1) Back in Sydney after a quick trip home to Perth.
2) Met up with Ann Werner who is over here on exchange from ACSIS in Sweden where I went on exchange in 2004. She is here for roughly 2 months.
3) Have almost finished Latour’s Reassembling the Social, and I’ll write more on this. It is a brilliant book for my PhD because I have been working on a position that is so close and yet so different that it will serve as a good enabling straw person argument, what, in terms of argument or discourse, Latour might call a ‘plug-in’. Problems I have with the book (up to about page 205 ish): absence of media and his use of multiplicity. On one level, Foucault will serve as a good foil to counter the ANT. My main problem is with Latour’s version of scale, but from the opposite side to which his argument is setup (ie from the Deleuzian side of calculable but unknowable multiplicity, when he is arguing against totalities (‘short cuts’, dialectical, platonic or whatever)). My basic point is that there are various moments particularly in the media apparatus, but it is present in any situation involving mass-produced objects, there is a functional relation between asymmetrical scales. He references this problem many times without properly addressing it.
4) Booked accommodation for the CSAA conference in Canberra.
5) Had the last class for my course today. Some of my students called the course that I tought a shambles. (I was the third lecturer, didn’t choose the readings, and didn’t know much about the university bureaucracy.) One even complained that the course cost $600. I explained to him that in educational monetary terms I was worth about $100,000. Others loved it, and especially loved the fact I only ever treat the students as thinking adults, rather than infants who must be fed an intellectual diet of cliches. For some this was problematic; they wanted to be judged and assessed, rather than given the skills to understand and produce their own forms of achievement. I was sad that one of the best students wasn’t going to do honours (a fourth year of undergraduate study to allow you to do postgraduate study, ie MA or PhD). EDIT 11/11: OK, so to be fair, it was actually me that described the course as a shambles.
6) Did a 6:34.1 on the ergo, and I somehow lost 4kgs while I was in Perth. Must’ve been the stress.
7) Amused a co-worker with my awesome powers of alliteration, which for a stutterer is akin to asking fat person jokes of a fat person.