In response to some of my posts in a diary entry by Mikhail over at Perverse Egalitarianism, Tom, of Grundledung, has written a nice post on my Principle of Translation and what I call, following DeLanda, “flat ontology”. The Principle of Translation states that “there is no transportation without translation”. By this I mean that no object functions as a mere vehicle of the difference of another object, but rather, in receiving the differences of other objects, it translates these differences, transforming them, producing something new. By “flat ontology”, I mean that being is said univocally or that it is said in a single and same sense for all that is. To properly understand this thesis, it is necessary to refer back to the Ontic Principle. The Ontic Principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference. In claiming that there is no difference that does not make a difference, I am not making the “precious” claim of the beautiful soul that all differences are important. That is, I am not making a normative claim. Rather, I am making the claim that the criteria for being something consists in making or producing differences. If something is, then it makes differences. I think this thesis is trite, which is why it’s good as a starting point for thought.
While trite, it has, in my view, striking consequences. Among these is the Ontological Principle or the univocity of being. In short, if there is no difference that does not make a difference, if to be means to make a difference, then it follows that anything that makes a difference is. Such is the thesis of my realism. Under this construal, ontology becomes “flat”– rather than “vertical” –insofar as being is not said differently of beings, but rather all beings are equal insofar as they produce differences. In other words, there is not one form of being for reality and another for appearance. Half-Cock Jack in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver is every bit as real as a quark. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to think meshworks of differences, rather than attempting to reduce all other differences to a finite set of differences such as matter or physical reality.
I have described the Principle of Translation as a radicalization– or to use Nate’s language, a “deflation” –of Kant’s correlationism. Where Kant privileges the mind-world relation, emphasizing the manner in which minds translate the objects of the world, I, following Graham, instead argue that what Kant says of mind-world relations is true of all object-object relations. All objects translate one another. Some of these processes of translation are of the simple causal variety. Some involve signs. Others involve emotions. Others involve signifiers. There are a variety of ways in which translation takes place. What Kant says of mind-world relations is simply a subset of a more general ontological principle and as a result Kant is engaged in a regional ontology, rather than a general ontology (and so too of all forms of correlationism).
It is in relation to this thesis that I think that Tom implicitly mischaracterizes the issue or my position. At the end of his post, Tom writes,
Even with these difficulties in mind, I think that some of the aspects of Levi’s attempt to construct a flat ontology ought to be resisted. There is something distinctive about subjects which makes some forms of flat ontology problematic. We can talk both about objects translating objects and about subjects translating objects. But the translations of the subject include those of a unique kind, which are not adequately addressed by simply increasing the complexity of a unitary flat ontology. So, there is no objection to saying that objects are active and possess affections which translate influences upon them in particularised ways. But there is a highly significant type of activity which subjects engage in, which the Kantian tradition characterises as spontaneous. It is in virtue of their spontaneity that subjects are responsible for the translations which they undergo: and this brings with it many of the traditional distinguishing traits which have been used to mark out subjects, namely freedom, normativity, rationality and intentionality. In the next post, I shall say more about how we should understand the spontaneity of subjects and how that impacts upon metaphysical issues.
If I read Tom correctly, then he is suggesting that flat ontology somehow ignores the differences of individual entities, treating humans as equivalent to rocks. While the Ontological Principle affirms equal-being or that all beings are insofar as they produce differences, it nonetheless maintains the differences among beings. One of the central aims of Onticology is not to assert that everything is the same, but rather to infinitely open the field of ontology so a proliferation of different forms of translation become open to investigation. In this respect, to use Nate’s language again, Onticology is deflationary. What it objects to is the posing of all philosophical questions– and especially ontological questions –in terms of one form of translation. Kant is committed to the thesis that mind is included in every inter-ontic relation, thereby subordinating or shackling all beings to mind. Likewise with all other correlationisms.
Onticology does not reject the thesis that minds translate objects– how could it given that minds are by the Ontic Principle and by the Principle of Translation? What Onticology objects to is the thesis that mind is somehow special in this regard or that minds must be included in every relation. But in point out what should be a rather obvious point, Onticology is in no way diminishing culture, mind, language, economics, history, or whatever other system of translation one might like to evoke. In asserting the inclusion of mind or culture in every objectile relation, correlationisms confuse regional ontologies with general ontologies, treating a subject of interest, for example of how humans experience time, with a generalized form of translation for all objects. Onticology seeks to open a domain where systems of translation can be investigated in their own right– including those pertaining to the human –without requiring the inclusion of the human in every relation.
Larval Subjects . 
June 24, 2009 at 12:18 am
wonder if the problem here is not just the anthrocentrism of the objection but also the inherent platonism of the new ontology being offered. Objects are not given. Indeed, I would say that objects are always taken for granted and that taking is not apodictic nor even understandable since each in its particularity escapes exactly that set association that Badiou, Duns Scotus, or Aristotle wanted to believe designated a natural kind. I think a famous locus of things in Frege is instructive or the machinations in the analytic ranks since Kripke, Quine, Putnam, etc. I think Deleuze’s “vitalism” was an attempt to locate this turn within the human activity of object making not as manufacture in its restrictive sense but most generally as a virtualization subject to the rational by virtue of the changelings afforded by propositional representation. This rendition of differencing — not difference which falls into the matheme and seems forgetful of the last 40 years — does suggest the central human activity in regard to thinging (parts of Heidegger are very helpful here) is that of sense that valorizes the encounter with locality and not system building. Was that not the path Nietzsche began to suggest around 1870? I see some hope for this in the 3rd book Badiou suggests might be coming in which he could examine the tension between the individual and the subject.
June 24, 2009 at 12:43 am
Dan,
I’m not clear where you’re seeing Platonism. Could you expand a bit? Also, it seems to me that both Badiou and Scotus make uneasy bedfellows with the concept of natural kinds. Badiou’s set theoretical ontology is, I think, a radical nominalism. That is, sets are not defined by any unifying quality defining membership of the set. As such, a set is not defined by the elements of the set falling under a natural kind. Similar, in his focus on haecceity, Scotus seems to privilege individual existence over essence (where essence is understood as what is common to a group of individuals). I think one of the major achievements of Deleuze is to develop a nominalistic ontology premised on the primacy of individual difference over genus-species difference. This, of course, is in keeping with the Darwinian orientation of thought where “natural kinds” are, at best, useful fictions defining polythetic similarity in a population of individuals and where individual difference precedes species-difference. The issue then becomes one of how to extend this Darwinian insight in the domain of biology to ontology in general.
June 25, 2009 at 8:12 pm
The concept of thing — it seems — forms for you a form, a universal in advance of any instance. Like what may be the ur form for Plato (and you?) “one” this seems a prerequisite for your ontics. Yet I do not see it as the case since each proposed “thing” — one of a set is either a mathematical simulation or something which escapes in its complexity and dynamic from exactly its description.
I do not think nominalism as practiced by Badiou escapes from platonism as it requires a concept of particular entities which is in advance of exactly their gathering or set association or use in proof etc. That is that the particulars are not the particulars themselves but their interpellated representatives in a world made possible by what — for me — is at its root platonic.
Let’s say — which I believe — that nothing repeats and no so called thing is the same — in its ontic differencing — so that repetition and mathematization is always the sign of a replacement which took place in the activity of identification (thus the centrality of both the human as interpellating entity and language as predisposition and institutionalizing normative — two things you seem to think you can de-emphasized).
The concept of the diffential series in Deleuze I thought avoid some of that in a way which your characterization may not capture. That is that the state of interpellating and the interpellated are not separate any more than the subject is from the locality such that the dynamic difference from the last makes the next available not as a pseudo identity with a class or kind but rather out of the immediate spread of its intrinsic matrix of associations.
Again I think “flat” is a dangerous way to nominate such an ontological twist since it has the air of equity and homogeneity in difference — this in part captured by Derrida’s “differance.” In short, it valorizes a procedure of inquiry which like Popper’s predispositions imports an institutionalized regulation into what is to count as “rational investigation.”
So, I think Darwin is a dangerous resource since his model is predisposed to rationalize difference.
June 25, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I don’t see how anything can escape being Platonic by your criteria as language is necessarily composed of general terms. Deleuze would be no worse off than any of the rest. Not a particularly interesting line of discussion in that event.
June 26, 2009 at 1:13 am
Ouch! Well, I am about to hit the road, so I cannot unpack all this much, but I do think interest is possible if one valorizes the event more than the concept of the event. In this construal, the “working vocabulary” does not vest itself as a method but as an evolving instance constituted not under cancellation but provisionally and dynamically in which the instance is co-immanent with its characterization. The meter and the metered change both (I actual see this as a basic principle in your system that you seem to eschew for its own practice). I think this does not offer much purchase for either realism or anti-realism as characterized by Braver (since you cite him) but I think there are possibilities here if one is looking for the elements between.
June 26, 2009 at 1:19 am
Dan,
I actually agree with you here. In other words, I think that such an ontology necessary rebounds self-reflexively on the theory itself such that it is necessary to emphasize that the ontology is a translation and subject to the same principle. This comes out a bit more clearly in my more formal article on these issues and will be something I have to work through in more detail in the future. The trick here is the issue of how to balance a non-representationalist realist ontology with the thesis that everything is translation without falling back into anti-realism. Hope you have a good trip and check back in with further thoughts when you return!
June 26, 2009 at 1:22 am
Also, I should add that I see my position as a radicalization of anti-realism pushing it to the point of realism, rather than a rejection of anti-realism tout court. In other words, I think the new continental realisms are of interest precisely because they retain the most important and exciting insights of the anti-realisms of the last one hundred years. This is one reason I have problems with Brassier’s realism– though admiring his work –because I think it somewhat returns us to representational realisms in line with the sort of naive realism Braver is critiquing.
August 26, 2009 at 5:03 pm
If A) there is no transport without translation, and B) truth must by definition be immune to translation, then there is no truth.
No? So let me do it slower (and more pedantic if that is even possible).
In order for a fact to be truth, it’s instance-in-language (that is, it’s description) must be equivalent to it’s instance-in-itself (which would be it’s “reality”, but silliness is already at our heels…).
The description is inherently a translation, and the fact in itself is inherently something that has not been translated. Every translation changes some properties of the thing, or in your words “produces something new”.
In order for these two things to *have the same value*, for them to be equivalent, then, there must be a way to ascertain that the translation that produced the description did preserve (or create anew) some properties of the thing itself.
If i want to know if the description and the fact-itself do share a given property, i would have to access the fact-itself without a translation. That is not possible by your own definition.
No matter how much corroborations i get of a given description, if those corroborations are themselves translations (which they must be by definition), then i can always be struck with confirmation bias. I would never know.
Then, whether or not there is the possibility that a given translation preserves some property of the thing-in-itself, the preserving itself being “truth”, either way it is impossible to get to it without translation. Again, this is by definition.
If i can’t get to an untranslated state of the reality, then it does not produce differences that could be measured or felt by a free agent. I can’t be touched by this property of descriptions, namely truth.
If truth does not make a difference, then it does not exist.
If you want to maintain your previous assertions and the importance of truth, you must call into action some god-like agency that would preserve this truth-ness property without any form of human control. That would be a kind of faith, and you are entitled to it, for sure… But i guess that would turn your flat ontology into an ontology that has one master geographic accident (truth) that you do your best to hide.
Obviously, you’ll pull a Popper and find some feeble excuse to pretend to yourself that the obvious conclusions of your thesis are mistaken, like when he couldn’t accept that Falsifiabilism equals unreachability of truth. I already did post a comment here and you deleted it. I don’t care. I just passed by to tell you that i wrote a post that somehow talks about you, but no one reads my blog so you shouldn’t care anyway, it’s just me, i have this thing about being honourable and talking sincerely (which in my previous comment you probably took as disrespectfully, but, again, i don’t care for people that make this one mistake…)