Missing Masses
Affect theory is an attempt to understand the elusive poetics of French philosophy by an Anglo-Saxon brain, which produces hilarious literal readings of great metaphors.
Latour: “the missing masses” (inanimate matter participating in human life, and, in particular, in the organization of urban space).
Anglo-Saxons: How can we understand “the missing masses” to account for the materialities influencing our lives in addition to the discursive and the political?
Well, if this is what you are going to derive from it, try no further. The “missing masses” is the gesture to the “masses” of Socialist transformations, of Marxist visions, in which the primordial thought of liberation moves from the oppressed subject of the human being to the silent subject of matter. It is a discourse of the liberation of the world from its materiality in which the actors are not only human and nonhuman but also animate and inanimate. It should not be flattened into your parsimonious little practical usages but rather expanded by the agglomeration of new metaphors on top of the ones that allow you to do so.
The scientific Anglo-Saxon discourse is a discourse of petty accountants afraid to make a mistake. At least philosophers could have unleashed the beast of their imagination, but no. Limited accurate little claims with no imagination is their sad lot.
