[Reader-list] Thoughts on Flat Ontology

[Jeebesh]

dear all,

recently in an conference on archiving ashok sukumaran argued that we  
need to seriously consider the "flat ontology" philosophy. it led to  
some interesting confusion. here is an interesting blog posting that i  
found furthering the confusion in my head :)

warmly
jeebesh

http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=168
Thoughts on Flat Ontology
On September 15, 2010,

The term ‘flat ontology’ was coined by Manuel DeLanda in his book  
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Flat ontologies are opposed  
there to hierarchical ontologies in which the structure and evolution  
of reality is explained by transcendent organizing principles such as  
essences,  organizing categories or natural states:

[While] an ontology based on relations between general types and  
particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a  
different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an  
approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a  
flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals,  
differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status  
(DeLanda 2004, p. 58).

In a flat ontology the organization of entities is explained with  
reference to interactions between particular, historically locatable  
entities. It is never the result of entities of one ontological kind  
being related to an utterly different order of being like a God, a  
transcendental subject, a natural state or its associated species  
essences (Sober 1980). For flat ontologies, the factors which motivate  
macro-level change are always emergent from and ‘immanent’ to the  
systems in which the change occurs.

DeLanda’s characterization of flat ontology comes during a discussion  
of the ontological status of species in which he sides with  
philosophers of biology like David Hull and Elliot Sober who hold that  
species are differentiated populations that emerge from variations  
among organisms and the evolutionary feedback processes these drive  
(DeLanda 2004, 60). For DeLanda, evolutionary feedback instances a  
universal tendency for identifiable things and their properties to  
emerge from intensive  or (or productive) differences such as  
variations in heritable adaptive differences or chemical  
concentrations (Ibid., 58-9; 70). Thus the formation of soap bubbles  
depends on the tendency of component molecules to assume a lower a  
state of free energy, minimizing inter-molecular distances and  
cancelling the forces exerted on individual molecules by their  
neighbors (Ibid., 15). The process instantiates an abstract tendency  
for near-equilibrium systems with free energy to ‘roll down’ to a  
macrostate attractor. Thus for DeLanda’s ontology (following Deleuze)  
individuals are not products of the operations of a Kantian/Husserlian  
transcendental subject but of the cancellation of intensive  
differences and the generative processes they drive. These processes  
are governed by mathematical structures – e.g. ‘virtual’ attractors or  
‘singularities’ – which are ‘quasi-causal’  influences on their  
trajectory through a particular state space (Ibid., 14).

How do we reconcile this second ontological claim (which I will refer  
to as ‘transcendental materialism’) with an adherence to a flat  
ontology of individuals. Is ontological flatness merely a regional  
principle applying to the ‘bits’ of the universe where differentiated  
particulars have alreadyemerged from intensive processes, rendering  
their generative mechanisms irrelevant to understanding or  
categorizing the entities they have become? Moreover, if these  
processes are explained in terms of the virtual structures they  
exhibit, such as their singularities, doesn’t TM just reintroduce an  
ontological hierarchy between particular and universal?*

Graham Harman argues that the quasi-causal role of the abstract or  
virtual in DeLanda’s thought vitiates its commitment to a flat  
ontology for which “atoms have no more reality than grain markets or  
sports franchises” (Harman 2008, 370). Thus while depriving species  
and kinds of any distinctive organizing role, DeLanda inflates the  
role of the ‘genus’ in the form of virtual patterns (such as the  
relationship between the topology of systems and their capacity for  
autocatalysis explored of Stuart Kauffman and others). Secondly,  
subordinating individuals to their historical generative processes is  
seen by Harman as a way of ‘undermining’ the status of the particular  
or individual, which – against the letter of flat ontology – is  
somehow less real or effective than the intensive processes that  
produce it.

I think Harman does contemporary philosophers a favour by anatomizing  
these tensions within DeLanda’s materialism. However, it is far from  
clear to me that the regulative ideal of ontological flatness  
necessitates an ontology in which deep individuals and their (largely  
non-manifest) capacities play the central organizing role. It may be  
that the generative histories of particulars are relevant only insofar  
as they leave ”lasting fingerprints” on the particulars they generate,  
making DeLanda’s proposal that we categorize particulars by way of the  
generative processes that produce them potentially problematic in some  
cases (Ibid.,374; DeLanda 2004, 50). However, if DeLanda’s (and  
Deleuze’s) transcendental materialism is correct, then any entity  
generated as a result of these processes will always be – as Iain  
Grant emphasizes – a fragile achievement, fatally involved in the play  
of further intensities (for example, at certain temperature  
thresholds, the lipid layers dividing biological cells from their  
watery milieu will simply melt, their ‘cohesion’ as individuals breaks  
down). The question of typing by generative process is thus an  
empirical matter of the causal relevance of such processes to the  
maintenance of individuals at all scales.

There  is no reason why flat ontologies have to be individualist or  
object-oriented. The  concept of the ‘individual’ and the wider  
category of the ‘particular’ are often conflated. The latter category  
may contain events, ‘diffusions’ or collectives: each of which may be  
insufficiently differentiated to qualify for objecthood (Roden 2004,  
p. 204). The cancellation of intensive quantities can certainly be  
accommodated within the category of particular events without  
threatening flatness (whether this is an orthodox Deleuzean solution  
doesn’t concern me). Secondly, insofar as the virtual laws of form  
which DeLanda describes reflect the mathematical structure of  
morphogenetic processes or systems, then their ontological autonomy  
need not violate the autonomy of the particular. Rather, morphogenetic  
structures reflect substrate neutral or formal constraints on the  
behavior of material systems whose effects are entirely produced by  
those systems. Quasi-causes do not preempt causes proper but reflect  
structural similarities between systems with otherwise distinct  
components.

For example, Stuart Kaufmann has used computer simulation of so called  
‘NK Boolean Netoworks’ to argue that the capacity of systems of  
mutually interacting parts to generate stable auto-catalytic cycles is  
sensitive to the number of inter-connections between those parts. If  
the number of connections is large (that is, if the number of  
connections K to a given component approximates to the number of  
components N) the system behaves in a random, disordered way. However,  
for smaller values of K (e.g. K=2) the system settles down to  
exploring a relatively small number of ‘attractor’ sequences. Kaufmann  
speculates that this relationship is substrate-neutral - independent  
of  nature of the system components (they could be nodes in an NK  
boolean  simulation or chemical substances in a solution).

So a provisional conclusion, here, is that we can retain the role of  
structural ‘quasi-causes’ and reject the primacy of individuals  
without compromising the regulative ideal of ontological flatness.

DeLanda, Manuel. (2004), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.  
London: Continuum.

___(2006), A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.

Harman, Graham (2008), ‘Delanda’s Ontology: assemblage and realism’,  
Continental Philosophy Review 41, 367-383.

Roden, David. (2004), ‘Radical Quotation and Real Repetition’, Ratio:  
An international journal of analytic philosophy, XVII/2 (2004), pp.  
191–206.

Sober, Elliot (1980) ‘Evolution, Population Thinking and  
Essentialism’, Philosophy of Science 47(3), pp. 350-383.

*We could also ask: is the cancellation of intensive difference merely  
a regional principle applying to various kinds of thermodynamic  
systems rather than, say, to more fundamental physical entities or  
structures?