The RMMLA in Albuquerque New Mexico has been fantastic this year. Of the many panels I’ve attended, there’s been discussions of OOO on each, which lots of terrific discussion after the sessions. In the responses to my paper (forthcoming, I believe, in the next issue of Speculations) I noticed that there was a strong tendency towards exclusionary binary thinking. I can’t go into too much detail at the moment as I’m heading out to meet Bogost, Morton and others soon, but one of the targets of my paper was forms of social and political analysis that focus on ideology, signifiers, representation, norms, and so on. In short, I was critizing the tendency of Continental social and political theory to privilege anything that has to do with text and meaning. In my experience, a number of my fellow Continentalists are not even aware that they are doing this, and have a hard time thinking about factors that don’t fall into the domain of the textual and meaning. I suspect this has something to do, as Ian argued in his talk and the brilliant forthcoming Alien Phenomenology, with the fact that we academics p in the humanities primarily deal with text and therefore come to experience texts, meaning, arguments, concepts, ideas, and so on as the only things that are real or important.
In some of the responses to my talk, I got the sense that others thought I’m dismissing texts, meanings, concepts, etc altogether. This, I think, misses the basic idea of flat ontology. Flat ontology is not an attempt to limit the types of entities we can appeal to explain things, but to Expand the types of entities we appeal to to explain things. The point is not to reject signs, texts, meanings, norms, and so on, but to make room for a discussion of the role played by other entities as well.
Flat ontology thus invites cultural theorists to think in terms of compositions. According to dictionary.com, a composition is,
1. the act of combining parts or elements to form a whole.
2. the resulting state or product.
3. manner of being composed; structure: This painting has an orderly composition.
4. makeup; constitution: His moral composition was impeccable.
5. an aggregate material formed from two or more substances: a composition of silver and tin.
In short, compositions are about mixtures of heterogeneous materials. The problem with so much contemporary social and political theory, it lacks this dimension of heterogeneous composition. For example, signifiers or ideology are treated as the sole glue that holds the social together. If you press the theorist, of course, they will concede that technologies, infrastructure like roads and power lines, availability of resources, weather patterns that influence harvest, etc, play a role. The problem, however, is that this acknowledgment does not appear in their theoretical practice.
To illustrate what I’m getting at, we might talk about race relations in the United States. It is notable that race relations are also reflected geographically in how populations of blacks and whites are distributed in terms of where they live. Statistically you find African-Americans concentrated in the cities, whereas you find whites in the suburbs. It wasn’t, however, always this way. If one wasn’t a farmer then he lived in the city, regardless of whether the person was white or black. What changed?
Theorists like Homi Bhabha or Spivake would tell us a story about the play of differance in the signifier generating discrete, oppositional identities and this is indeed part of the story. Here the signifier is the agency that accounts for these racial oppositions and therefore the most important target of critique. However, this story about the play of the signifier doesn’t give any insight as to why this statistical geographical distribution began to unfold at precisely this point in history.
For my part, I believe the refrigerator played an important role in generating new racial relations in the United States. Why? Prior to the refrigerator people faced the problem of the perishability of food. This necessitated living close to local markets so that you could go daily to get food. Unless you were a largely self-sufficient farmer, you therefore, by necessity, had to live in the cities if you were an office worker or industrial worker. With the advent of the refrigerator it became possible to buy perishable food for a week or more, thereby allowing for the birth of the suburbs. No doubt, racist ideologies played an important role in white flight, but notice that racism also begins to take on new forms and content as a result of these new geographical distributions.
I am not, of course, suggesting that this analysis is exhaustive or that the refrigerator is the cause of racism. The point of this example is to draw attention to the sort of complex interplays flat ontology wants to talk about and analyze. OOO wants to be capable of simultaneously engage in the sorts of analyses that theorists while Bhabha, Spivak, and Zizek engage in while also talking about technologies, resources, weather, biology, etc. OOO theorists think like cooks. Just as it would be absurd to say that the garlic causes the pasta sauce, it is absurd to suggest that it is the ideology or signifier causes racism. Garlic is a component in a composition that also includes the cook, temperatures, herbs, tomatoes, the stirring of the sauce, etc, all interacting with one another. Racism is a composition that involves signifiers, geographical distributions, infrastructure and how it restricts and enables access, technologies, persons, institutions, etc. We need a theory rich enough to think heterogeneous compositions in action that doesn’t produce counter-productive myopia arising from privileging one component of a composition to the detriment of a variety of other components. This means that we must become truly multi-disciplinary, learning about economics, geography, semiotics, history, technology, linguistics, etc. This is, to be sure, a lot of work, but it’s payoff is that it allows us to discern those key nodes and actors in networks where the introduction of new actants can have a profound impact on the composition as a whole. Critique and decoding is not enough. Sometimes simply building a road or making wi-fii universally available for free can initiate sequences of becoming that profoundly transform social relations.
Time to run.
Larval Subjects . 
October 16, 2010 at 3:16 am
I’ve been thinking about similar issues with regard to (in my case, ethnographic) methods. It seems to me that, despite dramatic changes in the theoretical disposition of anthropology, the methodology hasn’t really changed that much. Post-modern Participant-observation (PO) is more or less the same as positivist PO, except maybe more “participatory.” I think the problem lies in the focus on epistemology when looking at methods, to the exclusion of ontology. Not that epistemology isn’t important, but that it’s not the whole picture. So I’m trying to step back and look at what methods do in the world – construct knowledge, yes, but what else? As John Law points out, methods actually compose realities (taken as heterogeneous, in flux, etc.). What, then, does that do to methods and how we conceive of them? How would PO change if we thought ontologically about it rather than primarily or exclusively epistemologically? I’m not completely sure yet, but I think a lot of good work is being done here – Sarah Whatmore’s Knowledge Controversies project, Latour’s MACOSPOL, and, of course, Bogost and his games.
October 16, 2010 at 4:00 am
@ Levi
couldn’t agree with you more: the composite nature of social reality, and of reality in general, requires a hybrid analysis – a methodological pluralism that gives way to an epistemic pluralism (and sensitivity), culminating in multiple synaesthetic interpretations. Interpretations, perhaps, with discursive expressions and exchanges set to the task of practical life.
@ Jeremy
Anthro is never a pre-determined set of activities. In biophysical anthro epistemic questions are set aside (for the most part) in favor of empirical data. In cultural anthro interpretation/translation is foregrounded. In linguistics language is the focus, whereas social anth picks up with societal forms and quasi-structural analysis. In ecological anth systems analysis is key. And applied anthro, well, that’s about intervention – the practical application of eclectic research projects.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that anthro wholly ignores ontological questions, because a rigorous 4-field approach would conceivably weigh empirical concerns AND hermeneutic analysis equally to provide something that indeed approaches a “composite” view of human (and nonhuman) activities.
It’s true that cultural anthro has stagnated itself in the past with certain degree of hyper-reflexivity, but a lot of work is being produced now in medical and environmental anthropology that attends to a much wider view of things.
Bottom-line, as Levi notes:
October 16, 2010 at 4:01 am
assemblage theory anyone???
October 16, 2010 at 8:20 am
I like your comment Jeremy.
October 16, 2010 at 5:05 pm
[…] yesterday’s post I discussed hetergeneous compositions as one of the key concepts of flat ontology. In many […]
October 16, 2010 at 6:49 pm
@Michael – Yes, I suppose I should have been more specific. When I say anthropology, I generally mean cultural anthropology and not the other 3 fields – I shouldn’t make that generalization. But I also don’t see much genuine intermixing between the fields – what you call a “rigorous 4 field approach” – at least not on a practical level.
I agree, too, that this is changing, and that more people are now looking at ontological concerns, but I feel that the focus is still on gathering or constructing (depending on your theoretical outlook) knowledge – even in applied anthropology, a lot of which is about collecting data to inform some practical agenda.
Not that that’s wrong. I’m just suggesting that we step back from ethnographic methods and ask what is it that they do – in addition to gathering/constructing knowledge? What kind of assemblage does PO compose? Or interviews? And how might those methods be improved based on that kind of understanding?
October 16, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Both you guys have me outclassed here, but for my money it’s the post-Levi-Straussian ethnography that’s doing much of what I’m calling for.
October 16, 2010 at 8:24 pm
excellent post, I like the refrigerator story, and it would be great to add onto it the whole host of apparatuses that allowed suburbs/white flight to exist (my favorite being septic tanks)
October 17, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Levi, wonderful post! I recently encountered OOO through Tim Morton, and I’m excited to hear someone clearly articulate and frame something I’ve been saying for years, though I didn’t know what to call it. I used to say things like “attacking the problem of life from all fronts at once”, and I’ll probably still use that description when I speak to people who don’t know what OOO means.
How do you SAY it, by the way? Do you go “oooh”? Or “oh-oh-oh”? Or “triple-oh”? Or “triple-aught”? I’m not being facetious.
But from some fronts with which I’m familiar (that are anthropology, agriculture, gardening and ecological kitchen techniques), I think I may have to disagree with you about the fridge. I’m going to suggest that socioeconomic factors came first, and then the fridge followed after…not in time, but in significance to the extent that the fridge wasn’t much of a factor at all.
Prior to the fridge (and by “refrigerator” I’m assuming you mean the electric kind; there have been many ways of making and storing ice or diverting subterranean air into cooling boxes for thousands of years, and these have nearly all been “folk” technologies, not dependent on significant capital), even people who lived in the cities and relatively close to the markets usually did not make daily trips to the market. Household maintenance, for all except the conspicuously wealthy, simply takes too much time, because you can’t afford to have everything done for you while you work your 50-80 hour job like most do today; you have to be home a lot. Fermentation, drying and other forms of home food preservation were in wide use, and today remain much more effective at maintaining the nutritional value of food than refrigeration (although freezing is somewhat on par), and was well-known to add nutritional value to the food in many cases.
The myth of the “largely self-sufficient farmer” is one that I’ve been wishing to lay to rest for some time. This myth destroyed yeomanry in the United States, because the farmers bought into the idea. It is a form of viral romantic consumerism: you imagine yourself to be self-sufficient, so you go wholly capitalist, and then the bank takes everything. In fact, agricultural rural society for many thousands of years was not even nominally self-sufficient, and would be accurately described as “cosufficient”.
But cosufficiency requires a functionally interrelated agricultural community, and there’s no money in that for the business class. To them, too many people independent of markets means less money and power. Hence the proliferation throughout history of domestic Wars on Terror, actually wars on peasants: the systematic destruction of culture and communities and the expropriation of land for real-estate profiteering. The War on Witches during the reign of King James was a fine example: the clergy and the capitalists all got a nice juicy slice of that pie. Poor Jimmy mostly just got a headache, though: the destruction of the rural social infrastructure was so complete that he had to call off the witch hunts because they were putting a halt to agriculture and trade, and it took England a long time to recover.
Having some familiarity, both historical and direct, with cosufficiency, I can say with some certainty that the movements of populations from country to city and from city to suburbs had little to do with bottom-up initiative. Folk who are able to live far from bankers (both geographically and economically)–and I repeat that skilled peasants were generally quite able in this regard–generally do not hunger to get closer to them.
I also would contend that urban populations were not just waiting for the technology to spread out into the suburbs. This too, in trophic ecological terms, was mostly a “predator pattern”, not a “herbivore pattern”. The automobile industry and its buddy the real estate industry and its corollaries manufactured the desire to live in suburbs, having (with the help of the banks) emptied the rural areas surrounding cities of the farmers that used to live there. I realize that all this may sound very linear and therefore unrealistic, but that’s not my intention: I’m fully aware that much of these events were quite contemporary with each other, having watched them occurring with my own eyes in my own lifetime. But text lends itself to linear description. In any case, it actually takes a lot of convincing to get people to WANT to commute. Promulgating racial fear may have played a part in this, as may the artificial inexpensiveness of various forms of technology. If the INVENTION of the tech was an issue, then even the middle class would not have been able to afford to leave the urban areas: it had to be affordable to enough people to make it profitable. Again, this is a top-down decision, not a bottom-up one.
October 17, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Nick,
Thanks for the comment. All of these point snare good, although I’m not sure how important the truth of my example is. I’m not trying to provide a historical analysis here but to provide a clear example of a non -human agency playing a significant role in how human relations came to be organized independent of human ideas, signs, meanings, etc. It’s the theoretical orientation that’s important here. If the fridge example fails to hold up, we can just as easily talk about the role played by the horizontal geography of Eurasia and the vertical geography in the Americas on agricultural development, allowing the West to subsequently crush the Americas. Same point, different example. The aim is to get folks to stop focusing too exclusively on sign, meaning, and ideology.
October 18, 2010 at 3:44 am
@J
You say,
That is exactly the right question you should be asking Jeremy. Unfortunately, however, there is no right answer.
It is up to the new generations of anthropologists to define what anthro could be, and will be. I think the 4 field approach is the only way to go, for exactly the reasons Levi suggests above. A rigorous approach to the study of humans must account for so many “variables”, influences and contexts (what I would call ‘niche dynamics’) that anything less than a full-blown methodological pluralism is truly inadequate.