Over at Ian’s blog Bogost writes:
When thought of this way, to “meh” is to express the sublime, but not in Kant’s sense of a dominion over us. This sublimity is one of a level playing field, of a flat ontology, to use Levi Bryant’s term. It is a mundane sublime, one that is better characterized by Stephen Shore than by Ansel Adams. Following Harman, meh reminds us of the world’s insatiable ability to be so much and so many, all at once, whether as riverstones, as fur, as Fiat 500s, or as romantic comedies. It is a magnificent blandness that breaks star rating systems entirely. O Netflix, let me slouch and mutter it, without exclamation point, “meh.”!
I wish I could take credit for the term “flat ontology”, but alas it’s borrowed from DeLanda. I do get the sense, however, that we’re employing it in very different ways or that my ontology is a bit more pluralistic and less materialistic in temperament. It saddens me to see that the word “mundane”, such a beautiful word, has fallen so. From the online etymology dictionary:
1475, from M.Fr. mondain (12c.), from L. mundanus “belonging to the world” (as distinct from the Church), from mundus “universe, world,” lit. “clean, elegant”; used as a transl. of Gk. khosmos (see cosmos) in its Pythagorean sense of “the physical universe” (the original sense of the Gk. word was “orderly arrangement”). L. mundus also was used of a woman’s “ornaments, dress,” and is related to the adj. mundus “clean, elegant” (used of women’s dress, etc.).
Lurking behind the mundane is the Greek khosmos both as the physical universe, but also the “cosmopolitan” or the citizen of the world. And therein lies the sublimity of a mundane or a flat ontology… A worldly ontology. A single plane on which all beings are arrayed, whether they be humans, signs, thoughts, objects, animals or so on, rather than a house divided between the side of the subject and the side of nature. We’re we situating this sublime between Kant’s dynamic and mathematical antinomies, both of which underlie the two forms of the sublime, this would be not a sublime dreaming of a transcendence or separation between the world and its Other or the subject in the face of a magnitude it can’t comprehend, but a sublime of imbroglios of human and nonhuman actors where the two can never be clearly distinguished and where freedom and necessity can never be clearly sorted.
Larval Subjects . 
August 12, 2009 at 10:38 am
I’m not sure where the term “flat ontology” originally came from. Roy Bhaskar uses it too, but he uses it in the opposite sense of DeLanda. It’s a pejorative term for Bhaskar, because he uses it to refer to an ontology in which everything is flattened out into its givenness to us. Quite the opposite for DeLanda, who uses it to mean that all beings at all levels are treated equally.
As I said in my talk in Norway last November (rather uncontroversially, I think) DeLanda has always admired Bhaskar, and in his 2006 book I saw him drifting a bit away from Deleuze and toward Bhaskar. We’ll have to see what DeLanda’s 2009 book brings.
August 12, 2009 at 1:57 pm
You’re right, the way I refer to the term is ambiguous; I’ll make a note over on my post. In any case, I do think the different uses of it make yours, Levi, the correct one for me to refer to.
Thanks for the etymological notes on mundane. Indeed, it does seem to be almost universally derogatory now. The imbroglio is a nice figure here… have you used it before? I like it because, unlike “network,” which I’m increasingly resistant toward due to its neatness, “imbroglio” suggests messiness.
August 12, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I think Latour often uses the term “imbroglio” when talking about the mess of humans and nonhumans. I agree about the term “networks”. Unfortunately the term has come to signify a set of relations where all the connected elements are more or less of the same type (for example, networks of neurons), rather than its earlier signification of a composition of the heterogeneous or a multiplicity.
August 12, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Yes, thanks so much for redeeming the word mundane, I had no idea!
Not quite sure I have a handle on Bhaskar’s flat ontology. What does “everything flattened out in its givenness to us” mean?
As for Levi’s/Delanda’s, there’s tremendous freedom from stilted values we’ve inherited which negate and dismiss so much of reality. I get the impression from the standpoint of flat ontology, the inner circle is everywhere, and everyday is the wedding.
August 12, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Levi, you’re absolutely right and I’m embarrassed for having overlooked it. It’s from We Have Never Been Modern, I think? The idea of an entanglement of unrelated things. Mostly this amounts to the realms of, e.g., science and society, but it seems very much synonymous with networks for Latour, if I am remembering correctly. There’s the example about all the social, scientific, political conflations in the newspaper for example. I think I’m more enamored of John Law’s idea of “mess,” even though it’s roughly the same thing. And still, in both cases all these things made into messes or imbroglios tend be human at heart.
August 12, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Ian,
Do you have any suggestions of what to read by John Law? I keep seeing his name pop up, but sadly the book that looks like his most sustained engagement, After Method, is also very pricey. I tend to think the term “network” generates too much confusion, especially in terms of how it resonates in contemporary linguistic contexts. Today I was comparing and contrasting Malabou’s concept of networks with Latour’s in class, and the two are markedly different. Where, in Malabou, networks are composed of a single type of things like neurons or people, in Latour networks are a mess of things like people, neurons, saddles, rocks, factories, programming platforms, the chemical composition of the air at a particular point in time, weather events, “memes”, and on and on. “Assemblage” doesn’t quite get at the issue as it tends to be too restricted to material object. “Composition” gets a little closer as you get the sense of cement that is composed of stones, sand, water, and so on, but is too static. For aesthetic reasons I’m not too enamored with the term “mess” and I think it potentially conveys the wrong idea (that there isn’t emergent, if only temporary, order as a result of affordances and constraints), so perhaps “imbroglio” is the best way to go.
August 12, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Many of Law’s papers are online. For “mess” in particular, try out Making a Mess with Method [PDF].
Good point about the lexical ambiguity of “network.” Assemblage does tend either to mean machine or to invoke Deleuze. Mess doesn’t embrace emergence, true, although Law uses it more methodologically than concretely. Imbroglio still implies a situation of human creation to me, but maybe now I’m just being irritatingly pedantic.
August 12, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Yes, imbroglio implies a Larry David plot, is there another poet laureate of imbroglio? Voltaire?
Fascinating quest this search for a word that implies both mess and order. I checked, garboil doesn’t do it either. It’s a confoundment, and that’s fitting.
August 12, 2009 at 9:53 pm
My little book “The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations’ (UTP, 06) does have something to say about objects (which may, or may not, be physical ‘things’). It looks at Deleuze, and Poinsot, Heidegger, Uexkull, Maturana, on Umwelten and the nature of relations – and the relative beings involved in them. Lifts a hat to Latour and Stengers. Latour was to have examined the thesis on which it is based but ultimately Massumi took on the burden.
Non-sequitor: readers of french will be interested in Stengers most recent work on ‘La sorcellerie Capitaliste’ and ‘Au temps des Catastrophe.’ Capitalist Sorcery is in translation with Palgrave.
I also mention Primacy of Semiosis (PoS) as it seems relevant to Levi’s current book project ‘the democracy of objects’ – which is apparently concerned with ‘the relation between relations and their relata.
I have previously emailed this fascinating news to Larval Subjects – not sure if it ever gets there – or is trashed.