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Information Systems Research Forum
On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger
Graham Harman
American University in Cairo
Thursday 29 November 2007 12.00 - 1.30 p.m.
Fifth Floor, Tower One
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.
Graham Harman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, and currently Visiting Associate Professor of Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005), Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (2007), and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (just completed). His current book project is a systematic work of metaphysics entitled Object-Oriented Philosophy.
Please note places will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis - registration is not required.
For any further queries regarding this seminar or to request information about future events please contact Frances White. Research Coordinator.
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