Hi,
i was asked to forward this list - it may be of interest to some of you.
please reply to Paolo Palladino - (email address at the end of the message),
rather than to me.
thanks
Teresa
CODE AND CODING: FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT
>
>
>CODE AND CODING
>A one-day workshop at Lancaster University, sponsored by the Centre for
>Science Studies and the Institute for Cultural Research
>
>Bowland Senior Common Room, Friday, 30 November 2001, 10:30-17:00
>Registration is free, but please pre-register with the organiser!
>(Lunch £ 5.00)
>
>The word 'code' appears today in contexts as diverse as computer
>programming, genetic engineering and geo-strategic planning. Most of us,
>however, encounter the term while engaging in more mundane activities
>such as posting a letter. Lucy Suchman has described this workshop on
>'code and coding' as focusing 'on the migrations of 'code' across
>previously disparate discourses and arenas of practice'. This concise
>and apposite wording suggests that these disparate activities are being
>unified. Indeed, these 'migrations' can be associated with increasingly
>ubiquitous technologies of management, and, we can begin to speak of an
>emerging 'discourse of code'. Yet, as a number of anthropologists,
>geographers, historians, philosophers and sociologists would readily
>attest, the empirical evidence for the connection between these
>different contexts is disputable, and so are its methodological and
>philosophical presuppositions. Thinking about the 'migrations of 'code''
>then raises much debated questions about the relationship between
>language, practice and power. On the other hand, 'code' so challenges
>the boundaries between language and practice, and everything that is
>predicated on such boundaries, that it is possible to argue that these
>debates are being overtaken by the contemporary 'migrations of 'code''.
>The aim of the workshop is to draw out and clarify these issues. Anyone
>willing to participate in this discussion is invited.
>
>Programme:
>
>Morning session
>Paolo Palladino (History, Lancaster)
>Introduction to the workshop
>
>Papers:
>(These papers will be available from 15 November on the website of the
>Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University)
>
>Chair: Kirsten McAllister (Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster)
>
>Mick Dillon (Politics, Lancaster)
>'Becoming-dangerous: From Pre-formed Bodies to Bodies-in-formation'
>
>As part of a larger concern with the changing character of global power,
>Michael Dillon is currently researching the confluence of the molecular
>and the information revolution, and how that confluence is being
>appropriated by the strategic community, in Britain and the United
>States, for the purpose of revising their accounts of security, peace
>and war. Exploring the ways in which information and code, traditionally
>influential in strategic discourse and war via information theory and
>cybernetics, has mutated with the information and the molecular
>revolution, the paper will focus in particular on the changing
>conceptions of information and code associated with this so-called
>Revolution in Military Affairs. The paper is not concerned to advance a
>conception of code but to analyse how mixed conceptions of information
>and code, especially a certain conflation of information and code, has
>become ontologised as a principle of formation around which a revision
>of startegic affairs has been taking place since the early 1990s.
>
>See Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 'Global Liberal Governance:
>Biopolitics, Security and War', Millennium, 30 (2001): 41-66.
>
>James Griesemer (Philosophy, California-Davis)
>'What's Genetic about Genetic Coding?'
>
>James Griesemer is a philosopher of biology. He has written on the
>history, sociology and philosophy of museum-based natural history;
>laboratory-based ecology, and the units of evolution (including
>historical, philosophical and empirical studies). His current work
>considers the history of the separation of germ and soma and the
>philosophy of reproduction. He is also developing a new project on
>representations of time in biology and the problems of managing time in
>biological research. The strategy of his paper is take a process
>perspective on genetic coding rather than the static metaphor of a
>genetic code as a starting point from which to explore the issue of what
>is 'genetic' about the genetic code. The process perspective grows from
>a philosophical critique of the concept of a replicator (Dawkins),
>informed by a history of the emergence of ideas in 20th century biology
>from laboratory bench practices in the 19th century that set up the
>theoretical perspectives in which contemporary biology works. The result
>is that localizing the genetic code in the genes is problematised, both
>for molecular biologists aiming to 'disseminate' their science to the
>public and for critics attaching social and political values to objects
>of study in molecular biology.
>
>See J. R. Griesemer, 'Reproduction and the Reduction of Genetics, in P.
>Beurton, R. Falk, and H-J. Rheinberger (eds.), The Concept of the Gene
>in Development and Evolution, Historical and Epistemological
>Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
>
>Nigel Thrift (Geography, Bristol)
>'The Automatic Production of Cities'
>
>Nigel Thrift is a cultural geographer, and is especially interested in
>developing new theoretical and empirical understandings of the relations
>between society, culture and politics, relating especially to ideas of
>hybridity, embodied knowledge and discourse. His paper is concerned with
>how cities are understood once large parts of them are being regularly
>produced by code. He will try to answer questions such as: Should the
>digital writing of software be understood as authoring? Does writing
>encompass the effectivity of code? What differences do different kinds
>of code make? Are cities now 'writing acts' in the large?
>
>See N. Thrift, Spatial Formations, London: Sage, 1996.
>
>Afternoon session 1: Responses
>
>Chair: Paul Fletcher (Religious Studies, Lancaster)
>
>Fred Botting (English, Keele)
>
>Fred Botting teaches English Literature and writes on literary theory,
>romanticism and the gothic. His most recent book was Sex, Machines and
>Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present, Manchester:
>Manchester University Press, 1999. He has also co-written two books with
>Scott Wilson, The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) and
>Tarantinian Ethics (London: Sage, 2001).
>
>Howard Caygill (History, Goldsmiths)
>
>Howard Caygill is a philosopher of aesthetics who has published widely
>on Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, especially in
>relation to contemporary problematics. He is one of the editors of
>Tekhnema, an electronic forume for discussions of the relationship
>between philosophy and technology. His most relevant publication in
>relationship to the purposes of the workshop is 'Drafts for a
>Metaphysics of the Gene', in Tekhnema 3
>
>Robert Cooper (Management Studies, Keele)
>
>Robert Cooper has published widely on the nature of social organisation
>and disorganisation, cybernetics and information, technology and
>communication , and the socio-cultural aspects of human production
>systems. He is currently collaborating with the Department of
>Information Systems, London School of Economics, and the School of
>History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, on the social,
>cultural and institutional aspects of information; as well as developing
>a new project which looks at the changing nature of technology and mass
>society. See R. Cooper, 'Interpreting Mass: Collection/Dispersion', in
>N. Lee & R. Munro (eds), The Consumption of Mass (Oxford, Blackwell,
>2001).
>
>John Hughes and Wes Sharrock (Sociology, Lancaster and Manchester)
>
>Wes Sharrock and John Hughes are interested in the philosophy of social
>science, ethnomethodology, the application of Ludwig Wittgenstein's
>philosophy to the social sciences, and Computer Supported Cooperative
>Work. In general terms their attitude to 'code' is that the occurrence
>of the same word in different settings by no means assures similarities
>of meaning. Assumptions about the proliferation of 'code' may,
>therefore, be premature and superficial. Inferences from language to
>'social generalities' are often weak and contestable.
>
>Afternoon session 2: Discussion opened to the floor
>
>Chair: Scott Wilson (Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster)
>
>For further information, please contact: Paolo Palladino
>([log in to unmask])
>
>
>
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