The Democracy of Objects

6.3. Being is Flat

The foregoing chapters and sections lead to the conclusion that being is flat. The flatness of being is embodied in two fundamental claims. First, in light of our exploration of the interior of objects in chapter four, it becomes clear that ontologically the bland human-world gap or relationship possesses no metaphysical priority. As Harman puts it, “object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other”.[290] Second, onticology and object-oriented philosophy establish what might be called a heteroverse or pluriverse, where entities at all levels of scale, whether natural or cultural, physical or artificial, material or semiotic are on equal ontological footing. As Ian Bogost puts it, “all beings equally exist, yet they do not exist equally”.[291] Onticology and object-oriented philosophy therefore democratizes being, asserting not one primary gap between subjects and objects, humans and world, mind and reality, but rather an infinity of gaps or vacuums between objects regardless of whether humans are involved. Likewise, onticology and object-oriented philosophy democratize being by defending a plurality of types of objects, ranging from the semiotic to the natural. Rather than treating one type of object such as quantum particles as the really real upon which all else is grounded and to which all else ultimately reduces, flat ontology advocates a pluralism of types of objects at all levels of scale that are irreducible to one another. In other words, objects of different types and at different levels of scale are what Aristotle referred to as genuine primary substances.

As Harman has compellingly argued, philosophy, for the last two hundred or so years, has been obsessed with a single gap between the human and the world, treating this gap as metaphysically privileged or special, unlike all other relations with objects. Within the framework of onticology and object-oriented philosophy, however, the human-object gap possesses no privileged status, but is one among many gaps populating a heteroverse. As Harman remarks,

From this Harman concludes that, “contrary to the dominant assumption of philosophy since Kant, the true chasm in ontology lies not between humans and world, but between objects and relations”.[293] Far from the gap between humans and objects constituting a unique form of relation, withdrawal is a perfectly ubiquitous relation within being characteristic of all relations between objects. All objects are strange strangers with respect to one another regardless of whether or not humans are involved in these relations. Moreover, all objects are strange strangers with respect to themselves.

Within the framework of onticology, the ubiquity of withdrawal characteristic of all objects is theorized in terms of the operational closure of objects analyzed in chapter four and the split within objects between virtual proper being and local manifestation analyzed in chapter three. With respect to the operational closure of objects, the relation between objects whether human, social, biological, or inanimate is a non-relation between objects in which objects never directly touch or encounter one another. Like Leibniz's windowless monads, each object is a discrete substance or unit of its own, withdrawn from all other objects without any direct relation or contact. Objects never directly encounter one another, but rather only relate to one another as translations or information. And information is never something transmitted or exchanged by objects, but rather is constituted by each object as a function of its own internal organization and distinctions.

With respect to the split nature of objects embodied in the split between virtual proper being and local manifestation, a similar ubiquity of withdrawal is encountered. The virtual proper being of objects is abyssal and subterranean, such that it itself never comes to presence. Virtual proper being is structured without being qualitative and refers to that domain of powers and attractors presiding over the actualization of qualities or local manifestations. Insofar as virtual proper being is thoroughly withdrawn and never itself becomes present, it can only be inferred through the actual. It is only through tracking local manifestations and their variations that we get any sense of the dark volcanic powers harbored within objects. In other words, through second-order observation or the observation of how an object relates to the world in its non-relation, we form a hypothetical diagram of objects or a map of their attractors or powers. However, insofar as all local manifestations create something new in the form of qualities, this diagram can only ever be partial, hypothetical, and incomplete for, as Spinoza so nicely put it, we don't ever completely know what objects can do.

Nor is the withdrawal of objects ever merely a withdrawal of objects with respect to one another. Withdrawal is a form of non-relation so thorough that objects aren't simply withdrawn from one another, but are withdrawn even from themselves. As we have seen, all objects are akin to Lacanian divided subjects, $. On the one hand, no object ever actualizes the subterranean volcanic core with which its virtual proper being is haunted. This virtual domain is like a reserve or excess that never comes to presence. It is not simply that objects are, in themselves, fully actual and only withdrawn for other objects relating to them, but rather that objects are withdrawn in themselves. On the other hand, the distinctions or organization by which objects produce information for themselves are themselves withdrawn or invisible to the object that deploys them. As we have seen, every distinction necessarily contains two blind spots. Distinctions are blind to the unmarked space produced as a result of the distinction. As Luhmann puts it, objects can only see what they can see and cannot see what they cannot see. Moreover, they do not see that they do not see this. Yet in addition to this, objects are blind to their own operative distinctions. Distinctions can only be observed or used, but never observed and used. In making indications or interacting with other objects, the distinctions that render these indications possible become thoroughly invisible.

Insofar as withdrawal is ubiquitous, there is no reason to treat the human-object relation as metaphysically privileged. The human-object relation is not a special relation, not a unique relation, but a subset of a far more pervasive ontological truth that pertains to objects of all types. The point here is not that we should exclude inquiry into human/object relations or social/object relations, but rather that these analyses are analyses for regional ontology, for a particular domain of being, not privileged grounds of ontology as such. The issue here is thus very subtle. It is not a question of excluding the human and the social, but of decentering them from the place of ontological privilege they currently enjoy within contemporary philosophy and theory. Nor does this entail that all objects relate to other objects in exactly the same way. There are as many forms of translation as there are types of objects. Indeed, there are as many forms of translation as there are objects. Moreover, new forms of translation come into being all the time with the emergence of new objects and with the development of objects as analyzed in chapters four and five.

What onticology and, I believe, object-oriented philosophy propose is therefore a subtle shift in the distinctions governing the marked space of what philosophy and theory indicates. Far from seeking to exclude or eradicate phenomenology and bodies of cultural theory in the name of, for example, a naturalism or a scientistic materialism, object-oriented ontology aims to expand what can be indicated within the domain of philosophy and theory. Onticology and object-oriented philosophy thus find themselves in the position of receiving opposite and opposed objections from all sides. From the culturalists, we receive criticisms declaring that we are rejecting the human, the subject, meaning, signs, and the social. From the naturalists, we are accused of wooly-headed thinking that treats social entities, semiotic entities, texts, films, fictions and so on as real and autonomous entities within being.

In both cases, however, the rejoinder of object-oriented ontology is the same. What is objected to with respect to the culturalists is not the thesis that humans and social entities translate other entities in their own way, nor the thesis that humans and social entities are not genuine entities, but rather the Malkovichism that arises from privileging the human/world or social/world gap. As we saw in 6.1, Malkovichism consists in treating all other objects as blank screens upon which humans project their meanings, intentions, signs, and signifiers. Malkovich, like Narcissus, sees only himself in other objects, denying objects their own autonomy and dignity. The trick of cultural analysis thus lies in demonstrating that what we take to be the object is rather our own alienated image. What object-oriented ontology opposes is not the thesis that humans and society translate other objects, nor the thesis that humans and societies only encounter objects in “distorted” form in their own interior, but rather the culturalist tendency to reduce objects to alienated human reflections. To be sure we can, and should, investigate the manner in which humans and societies translate objects. Put in more technical terms, we should engage in reflexive second-order observations of our own distinctions and how they organize our experience of the world. Yet having made this concession, we must also redraw our distinctions in such a way as to make room for nonhuman objects as autonomous actors in their own right, such that these objects are not treated as merely passive screens for human projections and such that they are treated as perturbing the world in their own way. In other words, the point is to expand the domain of what can be investigated, not to limit it. However, this requires placing objects in the marked space of our distinctions and treating humans and societies as entities among other entities.

From the naturalists, by contrast, object-oriented ontologists are accused of treating a variety of psychic and cultural entities as real entities, ignoring the truth that the only real reality is the material and physical world. Put crudely, the naturalist accuses object-oriented ontology of treating as real what is merely an illusion or derivative. To the ears of the naturalist, object-oriented ontology thus looks like a form of arch-culturalism insofar as it treats entities like nations, groups, chairs, films, and so on as genuinely real entities. To make matters worse, the naturalist is appalled by the object-oriented thesis that these entities are irreducible to the physical, material, or natural domain. This ends up getting translated into the thesis that object-oriented ontology rejects neurology, biology, chemistry, physics and a host of other “hard sciences”.

However, once again, the point is the same. The aim is not to exclude or reject the entities explored by the “hard sciences”, but to refuse a hierarchical conception of being where these entities are treated as the “really real” beings and all the others are treated as derivative illusions or mere effects. Here, again, the aim is not to limit inquiry, but to expand the domain of what can be investigated. With the naturalists, object-oriented ontology agrees that the culturalists or social constructivists have illicitly reduced nonhuman beings to cultural constructs. With the social constructivists or culturalists, however, object-oriented ontology refuses to treat social and cultural entities as mere effects of the material and physical. Rather, object-oriented ontology argues that these entities are genuinely real entities in their own right. What object-oriented ontology thus objects to is the reductivism of many naturalist approaches.

However here we must proceed with care. Object-oriented ontology can readily agree that Supreme Court justices are impossible without brains, even if often it appears that they don't use their brains. The point is that brains are one thing and Supreme Court justices are another thing. Being a Supreme Court justice is irreducible to being a brain. Here we encounter considerations of both mereology and operational closure. In a rather bizarre formulation, we can ask ourselves whether Antonin Scalia is a Supreme Court justice. Initially the answer would appear to be an obvious yes, unless, somehow, Scalia is an imposter. However, within the framework of onticology, matters are not so simple. Supreme Court justices are elements within a particular object, namely, the United States. Like all other objects, this object is operationally closed, relating only to itself. As such, Scalia, the individual psychic system, belongs not to that object that contains Justice Scalia as an element, but rather to the environment of that object. Put differently, Scalia the individual psychic system belongs to the environment of Justice Scalia the element within a particular larger scale object. Moreover, insofar as the individual psychic system Scalia is itself an operationally closed object, it follows that Scalia's brain belongs to the environment of Scalia the individual psychic system. Insofar as Scalia's brain, such as it is, belongs to the environment of the individual psychic system Scalia, and insofar as Scalia belongs to the environment of that object that contains Justice Scalia as a member, it follows that Scalia's brain can only perturb Scalia the individual psychic system, and that Scalia the psychic system can only perturb the social-system or object that contains Justice Scalia as an element. In other words, each of these objects is withdrawn from the other such that each operates in terms of its own operational closure translating perturbations from one another into information.

In this regard, Scalia's brain has little to tell us about Justice Scalia. Put differently, Justice Scalia is irreducible to the individual psychic system Scalia, and the individual psychic system Scalia is irreducible to Scalia's brain. Instead, what we get is something akin to a high voltage Jacob's Ladder where sparks leap from non-communicating object to non-communicating object with each of these objects being irreducible to one another. At this point, I imagine the naturalist protesting that I'm proposing a thoroughly obscurantist universe populated by all sorts of occult substances like so many ghosts. Am I not here suggesting that Scalia is an immaterial soul and, were it not problematic enough to posit immaterial souls for individuals, have I not now multiplied the sorts of souls that exist through the postulation of even stranger objects like groups, societies, roles, and so on? Is not Ockham spinning in his grave in response to my lack of ontological parsimony?

However, I have already developed the resources for responding to this criticism in section 5.3 where I addressed the ontology of structure. While emergent entities are indeed irreducible to smaller scale entities, this does not entail that they violate any laws of physics or material reality. As we saw in 5.3, the defining feature of structure lies in the manner in which relations among elements making up the endo-structure of an entity or system are constrained. Nothing about these constraints violates the laws of physics or the findings of neurology, however the laws of physics and the findings of neurology cannot themselves account for why relations among elements are constrained or structured in this particular way. It is this nature of constraints or structures that accounts for the irreducibility of larger-scale objects. In a fine discussion of causality and emergence, Protevi writes,

With emergence, higher scale objects take on a life of their own that can only be accounted for in terms of their own organization. Such objects begin to constitute their own elements through their own elements. Here upward causality refers to the manner in which elements of the object produce the object, whereas downward causality refers to the manner in which the object constrains and structures its elements. What we get here is a system-specific causality, unique to each object, that while dependent on lower-scale objects is not accounted for by these objects.

With these observations, we now encounter the heteroverse characteristic of the flat ontology advocated by onticology and object-oriented ontology. Rather than one type of object, such as subatomic particles, that constitutes the really real, we instead get a heteroverse of different types of autonomous and irreducible objects ranging from quarks to tardigrades to ecosystems, groups, institutions, societies, humans, burritos and so on. An awl is no less real than a cane toad by virtue of being fabricated by humans, nor is an institution or group any less real than an awl by virtue of being immaterial. It might be argued that an awl is only an awl so long as it exists within the framework of society. Perhaps this is true, but how is this any different from the other regimes of attraction we explore in 5.1 where we saw that the particular form a local manifestation takes is in part dependent on structural couplings and regimes of attraction? When a sadistic scientist places a cane toad within a glass box without oxygen, that cane toad very quickly loses the capacity to locally manifest qualities pertaining to life. When the awl is detached from society, it is no longer able to locally manifest powers of punching holes in wood or leather. In these instances, what has been abolished is not the entity itself, but rather the ability of the entity to locally manifest itself in a particular way. Of course, in the case of the frog, entropy begins to set in rather quickly. Then again, it appears that this particular limitation on local manifestations arising from the absence of particular structural couplings is not necessarily irreversible in that it appears there are many instances where frogs can be brought back to life.

With this heteroverse of varied objects, we begin to see just how much the concept of society and the concept of collectives discussed in 6.2 differ from one another. The distinctions organizing the concept of society draw attention to subjectivity, signs, meanings, narratives, texts, discourses, power, social forces and so on. By contrast, the concept of collectives draws our attention to a variety of very different actors, human and nonhuman, perturbing and translating each other in particular ways within networks or assemblages. No doubt, it is something like this that Guattari was after in Chaosmosis. As Guattari writes,

Guattari appears to envision the analysis of collectives where a variety of different actors or objects ranging from subjects to signs to technologies and groups and institutions interact with one another in a highly complex fashion. To Guattari's list, of course, we could add the presence or absence of roads, power lines, internet connections, weather patterns, cane toads, ocean-going ships and canoes, H1N1 viruses and a host of other objects. Guattari's ontology is flat in the precise sense that all of these entities are full-blown actors rather than mere screens for human signs and intentions. And, of course, collectives need not involve signs or humans at all, but can be purely inhuman as in the case of the atmosphere of Saturn.

At this point, it is not unusual to hear humanist correlationists cry foul, accusing object-oriented ontologists of technological and environmental determinism. In my view, this is an unfair criticism. Somehow pointing out that it is impossible to fry eggs without a frying pan or some similar cooking surface becomes equivalent to the thesis that frying pans determine people to fry eggs. Somehow pointing out how the inland remoteness of China's abundant coal reserves played a role in China not kicking off the industrial revolution is transformed into the claim that this remoteness determined the form that Chinese culture took. In this regard, any qualification of human freedom, any evocation of actors other than meaning, narratives, signifiers, and discourses is responded to with incredulity at the suggestion that humans are merely among other beings rather than at the center of beings such that nonhuman beings are merely their screen, passive things upon which they impose form through their intentions and techniques, and where the world is merely our own alienated reflection. Such is the height of Malkovichism.

Faced with decades of content-based cultural criticism that implicitly, at least, adheres to Marx's formula that the aim of philosophy is not to represent the world, but rather to change it, it is peculiar that such theory doesn't seem to recognize that such cultural critiques seem to be fairly unsuccessful in producing their desired change. Here one would think that social and political theorists would become aware that this absence of change suggests that perhaps meanings, signifiers, signs, narratives, and discourses are not the entire story. One would think that in addition to these semiotic actors that play a role in collectives of humans and nonhumans, greater attention would be directed at the role of nonhuman actors in human collectives and the role they play in constraining the possibilities of existence. Such an attentiveness to these nonhuman actors would provide us with the resources for thinking strategies of composition that might push collectives into new basins of attraction. Whether or not a village has a well, a city has roads that provide access to other cities, and whether people have alternative forms of occupation and transportation can play a dramatic role in the form collectives take. However, in much of contemporary cultural theory, these sorts of actors are almost entirely invisible because the marked space of theory revolves around the semiotic, placing nonhuman actors in the unmarked space of thought and social engagement.

However, setting aside these criticisms, the more basic ontological point is that there can be no question of technological or environmental determinism precisely because objects cannot be determined by other objects. Insofar as all objects are withdrawn from one another, insofar as objects only relate to their environment selectively and through their own distinctions or organization, there can be no question of objects determining one another. This holds for humans as well. The most one object can do to another is perturb it, and even this is not always the case as objects are only selectively related to their environment such that there are many things towards which they are completely blind. In this regard, the manner in which one object responds to another always embodies a high degree of creativity.

In many respects, all of onticology culminates in the four theses of flat ontology. It is flat ontology that constitutes the democracy of objects. However, this democracy of objects does not amount to the thesis that all objects contribute equally to all other objects or to all collectives. Clearly tardigrades contribute little or nothing to collectives involving human beings. Here, then, I return to Ian Bogost's thesis that all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally. Entities perturb other objects more and less. Entities play greater and smaller roles in various collectives. Some entities, no doubt, do not perturb other objects at all, and as we saw in the case of Roy Bhasker in the first chapter, other objects are dormant. Flat ontology is not the thesis that all objects contribute equally, but that all objects equally exist. In its ontological egalitarianism, what flat ontology thus refuses is the erasure of any object as the mere construction of another object.