Abstract
This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a ‘mesoscale’ intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of ‘repetition’ and ‘mediation’, to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal ‘metapattern’ of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales.
Highlights
In this paper I seek to situate human social life within a wider choreography of organic and nonnorganic sociality and liveliness
I have argued for the importance of colloids: substances that appear at the macroscale as a continuous substance, but at a smaller mesoscale as a population of discrete, similar entities surrounded by an enveloping medium
The complex, shifting behaviour of a dynamic colloid is neither merely the sum result of individual interactions between its constituent parts, nor the result of a macroscale structure which determines these interactions; a colloid is a multiscalar ‘meshwork’ of movements, transformations and causal chains, in the ‘in-between’ of which emerge a diverse range of structurings and relationships, resistant to either ‘downward’ or ‘upward’ reductionism
Summary
In this paper I seek to situate human social life within a wider choreography of organic and nonnorganic sociality and liveliness. I explore the need for social theory to move beyond a narrow language of solidity and fluidity, to first engage more precisely with the complex phenomenology of rigid bodies and flowing substances and their diverse powers of memory and forgetting, and to go further by considering colloids, with their strange shifting and creative behaviours.
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