The affirmatives view of ontology and the world is wrongthey view the As a textual object, full of signifiers, narratives, and discourses this creates a focus on how human subjects relate to the world and makes objects invisible Bryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/rsi-discursivity-critique-and-politics/)So in response toa previous post, a lot of folks gave me grief about the following passage: I do think, however, that OOO can problematize our current political thought and open new avenues of political engagement and theorization. As it stands, cultural studies is dominated by a focus on the discursive. We hear endless talk about signs, signifiers, positions or positionality, narratives, discourses, ideology, etc. Basically we see the world as a fetishized text to be decoded and debunked. None of this should, of course, be abandoned, but I do think were encountering its limitations. In the few years Ive been writing on these issues, Ive been surprised to discover just how hard it is to get people to sense that there is a non-discursivepower of things; a form of power that is not about signs, ideology (as text), beliefs, positions, narratives, and so on. Its as if these things arent on the radar for most social and political theorists. I get the sense that the reason for this has something to do with what Heidegger diagnosed in his analysis of the ready-to-hand. Heidegger argues that when the ready-to-hand is working it becomes invisible. We dont notice it. It recedes into the background. Us academics live in worlds that work pretty well as far as material infrastructure goes. We are, for the most part, in a world where things work: food is available, electricity and water function, we have shelter, etc. As a consequence, all this disappears from view and we instead focus on cultural texts because often this is a place where things arent working. In response to these remarks, I was told that 1) of course no one has the naive belief that everything is text (what a relief! of course, the question is whether this belief registers itself in theoretical practice), and 2) that, in fact, these things are all the rage in the world of theory. Im well aware that there is a tradition of theorists that dont fit this mold, and perpetually refer to many of these theorists in my own work. Theorists that come to mind are figures such as Haraway, Stengers, Latour, Kittler, Ong, McLuhan, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad,Kevin Sharpe,Jennifer Andersenet al,Cathy Davidson, Braudel, DeLanda, Pickering, etc. They exist. The point is not that they dont exist, but that these forms of theory, I think, have been rather marginal in the academy;especially philosophy. In discussing these things, Im not making some claim to being absolutely original or to be originating something full cloth. Im more than happy to play some small role in bringing attention to these things; things that I believe to be neglected. I think, for example, that the new materialist feminists predate OOO/SR by 5-10 years, have many points of overlap with OOO, and have not nearly gotten the attention that they deserve. I think Latour and Stengers are almost entirely invisible in the world of philosophy conferences and departments; and I think that there are systematic reasons for this pertaining to the history of continental theory coming out of German idealism, the linguistic turn, and phenomenology. In German idealism you get a focus on spirit and the transcendental structure of mind. In the linguistic turn, you get a focus on how signifiers and signs inform our relation to reality (for example, Lacans famous observation that the difference between the mens room and ladys room results from the signifier in The Agency of the Letter, and Barthes claim that language is a primary modeling system inThe Fashion System). In phenomenology you get a focus on the lived experience of the cogito, Dasein, or lived body and how it constitutes (Husserls language, not mine) the objects of its intentions. read on! In each instance we get a focus on the differences thathumansare contributing, with a relative indifference to the differences that non-humans contribute. Material entities, as Alaimo observes inBodily Natures, are treated as blank screens for human intentions, language, concepts, signs. The metaphor of the screen is here important, for a screen is that which contains no difference of its own beyond being a smooth and white surface, and is therefore susceptible to whatever we might wish to project upon it with a camera. This has been thedominantmode of theorizing that Ive encountered in the last decade in my discipline of philosophy (and I have a fair background in rhetoric and literary theory as well). Phenomenology and the linguistic turn, I think, are the dominant positions represented at SPEP, for example, the main professional conference for continental philosophy (though thankfully things are beginning to change). When it is said that something is dominant, the claim is not that nothing different from it exists, but merely that a certain style of theorizing enjoys hegemony among that population. In media studies, I think, the situation is better. I think its better in geography as well. It depends on what population of theorists were looking at (a point entailed, incidentally, by my thesis that signifiers are material entities that must travel throughout populations).

This human oriented ontology leads to extinctiona flat ontology is the most ethical system and only way to solveBryant 12 (Levi, prof of philosophy @ Collin College, Flat Ontology/Flat Ethics, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/flat-ontologyflat-ethics/)I think that Eileen Joy, in a comment over at Alex ReidsDigital Digs, best articulates what the aims of an object-oriented ethics (OOE) might look like. Responding to one of his recent posts, she writes: For me personally, turning ones attention to animals, objects, post/humanism and so on is precisely about thickening our capacity to imagine more capacious forms of living with; it is precisely about developing more radical forms of welcoming and generosity to others, who include humans as well as trees, rocks, dogs, cornfields, ant colonies, pvc pipes, and sewer drains; it is precisely about amplifying the ability of our brains to pick up more communication signals from more persons (who might be a human or a cloud or a cave) whose movements, affects, and thoughts are trying to tell us something about our interconnectedness and co-implicated interdependence with absolutely everything (or perhaps even about a certain implicit alienation between everything in the world, which is nevertheless useful to understand better: take your pick); it is precisely about working toward a more capacious vision of what we mean by well-being, when we decide to attend to the well-being of humans and other persons (who might be economic markets or the weather or trash or homeless cats) who are always enmeshed with each other in various vibrant networks, assemblages, meshes, cascades, systems, whathaveyou. And just for me likely, just for me it is also about love, with love defined, not as something that goes in one direction from one person to another person or object (carrying with it various demands and expectations and self-centered desires), but rather, as a type of collective labor that works at creating fields for persons and objects to emerge into view that otherwise would remain hidden (and perhaps also remain abjectified), and which persons and objects could then be allowed the breathing/living room to unfold in various self-directed ways, even if thats not what you could have predicted in advance nor supposedly what you want it to do (in other words: ethics as a form of attention that is directed toward the for-itself propulsions of other persons and objects, human and inhuman). So, for me, work in post/humanism, and in OOO, is attentive to the world, which includes and does not exile (or gleefully kill off) the human (although it certainly asks that we expand our angles of vision beyond just the human-centered ones); it is both political and ethical; and it is interested in what I would even call the tender attention to and care of things, human and inhuman (I think that the work of Bennett, Bogost, Morton, Harman, Steven Shaviro, Jeffrey Cohen, Stacy Alaimo, Julian Yates, Myra Hird, Freya Matthews, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Levi Bryant, and many, many others who *never* get cited in these discussions, especially the women working in materialism, science/gender studies, queer ecology, environmental humanities, etc.) especially exemplifies this tender attention to and care of all of the items of the world. Any enlargement of our capacity to think about the agential, signaling, and other capacities of as many items/objects/persons, etc. of this world represents, in my mind, an enlargement, and not a shrinking, of our ethical attention. Its asking for a richer, thicker ontology, which gives is more to be responsible for (after all, thats partly where the specialness of humans comes in), but also: more to enjoy. It seems to me that the sort of ethico-political vision that Joy here proposes has two faces. On the one hand, there is that face directed towardsour contatus, our endeavor to persist in our being and flourish. Recognizing our interconnection withnonhumanthings and our impact on nonhuman things is not simply some hippy-dippy thesis that were one with the universe. No. It is a matter ofself-interest. Its the recognition that 1) we aredependenton this ecosystem to flourish, 2) that these relations upon which we aredependentarefragileand can be broken, and 3) that these things can also exercise oppressivepowerover us, undermining our ability to flourish or live well. As Spinoza saw, we always act withotherbodies. Some of these bodies enhance our power of acting, while others diminish it. By and large, ethical thought has been blind to our relations with nonhumans, focusing only on questions of how we should treat and live with other humans. Yet this completely obscures our real ethical circumstances or conditions. Today, more than ever, our collective survival depends on broadening the domain of what counts as sites of political and ethical concern, and that means taking into account our relationship to nonhumans

The alternative is to reject the affirmative and view the world through a lens of flat ontology

We do not mandate action rather we say you should view the world differently through justification for actions predicated as ontologically importanta flat ontology holds that all objects equally existBryant 10 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Flat Ontology, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/flat-ontology-2/)For DeLanda, then, flat ontology signifies an ontology in which there is only one ontological type: individuals. Thus for DeLanda the relationship between species and organism is not a relationship between the universal or essence that is eternal and unchanging and the particular or the organism as an instance of the species. Rather, both species and organisms areindividualsthat are situated in time and space. If species are not eternal essences or forms defining what is common to all particulars of that species, if they exist in space and time, then this is because species, as conceived by biology are nottypesbut rather are really existing reproductivepopulationslocated in a particular geography at a particular point in time. For DeLanda, then, being is composedentirelyof individuals. While I find much that is commendable in DeLandas ontology, where the sorts of entities that populate being are concerned, Im a bit more circumspect. At present Im not ready to throw in with DeLanda and the thesis that there areonlyindividuals. I am agnostic on the question of whether universals exist, and my intuitions strongly lean in the Platonic direction of treating numbers asrealobjects in their own right that have being independent of human minds. If this is the case, if numbers are real, then I have a difficult time seeing how they can be treated asindividualsin the sense that DeLanda intends and, moreover, I do not think that the genetic concerns that preoccupy DeLanda are relevant to questions of number, i.e., a genetic account of how numbers come to be if, in fact, they do come to be and are not eternal objects does not get at what numbers are. Consequently, if, within the framework of onticology, flat ontology doesnt signify that onlyindividualsexist, what does it signify? On the one hand, it signifies the trivial thesis that all things that are are objects. Objects differ amongst one another having their own unique properties and qualities (e.g. numbers have a different structure than organisms, obviously) but they are no less objects for this reason. On the other hand, and more fundamentally, flat ontology is designed to stave off strategies of what Harman refers to as ways ofunderminingandoverminingobjects. In short, a flat ontology is an ontology that refuses to undermine or overmine objects. What, then, does it mean to undermine or overmine objects. Of the two strategies, the concept of undermining is the easiest to get. Undermining is that operation by which the thinker attempts to dissolve the object in somethingdeeperof which the object is said to be an unrealeffect. Consequently, the minimal operation of undermining lies in 1) the assertion of a fundamental strata of reality that constitutes the really real, and 2) the dissolution of the object in and through that stratum. Lucretius is a prime example of an underminer. When Lucretius compares atoms to the alphabet and objects and states-of-affairs to words and sentences, what he is claiming is that atoms are the really real and that objects composed of atoms are bare epiphenomena that do not really have being in their own right (this is somewhat unfair to Lucretius as he does nod here and there toemergentproperties that result only fromrelationsamong atoms). Likewise, when Plato distinguishes between the forms and appearances, he reveals a strategy of undermining. All the entities and states-of-affairs we see in the world around us are, under one reading of Plato, mere copies of the forms that lack genuine and full being in their own right. When Badiou claims that beingquabeing is pure multiplicity without one, he is an underminer, treating structured situations as mere ephemera that are not true realities in their own right. Consequently, one claim of the flat ontology advocated by onticology is a vigorous rejection of this sort of reductivism. To be sure, the mereological considerations borne out of OOO dictate that objects are composed of other objects, or that a rock also contains atomic particles and perhaps even strings, but the being of each and every object is irreduciblein its own right. While it is certainly true that rocks are made up of atoms, the atoms are notmore realthan the rock and the rock is notless realthan the atoms or atomic particles. This is the weird mereology of OOO, so forcefully developed by Harman and presenting a real challenge and alternative to the infinite multiplicities of Badiou, that undermines our traditional understanding of part-whole relations. The atoms are objects in their own right. The rock is an object in its own right. The being of the rock is not shorthand for collection of atoms. There is a link between these objects but it is a link betweendistinctobjects. Within the framework of onticology, the proper being of an object is its virtual endo-relational structure and that endo-relational structure is not a property of thepartsthat compose the object, but rather belongs to the object itself. The parts of my body, for example, are constantly changing (cells die, cells are produced) but my proper being as an object or substance, my virtual endo-relational structure, remains the same. The flatness of flat ontology is thus first and foremost the refusal to treat one strata of reality as the really real over and against all others. It doesnt forbid or reject talking about interesting correlations among objects such as the relation between atoms and a rock or a person and the neuronal web of the brain, but it does hold that this is a relationbetween objects, not a relation betweenappearanceon the one hand andrealityon the other hand. In this respect, flat ontology endorses Latours thesis that nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else (Irreductions, 1.1.1). .

Finally, the kritik is a huge case turn real social change comes from engaging the material world of objects, not the academic world of textual discourse only a focus on objects can solve the affBryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/mckenzie-wark-how-do-you-occupy-an-abstraction/)Here Im also inclined to say that we need to be clear aboutsystem referencesin our political theorizing and action. We think a lot about thecontentof our political theorizing and positions, but I dont think we think a lot about how our political theories are supposed to actuallyactin the world. As a result, much contemporary leftist political theory ends up in a performative contradiction. It claims, following Marx, that its aim is not to represent the world but to change it, yet it never escapes the burrows of academic journals, conferences, and presses to actually do so. Like the Rat-Mans obsessional neurosis where his actions in returning the glasses were actually designed tofail, there seems to be a built in tendency in these forms of theorization to unconsciously organize their own failure. And here I cant resist suggesting that this comes as no surprise given that, in Lacanian terms, the left is the position of the hysteric and as such has a desire for an unsatisfied desire. In such circumstances the worst thing consists in getting what you want. We on the left need to traverse our fantasy so as to avoid this sterile and self-defeating repetition; and this entails shifting from the position of political critique (hysterical protest), to political construction actually envisioning and building alternatives. So whats the issue with system-reference? The great autopoietic sociological systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann, makes this point nicely. For Luhmann, there are intra-systemic references and inter-systemic references. Intra-systemic references refer to processes that are strictly for the sake of reproducing or maintaining the system in question. Take the example of a cell. A cell,for-itself, is notforanything beyonditself. The processes that take place within the cell are simply for continuing the existence of the cell across time. While the cell might certainly emit various chemicals and hormones as a result of these processes, from its own intra-systemic perspective, it is not for the sake of affecting these other cells with those hormones. Theyre simply by-products. Capitalism or economy is similar. Capitalists talk a good game about benefiting the rest of the world through the technologies they produce, the medicines they create (though usually its government and universities that invent these medicines), the jobs they create, etc., but really the sole aim of any corporation is identical to that of a cell: to endure through time or reproduce itself through the production of capital. This production of capital is notforanything and does not refer to anything outside itself. These operations of capital production are intra-systemic. By contrast, inter-systemic operations would refer to something outside the system and its auto-reproduction. They would be for something else. Luhmann argues that every autopoietic system has this sort of intra-systemic dimension. Autopoietic systems are, above all, organized around maintaining themselves or enduring. This raises serious questions about academic political theory. Academia is an autopoietic system. As an autopoietic system, it aims to endure, reproduce itself, etc. It must engage in operations or procedures from moment to moment to do so. These operations consist in the production of students that eventually become scholars or professors, the writing of articles, the giving of conferences, the production of books and classes, etc. All of these are operations through which the academic system maintains itself across time. The horrifying consequence of this is that the reasonswemight give for why we do what we do might (and often) have little to do with whats actually taking place in system continuance. Wesaythat our articles are designed to demolish capital, inequality, sexism, homophobia, climate disaster, etc., but if we look at how this system actually functions we suspect that the references here are only intra-systemic, that they are only addressing the choir or other academics, that they are only about maintaining that system, and that they never proliferate through the broader world. Indeed, our verystyleis often a big fuck you to the rest of the world as it requires expert knowledge to be comprehended, thereby insuring that it can have no impact on broader collectives to produce change. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that our talk about changing the world is a sort of alibi, a sort of rationalization, for a very different set of operations that are taking place. Just as the capitalist says hes trying to benefit the world, the academic tries to say hes trying to change the world when all hes really doing is maintaining a particular operationally closed autopoietic system. How to break this closure is a key question for any truly engaged political theory. And part of breaking that closure will entail eating some humble pie. Adam Kotskowrote a wonderful and hilarious poston the absurdities of some political theorizing and its self-importance today. Weve failed horribly with university politics and defending the humanities, yet in our holier-than-thou attitudes we call for a direct move to communism. Perhaps we need to reflect a bit on ourselves and our strategies and what political theory should be about. Setting all this aside, I think theres a danger in Warks claims about abstraction (though I think hes asking the right sort of question). The danger in treating hyperobjects like capitalism as being everywhere and nowhere is that our ability to act becomes paralyzed. As a materialist, Im committed to the thesis that everything is ultimately material and requires some sort of material embodiment. If thats true, it follows that there are points of purchase on every object, even where that object is a hyperobject. This is why, given the current form that power takes or the age of hyperobjects, I believe that forms of theory such as new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory are more important than ever (clearly the Whiteheadians are out as they see everything asinternallyrelated, as an organism, and therefore have no way of theorizing change and political engagement; theyre quasi-Hegelian, justifying even the discord in the world as a part of gods selection and harmonization of intensities). The important thing to remember is that hyperobjects like capitalism are unable to function without a material base. They require highways, shipping routes, trains and railroads, fiber optic cables for communication, and a host of other things besides. Without whatShannon Matterncalls infrastructure, its impossible for this particular hyperobject exists. Every hyperobject requires its arteries. Information, markets, trade, require the paths along which they travel and capitalism as we know it today would not be possible without its paths. The problem with so much political theory today is that it focuses on thesemiospherein the form of ideologies, discourses, narratives, laws, etc., ignoring thearteriesrequired for the semiosphere to exercise its power. For example, we get OWS standing in front of Wall Streetprotesting engaging in aspeech actyet one wonders ifspeechis an adequate way of addressing the sort of system we exist in. Returning to systems theory, is the system of capital based on individual decisionsof bankers and CEOs, or does the system itself have its own cognition, its own mode of action, that theyre ineluctably trapped in? Isnt there a sort of humanist prejudice embodied in this form of political engagement? It has value in that it might create larger collectives of people to fight these intelligent aliens that live amongst us (markets, corporations, etc), but it doesnt address these aliens themselves because it doesnt even acknowledge their existence. What we need is a politics adequate to hyperobjects, and that is above all a politics that targetsarteries. OOO, new materialism, and actor-network theory are often criticized for being apolitical by people who are fascinated with politicaldeclarations, who are obsessed with showing that your papers are in order, that youve chosen the right team, and that see critique and protest as the real mode of political engagement. But it is not clear what difference these theorists are making and how they are escaping intra-systemic self-reference and auto-reproduction. But the message of these orientations is to the things themselves!, to the assemblages themselves! Quit your macho blather about where you stand, and actually map power and how it exercises itself! And part of this re-orientation of politics, if it exists, consists in rendering deconstruction far more concrete. Deconstruction would no longer show merely the leaks in any system and its diacritical oppositions, it would go to the things themselves. What does that mean? It means that deconstruction would practice onto-cartography or identify the arteries by which capitalism perpetuates itself and find ways toblockthem. You want to topple the 1% and get their attention? Dont stand in front of Wall Street and bitch [yell] at bankers and brokers, occupy ahighway. Hack a satellite and shut down communications. Block a port. Erase data banks, etc. Block thearteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself. This is the only way you will tilt the hands of power and create bargaining power with government organs of capital and corporations. You have to hit them where they live, in their arteries. Did anyone ever change their diet without being told that they would die? Your critique is an important and indispensable step, but if you really wish to produce change you need to find ways to create heart attacks and aneurysms. Short of that, your activity is just masturbation. But this requires coming to discern where the arteries are and doing a little less critique of cultural artifacts and ideologies. Yet choose your targets carefully. The problem with the Seattle protests was that they chose idiotic targets and simply acted on impotent rage. A window is not an artery. It doesnt organize a flow of communication and capital. Its the arteries that you need to locate. I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me.

2. do not deal in abstractions thinking of Whiteness or racism as a social force that merely exists is a link because it starts our politics in the world of signifiersBryant 13 (Levi, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/onto-cartography-marx-and-abstraction/)First rule of onto-cartography, dont track in abstractions (society, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, environment). Second rule of onto-cartography: DONT traffic in abstractions! To this, a very close and old friend responded asking, but isnt the concrete an abstraction as well? Good question, so heres the response. Thats certainly an abstract way of responding! The idea is to suspend our assumptions about why and wherefore things are organized as they are, pausing instead to trace networks, relations between things, to discern how theyre linked up, how theyre organized, and so on. Rather than *beginning* with the premise that x organizes y, we should instead look at how things are actually linked and interact. Latours _Reassembling the Social_ is indispensable reading on this. His thesis is that these big terms do more to *obscure* than explain. I disagree with Latour on a number of his conclusions (I think he too hastily rejectsMarx notMarxism, for example but think hes making an important point. As Laruelle might argue, the problem with these big master-signifiers (society, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, environment) is that theyseemto be saying something withoutreallysaying anything. Here its worthwhile to think of Hegels analysis of formal ground in the Science of Logic. When we think in terms of formal ground weappearto be giving the ground of something, when weve really replaced the thing to be explained with a *synonym*. You ask why does the earth move about the sun? Themaitreresponds because of gravity! (formal ground). You ask what is gravity? The maitre responds things falling and orbiting about other entities! Youve replaced what is to be explained with a different set of words, that are nonetheless saying *exactly* the same thing (A = A).

This link independently turns the case and means the alt is a better strategy Reid 12 (Alex, buffalo u, http://www.alex-reid.net/2012/09/what-is-and-what-should-never-be.html)I think that's it. The issue in the conversation I was tracking above seems to be over whether or not "racism," which would certainly be an object in OOO terms, can overdetermine (or "overmine" in Harman's terminology) other objects, in this case, a shooting. In OOO terms, and here I am probably thinking more of Latour, it is certainly possible for one object to overwhelm another: a flame can burn up a piece of cotton is one of Harman's common examples. So is it possible for a person to be so overcome with racial hatred that it drives him to shoot someone? I would say it is absolutely possible. However, racism alone does not get someone shot. Obviously a gun is also required, at minimum. In addition, there are many other objects involved in a given situation that lead to the shooting which might shed light on why the shooting happened at that particular instant rather than a minute before or a day before or later. None of these other objects necessarily take away from the role of racism in the event, though they might provide us with a more nuanced understanding of how racism functioned in this particular case. Such an investigation shouldn't be taken as a moral judgment about racism, though its results might provide better tactics for confronting racism. On the other hand, the simple declaration that some spectral ideological force called racism swept down and caused a shooting doesn't really tell us anything useful at all. It just reasserts what one may already believe to be true. In the end, I don't think it is useful for anyone to assert a subject-oriented ontology. Isn't it necessary to be able to claim that racism is real beyond our subjective representations of it? Are we simply prescribing that racism exists? Instead, I would want to claim that racism is a real object with a real history, even though its reality withdraws from me. I know that I can only get some partial encounter with that real object; I can only know it in a limited way. But at the same time, I know that it is ontologically possible to destroy it, like the flame burning up the cotton. To me, the best way to do that would be to try to figure out how it really works.

2. Sequencing DA they make the object a footnote in cultural studies, we must focus on objects because discourse currently has a total hegemony in the academyBryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Worries about OOO and Politics, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/)Again, it is difficult to see how any of these considerations are indifferent to politics for me theyre riddles with political considerations or how they aim to cultivate a political conservatism. The entire aim is to enhance our ability to act, change the world about us, and intervene. This requires that we actually know what is organizing situations. And here I believe that nonhuman actors play a significant role in why assemblages take the form they do. If there is currently a focus on nonhuman entities in OOO and I perpetually go back and forth between human and nonhuman actors in my work, trying to show their imbrications with each other then this is because signification currentlyhegemonizescultural studies and the humanities and it is necessary to bring other things into relief. I would invite Berry to tarry a bit with the question of what difference toilets make especially in human assemblages where they are absent and what changing introducing plumbing might make in those assemblages. If he thinks seriously about such earthly things he might begin to see that signifying intervention is not the only form of intervention and that often big emancipatory differences can be introduced by attending to non-signifying entities.

Evaluate discourse and ideologies firstit is necessary to understand why we believe what we believeBryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)By way of a second point, while both onticology and iek argue that objects are split, the two do so for radically different reasons. For iek, objects are split between their appearance and the void of their place of Chapter 3: Virtual Proper Being 131 inscription in the symbolic. As a consequence of this divide between placeholder and place, objects can never be identical to themselves. Insofar as objects are split between their appearance and the void of their place of inscription, objects are effects of the symbolic or the signifier. Here iek directly follows Lacan, for as Lacan remarks in Encore, [t]he universe is a flower of rhetoric.143 The claim that the universe is a flower of rhetoric is the claim that the universe is an effect or product of rhetoric. The universe, for Lacan, is that which blooms out of language and speech. And indeed, earlier we find Lacan remarking that, [t]here isn't the slightest prediscursive reality, for the very fine reason that what constitutes a collectivitywhat I called men, women, and childrenmeans nothing qua prediscursive reality. Men, women, and children are but signifiers.144 Presumably Lacan would claim the same thing of flowers, zebras, subatomic particles, burritos, stars and all other entities. The thesis that objects are an effect of the signifier, the symbolic, or language is a variant of what I call the hegemonic fallacy. Put crudely, in political theory a hegemonic relation is a social, ideological, cultural, or economic dominance exerted over all other members of the social field. For example, Christianity and, in particular, evangelical Christianity, has a hegemonic influence on United States politics in comparison to other religious beliefs or the absence of religious belief altogether. Onticology shifts the concept of hegemony from the domain of political theory to the domain of ontology and might be fruitfully compared to the concept of ontotheology. Within the framework of onticology, the hegemonic fallacy occurs whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explanans of all other entities. In treating language or the signifier as the ground of being or the universe as an effect of the signifier, this is precisely what takes place in iek and Lacan. Beings are hegemonized under the signifier or language, just as they are hegemonized under mind in Kant. Lurking in the background of iek's argument is, I suspect, a variant of the epistemic fallacy and actualism as discussed in the first chapter. Just as Locke rejected the coherence of the concept of substance on the grounds that we are not given any access to substance in consciousness, the grounds for rejecting anything like prediscursive reality would lie in the fact that we can only speak about prediscursive reality through signifiers or language and that, no matter how hard we strive to escape language, we only produce more signifiers. Here language is the actuality that is given and we are invited to think of all being in terms of the epistemological or how beings are given to us through language. However, as we saw in the first chapter, this argument only follows if it is possible to transform properly ontological questions into epistemological questions. The reasoning through which we arrive at the existence of objects is found not in our access to objects through language or consciousness, but rather through a reflection on what the world must be like for our practices to be intelligible. And indeed, it is difficult to see how language could ever have the power to divide or parcel in the way suggested by the linguistic idealists were it not for the fact that the world is itself structured and differentiated. Absent a world that is structured and differentiated, the surface of the world, as a sort of formless flux, would be too slippery, too smooth, for the signifier to structure at all.

The K is a case turn to the affirmativetheir harms will be inevitably reproduced unless we break down the logic of correlationism Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, Worries About OOO and Politics, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/)Correlationism trains us to see all other material things as alienated images of ourselves in a mirror. The question always becomes what are things for us?, and the thesis is that matter is merely a brute passive stuff awaiting our inscriptions. In other words, the basic gesture that become dominant in cultural theory beginning around the 60s was to show that what we take to be objects are really our own significations that we fail to recognize as our own. A critical analysis modeled on Marxs theory of commodity fetishism but diverging quite significantly from hismaterialism thus came to consist in revealing how these significations come from us, rather than from the things themselves. Now, as I have said, both here and elsewhere, I have no desire to abandon this form of analysis. As I argue, all entities translate other entities in particular ways and this is no less true of humans. However, the problem with this style of analysis is that it renders invisible the differences contributed by nonhuman objects to social assemblages. We come to think that it is just significations that structure social assemblages and that if we want to change social assemblages all we have to do is critique and debunk significations or ideologies. Clearly critiquing and debunking ideologies is a part of changing social assemblages, but it is not the only part. And because correlationism functions as a theoretical axiom where we dont even recognize the existence of this other part say rice because it treats the only real difference as signifying difference, we find ourselves surprised when weve adequately critiqued and debunked signifying systems and the social system doesnt change. Perhaps this would clue us into the possibility that perhaps there are other actors involved in these social assemblages, holding people in place in particular ways. The problem is that correlationism tends to rendernon-signifying differences in social assemblages invisible because it begins from the axiom that nonhuman things are just blank slates awaiting our inscription. Anyone whos ever gardened knows that this cant possibly be true. The diacritical nature of how I signify tomato will not make my tomatoes grow any better. No, to grow tomatoes I have to navigate soil conditions, sunlight and heat (which are quite substantial here in Texas), the gangs of roving rabbits that populate my back yard, insects, worms, water, etc. I am enmeshed in an entire network of actors that contribute to whether or not the tomatoes will grow and, more importantly, I must constantly attend to these nonhuman actors. The point here is not, as Berry suggests, to diminish human political interventions and promote a troubling conservatism, but to expand the sites of political intervention as well as our possibilities of acting. We cannot effectively act and change things if we dont know how the assemblages within which we are enmeshed are put together, what actors are present in those assemblages, and how we might intervene on these actors to change our social possibilities. Correlationism tends to draw our attention to only one type of actor the signifier and while this is a real actor it is not the only one.

OOO opens up new ways of engaging in political action and thoughtBryant 12(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Power of Things, Larvalsubjects, 7/11/12, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/the-power-of-things/)A lot of people ask what the political dimension of OOO might be. I dont have an answer to that not because I believe OOO and politics are mutually exclusive, but because I think its egregious to speak on behalf of struggling people. The best philosophers can do is create weaponized concepts that might be taken up by others and deployed in their own projects. It is not for the philosopher to be telling the artist, activist, scientist, etc., what they should be doing. Just as the Lacanian analyst is an advocate of the analysands desire, creating a space in which the analysand might articulate her desire the analyst does not give advice, harbor fantasies of what the analysand should be, etc political articulation should arise immanently from within collectives themselves. Intellectuals should not play the role of a vanguard voice telling the people what they really should be concerned about. I suppose this is the influence of Ranciere on me. I do think, however, that OOO can problematize our current political thought and open new avenues of political engagement and theorization. As it stands, cultural studies is dominated by a focus on the discursive. We hear endless talk about signs, signifiers, positions or positionality, narratives, discourses, ideology, etc. Basically we see the world as a fetishized text to be decoded and debunked. None of this should, of course, be abandoned, but I do think were encountering its limitations.

This ontological question comes firstBryant 09(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology, 2009, http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf)Consequently, prior to even posing questions of knowledge, of how we can know, whether we can know, and what we can know, the would-be knower is already situated among differences. Here we encounter one reason that the Ontic Principle is formulated as it is. Situated among differences, we must say that there are (es gibt, il y a) differences. However, this thereness is indifferent to human existence. It is not a thereness for us, but a thereness of being. The incipient knower would like to know something of these differences. She would like to know which differences in the object make a difference, what ordered relations there are between differences of differing objects, and so on. It is this thereness of difference that first provokes wonder and inquiry into beings. Noting that differences come-to-be and pass-away, the incipient knower wishes to know something of this coming-to-be and passing-away and whether or not there are any enduring differences. Thus, far from difference having a status posterior to questions of knowledge, the thereness of difference is given and is what first provokes inquiry and questions of knowledge. Paradoxically it therefore follows that epistemology cannot be first philosophy. Insofar as the question of knowledge presupposes a pre-epistemological comprehension of difference, the question of knowledge always comes second in relation to the metaphysical or ontological priority of difference. As such, there can be no question of securing the grounds of knowledge in advance or prior to an actual engagement with difference. Every epistemology or critical orientation favors its particular differences that it strives to guarantee, and these differences are always pre-epistemological or of a metaphysical sort. Thus, for example, Kant does not first engage in a critical reflection on the nature and limits of our faculties and then proceed to ground physics and mathematics, but rather first begins with the truth of physics and mathematics and then proceeds to determine how the structure of our faculties renders this knowledge possible. As I will attempt to show further on, difference requires no grounding from mind.

Their ontology is based on hierarchiesprevents solvencyBryant 09(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology, 2009, http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf)The ontology that follows from the Ontic Principle is thus, in addition to being a realist ontology, what Manuel DeLanda has aptly called a flat ontology. As described by DeLanda, []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 ontological status.19 With DeLanda we affirm the thesis that being is composed of nothing but singular individuals, existing at different levels of scale but nonetheless equally having the status of being real. These entities differ among themselves, yet they do not have the characteristic of being more or less beings in terms of criteria such as the distinction between reality and appearance. Nonetheless, while I have the greatest admiration for DeLandas ontology, his individuals seem restricted to the world of nature. Insofar as the Ontic Principle dictates that whatever makes a difference is, it follows that the domain of being must be far broader than natural beings, including signs, fictions, armies, corporations, nations, etc.. Natural beings make up only a subset of being.

Their static notion of object ontology prevents change and solvencyBryant 09(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology, 2009, http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf)The entire motivation of these concepts first arises from the presupposition of a relational concept of objects in which objects are neither substances nor hold anything in reserve. For, just as Harman points out, where objects are nothing but relations it is impossible to see how the universe could be anything but a frozen crystal. Consequently, while philosophers are quite right to reject the traditional concept of substance, the problem to which the concept of substance is designed to respond nonetheless persists. The appropriate response to the bare substratum problem is thus not to reject the concept of substance tout court, but to reformulate the concept of substance in a way that responds to this entirely justified critique. What is required is an ontology that is capable of explaining the relation of relation to relata in a way that does justice to both. With relational ontologists we agree that there are properties of objects that only emerge as a result of the manner in which the object relates to other objects. Daniel Dennett helps us to think about the nature of these inter-ontic relations in Darwins Dangerous Idea with his valuable concept of design spaces.23 The concept of design space invites us to think of inter-ontic relations as posing a problem or setting constraints on the development of an entity. Thus, for example, one reason there are no insects the size of elephants on the planet Earth has to do with gravitational constraints on the development of exoskeletons. A design space can thus be thought as a sort of topological space of relations among objects that play a role in qualities an object comes to actualize. I speak of a topological space as opposed to a geometric space for topology allows us to think relations as undergoing continuous variations, whereas geometric relations are fixed. Thus, as a topological space, a design space admits of many variable solutions to the problem posed by the design space, while nonetheless possessing constraints. A point of crucial importance, in this connection, is that design spaces change with changes in relations among objects and in objects.24 In short, design spaces are not fixed and immutable.

Alt is a prereq to resolving the affs problemsBryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)If we must draw an ontological distinction between objects and the events they generate to understand the intelligibility of scientific practice, then this 48 Levi R. Bryant is precisely because objects do not ordinarily or regularly produce constant conjunctions of events. Constant conjunctions of events are the exception rather than the rule, and it is for this reason that we engage in experimental practice. In this connection, Bhaskar draws a distinction between open and closed systems. Closed systems are systems where constant conjunctions of events obtain. Open systems are, by contrast, systems where the powers of objects are either not acting or are rather disguised or hidden by virtue of the intervention of other causes. Open systems are the norm rather than the exception. And within open systems or entanglements of objects, the powers of discrete objects are often veiled or inactive. It is here that we encounter the rationale behind experimental activity. As Bhaskar puts it, Now once it is granted that mechanisms and structures may be said to be real, we can provide an interpretation of the independence of causal laws from patterns of events, and a fortiori of the rationale of experimental activity. For the real basis of this independence lies in the independence of the generative mechanisms of nature from the events they generate. Such mechanisms endure even when not acting; and act in their normal way even when the consequents of the law-like statements they ground are, owing to the operation of intervening mechanisms or countervailing causes, unrealized. It is the role of the experimental scientist to exclude such interventions, which are usual; and to trigger the mechanism so that it is active. The activity of the mechanism may then be studied without interference [...]. It is only under closed conditions that there will be a one-to-one relationship between the causal law and the sequence of events.28

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)The question of perception is not a question about the being of objects, but a question about our access to the being of objects. The point of the question is two-fold: first, the claim is that in order to talk about the being of objects we must first have access to objects. Second, the claim is that perhaps our access to objects has nothing to do with what reality itself is like. This is the point of the amoeba and the tree. The amoeba doesn't encounter the tree as a tree, and thus we should be skeptical of the idea that entities like trees are independent or real entities at all. The thesis is thus that the being of an object arises not from the object's own independent structure, but rather from the distinctions the being perceiving it makes. This is the correlationist gesture par excellence. To be sure, the correlationist may concede that there is something other than the amoeba, but he wishes to argue that there's no reason to suppose that this something is anything like how the amoeba experiences it because the nature of the being that the amoeba perceives is a function of the amoeba's distinctions, not of the being of this other-being itself.

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)Deleuze criticizes the concept of the possible for reasons similar to those Latour levels against the potential. In short, he criticizes the concept Between the possible oak tree and the actual oak tree there is absolutely no difference beyond the brute fact of existence. If, then, we conflate the potentiality of the acorn with the possibility of the oak-tree, we are making the claim that the acorn already contains the oak tree, but in a potential state. Alternatively, [t]he actualization of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation [...]. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate.124 In contrast to a process of realization or a movement from the possible to the real, the process of actualization is a creative process within substances that requires work. Moreover, the local manifestation produced in the process of actualization is something new and shares no resemblance to the singularities which it actualizes. To illustrate this point, let's return to the vexed example of the acorn. The virtuality of the acorn is not the oak tree, but rather is the notes of its being. The singularities that characterize its concrete existence are folded deep within that existence and withdrawn from the world. When the acorn enters into exo-relations with other entities, these singularities will be activated in a variety of ways depending on the exo-relations it entertains with other entities. If the soil is too damp and the temperature doesn't get warm enough, the acorn rots. If the temperature is right and there is a requisite amount of water in the soil, the acorn begins to germinate. But now, as the acorn germinates, it encounters other entities in the field of its exo-relations. There are, for example, all sorts of other plants growing in the region of the acorn with which the acorn's own roots must compete. As a consequence of this, the seedling becomes weak and anemic or strong and thriving. The region in which the acorn grows is perhaps particularly windy, with sheets of wind buffeting the plain where the seedling grows from a predominantly westerly direction. When we come across the oak tree decades later, we notice that it is bent and knotted in an easterly direction like a carefully pruned bonsai tree. It is as if the oak tree has become petrified wind. The point here is that the singularities or attractors belonging to the acorn do not contain the oak tree in advance. Rather, the acorn negotiates a milieu of exo-relations to other entities in producing its local manifestations or qualities. The attractors that preside over this process are radically non-qualitative. Here I find myself inclined to embrace Latour's thesis that [w]hatever resists trials is real.125 The problem with Latour's formulation is that it is purely negative and relational. In situating the endo-structure of an entity in terms of resistance, Latour emphasizes what occurs when an entity enters into exo-relations with other entities. This confuses epistemic criteria through which we or other entities recognize another entity as real, with what constitutes the reality of the entity regardless of whether anyone or anything knows it. In this regard, he thinks the being of an entity from the perspective of other entities encountering that entity. The wind, itself composed of many entities, encounters the seedling and must move around it. The seedling resists the wind. It is by virtue of its singularities, its endostructure, that the seedling is able to resist the wind, but these singularities aren't the resistance. Rather, the singularities would be there in the seedling regardless of whether or not anything interacted with them. From these observations, a number of distinctions follow. On the one hand, we must distinguish between symmetrical and asymmetrical qualities or local manifestations. Symmetrical qualities are qualities that can repeatedly snap in and out of existence. For example, the various shades of color the coffee mug manifests are symmetrical qualities in that, barring a transformation of the endo-structure of the coffee mug, these qualities can come in and out of existence. Turn off the lights and the mug becomes black. Turn on the light and the mug returns to that particular shade of blue. Asymmetrical qualities, by contrast, are irreversible qualitative On the other hand, we must distinguish between exo-qualities and endo-qualities. Exo-qualities are qualities that can only exist in and through a set of exo-relations to other objects. Color, for example, seems to be a quality of this sort. Color is an event that only takes place through a network of exo-relations between the molecular endo-composition of the object, particular wavelengths of light, and a particular neurological structure in an organism. Take any of these elements away and color puffs out of existence. As such, color, as an exo-quality, is a genuine creation of these three agencies being woven together. It is not the cup that is colored, but rather the entanglement of these agencies that produces color as an event. The cup merely has the power to contribute to the production of this exo-quality. Endo-qualities, by contrast, are qualities that really are in the object. However, endo-qualities, as local manifestations of a substance, come about in two ways. First, endo-qualities are local manifestations that can come about through the internal dynamisms of an object independent of any other objects. Here the object need not be perturbed by another object for the endo-quality to be produced. Second, endo-qualities can come about through exo-relations to other objects, where these exorelations irreversibly transform the local manifestation of the object. All asymmetrical qualities are of this sort. These events also harbor the power of transforming the endo-structure of objects, leading to the genesis of new singularities, powers, attractors, or vector fields in the virtual proper being of an object. The great error to be avoided lies in conceiving the virtual or potential in teleological terms, or in believing that the entity could be captured or fully grasped by summing up all possible points of view on the object. The relation between virtual proper being and local manifestation is not a teleological relation or a relation between an agency and a goal. Throughout the last three chapters, I have attempted to argue that objects can be fully concrete without locally manifesting themselves or actualizing themselves in qualities. Another way of putting this is to say that local manifestation is not the fulfillment of objects. Local manifestation is something that objects can do, but an object that does not locally manifest itself is not lacking in some way, nor is it somehow incomplete. Nor is it the case that we would encounter the complete being of a substance if only we could see it from everywhere at once. Where the local manifestations of a substance are concerned, these manifestations are, in principle, infinite. There is no limit to the number of local manifestations that an object can actualize, precisely because there is no limit to the exo-relations an object can enter into and the exo-relations it can consequently produce. Yet even if God exists and is capable of perceiving an infinity of local manifestations, the being of objects is nonetheless radically withdrawn even from God for the subterranean dimension of substance, its virtual proper being, is in excess of any of its local manifestations. The virtual proper being of objects consists not of qualities, but of powers and these powers are never exhausted by local manifestations. In this regard, there is never a complete mapping of any phase space, but rather only ever a limited mapping of a phase space dependent on the exo-relations into which the object has been placed.

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)Here I see no reason to follow Bhaskar in privileging closed systems over open systems. Bhaskar's thesis seems to be that the events we witness when a substance is placed in the closed system of an experimental setting constitute the true being of an object. Here, I believe, Bhaskar betrays his fundamental insight: that substances can be out of phase with the qualities or events of which they are capable, and that there is therefore a fundamental difference between substance and qualities. All that takes place in the closed system of an experimental environment is the situating of an object within a particular set of exo-relations such that particular events take place. Nothing about this suggests that the substance thus situated is exhausted by this setting or that we have been brought before the true being of the object. That being is always withdrawn and in excess of any of its manifestations. As every cook knows, when placed in other exo-relations other local manifestations take place. As I reflect on Harman's vigorous critique of potentiality, it seems to me that the real motivating desire behind this critique is the desire to preserve the concreteness of objects. As Harman writes, The recourse to potentiality is a dodge that leaves actuality undetermined and finally uninteresting; it reduces what is currently actual to the transient costume of an emergent process across time, and makes the real work happen outside actuality itself. The same holds true if we replace 'the potential' with 'the virtual', not withstanding their differences. In both cases, concrete actors themselves are deemed insufficient for the labour of the world and are indentured to hidden overlords: whether they be potential, virtual, veiled, topological, fluxional, or any adjective that tries to escape from what is actually here right now.126

Econ linkBryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)One important consequence that follows from the operational closure of substances is that this closure renders unilateral control of one substance by another substance impossible. As Luhmann puts it, An important structural consequence that inevitably results from the construction of self-referential systems deserves particular mention. This is abandoning the idea of unilateral control. There may be hierarchies, asymmetries, or differences in influence, but no part of the system can control others without itself being subject to control. Under such circumstances it is possible [...] that any control must be exercised in anticipation of counter-control.184 In this context, Luhmann is speaking of subsystems of a system and how they relate to one another. Because each subsystem of a system is itself founded on an operationally closed, self-referential system/environment distinction, one subsystem of the social system cannot control another subsystem of the social system. For example, the political subsystem cannot control the economic subsystem because each subsystem relates to its own environment in its own unique way as a function of its peculiar organization. The economic subsystem of the social system, for example, encounters perturbations from the political subsystem of the social system in terms of economics. What holds for subsystems within a larger system holds equally and even more so for relations between different systems or substances. Each substance interacts with other substances in terms of its own peculiar organization. As a consequence, there can be no unilateral transfer of actions from one system to another system, such that the content or nature of the initiating system or substance's action is maintained as identical. As we will see in the next chapter, this requires us to rethink relations of constraint between substances in what Timothy Morton has called meshes or networks of substances.

Alt k2 solve?Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)The point here is that the failure for change to occur despite compelling critiques of the dominant social order cannot simply be attributed to ideological mystifications. Social and political thought needs to expand its domain of inquiry, diminish its obsessive focus on content, and increase attention to regimes of attraction and problems of resonance between objects. The social space is far more free and informed than the structuralists and neo-structuralists, in their focus on content, acknowledge and it is more likely that the lack of change arises not from subjects being ideologically duped alone but from the manner in which we are entangled in life. It is not by mistake that often profound social change only occurs when the infrastructure of social systems encounter profound collapse, for in these circumstances psychic systems no longer have anything left to lose and live in the midst of a situation where the regime of attraction in which they once existed has ceased to be operative. Observations such as these teach critical theorists something important, yet the message of these events seems to be received with deaf ears. It is not an accident, for example, that the Russian Revolution took place in the middle of massive economic crisis and World War I. What examples such as these teach us are that content alone is not enough and that political theorists need to enhance their capacity of resonance with respect to nonhuman actors and regimes of attraction.

Some alt stuffBryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)The advantage of treating structure in terms of the system/environment distinction is that it allows us to think the manner in which structure is open to the world, thereby providing structure with events from the outside that play a role in how structure evolves or develops. Likewise, by treating structure in terms of entropy and complexity, we can see how structure is related to questions of how an object reproduces itself across time. It is sometimes contended that structure consists of relations between elements. Luhmann rejects this thesis on the grounds that it is too broad 232 Levi R. Bryant and indeterminate. While it is indeed the case that within any structure elements are related to one another, these relations are of a specific kind. On the one hand, while it is the case that one and the same structure can be embodied in a variety of elements, it doesn't follow from this that a structure can be embodied in any element. This feature of multiple realizability is crucial to understanding structure and objects, for it is almost always the case that the elements that realize a structure are destroyed or pass away, while the structure remains and persists. For example, citizens are born and die in the United States, and offices are occupied by a variety of different politicians. It is thus not the parts that make an entity an entity precisely because these parts can change. However, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that structures can exist without their elements. Objects can be destroyed through their parts insofar as a point is reached where the endo-structure of an object can no longer embody or sustain itself. It is precisely because the elements that realize structure pass away that systems or objects face the question of how to perpetuate themselves across time. In the case of autopoietic objects, the object faces the question of how to produce new events or elements to maintain itself across time. In short, each system or object must reproduce itself across time. In the absence of a reproduction of elements and therefore of relations, the object dissolves or falls apart. In this respect, we can see just how dynamic objects are. Objects are not brute clods that simply sit there unchanging until provoked, but perpetually reproduce themselves in the order of time. This structure of reproduction can be represented in terms of Bergson's diagram of attention and memory as presented in Matter and Memory. 255

Turns waming?Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)The political system, in its turn, finds itself entangled with the regimes of attraction governing the lives of psychic systems as well as the economic system. The code according to which the political system functions is that of power/no-power. In concrete terms, this code revolves around questions and issues of re-election. Many of the changes required to mitigate the effects of climate change would prove to be a significant hardship on lives of citizens, as it would require major changes in the regimes of attraction upon which they rely for their existence. This is especially the case in countries with developing economies where many are just trying to find a way to feed their families from day to day. While many might be abstractly supportive of taking action to mitigate the coming climate crisis, when concrete proposals are made, many of the suggested changes are deeply unpopular because these things would significantly impact how people live their lives (imagine how Americans would respond to being told to cut down on their meat consumption!) and might lead to the loss of jobs. This, in turn, translates into whether or not politicians get votes and get re-elected. As a consequence, it is likely that a Faustian bargain is made where the politician who is ecologically aware tells himself that at least he is making incremental change. Nonetheless, it seems that a lot could be done by more heavily regulating the shipping industry, encouraging the trucking industry, for example, to switch over to alternative fuels, giving large tax breaks to families and individuals that drive hybrid cars, use solar panels, increase their energy efficiency, making the use of school buses and trains a patriotic action for high school students, and providing government subsidies to developing countries that provide and develop environmentally friendly industries for their citizens, and so on. However, here the political system encounters another entanglement with industry and business that makes such actions less than appealing from a political perspective. These changes all imply major economic hardship for a variety of businesses and industries that make massive amounts of money from their practices. In the United States at least, the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the gates for corporations to use unlimited funds for political purposes. This entails that every U.S. politician must now think twice before proposing policy changes as they Chapter 5: Regimes of Attraction, Parts, and Structure 241 now face massive advertising campaignsalways conducted behind front groups implying that they're the work of average Americans and grass root activiststargeting the possibility of the politician's re-election. The point of this rather pessimistic analysis of resonance within social systems with respect to issues of climate change is to underline the manner in which the constraints and selections governing openness to the environment always involve risk. Within our current social system, the distinctions governing resonance between the various social subsystems, psychic systems, and the broader environment have generated a quagmire that renders responsiveness to climate change very difficult. The forms of resonance that do exist, in their turn, create the very real possibility that these social systems will themselves collapse as a result of changes in their environments that abolish sources of perturbation upon which they depend. As climate change and population growth intensifies, it is very likely that there will be famines as a result of changes in the climate that destroy farming and water resources. This will generate a variety of social crises that will reverberate throughout all the different social subsystems.

Alt card?Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)At the level of object-oriented and onticological mereology, we cannot work from the premise that location in time and space is sufficient to individuate an object, nor that objects exist only at a particular scale such as the mid-range objects that tend to populate the world of our daily existence. Rather, entities exist at a range of different scales, from the unimaginably small to the unimaginably large, each characterized by their own duration and spatiality. Here a tremendous amount of work remains to be done in thinking these spatial and temporal structures. In my view, onticology and object-oriented philosophy have opened a vast and rich domain for thinking these strange structures of space and time. What is important, however, is the recognition that the substantiality of objects lies not in their parts, but in their structure or organization, and that objects are not brute clods that merely sit there, contemplating their self-perfection like Aristotle's 244 Levi R. Bryant Unmoved Mover, but that they are dynamic and evolving as a consequence of their own internal dynamics and interfaces with their environment.

A2 Perm?Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)Onticology proposes what might be called, drawing on DeLanda's term yet broadening it, a flat ontology. Flat ontology is a complex philosophical concept that bundles together a variety of ontological theses under a single term. First, due to the split characteristic of all objects, flat ontology rejects any ontology of transcendence or presence that privileges one sort of entity as the origin of all others and as fully present to itself. In 246 Levi R. Bryant this regard, onticology proposes an ontology resonant with Derrida's critique of metaphysics insofar as, in its treatment of beings as withdrawn, it undermines any pretensions to presence within being. If this thesis is persuasive, then metaphysics can no longer function as a synonym for metaphysics of presence, nor substance as a synonym for presence, but rather an ontology has been formulated that overcomes the primacy of presence. In this section, I articulate this logic in terms of Lacan's graphs of sexuation. Here I believe that those graphs have little to tell us about masculine or feminine sexualityfor reasons I will outline in what followsbut a great deal to tell us about ontologies of immanence or flat ontologies and ontologies of transcendence. Second, flat ontology signifies that the world or the universe does not exist. I will develop the argument for this strange claim in what follows, but for the moment it is important to recognize the definite article in this claim. The claim that the world doesn't exist is the claim that there is no super-object that gathers all other objects together in a single, harmonious unity. Third, following Harman, flat ontology refuses to privilege the subject-object, human-world relation as either a) a form of metaphysical relation different in kind from other relations between objects, and that b) refuses to treat the subject-object relation as implicitly included in every form of object-object relation. To be sure, flat ontology readily recognizes that humans have unique powers and capacities and that how humans relate to the world is a topic more than worthy of investigation, yet nothing about this establishes that humans must be included in every inter-object relation or that how humans relate to objects differs in kind from how other entities relate to objects. Finally, fourth, flat ontology argues that all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects. While indeed some objects might influence the collectives to which they belong to a greater extent than others, it doesn't follow from this that these objects are more real than others. Existence, being, is a binary such that something either is or is not.

A2 nihilismBryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)What I aim for with the concept of flat ontology is a synthesis of these two cultures. I desire an ontology capable of doing justice to these strange nonhuman actors, capable of respecting these strange strangers on their own terms, and an ontology capable of doing justice to the phenomenological and the semiotic. Moreover, I believe that such a project is absolutely vital to the future of contemporary thought. The first of these two cultures is regnant in the contemporary world of theory. The aim of diminishing the primacy of the human is not nihilistic nor designed to exclude the human, but is premised on the thesis that, so long as the first culture maintains center stage, we are thoroughly unable to properly comprehend human collectives nor theorize strategic ways of transforming Chapter 6: The Four Theses of Flat Ontology 249 them. In this connection, flat ontology makes two key claims. First, humans are not at the center of being, but are among beings. Second, objects are not a pole opposing a subject, but exist in their own right, regardless of whether any other object or human relates to them. Humans, far from constituting a category called subject that is opposed to object, are themselves one type of object among many

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)Crucial to the flat ontology proposed by onticology is the thesis that the world does not exist. Alternatively, we could say that the whole does not exist. Here I am deeply indebted to Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds and Timothy Morton's dark ecology proposed in Ecology Without Nature. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou demonstrates that every concept of the Whole is beset by inconsistency.284 In Ecology Without Nature, Morton argues that we must abandon the concept of nature as a unified whole or milieu within which beings reside and with respect to which humans and culture constitute an outside such that nature is always over there.285 To my thinking, Morton's conception of being without nature shares a great deal of affinity to Latour's concept of collectives. In Pandora's Hope, Latour writes that, [u]nlike society, which is an artifact imposed by the modernist settlement, [the concept of collectives] refers to associations of humans and nonhumans. While a division between nature and society renders invisible the political process by which the cosmos is collected in one livable whole, the word collective makes this process central.286 Setting aside Latour's reference to politics, the concept of society is, according to Latour, based on a distribution or enclosure of beings where nature and society are treated as two already collected wholes that are somehow supposed to relate to one another while remaining entirely distinct. Society is treated as the domain of all that pertains to the human in the form of freedom, agency, meaning, signs, and so on, while nature is treated as the domain of brute causality and mechanism without agency. As a distinction, the concept of society thus encourages us to focus on content and agency, ignoring the role that nonhuman actors or objects play in collectives involving human beings. Within the distinction pertaining to nature, nature is treated as already gathered and unified and we are encouraged to focus on causality and mechanism alone. By contrast, in proposing that we replace the concept of society with the concept of collectives, Latour encourages us to attend to how associations between humans and nonhumans are formed.

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)If it is so vital for flat ontology to establish that the world does not exist, then this is because the world must not be treated as a milieu in which beings or objects are contained as parts to a whole. In short, if flat ontology is to truly be flat, then it is necessary to establish that the world is not a container within which beings are found. Alternatively, it must be shown that the world is not a super-object composed of all other objects as sub-multiples that form a harmonious whole consisting of beings as complementary and inter-locking parts. As such, following Badiou, there is not world, but rather worlds. The universe, which is really only a manner of speaking, is a pluriverse or multiplicity of universes. Here, then, it is important to observe the role of the definite article in the thesis that the world does not exist. Generally when we speak of the world we mean this as shorthand for the totality of all that exists. The thesis that the world does not exist is the thesis that no such totality exists nor is it possible for such a totality to be formed. Rather being consists entirely of objects and collectives There are two ways of arguing that the world doesn't exist, the first of which has already been hinted at in chapter five in the context of mereology. Within the domain of formal reasoning, Z-F set theory shows the inconsistency of any attempt to form a totality or whole. Set theory provides a variety of resources for contesting the consistency of any totality or whole, however, here I'll focus on the power set axiom. As we've already seen, the power set axiom allows one to take the set of all subsets of an initial set. Thus, if we have a set composed of elements {a, b, c}, the power set of this set would be {{a}, {b}, {c}, {a, b}, {a, c}, {b, c}, {a, b, c}}. At the level of formal reasoning, if the power set axiom spells the ruin of any whole or totality, then this is because it reveals the existence of a bubbling excess within any whole or collection. This is a variation of Cantor's Paradox. Cantor's paradox demonstrates that there can be no greatest cardinal number precisely because the power set of any cardinal number will necessarily be larger than the cardinal number itself. In a stunning inversion of the ancient thesis that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the power set axiom reveals, to the contrary, that the parts are always greater than the whole. As I argued in the last chapter, from a certain perspective each object is a crowd, containing within itself a plurality of other autonomous objects that very likely know nothing of the object of which they are parts. Any whole that does manage to establish itself is, as Deleuze has put it, a One or Whole so special that it results from the parts without altering the fragmentation or disparity of those parts, and, like the dragons of Balbec or Vinteuil's phrase, is itself valid as a part alongside others, adjacent to others.288 What the power set reveals is the bubbling pluralism of the world beneath any unity or totality. Any totality or whole, in its turn, is itself an object or One alongside all sorts of other ones.

Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)If it is to be established that the World does not exist, then what is required is not a demonstration of the possibility of the ruin of any Whole, but rather the demonstration that in fact the World does not exist. The resources for this second argument have already been developed in my discussion of operational closure in chapter four. There we saw that every object is operationally closed such that it constitutes its own system/ environment distinction. The paradox of this distinction is that, while it is a distinction between system and environment, the distinction itself falls on one side of what it distinguishes: the system. In short, the environment/ system distinction refers not to two present-at-hand entities, systems and environments, but is rather constituted by systems themselves. This distinction, in its turn, constitutes the entity's openness to its environment, and that openness is always of a selective nature. However, here we must be careful to distinguish between the environment of a system and systems in the environment of a system. While an object does indeed constitute its environment in the sense of constituting those sorts of perturbations to which it is open, objects do not constitute other objects or systems in their environment. At best, working on the premise that an object is open to some other systems in its environment, an object translates perturbations it receives from these other objects. Two points follow from these observations. First, insofar as environment is constituted by the object drawing the distinction between system and environment, it cannot be said that environments are a present-at-hand milieu in which objects exist. As we saw in chapter five in connection with our discussion of developmental systems theory, objects construct their environment even as they are often buffeted by perturbations from systems in their environment. Second, and in a closely related vein, because objects are only selectively open to their environments, it follows that objects are not open to all systems in their environment. The tardigrade does not belong to the environment of a tree, nor does the tree belong to the environment of a tardigrade. Likewise, my three-year-old daughter, qua social subject, does not belong to the environment of her toy box. No matter how much my daughter yells at the lid of her toy box when it accidentally falls down upon her headand she does, indeed, yell and curse, in her own way, the toy boxthe toy box does not respond or bow to her will. While she might address her toy box as little brother for reasons that thoroughly baffle me, the toy box is indifferent to her designations and scoldings. One might object that certainly the acoustic resonances of her scolding voice perturb the toy box and such an objection would not be mistaken. However, the manner in which the vibrations of this tiny voice affect the polished oak wood of the toy chest do not entail that that oaken toy box transforms these perturbations into information qua voice. Sadly, for my daughter, that toy box is as dense as wood. With Leibniz, perhaps, we can say that there are as many worlds as there are objects. What we cannot say, however, is that the World forms any sort of organic unity or whole in which all objects interrelate with one another as a compossible system. There is no world-system precisely because there is no World. On the one hand, contrary to Whitehead, it simply isn't the case that every entity relates to every other entity. Many entities fall completely outside local collectives such that they are both entirely oblivious to these collectives and such that these collectives are entirely oblivious to them. Put differently, there are a number of instances in which there is absolutely no resonance between entities. Quite literally, they belong to entirely different universes. As in the case of neutrinos that are unable to relate to most other particles due to their neutral charge, scientists have to painstakingly create apparatuses capable of bringing these entities into relation with the entities of our world. On the other hand, even in those instances where entities do relate, each entity relates to other entities on its own terms as a function of the distinctions it draws