macro-physics! - Latour and plasma

I wanted to respond off-the-cuff because Mike, in his usual sharp manner, raises exactly the thematic concerns that have been bothering me lately. My concerns are currently circulating around intentionality, Harmanesque broad intentionality at that, transcendentalism/autonomy/subjecthood, and arising from Harman’s response to my reading of the vicarious causation essay the possibility of a hermeneutics of objects. All this has been buttressed for me by an attempt to engage with Žižek which has more or less confirmed to me that Žižek most clearly represents all that object oriented thinking rejects. So I must admit it is a little bitter-sweet to discover that Latour has already beaten me to the punch (at least in extending the range of hermeneutics) with the following quote:
“Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.”

Mike is right to wager that I’d find myself at odds with this, but this all depends on how Latour is using the word hermeneutics. If it is meant, and I suspect this is not the case, that Latour means the art of interpretation is a ‘property’ (and this is an awkward use of the word property) of the world then we might be treading in dangerous waters - from the charge of anthropocentricism to the Kantian limitation that one is here speaking about something beyond the phenomenal realm of experience. It is more likely that Latour means to draw out the classical (and indeed sacred...another subtle Latourian theme) meaning of hermeneutics as ἑρμηνεύω or translate. Re-working the quote along these lines one could then state that ‘Translation is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.” This line would, in turn, be classically Latourian – perhaps even mundanely so.

Moving to the conceptual I find it difficult to understand what hermeneutics as a property of the world could possibly mean. This remains, at least for me, the leap of faith moment from the phenomeno[al]logical onto some immanent plane that I admit I cannot yet picture (and ought we to picture it or not?). Latour in his paper on philosophy admits that he harbours a secret desire to piece together a philosophical system and Harman has already argued that something metaphysical is in place in Latour. Mike notes that one of the strengths of Latour is precisely his willingness to admit metaphysical consequences into his work. If the plasma is anything to go by Latour is deeply metaphysical.

The plasma, as Mike points out, is something entailed by Latourian analysis (if I have him right here). Since ANT works on the premise of networks across an immanent or flat plane then one is left with the metaphysical problem that not all actors are always active (perhaps literally or perhaps they are not active in the phenomenal realm of experience – hence the transcendent aspect) and if this is the case one must deduce something like a plasma in order to account for this fact [arising from the ANT mode of analysis (entailed by it as such)]. This Mike sees as a kind of deficiency in the general mode of micro-analysis, the natural home of ANT and the social sciences generally, and opens up the necessary for a macro-analysis (macro-physics!). Of course this all smacks of metaphysical broadening, abstraction and associated un-Latourian nastiness and not the good old messiness we seek.
Yet the plasma is simply that which is “...not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified” which is not a radically new improvement upon the Hegelian ‘for us’ schema (the plasma is that which is not yet for self-consciousness but will be at some point in the sweep of things) or, alas, Heideggerian equipmental usage (the plasma is the background of things not yet in use). Yet we do have some ways to opt-out here: we can consider the unformatted as having Harmanesque lives of their own, with their own intentionality that is available, at some points but not always, for some human disclosure. The necessity of the plasma also nicely ties in with Harman’s real objects which are logically entailed by his analysis rather than encountered in (phenomenal) experience.

Of course this all works at a deeply conceptual (even metaphysical level) and I suspect that despite this being the natural territory of the philosopher it might require a Heideggerian leap on the part of the social scientist.