dude this is awesome.
bees communicate by dancing for one another. certain dances (the waggle for instance) tells you that the food is 400m away, and if they dance longer, it's 600 m away. different continental bees (african asian etc) dance with different duration/distance ratios, but still understand one another.

forwarded to me by C. Kers-lake, who cited it as an example of spiritual automata. i think he was half-kidding, half serious.

still, i think this is how i want to communicate from now.

prof: 'so when do you think you can get that paper in to me?'
me: [buttwagging bootyshaking]
prof: '...what do you mean, 400m?'

Quoted: Honeybees can communicate with others from far-off continents by learning to interpret their moves

reply to Will's dot...

this is a much more well-researched comparison of the two track records. it's longer, but i got more from reading some real details.

i don't know if i like the ideas of this guy yet, but so far i'm intrigued enough to keep reading. he ties a lot of shit together, but i'm not clear as to the fundamental approach taken yet toward political economy.

Quoted: from an interview on his site: "Among the abiding questions at the intersection of economics and anthropology are the following: Is the economists’ aspiration to place human affairs on a rational footing an agenda worthy of anthropologists’ participation or just a bad dream? Since economics is a product of western civilization – and of the English-speaking peoples in particular – is any claim to universality bound to be ethnocentric? If capitalism is an economic configuration of recent origin, could markets and money be said to be human universals? Can markets be made more effectively democratic, with the unequal voting power of big money somehow neutralized? Can private and public interests be reconciled in economic organization or will the individualism of homo economicus inevitably prevail? Should the economy be isolated as an object of study or is it better to stress how economic relations are embedded in society and culture generally? None of these questions is exclusive to economic anthropology."

he has some interesting sounding papers in here. no idea if they're better than his book on D&R though, which i found banal at best, damaging at worst...

A conference about ontology and politics in light of Deleuze, Whitehead and Badiou. Oliver Feltham, Jeffrey Bell and Bruno Bosteels are going to be lecturing, among many others.

godammit! why do I always hear about these things too late? i still wanna go really bad though. really....bad....want...to...

Quoted: event and decision conference

In this interdisciplinary conference, the philosophies of Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead become sites for reflecting on Ontology and Politics in the many fields of its productive presence and novelty: philosophy, cultural studies, social and political theory, art, literature, and religion. How does the concerted call for the event uncover deep questions and directions of thought in the philosophies of Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead? How does an “ontology of decision,” an emphasis on event, multiplicity, and becoming change the framework and landscape in which these disciplines operate?

Lecturers

1. Jeffrey Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University
2. Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University
3. James Bradley, St. John’s, Newfoundland
4. David Brockman, Southern Methodist University
5. Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne
6. Roland Faber, Claremont Graduate University
7. Oliver Feltham, American University of Paris
8. Catherine Keller, Drew University
9. Henry Krips, Claremont Graduate University
10. Graham Livesey, University of Calgary
11. Helmut Maaßen, European Society For Process Thought
12. Keith Robinson, University of South Dakota
13. James Williams, University of Dundee
14. Adrian Parr, University of Cincinnati

Commentators

1. Philip Clayton, Claremont Graduate University
2. Anselm Min, Claremont Graduate University
3. Masahiro Yamada, Claremont Graduate University

Plenary Address

1. Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University

A version of one of the chapters of Ray brassier's forthcoming book Nihil Unbound is available as video here.

***update...okay I watched this today. the opening discussion of heidegger is very promising as a problem, but he doesn't pull it off, he merely poses a limit of phenomenological approaches to fundamental ontology. then he moves into Deleuzeland...he moves through the first two syntheses perfectly fine, and then once he gets to the thrid synthesis, which is supposed to raise the problem of psychic individuation, he flounders and again, merely poses a problem, and doesn't seem to go very far with it. his disclaimer in the beginning of the paper about the 'missing part' of his paper becomes frustratingly true toward the end. on the other hand, he reaches a very difficult problem worthy of consideration. the proximity of this paper to the problem of my thesis is very close.
as an aside, it is strikingly ironic to see brassier's 'brazen' dismissal of derrida (which he gets chopped for in the question/answer period, predictably) is kind of funny only because for those of us who recently watched the youtube transcription of Derrida's paper on deleuze and stupidity (Betise) and animality, which also (exactly like Brassier's paper) hinged on the problem of a 'priveleging of psychic individuation' , the topic ends up bringing them closer than the latter would probably like to admit, at least regards their suspicions of deleuze. in other words, he beats up on derrida but ends up having almost exactly the same concerns about deleuze. and is equally unable (as was Derrida) to articulate the problem thoroughly, without flopping about.