Flat Ontology, Questions, and Assemblages
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I’ve been having a lengthy discussion with a very good friend about normativity and how we go about determining values. One of the things that keeps coming up is the question of what ethical implications my version of object-oriented ontology. In particular, they ask whether my flat ontology is making the claim that all things are equally valuable or have equal worth. This question isn’t unique to my friend. It’s something that has come up since I first proposed flat ontology years ago. When I first started receiving this question I was completely caught off guard. Flat ontology is a thesis about what is and how things are, not a thesis about values and worth. It is not making the claim that a flea is as valuable as a human being. It is the thesis that fleas are real and so are human beings. Given the curious tendency of people to convert ontological claims into value claims, I’ve come to suspect that there’s some feature of our psychology that leads us to do this. I’m not sure why, but I encounter it so frequently that I find it difficult to escape this conclusion.
None of this is to say that I don’t think there aren’t political and ethical implications of my work, just not how one might think. When I reflect on my articles, The Democracy of Objects, and Onto-Cartography, I think the entire aim of my work is to help people ask better questions. I’ve said this for years, but now that I think about it, I’ve seldom explained what I mean by a better question. There’s a very real sense in which my work isn’t aimed at philosophers. I get very impatient with debates in philosophy about who interpreted a philosopher better, or whether we should be Kantians or Hegelians or speculative realists, or whether Heidegger got it right or Badiou got it right. These all have merit and value, but they’re not what I’m after.
If I were to sum up the spirit of my work, I would say that it is a philosophy of design. When I say I want my work to help people to ask better questions, I’m talking about better questions with respect to the world we live in and how it is put together. I see design problems everywhere and I see a lot of cruelty in our world because we don’t reflect on design and how it enhances or detracts from our lives. Take education reform. A feature of both Bush and Obama’s education reform was to link federal funding of schools to student performance. The idea was that if a school is performing poorly we should withdraw funding to get the teachers and the school to get their act together. I think this is a terrible design solution. The idea is that the schools are failing because teachers aren’t doing their job (notice also that at a certain point we began demanding teachers get more training– at least a master’s degree –so they would be competent at their jobs). These sorts of design solutions are profoundly superficial in their analysis of the problem.
read on!
Good design requires thinking ecologically, where ecology doesn’t simply mean “natural ecosystems”, but relations between people and things of all kinds. Take a place like Flint, Michigan. What sort of assemblage is it. Years ago the factories closed down, leading jobs to become decimated. This meant that there was a collapse in home ownership. That collapse in home ownership meant that there was a collapse in property tax revenue. Property taxes are the primary way in which schools are funded in the United States, so this led to a crisis in maintaining schools, providing supplies, providing simple things like heat and air conditioning in the summer and winter months, etc. With joblessness, of course, comes all of the other problems: rising crime rates, substance abuse, broken families, a rise in domestic violence, etc. Meanwhile, there is the whole Flint, MI water crisis where the water is poisonous in a way that literally causes brain damage, causing a variety of emotional and cognitive disorders. There is an entire ecology here filled with all sorts of negative and positive feedback loops that make achieving “escape velocity”– finding a way out of the poverty –incredibly difficult.
Return then to the “solution” of Bush and Obama. They said the problem was the teachers. If they just had more training, they argued, and if they just did their job, then students would perform. The entire premise of their linkage between federal funding and student performance is placed on human performance– in this case, teachers –and humans alone. They have not analyzed the ecology of the situation that contributes to the poor student performance. How are these students supposed to perform well when they develop in this sort of ecology? How can they perform well when they exist in this sort of an impoverished world? Recent research, for example, suggests that there is a high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among children raised in conditions of poverty literally impacting the development of brains, and that post-traumatic stress disorder, in its turn, is linked to diminished cognitive function. What I outline here is a very brief sketch of what I called a “cartography” in Onto-Cartography. A cartography is the mapping of an assemblage and how the elements of an assemblage form an ecology that plays a key role of the movements and capacities open to us.
Good design, I believe, requires good cartographies. You have to map an assemblage in order to devise good design solutions. As Deleuze taught in Difference and Repetition, the first step is always to survey the problem. The problem, in my view, is the ecology. When I say I want to provide tools to help people ask better questions, I mean questions that arise out of an awareness of the organization of the ecology they are dealing with. It turns out that this doesn’t even occur to a lot of people. Those education reformers were blind to the ecologies that generates the educational crisis that they are trying to fix. They just see the educational crisis. They just see the tip of the iceberg. I think Heidegger explained why this is so in Being and Time: We are so integrated with the “ready-to-hand”, with the equipment that we use, that it is invisible to us. We take it for granted. Thus, when people like Bush and Obama address an issue like education, they have developed in an ecology that has always worked for them and they assume these things are in place for others. They don’t see what they constantly see.
The first principle of a design philosophy, in my view, is flat ontology or, as Ian Bogost put it long ago, the thesis that “all beings equally exist, but they do not exist equally”. Again, this is not a normative statement or a value statement. It is not a claim about worth. Consider how we often talk about politics. We take it as a strictly human affair pertaining to the beliefs and commitments of human beings with respect to one another. We bracket out all non-humans. We here practice a lumpy ontology, where humans are treated as the center and all else is ignored. Flat ontology instructs us to look not just at the humans, but all of the elements of the assemblage. How are they all relating to and interacting with one another in the functioning of the assemblage. This is the first step n undertaking a cartography of an assemblage. When I think of the ideal audience of my work, who I would most like it to reach, it is not philosophers, but activists, designers, architects, or all of those who are engaged in trying to solve very concrete and real world problems. Marx famously said that the point of philosophy is not to represent the world, but to change it. I want my work to make some small contribution to doing that.
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February 17, 2020 at 9:11 pm
Yes!
I could not agree more.
February 18, 2020 at 12:18 am
Described this way, flat ontology seems similar to systems thinking.
February 18, 2020 at 9:38 am
“Description” is always implicitly “normative”, and therefore ethical/political/aesthetic, i.e. producing value judgments, insofar as it attempts to criticize this blindness to the obvious that you trace out here; in this case, the core liberal preconceptions of freedom and individual subjectivity. But it is also political in the sense that it does not have to be as charitable as you seem to be here: people aren’t always just blind, they are also advancing their agendas, in this case obviously including the continuation of inequality. These agendas are unfolding on relational fields of powers, each one of which is more or less accordant or discordant with the others, etc. So, obviously “normative”=value-related implications are not emerging simpliciter out of “descriptive”=value-neutral presuppositions, but there is a reduplicated normativity always at work in each descriptive attempt. The problem is whether this reduplication is part of the conceptualization of the problem of normativity, that is of the conceprualization of the [normativity descriptivity] field; whether a structure of thought tends to take off from the descriptive or from the normative, the two of them forming, from this point of view, a spectrum. The way you end your post, it seems as though you claim that your work is purely descriptive, which would lead to an abstract conceptualization of descriptivity, and therefore of normativity. In short, I think the question about the political aspect of a thought structure always makes sense, given the clarifications above: a) description always implying reduplicated normativity, and b) all utterances being embedded (but not reducible to) power relations. That said, I am sympathetic to your angle.
February 18, 2020 at 9:57 am
I largely agree with what you say here, though I do think the failure to see for many people truly is the result of all sorts of unconscious dynamics, rather than malicious intent as you suggest. This is what I encountered again and again in the clinic when I practiced as a psychoanalyst. People really did not see the lenses through which they saw the world and other people. Of course there are all sorts of value judgments at work in our descriptions. I do not deny that at all. After all, I’m clearly referring to all sorts of values and things that are better and worse when I talk about Flint above. That said, I think that discussions of normativity are often counter-productive because we get so involved in trying to make them explicit and determine grounds for them, that we never get back to the world, doing mappings, and attempting to devise solutions to the problems we’re dealing with. Moreover, I think we need to take great care not to jump from the conclusion that because all observations and engagements with the world involve values, these observations and engagements do not get at something of the real.
February 18, 2020 at 3:32 pm
“This mapping of input-output relations could be our primordial model for being in the world and stabilising relationships. It is how babies learn to cope with their environment, but is also surely how all entities, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, do the same performative experimental coming-to-terms with otherness.”
https://www.academia.edu/20618708/Islands_of_Stability_Engaging_Emergence_from_Cellular_Automata_to_the_Occupy_Movement
February 19, 2020 at 9:59 am
@ February 18, 2020 at 9:57 am
Then we’re more or less on the same page, after surprisingly few clarifications. I don’t confine agenda to “malicious intent” (whatever we take intent to be); maybe it was a poor choice of signifier, but I take it to contain a strong descriptive element, in the form of striving or (will to) power. Whatever one’s take on them, things have more or less observable and analyzable results, which are then to be judged as best as one can judge them, given all limitations involved. The crucial thing -and I agree both re: the counter-productivity and the surprising frequency of blindness to normative presuppositions- is the starting point of the acceptance of things just being, independently of our judgments. This is why the problem of where to start thinking from, the Anfang thing, is surely one of the most pertinent and decisive ones. I’m also largely in agreement about the pragmatic element; I’ve always enjoyed Whitehead’s airplane metaphor: you start from the ground, fly in theory and then get back on the ground, man. And you do get something of the real, because you’re made from the stuff of the real (there’s no other stuff to be made from).
Given all that, I think that flat ontology (i.e. monism) needs to take heed of not going too relational, that is of not ending up substantializing relationality-in-itself. If a monistic background is truly at work, one can then center on humans as much as one wants: they are, after all, not only the most interesting and the most similar, but also the most valuable thing to humans. A humanism that would get rid of needless presuppositions of eminence, and get to the human from the bottom up, so to speak.