I like this very much. We’re treading on here-to-fore untrod ground and so our formulations must necessarily be fuzzy, and therefore flexible. We’ve got to do a fair turn of stomping and dancing around before we get the lay of the land.

I believe that these sentiments are so commonplace in Latour’s work that citations would be superfluous; however, the following posts contain more detail if such is needed:
http://circlingsquares.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/sociality-and-relationality.html
http://circlingsquares.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/harman-on-me-on-harman-on-latour-on.html

Never does the social seem to be all encompassing — far from it. In fact, Latour is at pains, particularly in Paris: Invisible City to show over and over again just how DISconnected most of ‘Paris’ is. Indeed, Paris as a totality is seen to be profoundly fragile. ‘Social’ describes the filaments that hold Paris together qua a city — it doesn’t describe the elements that hold it together in any other sense; it doesn’t describe the bonds holding together the atoms composing a street lamp on the Champs-Élysées. Or, rather, it doesn’t so long as there isn’t some institution socialising those bonds and tying them into the social somehow. If these bonds WERE social in the absence of any such institution then the social would be always already there, any- and everywhere that there were relations of any kind; it would require no composition and politics (as the progressive composition of the common world) would be pointless.

And politics is the point: take a look at Latour’s recent essay ‘Paris, invisible city: The plasma’ — the essay that my original post was actually commenting on. In that essay Latour is quite explicit that the importance of plasma is political — that if things are not always already bound up into a given social configuration then politics becomes necessary to compose and bring together those previously unsocialised elements to make a new common world. Never is it implied that these ‘extra-social’ elements are plasma in the sense that Harman suggests — that of ephemeral phantoms transcending ALL relationality. The plasma is only implied to be those elements that are not yet circulating in SOCIAL networks.

If the police chief turns off his CCTV cameras he’s closed off part of the social. The streets he was previously looking at haven’t evaporated — they still enjoy other kinds of relations and other kinds of existence, he’s just temporarily disconnected them from his portion of the social network of Paris. If a person dies from an unknown illness the pathogen is perfectly real but it is not social since it cannot be formatted in such a way as to circulate in social networks. And so on. (See the second post listed above for more on this.)

The main point is simply this: if you take social association to be a synonym for every kind of relation altogether (i.e. take it to be metaphysical in and of itself) rather than taking it to denote a particular kind of relation then Latour’s entire sociology takes on a completely different meaning. The social ceases to be narrow, particular and requiring composition and it becomes sprawling, all encompassing and limitless. Its outside (its plasma) ceases to be other assemblages of unsocialised things enjoying and employing other kinds of relationality and instead becomes something phantosmagorical, ephemeral and occult, transcending all relation.

This little, seemingly innocent abstraction — from social qua KIND of relation to social qua ALL relation — changes the meaning of pretty much everything.

Of course people are free to interpret Latour’s work as they see fit and it DOES make a very interesting metaphysics if you abstract it from the particularities. However, what I am trying to resist is the idea that Latour’s sociology can be easily abstracted from all the particularities it explicitly presupposes and lose nothing in translation.

While I very much like his version, Harman’s Latour is very different to the Latour one encounters actually reading the primary texts. The translation of Latour’s sociology into a metaphysics involves a large degree of transformation — transformation that isn’t always adequately acknowledged. There’s nothing wrong with transformation but, unacknowledged, it will, I fear, prove misleading and confusing, conflating, as it does, quite different sets of ideas.