[Reader-list] Fwd: Thoughts on Flat Ontology

[shaina a]

re-forwarding the mail from ashok, since a few of the imp. links were
stripped. sorry for the repetition.

x
shaina




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"
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/correlationism-and-the-fate-of-philosophy/
(This is another non-DeLanda source for the idea of flat-ontology).
Correlationalism is basically the Kantian 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,
http://avoidingthevoid.wordpress.com/dictionary-of-concepts-for-graham-harmans-object-oriented-philosophy-draft-work-in-progress/
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 of 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 Speculative Turn 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
http://www.camputer.org/event.php?id=77), across footage, films and
software (see pad.ma), or between a few bamboos, sunlight, a common
space and a practice (see camp roof
http://camputer.org/event.php?id=91)  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) also can be seen as
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 even fetish can be quite
profound. (see Laruelle in speculative turn) 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