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.

本文认为，对胶体的探索可以帮助我们将人类社会生活置于对物质的社会性和生命性的更广泛理解中。胶体是溶胶、泡沫、粉末、凝胶、面团和糊状物等物质，它们表现出复杂且不断变化的宏观物理特性，不符合固体、液体或气体的标准概念。胶体可以以复杂和创造性的方式表现，因为它们在不同相中，在分子尺度和宏观物质尺度之间的“中尺度”中间对分散和连续物质进行拓扑包裹。我将胶体及其“重复”和“中介”的双重现象与对社会生活的理解联系起来，即既不能还原为单独个体之间的相互作用，也不能还原为跨个体的整体。