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.

Updates and plasma

It should be clear already from the little hiatus in posting that we're taking a little break for the holidays. We'll resume in earnest in a couple weeks--finishing up some Latour concerns, and then moving on to Graham Harman and Ray Brassier, and a couple others--though some sporadic thoughts might pop up here in the meantime.

One of those is the following, and I'll also just use it to also welcome Paul to the blog. On page 245 of Reassembling the Social, Latour says the following:

Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.

I wonder if this has any relation to what Paul is working on. I suspect he'd be at odds with what Latour means by this, since it appears in his discussion of "plasma"--the problematic notion I have been trying to see as required by (or, since I think ANT isn't doomed by this small point, merely as a consequence of) the "immanence" of Latourian analysis with respect to its networks (Latour has a long passage at the end of WHNBM asserting immanence--in the sense it is being used there--is also transcendent, but I think that actually only confirms my point). Latour needs plasma not just metphysically but because his mode of analysis requires it (as is only fitting for a mode of analysis that--refreshingly--isn't afraid to draw tough metaphysical conclusions from what it is doing). It is a name not just for the "unformatted" but also for the "unaccountable" that can nevertheless be counted by the micro-level ANT analysis:

I call this background plasma, namely 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 [...] This does not mean that the solid architecture of society is crumbling behind, that the Great Leviathan has feet of clay, but that society and the Leviathan circulate inside such narrow canals that in order to be activated they have to rely on an unaccounted number of ingredients coming from the plasma around them. So far I have insisted too much on continuity, which is achieved through traceable connections that have always to be considered against a much vaster backdrop of discontinuities (244-45).

The plasma is the name for the nature of the background against which the agents that ANT traces emerge. Latour has acted as if networks go everywhere through their continuity, as if "everything is connected" and waiting for ANT to discover it. It is because he wants to avoid the "all-connectedness" that Latour introduces this backdrop of discontinuities. But in a strange way, Latour also specifies the nature of that background to be what ensures the fluidity--the possible breakup--of any punctuated actor. It is its nature to be small and micro-, however vast its unformattedness--and this is what really makes it plasma.

I'll get into this in more detail in another post, but Latour is saying all this because he wants to try and stop the tendency to search elsewhere for big, undefined powers which will explain a particular event--even (or perhaps especially) when it is necessary to look elsewhere to show the backdrop against which your analysis takes place. That is, even when you are doing something like ANT, and refusing to attribute causes to "the social," even then "action doesn't add up," as Latour nicely puts it (243). So the question revolves around how, if network doesn't touch everything, it still has massive holes such that it doesn't account for everything (and in fact, this is in part what allows actors to emerge into your account, besides the fact they are in the network). So plasma is the solution to the question about the nature of these holes:

If it is true, as ANT claims, that the social landscape possesses such a flat ‘networky’ topography and that the ingredients making up society travel inside tiny conduits, what is in between the meshes of such a circuitry? (242).

And supposedly plasma allows us to stop referring to these outsides on this level--on the level of what provides the immense background for our network:

Once we recognize the extent of this plasma, we may relocate to the right place the two opposite intuitions of positivist and interpretative sociologies: yes, we have to turn our attention to the outside to make sense of any course of action; and yes, there is an indefinite flexibility in the interpretations of those courses. But the outside is not made of social stuff—just the opposite—and interpretation is not a characteristic of individualized human agents—just the opposite.

To interpret some behavior we have to add something, but this does not mean that we have to look for a social framework. Of course, sociologists were right to look for some ‘outside’, except this one does not resemble at all what they expected since it is entirely devoid of any trace of calibrated social inhabitant. They were right to look for ‘something hidden behind’, but it’s neither behind nor especially hidden. It’s in between and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown. It resembles a vast hinterland providing the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled, much like the countryside for an urban dweller, much like the missing masses for a cosmologist trying to balance out the weight of the universe.

To interpret some behavior we have indeed to be prepared for many different versions, but this doesn’t mean that we have to turn to local interactions. At many points in this book I have criticized phenomenologists, and perhaps also humanists, for believing that face-to-face interactions, individual agents, and purposeful persons provided a more realist and lively locus than what they called the vain abstractions of society. Although they were right in insisting on uncertainties, they have misplaced their sources. It’s not that purposeful humans, intentional persons, and individual souls are the only interpretative agents in a world of matters of fact devoid of any meaning by itself. What is meant by interpretations, flexibility, and fluidity is simply a way to register the vast outside to which every course of action has to appeal in order to be carried out. This is not true for just human actions, but for every activity. Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself. The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms (244-45).

I've quoted so much (and in there is the quote I started with) because I don't want to explicate it all in full now, but just situate the little remark that I thought would bear upon some of Paul's concerns and, in a different way, I knew would bear upon mine.

And now just one more sporadic thought: Sartre and Latour. I'm reading Sartre's excellent Critique of Dialectical Reason and it strikes me that some notions of collectivity explored there might have something to do with what Latour is getting at. I know OOO and Sartre can be brought together because of the work of Eleanor Kaufman, whose forthcoming book on the incorporeal (the topic of her Gauss Seminar lectures in the Spring of 2009, which I was lucky enough to get off my lazy ass, go over to the East Pyne building, and see) should make that clear (and for the record I think she ends up more on the OOO side of things, interestingly, than the SR side of things... even with her use of Deleuze... She does this by seriously correcting the overemphasis on Merleau-Ponty in recent years--who is always too easily appropriated by Heideggerians, or too easily made into a target by postmodern theory like Irigaray or Derrida--by bringing back Sartre's weird phenomenology in all the right ways...). But then there is the notion of the collective--whose "seriality" in the Critique might have less to do with what Latour is getting at on the face of it, but perhaps in a deeper way makes his position (trying to find some sort of "group" of different composition than in either classical Marxism or in sociology) close to Latour in an interesting way:

[...T]he dependence of the worker who comes to sell his labor power cannot under any circumstance signify that this worker has fallen into an abstract existence. Quite the contrary, the reality of the market, no matter how inexorable its laws may be, and even in its concrete appearance, rests on the reality of alienated individuals and on their separation. It is necessary to take up the study of collectives again from the beginning and to demonstrate that these objects, far from being characterized by the direct unity of a consensus, represent perspectives of flight. This is because, upon the basis of given conditions, the direct relations between persons depend upon other particular relations, and these on still others, and so on in succession, because there is an objective constraint in concrete relations. It is not the presence of others but their absence which establishes this constraint; it is not their union but their separation. For us the reality of the collective object rests on recurrence. It demonstrates that the totalisation is never achieved and that the totality exists at best only in the form of a detotalised totality. As such these collectives exist. They are revealed immediately in action and in perception. In each one of them we shall always find a concrete materiality (a movement, the head office, a building, a word, etc.) which supports and manifests a flight which eats it away. I need only open my window: I see a church, a bank, a cafe – three collectives. This thousand-franc bill is another; still another is the newspaper I have just bought... (Preface, "The Problem of Mediations").

It's not really a matter of reconciling (it's interesting how much philosophical time is spent doing that) than recognizing the significance of Latour's contribution to notions of not just the being of objects (I included the above because a desire to include them--though with an obviously completely different ontological assumption than anything in Latour--is there) but also the shape of group action. And while I think Latour goes precisely in the opposite direction as Latour (never towards totalization--this is why he must force an immanence instead) I just wanted to register that--I know you Evan have been feeling this perhaps more than I have.