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Elizabeth:

It's funny that I was going to write about Bruno Latour in my first email, but decided to keep it simple, but I see from your other email that we might be thinking along the same lines. My first chapter is called "What is a Tarot card? On the Durability of Weak Objects" and it is an attempt to use ANT to provide a materialist account to the practice of tarot reading. In sociology, at least, what we often study is how or why individuals get involved in various communities and we attempt to explain that behavior with recourse to variables-- race, gender, class, education. As you know, Latour suggests this form of sociology actually obfuscates what produces the social, which are the movements of a myriad of actors. For Latour, we can't determine who or what those actors are in advance or limit our perception of actors to a human realms. So, yes, spirits, demons, rocks, paper, scissors... they are all in the mix with Latour. It has always seemed, however, that he doesn't really solve the problem for the researcher (in fact, a real ANT study seems like it would take a hundred years as you figure out which actors are moving and speaking. Latour addesses this potential slip into cacophony in Reassembling the Social and what he prescribes to ward off insanity is writing-- hence my comment about figuring it out on the page.) We should talk more about what working with Latour does entail because even if he doesn't solve all problems, I have found that he, unlike other sociological studies of spirituality and alternative practices, is at least willing to afford an ontological dignity to the subject. After one professor in my dept told that there "might be validity in writing about things that most people don't see" I sort of had fun writing chapter one and riffing on the idea that the cards do in fact exist and have a long and wonderful history, which is not a history of just "strange people" playing with cards, but rather the work of technology, markets, voices, visions, images, and circulating notions of the self and what it means to be human being. In short, there is a lot "work" that goes into the existence of the cards and I wanted to start the dissertation there, rather than with the usual "let me explain how 'rational' people come to Tarot."

In any case, my research is not exhaustive I'm sure, but there doesn't seem like there is much ANT work in this regard. Latour writes about a book called Les Guerre de la Vierge by Elizabeth Claverie that sounds perfect, but I can't find an English translation. I'm actually signing up for a french reading class to get through it! However, did you see the call for the Materialism in Religion conference taking place this year in New Mexico? There must be other out there thinking these things and it would be wonderful to start sharing resources and/or creating them ourselves. I follow a number of Latourian inspired philosophers (Object Oriented Ontology) and they have begun to take up mysticism, panpsychism, and life itself (although not w/ a Latourian method, they sort of took inspiration from him-- see Graham Harman-- and then ran with the idea of flat ontology.) I just finished Eugene Thacker's After Life, where he develops his notion of "dark pantheism" that draws from Neoplatonism, the Scholastics, & Delueze. Thacker is usually a science guy, but here he is writing about demons and for a number of reasons, science studies, environmentalism, spirituality, and philosophy seem to be converging and it feels like there is some space to write about "the weird" (this is their word, not mine) without immediate recourse to accusations that you're "crazy." For the moment anyway... before the internet is on to its next fad.

If anyone wants a rundown of OOO, let me know. I'd be happy to provide links. At CUNY, my chair, Patricia Clough and I have also started a reading group for the Spring: http://speculativecuny.wordpress.com/

And, Elizabeth if you want to talk more about Latour and writing, please email me.

Best regards,

Karen


On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Nelson, Elizabeth Angeline <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
@Kathryn - Thank you for the references you suggested, both Taves and Jung. My aunt just sent me a copy of the Red Book for Christmas (she is very good at picking out gifts).

@Karen - It is not often that I get jealous of another person's dissertation topic. If you'd like, I'd love to chat with you more off list. I am curious how your working out "on the page" of the practitioner - academic tension is, well, working out for you. Do you have a theoretical apparatus you find helpful? Is it more a matter of laying out your source materials (interviews, related scholarship, your own experiences, etc) and waiting for interconnections, flashes of insight?

@Angela, Toyin, Chas, Shya, & Kathryn  - Thank you all for, in your own ways, hinting at paths toward a third perspective. It is good to know that one exists, though as in my question for Karen, I am curious about concrete methods for finding it. I suppose at bottom the method must be a personal thing, though I do like to hear how others have thought this through!

Best,
Elizabeth

Elizabeth Nelson
PhD Candidate
Department of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

Graduate Fellow
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar
"The Circulation of Technoscientific Facts and Objects"
Indiana University, Bloomington
http://sawyer.indiana.edu/index.html



--
Karen Gregory
PhD candidate
Department of Sociology
The Graduate Center
City University of New York