 2013
Traducteur: Barbara Bender
Reference: «Le tout est toujours plus petit que les parties. Une expérimentation numérique des monades de Gabriel Tarde », Réseaux, Vol. 31, 177, pp. 199-233, 2013

Langage: Allemand/German
Date: 201-
Translator:
Reference: in Ramón Reichert (editor) Big Data, Transcript.

Langage: Portuguese
Date: 2015
Translator:Flávia Gonsales e Beatriz Redko
Journal: Paragraph Journal Vol 2, n°3 2015 pp. 8-25
Title: “O Todi é Sempre Menor Que As Parte um teste digital acerca das mônadas de Gabriel Tarde"
 

Actor-Network-Theory, Digital Humanities, Quantitative methods, Gabriel Tarde 🔗
(121)
Networks, Societies, Spheres – Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist
2010

Keynote Lecture, Annenberg School of Design, Seminar on Network Theories, February 2010, published in the International Journal of Communication special issue edited by Manuel Castells Vol 5, 2011, pp. 796-810.

Abstract
Although the word “network” is now ubiquitous and most of the time associated with IT, it has a much longer history and a deeper philosophical import. The paper reviews some of the meaning of the word in the so called “actor network theory” an especially what the new technique of digital tracing does to social theory. The argument is that the tracability of the social allowed by the notion of network has dissolved the two end points of social theory –the individual and the society- to replace it by a navigational experience that might stop at the aggregate or at the element without giving them any privilege.
Translations

201-: Italien/Italian
in Philosophy of the project. Towards a theory of design, Insege, Mimesis, sous la direction de Dario Mangano.

Quantitative methods 🔗
(120)
Steps Toward the Writing of a Compositionist Manifesto
2010

In New Literary History, Vol. 41, 471-490, 2010.

Abstract
In this paper, written in the outmoded style of a “manifesto”, an attempt is made to use the word “composition” as an alternative to critique and “compositionism” as an alternative to modernism. The idea is that once the two organizing principles of nature and society are gone, one of the remaining solutions is to “compose” the common world. Such a position allows an alternative view of the strange connection of modernity with the arrow of time: the Moderns might have been future-centered but there is a huge difference between the future of people fleeing their past in horror and the “shape of things to come”, that, strangely enough, now appears suddenly in the back of humans surprised by their ecological crisis.
Translations

Translation: Allemand/ German
Translator: Hagen Schölzel
Reference: « Versuch eines „Kompositionistischen Manifests“ » in Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie, N°1, 2013 pp. 8-30 (with a postscript).

Republication in English:
Reference: in Catherine de zegher Gerald McMaster "Catalogue of the18th Biennale Sydney", 2012 pp. 65-78.

Republication in English
Reference: Valérie Deifel, Bernd Kraefner and Virgil Widrich (editors) An envelope for arts, sciences, politics and us. Mixing realities and mediating myths and methods, Springer Wien New York, pp. 12-35, 2012.

201-
Language: Spanish (Mexico)
Translator: Luciano Concheiro
Journal: Fractal, Mexico City, special issue on manifests

Compositionism, Semiotics & Literature Studies 🔗
(117)
Entering a Risky Territory – Space in the Age of Digital Navigation
2009

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 581-599

Abstract
The great advantage of the digitalization of maps has been to rematerialize the practice of using maps. It is thus much easier than before to contrast the mimetic from the navigational use of maps made every day more visible by the developments of digital techniques. The paper aims at opening a conversation between science studies and geography by showing how the notion of territory itself may now be clearly seen as an artefact from a mimetic usage of maps.
Downloads
Wkraczając na terytorium ryzyka (Polish trans.)application/pdf icon
Translations

2010: Polonais / Polish
Kultura Popularna 3-4 (9-10) pp. 103-125

2013 Portugais/Portuguese
Entrando em territorio arriscado . O espaço na era de navegaçao digital
Terra Brasilis n 2 (July) 2013 online

2013 Allemand/German
« Das Territorium ist die Karte. Raum Im Zeitalter digitaler Navigation »
in Tristan Thielmann & Erhard Schüttpelz (editors) Akteur-Medien-Theorie, Transcript, Bielefeld, 2013, p.583-614.

Digital Humanities, Quantitative methods 🔗
(116)
Tarde’s idea of quantification
2009

In Mattei Candea (editor) The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, Routledge, London, pp. 145-162, 2010

Abstract
Even though Tarde is said to have had a literary view of social science, he himself was deeply involved in statistics (especially criminal statistics) and took an essentially quantitative view of social phenomena. What is so paradoxical in his view of quantification is that it relies not only on the aggregates but also on the individual element. The paper reviews this paradox, the reason why Tarde was son intent on finding a quantitative grasp for establishing the social sciences and relates the type of data Tarde envisioned with the peculiar new types of information available today in digital formats, datascapes that might vindicate many insights that seemed so odd at the time of Tarde. (see also 82)
Translations

Langue: espagnole
Traducteur: Ignacio Prieto
Titre: “La idea de Cuantificacion in Tarde »
Revue: Acta Sociologica vol 77 septembre décembre 2018, pp. 157-181

Gabriel Tarde, Quantitative methods, Social Theory 🔗
(115)
Spheres and Networks. Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization
2009

In Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer, 30 pp. 138-144, 2009

Abstract
A joint lecture with Peter Sloterdijk to explore the two concepts of “sphere » and of “network”, the paper (in line with 112) shows that there is only an apparent contradiction between the two concepts, contradiction that is maintained only as long as the nature/society trope is maintained. Both concepts act as an alternative definition of space and, although they seem to restrict the expansion of modernism concepts (especially nature), they are in effect the only way to find rooms for the artificial and material conditions of an ecological space.
Downloads
Sphères et réseaux (French trans.)application/pdf icon
Translations

2009: Français / French
« Sphères et réseaux, deux façons de saisir le global », in Les Etudes du CFA n° 26, Septembre 2009

201-: Russe/Russian
by Luba Bronzino in " Bulletin of people's " Friendship, University of Russia " http://elibrary.ru/title_about.asp?id=9657

Republication republication in "Space: Critical Concepts in Geography", edited by Peter Merriman, Routledge, 201-

201-
Language: Italian
Editor: Giovanni Leghissa
Journal: http://philosophykitchen.com/)

Actor-Network-Theory, Design, Ecology & Political Ecology 🔗

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