The Democracy of Objects

Levi R. Bryant

• Publisher: Studium Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9788027232178
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects, Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought of Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology that he calls "onticology". This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. Drawing on the work of the systems theorists and cyberneticians, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he is able to integrate the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.Contents: Towards a Finally Subjectless Object Grounds For a Realist Ontology The Paradox of Substance Virtual Proper Being The Interior of ObjectsRegimes of Attraction, Parts, and Structure The Four Theses of Flat Ontology

Chapter 1

Grounds for a Realist Ontology

Table of Contents

Things-in-themselves? But they’re fine, thank you very much. And how are you? You complain about things that have not been honored by your vision? You feel that these things are lacking the illumination of your consciousness? But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival.

— Bruno Latour⁷

1.1 The Death of Ontology and the Rise of Correlationism

Our historical moment is characterized by a general distrust, even disdain, for the category of objects, ontology, and above all any variant of realism. Moreover, it is characterized by a primacy of epistemology over ontology. While it is indeed true that Heidegger, in Being and Time, attempted to resurrect ontology, this only took place through a profound transformation of the very meaning of ontology.⁸ Ontology would no longer be the investigation of being qua being in all its variety and diversity regardless of whether humans exist, but rather would instead become an interrogation of Dasei’s or human being’s access to being. Ontology would become an investigation of being-for-Dasein, rather than an investigation of being as such. In conjunction with this transformation of ontology from an investigation of being as such into an investigation of being-for-humans, we have also everywhere witnessed a push to dissolve objects or primary substances in the acid of experience, intentionality, power, language, normativity, signs, events, relations, or processes. To defend the existence of objects is, within the framework of this line of thought, the height of naïveté for objects are held to be nothing more than surface-effects of something more fundamental such as the signifier, signs, power or activities of the mind. With Hume, for example, it is argued that objects are really nothing more than bundles of impressions or sensations linked together by associations and habits in the mind. Here there is no deeper fact of objects existing beyond these impressions and habits. Likewise, Lacan will tell us that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric”⁹, treating the beings that populate the world as an effect of the signifier.

We can thus discern a shift in how ontology is understood and accompanying this shift the deployment of a universal acid that has come to dissolve the being of objects. The new ontology argues that we can only ever speak of being as it is for us. Depending on the philosophy in question, this “us” can be minds, lived bodies, language, signs, power, social structures, and so on. There are dozens of variations. The key point here is that it is argued that being can only be thought in terms of what Graham Harman has called our access to being.¹⁰ As such, ontology becomes not an interrogation of being as such, but rather an interrogation of our access to being. The answer to the question, “what is being?” now, everywhere and always, carries a footnote, colophon, or bit of fine print such that the question must be read as “what is being for us?”

And if the question of ontology now becomes the question, “what is being for us?” it follows that there can be no question of what being might be as such, for we have resolved to treat being only in terms of our access to being such that what being might be apart from our access to being now becomes an entirely meaningless question. This for two reasons: First, were we capable of knowing being apart from our access to being, it is argued, it would follow that we therefore have access to this being, thereby converting this being alleged to be beyond its givenness to us back into being-for-us. Second, to know something, the argument runs, we must have access to that thing. Yet being beyond our access to it is precisely a form of being to which we have no access. Therefore it follows that claims about such a being are, strictly speaking, meaningless. I hope to show later why there is good reason to doubt the soundness of both of these arguments, but for the moment it is enough simply to tarry with them to understand their logic, for these arguments constitute the basic schema of nearly every reigning philosophical position today.

If, then, these arguments are granted, it follows that there can be no question of what being might be like apart from our access to being. For the condition under which it would be possible to speak of being apart from our access to being would require access to that being, yet we do not have such access. Consequently, it follows that philosophy must abandon the question of whether being as it is given to us is like being as it is in itself because we are unable to “get out of ourselves” to compare being as it manifests itself to us with being as it is in-itself apart from us. The best we can hope for, the most we can know, is being as it manifests itself to us, and philosophy shifts from being a discourse concerned with the being of beings, with what substance, as Meillassoux has put it, constitutes true substance (objects, God, nature, particles, processes, and so on?)¹¹, to being a discourse about the mechanisms through which beings are manifested to us (mind, language, normativity, signs, power, for example). Ontology becomes transcendental anthropology and the world becomes a mirror in which we don’t recognize our own reflection.

Philosophy, of whatever stripe, thus comes to be characterized by what Meillassoux has aptly named correlationism. As Meillassoux puts it, “[b]y ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never either term considered apart from the other”.¹² While I have reason to disagree with Meillassoux’s proposal for escaping the correlationist circle (and with his ontology), I believe that his concept of correlationism nicely summarizes the episteme, in the Foucauldian sense, that governs contemporary philosophy. When, in The Order of Things¹³ and The Archeology of Knowledge¹⁴, Foucault introduces the concept of epistemes, he intends epistemes not as determinate positions in some discipline that might be opposed to another position, but rather as a set of statements functioning as the historical a priori of a particular discursive space. An episteme would be precisely that set of statements that allow opposed theories of, for example, language, to be opposed. It is the common framework these opposed positions share that allows them to enter into antagonistic relations with one another. The claim that correlationism constitutes the episteme of contemporary philosophy is thus not a claim about any specific philosophical position, but rather about the common framework regulating philosophical discourse in our contemporary moment. This episteme is shared by thinkers as diverse and opposed, for example, as the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the Merleau-Ponty of The Phenomenology of Perception, and the Derrida of Of Grammatology. Despite the vast differences and disagreements among these positions, their thought and disagreements nonetheless unfold within the horizon of the unspoken premise of a necessary correlation between being and thought. The object of these disputes is not whether correlationism is true, but rather how the primordial or most fundamental correlation is to be articulated.

With correlationism we thus discover the root of contemporary theory’s suspicion of both objects and realism. Realism must necessarily be anathema to all variants of correlationism by virtue of the fact that it claims knowledge of beings independent of the correlation between thinking and being. All realisms are committed to the thesis that it is possible to know something of beings independent of their being-for-thought, yet this is precisely what is precluded by the correlationist gesture. Here it is important to be precise. Correlationism is not the thesis of subjective idealisms whereby esse est percipi or where to be is to be perceived. Subjective and absolute idealism are only two variations of correlationism. The correlationist need not be committed to the thesis that there is no being apart from thought. Indeed, most correlationists are committed to the thesis that there is something other than thought. Kant, for example, held that in addition to phenomena (beings for-us) things-in-themselves exist. The correlationist merely argues that we have no access to these beings that are apart from thought and can therefore only speak of being as it is for-us. And here we find the categorical dividing line between realisms and anti-realisms or correlationisms: for the anti-realist or correlationist, claims about beings are never claims about beings-in-themselves or beings apart from us, but are always and only claims about beings as they manifest themselves to us. For the realist, by contrast, claims about objects really are claims about objects and not objects as they are for-us or only in relation to us.

As a consequence, it becomes clear that, for the correlationist, objects take on the status of fictions. Because objects can no longer be equated with things-in-themselves, because objects are only ever objects for-us and never things as they are independent of us, objects become phenomena or are reduced to actual or possible manifestations to us. Philosophy now shifts from being a debate about the nature of things-in-themselves or substance, to a debate about the mechanisms by which phenomena are produced or structured. Is it mind that structures phenomena? Language? Power? Intentionality? Embodied experience? Such are but a handful of the options that have been entertained by contemporary theory.

At the heart of correlationism it is thus clear that there is a profound anthropocentrism, for where it is held that being can never be thought in its existence apart from thought, it becomes clear that any claims about being ultimately harbor the implicit colophon that claims about being are claims about being for humans. Moreover, despite declarations of anti-humanism on the part of both Heidegger and the structuralists and post-structuralists, it is clear that these anti-humanisms bring us no closer to realism. For, to put it crudely, what the anti-humanisms object to is not the correlationist thesis of a necessary relation between being and thought such that the two can never be thought apart from one another, but rather the manner in which humanisms situate the primordial correlation in the minds of individual knowers. Thus, for example, structuralist and post-structuralist anti-humanisms emphasize the autonomy and independence of language and social relations. Here the argument runs that it is not sovereign subjects that are calling the shots, but rather language and/or social relations. What the structuralist and post-structuralist anti-humanists wish to examine is the manner in which language and social relations are determinative of the actions of individuals and how, if Althusser is to be followed, the individual itself is an effect of these more primordial agencies. It now follows that these impersonal and anonymous agencies are the condition for manifestation, not individual human minds. World, the story goes, is not a construction of the mind of human individuals or transcendental subjectivity, but of impersonal and anonymous social structures.

However, while anti-humanisms rescue philosophy from its focus on individual minds, allowing us to discern the sway of far more impersonal and anonymous patterns and structures at work in the heart of thought and social relations, it by no means follows that anti-humanism has escaped anthropocentrism. For social relations, economic relations, and language are nonetheless human phenomena, even where the human is discursively constructed, and it therefore follows that we remain within the orbit of anthropocentrism; for just as we began humanistically with the premise that we cannot know what being might be independent of our thinking of being, we now conclude that our claims about being are claims about being in relation to or correlation with language, power, or social relations. The question of what the world might be like apart from humans is, for both the humanists and the anti-humanists, entirely foreclosed.

1.2. Breaking the Correlationist Circle

With correlationism, the question of ontology is no longer, “what is being qua being?” but rather, “what is being qua Dasein?” or, “what is being qua language?” or, “what is being qua power?” or, “what is being qua history?” or, “what is being qua the lived body?” and many other avatars besides. While disputes among these various formulations of the correlation are heated, we are nonetheless faced with a series of anthropomorphic determinations such that being is always to be thought in relation to some aspect of the human. Protagoras, in one form or another, rules the day. What we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing and the philosopher can be just as interested in questions of how, to evoke Harman’s favorite example, cotton relates to fire as she is in questions of how humans relate to mangoes, but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings where some instance of the human is treated as that which overdetermines all other beings and where the primary order of the day is always to determine how individual minds relate to other objects or how the social and cultural relates to being. If, as Žižek contends, metaphysics, in the pejorative sense of ontotheology, consists in elevating a part to the ground of the whole, then the anthropocentrism of correlationism is metaphysical through and through despite its protestations to the contrary or its characterizations of itself as a critique of metaphysics.¹⁵ Correlationism is ontotheology with the human in the place of God.

Our question is two-fold: on the one hand, what are the philosophical premises that led correlationism to become such a persuasive position in contemporary philosophy? On the other hand, is there a way to twist free from the correlationist deadlock so as to convincingly defend a genuinely post-humanist, realist ontology? A post-humanist, realist ontology is not an anti-human ontology, but is rather, as we will later see, an ontology where humans are no longer monarchs of being but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings. In this section, I will address the second of these questions through a foray into the early thought of the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. This discussion will also set the stage for my later discussion of the ontology of objects. Ironically, it turns out that the way out of correlationism is to be found through transcendental argumentation. But here I am getting ahead of myself.

Before outlining Bhaskar’s defense of ontological realism, it is first necessary to express a note of caution. In his early work, and especially A Realist Theory of Science on which I will lean heavily here, Bhaskar is primarily interested in the ontology of science. Within the context of the present book, this poses special dangers as readers might arrive at the mistaken impression that I am arguing that the objects of the natural sciences are exhaustive of being as such. In short, one might conclude that I advocate the thesis that being and the objects of the natural world are synonymous. As I develop Bhaskar’s argument for a realist theory of science, my aim is not to defend naturalism as the one true ontology, but rather to unfold the argument by which he arrives at a realist ontology. And here I am only interested in the ontological dimension of his argument. As Bhaskar writes,

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is ‘of’ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no one to know it.¹⁶

Bhaskar refers to these two dimensions of knowledge as the transitive and the intransitive respectively. The transitive refers to the dimension of the social in the production of knowledge, such as inherited discourses, scientific training, institutions, and so on. By contrast, the intransitive refers to the domain of being that would exist r...

Table of contents

• The Democracy of Objects
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography