[Reader-list] Thoughts on Flat Ontology
ashok sukumaran
ashokansuku at gmail.com
Fri Mar 4 01:33:37 IST 2011
Hi jeebesh,
at some point I had unsubscribed from reader-list as I found it hard
to be part of the discussion, but feel free to post this note there. I
dont know if ill be able to respond in more detail, but heres a few
points/ resources.
So the way in which flat ontology "clicked" for me was by way of
Latour, and his most beautiful term, Irreduction. There is a detailed
discussion of this in Harman's book on Latour, the Prince of Networks,
see the link below. But the key point in Latours irreductions book is
that: "nothing can be reduced to anything else... everything may be
allied to everything else." This is a big door-opener, because it
asks us to do the opposite of a lot of usual disciplinary and
scholarly work. Because everything can count, in its own way, and in
surprising ways. Further, not only in terms of entities but in terms
of their relations or difference, is only one set of relations or
differences mpiortant (for ex. between human and world) while another
set (between entities in the world that meet without us) is
irrelevant, or has to be reduced to what we know, or want, or fear or
desire?
As many may know, Meillassoux coined a term for such reduction-to-
human-access tendencies in philosophy a few years ago, naming it
"correlationism". (This is another non-DeLanda source for the idea of
flat-ontology).
Correlationalism is basically the idea that nothing can be, without
our thinking it, which creates the subject-object pair as a vicious
circle that cannot be broken out of. Anti-correlationist philosophies
can open up on the other hand a "great outdoors", an exciting and
quite unexplored territory. Which contains a number of political and
ethical challenges, such as the question not only of the "rights" of
birds, animals, natural resources, artworks, computer programs and
other "subalterns", but of their agency, how they actually act in the
world, and amongst each other.
Now to the question of "depth" in such ontology, which was a doubt
jeebesh you had in the conference. I think the confusion arises if you
see depth as a spatial thing, because you then end up with a kind of
materialism of depth, an object made up of its parts. Depth is a
metaphor here, just as "object" itself is, because stories and
families are also objects, not only tables and chairs. An object is
exactly that which is greater than its parts. You cant reduce a story
to its words, something will be lost. This doesn't mean that you cant
enjoy or cherish each word, you can, since it is an object in turn,
and something is lost if you now look at the letters alone.
To look at this another way, here is something from what you posted:
"There is no reason why flat ontologies have to be individualist or
object-oriented". That is actually correct, and IS the major
difference between Latour and Harman's ontology, a difference which is
laid out in detail in the second half of the book on Latour. For
Latour, ontology is flat, but for Harman ontology is object-oriented,
flat with respect to our usual categories of culture, nature,
imagination, etc., but split between the real and sensual realms, and
differentiated into objects. For Harman, unlike Latour, depth or what
he calls withdrawal is a nuclear, rumbling, core feature of objects.
More background, and what this leads to is here, in a useful glossary
of Harmanian terms. Simply put, withdrawal means that a tree or a
sculpture is not exhausted by what you and me think of it, how the
earth or fertiliser or curators effect it, or any relation at all.
Because otherwise, everything is this play of what you think and what
I think, and there is no tree left.
Harman and other object-oriented ontologists such as Levi Bryant
actually disagree on whether this withdrawn realm is a kind of
Deluezian virtual or something else. For me, a flat ontology without
some kind of withdrawal is "too flat" simply because it suggests an
impoverished world that is only made of relations and events, which I
think also proclaims a kind of victory of the most-connected or most
eventful, without giving us actual and persistent fish, fireworks,
films or fantasies in return. Object-oriented ontology does give us
these actual entities, the object being a kind of firewall between an
inaccessible core and radiant sensual effects.
For a practical example, do see the object-oriented ecologist Tim
Morton's great riffs on climate and global warming as the real,
withdrawn, massive, hyper-objective depth of what we perceive as
weather. For ex. here:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/sizewell-b-nuclear-power-station.html
Now, its possible open up climate's black box by measuring devices,
satellites etc. And you find things like the ozone hole, trade winds,
polluting industries, icebergs, etc. which each have sensible
qualities, their capacity to exert forces, but also withdraw in their
own way. And so on... objects are found "all the way down" to the
raindrops or atoms, but not "all the way up" since reality cannot be
constructed deterministically. Another thing about depth is that if
you don't attempt this opening up at all, you are stuck with only
weather as the perceivable, and the thinkable, as a false immediacy,
hamare yahan to koi garmi nahin hai. And then you cannot really deal
with something like global warming.
For me, objects in a flat ontology are more chunky, sticky, deep and
at the same more open way or thinking than is described by recent
metaphors of "networks" or digital-this or that (with a greater
opportunity of describing or working with specific mediations). It is
also nice that it doesnt depend on any kind of technological metaphor,
even though "objects" still makes many people freak out.
Heres harman:
" objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one
imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and
insurgencies equaling those found in the most conflicted human moods."
As a total amateur in this philosophy, I am not involved in "proving"
if this ontology correct one, or not. But it seems to offer the
possibility of thinking differently. I have many questions about how
such ontology can be related to practices, which are often about
constructing relations, in our case "infrastructures", ways to connect
ideas or things. Which is why, my proposal in the conference was
actually called "modes of existence" or modes of operation, which is
an idea related to Latour's own new yet-unpublished work, and his
essay in Speculations below. It was also to suggest modes of practice
that come from such a flat orientation.
But to give concrete examples from our own work, flat ontology with
some depth allows for a fresh way of understanding the interactions
between for ex. electricity, people, and the contingency and
chunkiness of systems (in my own "early work") , between information,
commodities, communities, taxation and nation states (see wharfage),
across footage, films and software (see pad.ma), or between a few
bamboos, sunlight, a common space and a practice (see camp roof) all
of these as forces and entities in their own right, arrayed in a non-
heirarchical way. And art, as an entity greater than these parts and
more beautiful (or troubling, or evocative, or creating its own time)
is also perhaps the art of creating or inventing objects. Drawing from
and lighting up relations, but at the same time alluding to the
further depths of objects it touches (such as a material, or a sea, or
certain people, or a politics) whose entirety is not, cannot be,
housed in or literally linked to the artwork.
One of the great things about this branch of philosophy is that a lot
of the primary and secondary materials are available online, for free.
So interested people should look at.
The Prince of Networks, Harman on Latour
http://www.re-press.org/content/view/63/38/ (entire book pdf)
The Speculative Turn
http://www.re-press.org/content/view/64/38/ (entire book pdf, see
Levi's "Flat Ontology", pg 269)
And many blogs including:
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/category/oop-classic/ (Grahams
blog posts in the category OOP classic)
The density and overall generosity of the blogging being done here
really produces another kind of "flat ontology" that gives outsiders
like me an unprecedented level of access. The amount of philosophy and
philosophical debate being done on blogs such as below is quite
incredible. See the many critical conversations with relationists,
Derrideans, etc that have already taken place.
From the self-described marxist Levi Bryant:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/
And Morton here:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/
among many others, see the side links, part of a broader family which
could include Stengers, Haraway and even Deleuze. Graham's talk at
CAMP in bombay and the questions that came from it are being
transcribed and will be shortly available on pad.ma.
To return to briefly to the archive conference, a couple of points: In
the archive, human memory is only one of the residues. Moreover a
fetishised object transforms and obscures not only its "social
relations" but all kinds of relations, including how it was made,
accidents, technical or ecological ancestry. This object in the
archive, carrying some traces and radiating or suggesting other new
ones, can be a very fertile thing, and fetish can be quite profound.
(see Laruelle in speculations) Imaginations, multiplications, modes of
access, in short the future, is created in the archive in ways in
which neither God nor the Subject is master. The important thing I
guess is that we shouldn't confuse the latter two anymore ;)
This doesnt mean a removal or erasure of the human, far from it. Like
going to space didnt erase the earth. It tends to make life and all
the dimensions of earth all the more precious, if a bit unfamiliar,
like in a new light.
Hope this helps,
warmly,
ashok
On 2 March 2011 18:45, shaina a <kalakamra at gmail.com> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeebesh <jeebesh at sarai.net>
Date: 2 March 2011 17:32
Subject: [Reader-list] Thoughts on Flat Ontology
To: reader-list list <reader-list at sarai.net>
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?
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