Thoughts on Flat Ontology
On September 15, 2010, In Uncategorized, By
I’m currently working on a paper whose theme is morphing from the ethics of ‘becoming posthuman’ to the implications for posthumanism of embracing a flat ontology. This post is part of my attempt to clarify the conceptual degrees of freedom involved in the idea of flat ontology before applying it to the specific field of the posthuman.
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 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 whereby identifiable things and their properties emerge from intensive or (or productive) differences (Ibid., 70). Thus the formation of soap bubbles depends on the tendency of component molecules to assume a lower a state of free energy, thereby minimizing inter-molecular distances and cancelling the forces exerted on individual molecules by their neighbors (Ibid., 15). The process instantiates an abstract tendency for systems with large amounts of free energy to ‘roll down’ to some 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 already emerged from intensive processes? 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 ontological 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 we should want to move further towards an ontology in which deep individuals and their (largely non-manifest) capacities play a central role in the interests of approaching some regulative ideal of ontological flatness. It may be that generative histories are relevant only insofar as they leave ”lasting fingerprints” on the individuals they generate (Ibid.,374). However, if DeLanda’s (and Deleuze’s) transcendental materialism is correct, then any resultant individual will always be – as Iain Grant emphasized in a recent talk – a fragile achievement, fatally involved in the play of further intensities. There is no reason why flat ontologies have to be individualist. The individuals and the wider category of the ‘particular’ are often conflated. The latter category may contain events, ‘diffusions’ or collectives: all 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 its ontological autonomy does not violate the autonomy of the particular. It simply reflects constraints consequent on kinds of material organization.
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. (2009), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. 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?
the the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1994, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything:
is it raining 
attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a way, with many models recognized as maps, and with no one elevated absolute
berg created what has come to be called 'metaphorology', which states that what lies under metaphors and language modisms, is the nearest to the truth (and the farthest from ideologies). His last works, especially "Sorrow Crossing the River" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss), are attempts to apprehend human reality
Donald drives his car with a light, percussive rhythm. After pressing on the gas pedal for a second, he lets up briefly, and then presses back down again. Down. Release. Down. Release. The tempo doesn’t vary.
