Latour’s plasma

Following Jay Foster’s recent article, the Circling Squares blog claims that I’m overgeneralizing Latour’s plasma. I ignored this when Foster said it, but with two people it risks becoming a meme, so let me quote the blog critique and explain why it’s wrong:

“Harman claimed that plasma is something that is totally unformatted, outside all relations, metaphysically, when it is fairly clear from the original Paris, from Reassembling and from this latest essay that plasma denotes that which is outside of relations with respect to a particular network. Typically, this means when something is outside the epistemic networks that socialise things and make them possible objects of politics. It is, therefore, more of a sociological concept than a metaphysical one; it ‘is what makes it possible to measure the extent of our ignorance concerning Paris’ — or the world in general. It isn’t something that is generalisable to all things and all relations since it pertains primarily to epistemic or social relations.

Indeed, “ignorance” is the key word. Plasma is that which is unformatted (or formalised) and therefore cannot circulate in (our) networks — this is what Latour claims in Reassembling. This doesn’t mean that plasma is, metaphysically speaking, outside all relations. Plasma is a concept deployed to prevent premature formalism; the assumption that we already know how things hold together. It is precisely because of our profound ignorance with respect to how parts relate to wholes and how things go about their existence (and, indeed, how things affect our existence) that we mustn’t prematurely shoehorn them into prescribed roles, lest we foreclose our ability to come to understand them and, in Latour’s terms, to engage in composition — i.e. politics.

It is the megalomania of the panopticon that presumes that we can sensibly speak of things that have not yet been enrolled in our networks. This is Latour’s Kantian moment, however it differs from Kant as noumena are not forever, irrevocably ‘out there’ — they can be enrolled, formalised and brought ‘in here.’

Plasma may or may not be differentiated within itself but it is a mystery to us for as long as it remains formless, as long as it does not circulate within our networks. However, it is not so far flung and mysterious that it is forever beyond our grasp. And the first step in grasping it, it seems, is to admit our ignorance and avoid making unjustified assumptions as to what it’s all about. Hence plasma.

When talking about plasma Latour clearly has his sociological hat on, not his philosophical one. Of course, there’s nothing stopping anyone from extracting philosophy from a sociology and Harman does this wonderfully with Latour’s work for the most part but the project falls apart somewhat when it gets to plasma. In fact it ends up with Harman completely misunderstanding Latour.”

Here’s the central point where the critique goes astray: “[Plasma] isn’t something that is generalisable to all things and all relations since it pertains primarily to epistemic or social relations.”

This misses Latour’s entire point. “Society” for Latour has nothing to do with a social realm as opposed to other kinds of realms. The social for Latour contains absolutely everything, including fictional and nonexistent beings (as long as they have some sort of effect on other things).

The idea that the plasma isn’t inherently unformatted but simply not yet known to humans gives a central status to the human knower that is simply not part of Latour’s outlook.

In short, plasma is one of the most metaphysical concepts in all of Latour’s work. It cannot be tamed or decaffeinated by trying to claim that it’s just the harmless and tepid point that sociologists must humbly realize that they don’t know everything yet.

Instead, as explained in Prince of Networks, Latour needs to posit the plasma because his overidentification of things with their effects on other things leaves him with no way to explain change, and thus he ends up in the same position as the Megarians in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It is an innate hazard of all relational ontologies, of which Latour has developed perhaps the most interesting version we’ve seen.

Another part I don’t like: “When talking about plasma Latour clearly has his sociological hat on, not his philosophical one.” (emphasis added) You can’t use the word “clearly” unless the case is actually clear; it shouldn’t be a clumsy battering ram used to assert that your opponent is so obviously off the mark that sustained argument is not even necessary.

Here’s a more general issue. To say that Latour sometimes wears a metaphysician’s hat and sometimes a sociologist’s hat is certainly true. But it is never true at those moments where he is in fact making metaphysical claims. The distinction between metaphysics and sociology cannot be invoked on an ad hoc basis simply to insulate Latour’s argument from extreme metaphysical consequences at the places where such consequences arise. The plasma is one of those cases. It is a striking invocation of something like the pre-Socratic apeiron, for reasons entirely necessary to Latour’s argument, and with the same difficult consequences we see among the pre-Socratics (and to some extent in contemporary arguments about “the virtual”.)