event mechanics

Recent tech news is that Google has puchased Metaweb. Very interesting for any post-structuralist tech heads is that Metaweb has been developing a search engine that searches for what it calls ‘entities’ and what most post-structuralist philosophers would call ‘events‘, Dan Nosowitz’s description:

Essentially, it views keywords, the way we search now, as an inferior search method to what it calls “entities.” Words can vary in meaning, refer to different things, have different levels of importance or relevance at different times, and often return inexact results. So Metaweb has created a constantly growing database, or directory, of 12 million “entities,” which are really just persons, places, or things, and all the different ways you might refer to them. Wording isn’t so important with Metaweb, it’s the end meaning that matters.

Once Metaweb figures out to which entity you’re referring, it can provide a set of results. It can even combine entities for more complex searches–”actresses over 40″ might be one entity, “actresses living in New York City” might be another, and “actresses with a movie currently playing” might be another. Instead of searching through that jumble of keywords, Metaweb would just connect you to those three entities, and file down your results.

The “end meaning”, hey? The difference between ‘wording’ and ‘end meaning’ is precisely what Deleuze investigated in one part of his PhD work published as The Logic of Sense.

‘Wording’ implies an easy relation between a well or resource of meaning that only has to be properly accessed by sense-making mechanisms. This structuralist approach assumes a meaning and then goes and finds examples of it through algorithmic (or intuitive, for the human cognition machine,) ‘categorical’ pattern recognition.

The ‘end meaning’ is something else. The importance here is the use of ‘end’ which implies a temporal process. Deleuze argued that ‘sense’ is actualised as the movement between at least two series (signifier and signified). Deleuze’s proposition is a stripped down version of what happens in reality as he goes on to trouble the structuralist dance between signifier and signified with a materialist variation so that ‘sense’ (any meaning, in identity, reference, etc.) is not the transcendental over-determination of a categorical structure, but the immanent actualisation of a feedforward loop.

Think of a marriage. The sense of ‘this marriage’ is the actualisation of relation of futurity (this marriage in the future present) that emerges from the present materiality (this house, this couple, these bodies, this argument/kiss/dinner/etc.) as it circulates as and within the present materiality. This is still far too simplisitic however, because there isn’t just one sense that can transcendentally unify all others; rather, there is a baroque multiplicity of senses and correlative events, all immanent to different temporalities (this life, this career, this dinner, this week).

This is very exciting as it signals a shift from the linguistic algorithm fetish of existing crypto-humanities researchers of the web to a far more complex appreciation of meaning or ‘sense’ where meaning is produced as a process and not simply accessed from an over-determining ‘meaning’ structure. It is a move from a web searchable only in terms of its categorical generality to one organised around an immanent specificity (i.e. what Deleuze and Guattari called haecceitties).

Most reviews of Up In the Air work hard to locate it in a romantic comedy framework, such as David Cox’s review at The Guardian. It is not a romantic comedy. Similar in some ways to Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses a constellation of romantic comedy tropes as a critical tool. Instead of romance and isolationist social relations like in Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses the romantic comedy tropes to problematise ‘loyalty’ in our privileged late-capitalist and post-everything cultural landscape.

Loyalty is no longer something built on trust or expectations of trust forged through shared experience. The function of expectation in this traditional sense of loyalty is important, because it introduces a temporal logic whereby one’s trust is demonstrated now by proffering one’s future trustworthiness. Within capitalist relations of exchange loyalty was therefore experienced as the goodwill developed from already demonstrated positive service experiences and the expectation of continued good service.

What Up In the Air explores is the inversion of the burden of loyalty. A capitalist enterprise does not produce loyalty in its customers or in its workers in a traditional sense of goodwill through positive social relations and the expectation of positive social relations. Instead, enterprises now produce ‘loyalty’ as the accumulation of the debt of good service that the company owes a customer (or worker). The company wants to owe its customers ‘reward points’; it is in the customer’s debt: hence, the production of an expectation and a formalisation of process and time itself. This is naturalised as a ‘reward’ for the customer’s ‘loyal’ patronage.

There are a number of relations of actual (dis)loyalty in Up In the Air:

1) Between businesses and their workers, who for the most part of the film are about to be fired.
2) Between various romantic couplings.
3) Between enterprises and their consumer patrons.

The virtual relations of loyalty — what I described in a previous post as “the virtual feedforward loops that cultivate and then harness anticipation as an affective or ‘felt tendency’ for guiding consumer behaviour” — are structurated by conventions of expectations. Beyond consumption is a mobile diffuse logic of expectation determined by capital, that exploits the affective conditions of trust that underpins loyalty.

Relations of actual loyalty have an inherent temporal dimension because loyalty is only ever actualised as a field of social possibility premised on assumed distributions of trust. I am loyal, because I trust, therefore my loyalty is trusted. The expectation emerges from affective relations of shared experiences as the world is endured together.

But we are increasingly atomised. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is absolutely solitary. He wants to inhabit a frictionless world; points of disjuncture are merely fulcra to propel himself further into the flow. He is the limit case of a process through which we are forced out into the world and alienated from solidarity only so we scrabble to consume formalised, ritualised cultural events together. Sport, the nation, the family. A spectator does not experience sport; ‘sport’ is the shared experience of another’s affective implication in the potentiality of an entirely contrived contigency (shared with yet another’s affective implication…). The poverty of the formal dimension of these experiences breeds the need to push beyond the surface affectivity. Violence, hatred, hooliganism produce real contingencies in the world that must be endured together. The economy of respect in masculinist sporting cultures is an index of trust and its distribution. Other peripheral cultures have the same generative capacity. The limit case is perfectly described by Paul Corrigan in his short piece ‘Doing Nothing’ about the way working class youth in 1970s Britain used the street as a space of potentiality.

In capitalist enterprises there is absolutely no trust. Instead of a distribution of trust, there is a distribution of naked expectation. A perverse and obscene expectation of the worst. And at worst it is the expectation of a ruthless ambition to satisfy self-interest. The profit motive is a shared belief that gives discursive form to this expectation. Workers (anyone who labours under the expectations of others) are continually at war with the received infrastructure of alienated expectations by using humour and the potentiality of the workplace itself to generate shared experiences. Such bonding is tolerated by those that impose their expectations as a necessary condition of lived labour. The expecters have their own weapons, by making expectation mobile, by controlling the expectation of expectation through distributions of risk. Risk introduces contingency into the workplace. This is what the workers fired in Up in the Air failed to recognise. Their fellow workers may have endured the world of the workplace together with them and felt like family, or they may have even worked extremely hard to assume and inculcate the imposed expectations of management into their daily experience of the workplace, but this is not loyalty. The expectation of expectations can not be trusted. Workers have to be at war with expectation and exploit the mechanism of imposition (reception, inculcation, expression).

Outside it is almost too hot too move. Luckily my folks have insulation in the roof, which makes inside bearable. I am sitting here at the computer with the soft roughness of my t-shirt weighing upon my sun burnt shoulders. I’ve got burnt on my epic walks travailing the suburban Perth countryside. I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been in Perth. My big walks have been for exercise but they have also been something of a mind clearer. Some relief, but I am also relentless, so something of a burden. My mind is probably just as fatigued and sun burnt as my body, and my thoughts also weigh upon my shoulders.

Open, public space is weird here. There is so much of it. Drivers drive like tourists, even though they are locals, because there is so much space and the rhythms of traffic seem anestheticised. Yet, there is a paranoid grasp for position within the space, by pedestrians and drivers, like the people of Perth are scared it might somehow all be taken away. The irony is that in cities like Sydney, where there actually isn’t much space, inhabitants quickly learn how to negotiate with strangers far more successfully. The question of space, and I mean beyond geographical space, and how to live with space ethically is a problem of realising that freedom (to move, to live, to be who you want to be) is enabled by constraints. I have been thinking about what constraints I have in my life that enable me.

Maarinke has a wonderful post up on her tumblr blog. She has been incredibly tenacious in her process of unpicking the web of relations between her and the world and assessing them. Most of the time it has been with patience and care, at least for as long as I have been on the scene to witness it.

Speaking with her about all the things in her post is a great challenge for me, and I mean that in an objective, intellectual sense. I have been lucky enough to be basically self-trained in some of the main concepts and philosophies of post-structuralism and for me it isn’t some professional pursuit. I live and breathe and act with a strong ethical commitment derived from all my favourite dead Frenchmen. What is this ethics?

Following Deleuze, it is an ethics of being worthy of the events that befall us. Events are not happenings that happen to things. It is within events that things are formed.When a tree greens, the event ‘to green’ is independent of the tree and in part makes the tree what it is, but it is an event that is repeated in different ways throughout the natural world. Yet, following Derrida (and to a certain extent Deleuze), when we start to enfold the world into us, just as we let the world envelope us in turn, our perspective on events plays an important part in understanding what I would call their majestic grace.

Our lives are a tapestry of events that we will only ever partially grasp. To shift perspective, a task which is normally exceptionally difficult, requires an extreme force of will to let go of those elements and relations in the world that grip us in an immediate and intimate sense and experience the serene tranquility of floating above and beside events. Maarinke’s process of self-reflexivity has been impressive to witness as she has been and continues to be tenacious in her pursuit of such tranquility. It means going to war against the world and against one’s self in the most patient and caring way imaginable.

Deleuze called this process counter-effectualisation. For him events were surface effects of the mixture of bodies and the passions of bodies. Bodies here means every entity in the broadest possible sense. To counter-effect the passage of an event means grasping the singularity of these bodies and their passions in a different way. The simplest way to explain this in the context I am talking about is in the example of the advice about arguing with one’s loved ones. Some people say you should always resolve arguments before going to bed. Other people say you should sleep on it. In both cases there is a relation between urgency and patience determined by one’s proximity to the event of the argument and the event of the argument placed in a much broader context, perhaps of a life or lives or a life shared together in a relationship. The point is that this homely advice attempts to get people to realise that they need a different perspective on the passage of events.

The post-structuralist philosophies that I enjoy and read provide conceptual tools for allowing you to do this in a radical way. We exist in a baroque architecture of events, like a haphazard set of networks seemingly without order or reason. We are part of events that we can trace from the past. Past lovers, past friendships and past responsibilities are all present, still, now, in the way they grasp us sometimes in their wonderful, but often in their terrible holds. We are sometimes doomed to repeat the way we process the world following the causal relations of our actions born of these past events. In this way we repeat the events in different ways with new people and new relationships. All this sounds horrifyingly nihilistic, doesn’t it? Ha! This is not the end of the story, however.

We are not automatons programmed by past events, or we might be, but we have the capacity, through self-reflexive practices, to change the programming of our subconscious even though we may not know what that programming is. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a different future, a future that is made up of events that begin here, now. You want a relationship in the future? That relationship has already started. We have not yet been programmed by future events even though they may appear to be on a continual differentially repeated line with the past. We can intervene in our repetitions. Work to create new events that enable us to affirm who we want to be and who we want to be with.

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be “blamed” for one’s own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external “evil.”

There are a few different conceptions of ressentiment and its wikipedia page is pretty good at outlining the different definitions. As the above brief description explains, ressentiment is a projection onto the world of a painful relation of one’s self to one’s self. Most people have focused on the question of identity, of the distribution of ill will and the construction of the ‘external scapegoat’. Deleuze isolates three characteristics of Neitzsche’s ‘ressentiment’:

Deleuze interpreting Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ressentiment discusses three characteristics. First, there is the inability to admire, respect or love. Second, there is passivity. Third, there is the imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities and perpetual accusation. (Deleuze, 1983).

I have encountered ressentiment in myself a number of times and I have documented it here in different ways. Here are the top posts from my blog. There are many other instances on the topic, but not in such a sustained way. It shows that I have not really changed the way I understand ressentiment.

1. Singular Complementarity, June 17, 2005

In this post I discuss how falling in love is not a relation between two people, but the folding of two already infinitely folded zones of intensity/sensation. In the second half of the post I warn of a danger.

There is a gamble in the meeting-gesture. This, of course, is the danger.

There are folds that are so worn and habitualised they become creases that scar the surface and will never be sufficiently folded in any other way again. They are the dead areas of the surface and within such proximities there is only darkness. Even if such dark areas are already infinitely folded they operate as blunt surfaces or jaggard formations of folds. These surfaces can become weaponised gestures that are weilded when the soft comfort of complementary folding becomes the acrimony of the crease. Each gesture ceases to be a meeting and becomes an attack of weaponised surfaces. The brightness of midday is eclipised by the shadows that form at dusk. In the end, the surfaces can be so dark even the attacks become empty and instead it simply becomes the meeting of shadows. However, here and now nothing is final.

Joy can only be reclaimed by a gesture, a meeting that forms complementary folds at the speed of sensation. If all one ever brings are weaponised surfaces that are blunt and jaggard and which carry the expectation of an anxious folding to be wrought upon and by the Other so as to render a complementarity, then joy is short lived. Eventually all that is left is a blunt and jaggard surface.

Rather than the meeting of supple folds, a love born of ressentiment is born of complementary dead zones of intensity. People turn these hard jaggard surfaces of themselves to the world as a defence. The only antidote is more love and the strength and courage to envelope an other’s folds into the supple folds of your heart.

2. Now, letting go, July 5, 2005

This post was inspired by pretty epic breakup (got dumped in the US) and the song Mr Brightside by The Killers.

Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I’m Mr Brightside

The Killers track captures in a beautiful lyrical manner the required disposition for engaging with the world again after having one’s heart broken and allowing one’s self to refold the world into one’s self anew. I am currently listening to this track on repeat as a kind of hipster mantra for warding off feelings of ill will. In the post I use the analogy of the Adam and God ‘just touching’ image of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and offer a somewhat heretical reading. What if Adam was ‘letting go’ of God? Anyway. ‘Letting go’ is a process:

Sure, part of you dies, and it is gone forever, only to be resurrected in un/pleasant dreams. But there is a joy in ‘letting go’. There is. The world is refolded into one’s self. Instead of a short circuit of desire between your self and an other, the circuit opens up to the world. Another part of the world is born and that is what needs care. The eager to-come of Destiny that never does, for it is always becoming on the bright side of our souls. [...]
The pain of letting go and the necessary disaffection that allows one’s self to let go of one’s past copy. We are always somewhere in between. Between two copies of ourselves. Letting go of you means letting go of my self. [...]
To allow ourselves to refold the world into our selves again. This is what I now welcome and care for, like a wandering stranger whom I have chanced upon: the new stranger of my self in the world.

Wow, that last sentence is killer. I am a pretty good writer sometimes!

3. produce openings on the world October 27, 2007

I return to the common theme here of welcoming the world into myself, producing openings on the world. I draw on the famous symptomology of post-war US culture David Riesman of three ‘character’ types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Riesman’s three character types are interesting because of their processual nature; they are not innate traits, but capacities of subjectivity evident only through interaction. I have large block quotes from the text to describe what these are, but the relevant bit is towards the bottom of the post, where I describe a woman of ressentiment:

Sometimes the clash between characters exists in a single person. How to produce openings on the world that aren’t filtered through the tortured, guilt-ridden ‘gyroscope’ of the ‘inner-directed’ character? It requires so much work and patience. Sometimes too much. Sometimes it is necessary to give up and accept the fact that being ‘inner-directed’ produces a resource of a sort of strength, which is entirely destructive, but which at least allows the person to exist in the world and continue struggling in impossible situations. When all recourse is exhausted then it is terribly sad especially when beautiful and intelligent people lock away the world from themselves and will never know what it means to be part of something much larger. It is terribly sad when someone becomes this character, and cannot face the world.

I do offer a description of a kind of feminist Übermensch (for purely selfish reasons, because they are as sexy as fuck):

There is nothing sexier than a woman who knows her place in the world. This does not mean she subjugates herself to patriarchal norms. Rather she uses that knowledge to orientate herself in creative and life-affirming ways. Normally this requires an infrastructure of education or the grace of intuition.

4. she left the bit with the most toast crumbs, September 5, 2009

In this post I explore the more complex problem of producin new openings on the world so as to enable new foldings of the world to ‘take’ or ‘develop’

Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ’slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

There is a complexity to this process, one that requires care and, above all, patience, to let the other person or people fold the world in their own time.

5. letting go, embracing, the world

So most recently, how to ward off my own ressentiment:

I am pretty hardcore when it comes to enduring what life throws my way. It is easy when I feel contempt for most of the world and all the stupidities that it contains. I guess it is easier to think about what I won’t do.

I offer a list of axioms for warding off ressentiment, the full descriptions of each of these are in the blog post:

I won’t stop falling in love.
I won’t stop rolling the dice.
I won’t fret about not understanding.
I won’t stop inviting people into my world.
I won’t stop listening to special songs.
I won’t stop writing my poem.

What I have forgotten about ressentiment is the temporal dimension. There is a contradictory movement of dispising the present while being incapable of imagining the future or past, because any kind of temporal relation is derived from a projection of the present, ie ‘This painful present will continue” “This present is a repetition of the past, nothing changes.” This is why it is so hard to imagine a new opening on the world and a different way of relating to the world, because you become literally locked in time.

To break free of ressentiment means to break time itself; to go to war against all possible futures and all possible pasts that suck life out of itself.

It is not human consciousness that distorts the reality of things, but relationality per se. Heidegger’s tool-analysis unwittingly gives us the deepest possible account of the classical rift between substance and relation. When something is ‘present-athand,’ this simply means it is registered through some sort of relation: whether perceptual, theoretical, practical, or purely causal. To be ‘ready-to-hand’ does not mean to be useful in the narrow sense, but to withdraw into subterranean depths that other objects rely on despite never fully probing or sounding them. When objects fail us, we experience a negation of their accessible contours and become aware that the object exceeds all that we grasp of it. This predicament gives rise to the theme of vicarious causation.

Graham Harman’s theory of vicarious causation has been copping a battering around the blogging traps recently. Rightly so. The example he provides of perceiving a pine tree is utterly contradictory. Why should the objectness of the pine tree be defined by the human-centric practice of perception? Surely the great pine tree philosophers equally misguided as Harman would lament our status as not ‘real’ objects because of our inability to ‘perceive’ the sun as a form of energy production. We only have a ‘reality’ and not merely sensuous objects when we become enemies of the trees and attack them with axes and chainsaws.

I agree with the first line in the above quote 100%. To pursue ‘objects’ from this initial thought is incorrect and leads to an impossible theory of causation. It is not human consciousness but relationality per se that ‘distorts’ or, as I prefer, produces the reality of things. There is only ‘sensuousness’ or affect and the capacity to be affected. Harman has inherited a conception of human thought as necessarily being an idealism; it is not. There is an affective threshold to thought. Thought develops through the body like an old photograph develops.

One last note, regarding this proposition from Harman:

CONTIGUITY. The various sensual objects in an intention lie side by side, not affecting one another. Only sometimes do they fuse or mix. Within certain limits, any sensual object’s neighbors can be shuffled and varied without damaging the identity of that object, as when drifting mists do not interfere with my focus on the tree.

‘Only sometimes’? How about ‘Only in reality as reality’? What I realised during my PhD and am now thinking about again for a book on ‘enthusiasm’ is that intensive relationality has a problematic contiguity. Proximity is not a function of spatial or spatialised-temporal intimacy, it is only in this ‘sometimes’ (that Harman speaks of), which is actually the temporality of Kairos (as per Negri’s essay), does reality ‘develop’ itself into a baroque architecture of events through various (virtual) threshold-singularities.

Monetizing Enthusiasm: The Missed Opportunity of Social Media and Car Enthusiast Magazines

Abstract: The publishing industry that services the scene of modified-car culture in Australia has largely missed the boat when it came to moving from being a once profitable commercial print industry into a profitable social media enterprise. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in the context of the last 30 years of modified-car culture and the enthusiast media industry that developed around it. A number of possible approaches are proposed for monetizing enthusiasm through social media that should be useful for other enthusiast scenes.

When post-structuralist marxists become capitalist.

My heart is well and truly broken.

I recently had a discussion with a mate over some beers about intellectual property. My mate was worried that I ‘give away my ideas for free’ on this blog. My mate intimated that there are examples where ideas that at the very least had been ‘inspired’ by my writing on here was actually finding its way into other people’s work. My mate would not elaborate with examples. This is a very serious matter within academia because it goes to the heart of what an academic or scholar is meant to do. It really doesn’t worry me, in the way my mate was talking about it, however. Beyond professional contempt, and even the ethical question of using someone else’s labour for your own purposes, is a bigger problem for me that bankrupts intellectual culture.

My immediate response to my mate was to point out the difference between having the capacity to create and being able to think an idea. Most people who have read a bit of Deleuzean philosophy or maybe some of the secondary literature will be able to understand the sort of posts I write on here and that my mate was talking about. Being able to think ideas and understand the arguments developed here on my blog is of course what I hope will happen. Otherwise there would be little point!

Sure I’ve taken the time to read half a library’s worth of books, as have most people of a similar age with a scholarly disposition, not because I want a job out of it*, but because I actually enjoy reading. I find almost nothing as pleasurable as engaging with the challenge posed by the text; yes, I am an epic geek. (That is what I find so frustrating with some contemporary philosophy in particular, it valorises obvious ideas and seems content to dress up regurgitation. The challenge becomes a bullshit rhetoric of defending a position or term, rather than working towards something.) I feel sorry for those people who do not experience this pleasure (and I meet these people everyday!) as books provide a near infinite resource. When it is someone who has read a whole bunch of stuff, then reads my blog and finds the arguments or points made worthy enough of being included in their own work, but keeps this connection to themselves, I feel there is a far more profound problem than some bullshit to do with whose ideas are used by whom and when.

Intellectual practice is always distributed across many acts of creative thought. Inspiration can come from anywhere. It seems to me that the ‘paranoid’ academic misses out on this. To appropriate ideas is not inspiration, there is little transformative potential in appropriation. An appropriated idea is liquidated of the capacity to bridge between thinkers and the virtual structures of thought assembled by the thinker-architect and the power of their imagination. Imagination is like a muscle, it needs to be exercised, otherwise it atrophies.

*That is not to say that I don’t want to have a proper punt at academia at some point and for me to do that I need to publish. I have started this process of churning out journal articles.

I just bought this artwork today, will write a blog post soon about it and the artist.

Judd Apatow’s Funny People is the first new movie I have seen in a long time that I can genuinely say was good. Film critics describe Funny People as the third movie in a ‘trilogy’ with 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Reading some of the reviews, especially the bad ones, makes me wonder how the fuck these people get jobs as film critics. Who the fuck pays these people and who the fuck reads them except with the same displeasure that you come across as the consequence of an innocent internet search like when you can’t help read some bigotted scrawl on a toilet stall wall? So move on if you don’t need a dose of hatorade to fire you up this timeless internet day. I am going to try and shake off some of the nastiness I am feeling by putting finger to keyboard (over the fold). I am the groundhog that is driving angry in the Groundhog Day of the cultural industry. Believe it.

(more…)

Earilier discussion here, here and here.
It is clear that in his book Prince of Networks on Bruno Latour and on his blog, Harman is trying to make room for a concept of time as a series of cinematic-instants. He argues against an allegedly Bergsonian conception of time in Deleuze’s work that is organised around duration. One of the things that struck me about Reassembling the Soical was its distinctive Deleuzian tone. From Latour’s Reassembling the Social:

A terminological precision about network
The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago. And yet the tradition in which we use it remains distinct in spite of its possible confusion with two other lines. One is of course the technical networks—electricity, trains, sewages, internet, and so on. The second one is used, in sociology of organization, to introduce a difference between organizations, markets, and states (Boyer 2004). In this case, network represents one informal way of associating together human agents (Granovetter 1985).
When (Castells 2000) uses the term, the two meanings merge since network becomes a privileged mode of organization thanks to the very extension of information technology. It’s also in this sense that Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) take it to define a new trend in the capitalist mode of production.
But the other tradition, to which we have always referred, is that of Diderot especially in his Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769), which includes twenty-seven instances of the word reseaux. This is where you can find a very special brand of active and distributed materialism of which Deleuze, through Bergson, is the most recent representative. (129)

This is here as a note to which I shall return to try to answer the question, If Harman presents a Heideggerised Latour, what would be a Deleuzian Latour?