LSE Lecture: On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger

Today I went to a semiar at LSE, to a place studio Ciborra (in fact it looks like an "open workspace to push creativity for IT People", maybe it is, they had all this fancy stuff, a nice big LCD Screen instead of a projector, some kind of bar and colorful chairs, and they develop IT). The guest lecturer was a philosopher from Egypy, Graham Harman.

Abstract (taken from the LSE Page):

Though Heidegger continues to solidify his status as the consensus “great philosopher” of the twentieth century, there are some obvious points of difficulty with his ontology. Latour strikes an effective blow on two of these points. First, he restores agency to non-human actors. Second, he revives a taste for concrete discussion of specific kinds of objects (trains, apricots, volcanoes).Yet there is one key weakness in Latour’s ontology that must be addressed: his relationism. The reality of an actor, for Latour, is defined by the way it affects, modifies, or perturbs other things. This leads to problems that I will review in my talk, and which are only partly remedied by Latour’s intriguing new concept of plasma.

Surprising resources for a new realism are found in Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. Transforming Latour’s army of onefold actors into an armada of fourfold objects, we find a Heideggerian alternative to Latour’s shapeless molten plasma. Latour corrects Heidegger’s Dasein-centrism, but at the same time Heidegger counters Latour’s overinvestment in relationality. In this way, object-oriented philosophy crossbreeds the virtues of its two ancestral heroes.

In fact he was giving a short introduction into Latour and Heidegger, pointing out strenghts and weaknesses

	Latour	Heidegger
Strengts	Rejects domination of human beings over entities Specific actors treated on their own terms	Things not reduced to their relations
Weaknesses	Things fully reduced to their relations	Human dominance Specific entities usually treated with contempt

Harman argued that their strenghts would perfectly complete each other. Heidegger, in his view was completely misinterpretet when read as a pragmatist, because he was not concerned with the question of consciousness and unconsciousness (I would argue not dividing consciousness and action this is exactly the central point - at least in - sociological pragmatism...but thats another discussion). Every thing & actor in Heideggers work has got a character which is deeper than the qualities which can be experienced in practical use, there are some hidden qualities (I think it is always a little bit strange to assume there are hidden forces behind any actor, that is what I dislike with the structuralists as well - and this is the same that Latour would criticise), which are divided into 4 qualities. This is why we are talking a Fourfold actor. Things are deeper than practise.

Latour on the other side, in Hamans view, comes to a paradoxical problem in his argumentation, because when everything just needs something third to translate the other then it leads into a infinite regress. "Any two things are only linked by a third thing."
This, and the argumentation, that a object is only a object in its current network of assoziations (lets call it context) leads to the situation that according to latour everything is happening at the same time. Paradoxically by this strong situatedness, everything is cut-off from the next point in time, because everything is bound and needs to be translated by a third to change.
Harman told, that the hidden solution in Latours writing is the force of the Plasma (which I haven't read about right now, but I havent finished "Reassembling the Social" jet), which is able to break up assoziations.

In fact, the solution for Harman, if I understood him right, is to introduce a metapysical power into Latour, which he takes from Heidegger, to improve it, and to explain, what the essence behind "things" is.

In my eyes this approach might be interesting, but I'm not a philosopher (bloddy hell, thank god!) and not sure if I understand the concept of Heidegger (probably I should read some of it). Introducing a metaphysical power and hidden qualities of objects, which cannot be seen in practice seems a quite strange solution to me, when I reflect on it.

Harman is going to send this Paper to Latour in some time, and told, that we could get it, if we asked him, so just do it. If I misunderstood him, please comment.