The affirmative’s view of ontology and the world is wrong—they 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 to a 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 we’re encountering its limitations. In the few

years I’ve been writing on these issues, I’ve been surprised to discover just how hard it is to get people to sense that there is a non- discursive   power of things; a form of power that is not about signs, ideology (as text), beliefs, positions, narratives, and so on. It’s as if these things aren’t on the radar for most social and political theoris ts. 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 don’t notic e 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 aren’t 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. I’m well aware that there is a tradition of theorists that don’t 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 Andersen et al, Cathy Davidson, Braudel, DeLanda, Pickering, etc. They exist. The point is not that they don’t exist, but that these forms of theory, I think, have been rather marginal in the academy; especially philosophy. In discussing these things, I’m not making some claim to being absolutely original or to be originating something full cloth. I’m 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 real ity (for example, Lacan’s famous observation that the difference between the men’s room and lady’s room results from the signifier in “The Agency of the Letter”, and Barthes’ claim that language is a primary modeling system in The Fashion System). In phenomenology you get a focus on the lived experience of the cogito, Dasein, or lived body and how it “constitutes” (Husserl’s

language, not mine) the objects of its intentions. read on! In each instance we get a focus on the differences that   humans   are contributing, with a relative indifference to the differences that non-humans contribute. Material entities, as Alaimo observes in   Bodily 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 the   dominant   mode of theorizing that I’ve 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 it’s better in geography as well. It depends on what population of theorists we’re 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 extinction—a 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 Reid’s Digital 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 one’s 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 that’s 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. It’s asking for a richer, thicker ontology, which gives is more to be responsible for (after all, that’s 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 towards our contatus, our endeavor to persist in our being and flourish.  Recognizing our interconnection with nonhumanthings and our impact on nonhuman things is not simply some hippy-dippy thesis that “we’re one with the universe”.  No.  It is a matter of self-interest.  It’s the recognition that 1) we are dependent on this ecosystem to flourish, 2) that these relations upon which we are dependent are fragile and can be broken, and 3) that these things can also exercise oppressive power over us, undermining our ability to flourish or live well.  As Spinoza saw, we always act with other bodies.  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 important—a 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 are   individuals   that 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 not   types   but rather are really existing reproductive   populations   located in a particular geography at a particular point in time. For DeLanda, then, being is composed   entirely   of individuals . While I find much that is commendable in DeLanda’s ontology, where the sorts of entities that populate being are concerned, I’m a bit more circumspect. At

present I’m not ready to throw in with DeLanda and the thesis that there are   only   individuals . I am agnostic on the question of whether universals exist, and my intuitions strongly lean in the Platonic direction of treating numbers as   real   objects in their own right that have being independent of human mind s. If this

is the case, if numbers are real, then I have a difficult time seeing how they can be treated as individuals in 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” doesn’t signify that only   individuals   exist, 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 of undermining and overmining objects. 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 something   deeper   of which the object is said to be an unreal   effect. 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 objec t 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 to emergent   properties that result only from   relations  among 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 being qua being 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 irreducible   in its own right. While it is certainly true that rocks are made up of atoms, the atoms are not   more real   than the rock and the rock is not   less real   than 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 between   distinct   objects. 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 the   parts   that 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 doesn’t 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 relation   between objects, not a relation between   appearance   on the one hand and   reality   on the other hand. In this respect, flat ontology endorses Latour’s 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 I’m also inclined to say that we need to be clear about system references in our political theorizing and action.  We think a lot about the content of our political theorizing and positions, but I don’t think we think a lot about how our political theories are supposed

to actually act in the world.  As a result, much contemporary leftist political theory ends up in a performative contradiction.   It claims, following Marx, that it’s 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-Man’s obsessional neurosis where his actions in returning the glasses were actually designed to fail, there seems to be a built in tendency in these forms of theorization to unconsciously organize their own failure. 

And here I can’t 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 critiqu e (hysterical protest), to political construction– actually envisioning and building alternatives. So what’s 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 not for anything beyond itself.  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.  They’re 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 it’s 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 not for anything 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 reasons   we   might give for why we do what we do might (and often) have little to do with what’s actually taking place in system continuance.   We   say   that 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 very   style   is 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 he’s trying to benefit the world, the academic tries to say he’s trying to change the world when all he’s 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 Kotsko wrote a wonderful and

hilarious post on the absurdities of some political theorizing and its self-importance today.  We’ve 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 there’s a danger in Wark’s claims about abstraction (though I think he’s 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, I’m committed to the thesis that everything is ultimately material and requires some sort of material embodiment.  If that’s 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 as internally related, as an organism, and therefore have no way of theorizing change and political engagement; they’re quasi-Hegelian, justifying even the discord in the world as a part of “god’s” 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 what Shannon Mattern calls “infrastructure”, it’s 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 the   semiosphere   in the form of ideologies, discourses, narratives, laws, etc., ignoring the   arteries   required for the semiosphere to

exercise its power.  For example, we get OWS standing in front of Wall Street protesting– engaging in a speech act –yet one wonders if   speech   is an adequate way of addressing the sort of system we exist i n .  Returning to system’s theory, is the system of capital based on individual decisions of bankers and CEO’s, or does the system itself have its own cognition, it’s own mode of action, that they’re ineluctably trapped in?  Isn’t 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 doesn’t address these aliens themselves because it doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. What we need is a politics adequate to hyperobjects, and that is above all a politics that targets   arteries.   OOO, new materialism, and actor-network theory are often criticized for being “apolitical” by people who are fascinated with political   declarations, who are obsessed with showing that your papers are in order, that you’ve 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 m aking 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 to   block   them.   You want to topple the 1% and get their attention?   Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch [yell] at bankers and brokers, occupy a   highway.   Hack a satellite and shut down communications.   Block a port.   Erase data banks, etc.   Block the   arteries; 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 arterie s .  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 doesn’t organize a flow of communication and capital.  It’s 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, don’t track in abstractions (society, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, environment). Second rule of onto-cartography: DON’T traffic in abstractions! To this, a very close and old friend responded asking, but isn’t the concrete an abstraction as well? Good question, so here’s the response. That’s 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 they’re linked up, how they’re 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. Latour’s _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 rejects Marx– not Marxism, for example –but think he’s making an important point. As Laruelle might argue, the problem with these big master-signifiers (society, patriarchy, capitalism,

racism, environment) is that they   seem   to be saying something without   really   saying anything . Here it’s worthwhile to think of Hegel’s analysis of “formal ground” in the Science of Logic. When we think in terms of formal ground we appear to be giving the ground of something, when we’ve really replaced the thing to be explained with a *synonym*. You ask “why does the earth move about the sun?” The m’aitre responds “because of gravity!” (formal ground). You ask “what is gravity?” The m’aitre responds “things falling and orbiting about other entities!” You’ve 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 they’re 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 a ssemblages 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 currently   hegemonizes   cultural 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 an d that often big emancipatory differences can be introduced by attending to non-signifying entities.

Evaluate discourse and ideologies first—it 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 Žižek argue that ¶ objects are split, the two do so for radically different reasons. For Žižek, ¶ 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 Žižek ¶ 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 rhetori c. 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 ¶ collectivity —what I called men, women, and children—means 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 Žižek and Lacan. Beings are hegemonized under the signifier or ¶ language, just as they are hegemonized under mind in Kant. Lurking in ¶ the background of Žižek'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 affirmative—their 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 60′s 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 Marx’s 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 don’t 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 we’ve adequately critiqued and debunked signifying systems and the social system doesn’t 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 who’s ever gardened knows that this can’t 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 don’t 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 don’t have an answer to that not because I believe OOO and politics are mutually exclusive, but because I think it’s 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 analysand’s 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 discursiv e. 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 we’re 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 hierarchies—prevents 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), a n 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 DeLanda’s 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 Darwin’s 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 campaigns—always conducted behind “front ¶ groups” implying that they're the work of average Americans and grass root ¶ activists—targeting

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 sexuality—for reasons I will outline in what ¶ follows—but 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 head—and she does, indeed, yell and ¶

curse, in her own way, the toy box—the 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 and its own peculiar organization. As ¶

a consequence, there is no whole or totality that can be formed out of the ¶ entities that populate the world. ¶ The thesis that the World forms an organic totality where no such ¶ totality exists surreptitiously treats the collective as already formed, as ¶ already being there, without attending to any of the work and translations ¶ required for collectives to come into being. It treats collectives as ¶ accomplished, while ignoring the arduous work required for any collective ¶ to form itself. As such, it ignores the antagonisms that populate being as ¶ well as the lack of resonance between all sorts of objects. While the idea ¶ of the World as an organic and harmonious unity might prove comforting ¶ and reassuring, providing us with the sense that we belong to a Whole in ¶ which each entity has its proper place, such a conception of being does a ¶ profound injustice to the entities that populate the multiple-composition ¶ of being and ends up recapitulating the discourse of the master and the ¶ logic of ontologies of transcendence. Put differently, concepts of World as ¶ an organic Whole or totality foreclose the strange stranger. Each entity, the ¶ story runs, has its proper place within the organic totality and is defined ¶ by its relation to all others. What is thereby abolished is the non-relation of ¶ each and every relation and the recognition of that which is entirely nonrelational with respect to any particular collective or entity. ¶ If conceptualizations of the World premised on the organic unity of the ¶ Whole recapitulate the logic of the discourse of the master and ontologies ¶ of transcendence, then this is because such discourses inevitably must have ¶ recourse to some entity that perturbs the “natural” order, preventing it ¶ from existing harmoniously as ontologies of the World dictate. It is always ¶ Man, technology, the foreigner and so on that perturbs the “natural” ¶ order. In other words, within the conception of Nature as an organic whole ¶ or totality, there is always recourse to some uncanny agency generating ¶ disharmony that upsets the harmonic natural order. Such conceptions of ¶ being necessarily have recourse to objet a as a disruptive agency that upsets ¶ the “natural” order. Moreover, this disruptive agency, this trickster, to use ¶ Lévi-Strauss's memorable term, is treated as an accident that could return ¶ the natural order to harmony were it eradicated. As such, discourses about ¶ the existence of the World and the intrinsic harmony of nature end up ¶ repeating the friend/enemy logic analyzed so attentively by Schmitt.

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)

Insofar as withdrawal is ubiquitous, there is no reason to treat the ¶ human-object relation as metaphysically privileged. The human-object ¶ relation is not a special relation, not a unique relation, but a subset of a far ¶ more pervasive ontological truth that pertains to objects of all types. The ¶ point here is not that we should exclude inquiry into human/object relations ¶ or social/object relations, but rather that these analyses are analyses for ¶ regional ontology, for a particular domain of being, not privileged grounds ¶ of ontology as such. The issue here is thus very subtle. It is not a question ¶ of excluding the human and the social, but of decentering them from the ¶ place of ontological privilege they currently enjoy within contemporary ¶ philosophy and theory. Nor does this entail that all objects relate to other ¶ objects in exactly the same way. There are as many forms of translation as ¶ there are types of objects. Indeed, there

are as many forms of translation as ¶ there are objects. Moreover, new forms of translation come into being all ¶ the time with the emergence of new objects and with the development of ¶ objects as analyzed in chapters four and five. ¶ What onticology and, I believe, object-oriented philosophy propose ¶ is therefore a subtle shift in the distinctions governing the marked space ¶ of what philosophy and theory indicates. Far from seeking to exclude or ¶ eradicate phenomenology and bodies of cultural theory in the name of, for ¶ example, a naturalism or a scientistic materialism, object-oriented ontology aims to expand what can be indicated within the domain of philosophy and ¶ theory. Onticology and object-oriented philosophy thus find themselves in ¶ the position of receiving opposite and opposed objections from all sides. ¶ From the culturalists, we receive criticisms declaring that we are rejecting ¶ the human, the subject, meaning, signs, and the social. From the naturalists, ¶ we are accused of wooly-headed thinking that treats social entities, semiotic ¶ entities, texts, films, fictions and so on as real and autonomous entities ¶ within being.

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)

From the naturalists, by contrast, object-oriented ontologists are ¶ accused of treating a variety of psychic and cultural entities as real entities, ¶ ignoring the truth that the only real reality is the material and physical ¶ world. Put crudely, the naturalist accuses object-oriented ontology of ¶ treating as real what is merely an illusion or derivative. To the ears of ¶ the naturalist, object-oriented ontology thus looks like a form of archculturalism insofar as it treats entities like nations, groups, chairs, films, ¶ and so on as genuinely real entities. To make matters worse, the naturalist ¶ is appalled by the object-oriented thesis that these entities are irreducible ¶ to the physical, material, or natural domain. This ends up getting translated ¶ into the thesis that object-oriented ontology rejects neurology, biology, ¶ chemistry, physics and a host of other “hard sciences”. ¶ However, once again, the point is the same. The aim is not to exclude ¶ or reject the entities explored by the “hard sciences”, but to refuse a ¶ hierarchical conception of being where these entities are treated as the ¶ “really real” beings and all the others are treated as derivative illusions or ¶ mere effects. Here, again, the aim is not to limit inquiry, but to expand ¶ the domain of what can be investigated. With the naturalists, objectoriented ontology agrees that the culturalists or social constructivists have ¶ illicitly reduced nonhuman beings to cultural constructs. With the social ¶ constructivists or culturalists, however, object-oriented ontology refuses to ¶ treat social and cultural entities as mere effects of the material and physical. ¶ Rather, object-oriented ontology argues that these entities are genuinely ¶ real entities in their own right. What object-oriented ontology thus objects ¶ to is the reductivism of many naturalist approaches.

The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic engagement with Mexico over the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in a manner consistent with a Mestiza consciousness.

Aff Answers

Humans 1STThe rest of the biological world is exceptionally violent - what makes humans unique is our ability to engineer peace.Goodall & Wrangham 13 - *has directed the scientific study of chimpanzee behavior at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania since 1960, **Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University (Jane, Richard, January 4th, 2013, We, Too, Are Violent Animals http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578220002834225378.html)Where does human savagery come from? The animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, writing in Psychology Today after last month's awful events in Newtown, Conn., echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh aggression, he wrote, is "extremely rare" in nonhuman animals, while violence is merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only we could "rewild our hearts," he concluded, we might harness our "inborn goodness and optimism" and thereby return to our "nice, kind, compassionate,

empathic" original selves. If only if it were that simple. Calm and cooperative behavior indeed predominates in most species, but the idea that human aggression is qualitatively different from that of every other species is wrong. The latest report from the research site that one of us (Jane Goodall) directs in Tanzania gives a quick sense of what

a scientist who studies chimpanzees actually sees: "Ferdinand [the alpha male] is rather a brutal ruler , in that he tends to

use his teeth rather a lot…a number of the males now have scars on their backs from being nicked or gashed by his

canines …The politics in Mitumba [a second chimpanzee community] have also been bad. If we recall that: they all killed alpha-male Vincent when he reappeared injured; then Rudi as his successor probably killed up-and-coming young Ebony to stop

him helping his older brother Edgar in challenging him…but to no avail, as Edgar eventually toppled him anyway." A 2006 paper reviewed evidence from five separate chimpanzee populations in Africa, groups that have all been scientifically monitored for many years. The average "conservatively estimated risk of violent death" was 271 per 100,000 individuals per year. If that seems like a low rate, consider that a chimpanzee's social circle is limited to about 50 friends and close acquaintances. This means that chimpanzees can expect a member of their circle to be murdered once every seven years . Such a rate of violence would be intolerable in human society. The violence among chimpanzees is impressively humanlike in several ways. Consider primitive human warfare, which has been well documented around the world. Groups of hunter-gatherers who come into contact with militarily superior groups of farmers rapidly abandon war, but where power is more equal, the hostility between societies that speak different languages is almost endless. Under those

conditions, hunter-gatherers are remarkably similar to chimpanzees: Killings are mostly carried out by males, the killers tend to act in small gangs attacking vulnerable individuals, and every adult male in the society readily participates. Moreover, with hunter-gatherers as with chimpanzees, the ordinary response to encountering strangers who are vulnerable is to attack them. Most animals do not exhibit

this striking constellation of behaviors, but chimpanzees and humans are not the only species that form coalitions for killing. Other animals that use this strategy to kill their own species include group-living carnivores such as lions, spotted hyenas and wolves. The resulting mortality rate can be high: Among wolves, up to 40% of adults die

from attacks by other packs . Killing among these carnivores shows that ape-sized brains and grasping hands do not account for this

unusual violent behavior. Two other features appear to be critical: variable group size and group-held territory. Variable group size means that lone individuals sometimes encounter small, vulnerable parties of neighbors. Having group territory means that by killing neighbors, the group can expand its territory to find extra resources that promote better breeding. In these circumstances, killing makes evolutionary sense—in humans

as in chimpanzees and some carnivores. What makes humans special is not our occasional propensity to kill strangers when we think we can do so safely. Our unique capacity is our skill at engineering peace . Within

societies of hunter-gatherers (though only rarely between them), neighboring groups use peacemaking ceremonies to ensure that most of their interactions are friendly. In state-level societies, the state works to maintain a monopoly on violence. Though easily misused in the service of those who govern, the effect is benign when used to quell violence

among the governed. Under everyday conditions, humans are a delightfully peaceful and friendly species. But when

tensions mount between groups of ordinary people or in the mind of an unstable individual, emotion can lead to deadly events. There but for the grace of fortune, circumstance and effective social institutions go you and I. Instead of constructing a feel-good fantasy about the innate goodness of most people and all animals, we should strive to better understand ourselves, the good parts along with the bad.

we can have politics, but only after ontology. At this point, we are hardly political at all - it eliminates the possibility for an event.Galloway 12 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (Alexander, http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/, A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on Radical Thinking”, June 3rd 2012)I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows Harman’s anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power. That’s a classic case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go along to get along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not a politics make. By contrast, Badiou’s position is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the *first* antagonism, not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is always “trenchant” in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s “theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how “resistance is primary vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where. If you’re still skeptical just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in

Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened. That’s political

neutralization in a nutshell . In other words there is no event for Harman . And here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s recent characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology, modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on “Being Without Event.”

Separating ontology from politics causes pure passivity.Galloway 13 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (Alexander, Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 347-366, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668529, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism)In order to address these important questions I will expand the field of view and make some observations about philosophical realism.9 In this context, realism means quite simply that an external world exists independent of ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefs—although it is often also taken to entail the less simple epistemological thesis that we have direct and verifiable access to knowledge about that external world. In the wake of Kantianism and subsequent to phenomenology and structuralism, realism had essentially gone extinct in the continental tradition, despite having healthy offshoots in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of science. But things began to change around 2002. In that year Manual De Landa published a book on Gilles Deleuze,

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, stating in no uncertain terms “I am a realist”; in the same year Harman published his first

book, which proposed a realism around a so-called object-oriented philosophy Perhaps the most influential of the recent realist texts has been Meillassoux’s book After Finitude, which advocates that one move beyond what Meillassoux calls correlationism and reconcile thought with the absolute. For Meillassoux correlationism means that knowledge of the world is always the result of a correlation between subject and object. “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the

correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other,” Meillassoux writes.11 Under the system of correlationism, subjectivity and objectivity are forever bound together. Thus, one might naturally put figures like Immanuel Kant in this camp with his highly mediated model of subject and object. Phenomenology is also a key entry in the history of correlationism, as well as much of the French philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, obsessed as they were with the inability for man to move beyond the prison house of language. Postmodernism is considered to be a high water mark for

correlationism, particularly the notion, often attributed rightly or wrongly to postmodern thinkers, that the subject is ultimately at the

mercy of ideology and spectacle, behind which there exists no absolute truth or reality. For correlationism human subjectivity always has a crucial role to play; the real world doesn’t exist, or if it does we cannot have direct access to it. Meillassoux pits himself firmly against the long tradition of correlationism in continental philosophy.

For Meillassoux the real world exists, and it can be known. He endorses a so-called Copernican revolution wherein the anthropocentrism of correlationism is displaced in favor of a system in which reality is at the center, and the human is but one element in the network of the real. Levi Bryant and others have called this a flat ontology comprising a single plane , the real, within which exists human In the opening chapter of

After Finitude, titled “Ancestrality,” Meillassoux lays out the basic stakes of what a noncorrelationist position might look like by making reference to the Kantian trap that has gripped Western philosophy for some time: “Thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’. . . . We cannot represent the ‘in itself’ without it becoming ‘for us’, or as Hegel amusingly put it, we cannot ‘creep up on’ the object ‘from behind’ so as to find out what it is in itself” (AF, pp. 3–4). Meillassoux does not so much creep up on the object but posit a historical time scale outside the cognition of the human, a historical time prior to humanity altogether. Thus he speaks of the “ancestral realm” and the “arche-fossil”: “ancestral” claims are claims about things before the existence of man and therefore prior to what the phenomenologists call the “givenness” of human experience; the “arche-fossil” is the trace that allows someone to make ancestral claims. For example, radiological decay is an “arche-fossil” that allows a scientist to date prehistoric fossils. Meillassoux culminates these provocations by asking what if anything correlationism can say about such “ancestral” claims; the facts in question technically would fall prior to the subjectobject relation as such and hence prior to the model proposed by correlationism. If human thought had a beginning, what to think of history prior to human thought? Science emerges as something of a trump card, as Meillassoux poses the following question to his correlationist opponents: “how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences’ capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm?” (AF, p. 26; emphasis removed). The opening section of the book also stresses the importance of mathematics. He describes an enigma in which mathematics is granted the ability to speak about the historical past in which humanity was absent: “how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world where humanity is absent. . . . This is the enigma which we must confront: mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent” (AF, p. 26); but also earlier Meillassoux brings in mathematics during his discussion of primary qualities: “all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself” (AF, p. 3; emphasis removed). (I will return to the question of mathematics in a moment, but it is worth identifying it explicitly here.) Meillassoux’s use of the “ancestral realm” thus allows him to open up a space for a purely real world, a world that has never had a

human eye gaze upon it or a human mind think about it. “To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought,” he writes, “a world without the givenness of the world” (AF, p. 28). The phrase “givenness of the world” is a reference to how phenomenology talks about presence. It refers to the way in which the world is given into perception by a thinking being. “Our task, by way of contrast,” writes Meillassoux, “consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given.” The holy grail for Meillassoux is therefore existence without givenness. He understands the absolute as something “capable of existing whether we exist or not” (AF, p. 28). How should we evaluate Meillassoux and his intervention into contemporary philosophy?13Afew issues spring to mind, all concerning Meillassoux’s relationship to politics and history. I will address two criticisms first in relatively vague terms, then move to a third, more pointed critique. First is the question

of metaphysical necessity itself, be it in the form of essentialism, the absolute, a natural reality, or universal truths. All of these things were at some time or another the antagonist of what one calls critical theory in the broadest sense, that is

to say the practice of sociocultural critique invented by Karl Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century and practiced in various ways by the Frankfurt school, structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural studies, and certain kinds of queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory up through the end of the twentieth century. In much of this work, essence and truth themselves are the antagonists, to be replaced by constructed identities and contingent worlds. (Recall how Marx and Friedrich Engels, in part two of

the Communist Manifesto, promised to do away with truth!) With the new speculative realism, and perhaps also in a

different way with Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, one risks switching from a system of subjective essentialism (patriarchy, logocentrism, ideological apparatuses) to a system of “objective” essentialism (an

unmediated real, infinity, being as mathematics, the absolute, the bubbling of chaos). Is it time to trot out the old

antiessentialist arguments from our Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial forebears? Isn’t Meillassoux’s

metaphysical essentialism—his support of the universality of contingency (which in its impotent universality becomes meaningless), his

pursuit of the absolute, his endorsement of a pure real—just as repugnant as other brands of

metaphysical essentialism ? Thus we must confront directly the fundamental provocation of the new philosophical realism.

For, contra the tradition of materialist critical theory since Marx, much of today’s realism claims that ontologies should not be political; it claims that ontological speculations must be separated from political ones. Such choruses are being heard more and more frequently today. I have no doubt that many of the figures associated with today’s

philosophical realism would view themselves as politicized souls of some caliber. And the argument is often heard that the uncoupling of the ontological from the political is a neutral act in and of itself and in so doing casts no aspersion as such on the political project. One simply can do metaphysics over here, while doing politics over there. Furthermore, promulgators of such arguments often laud the uncoupling as a feature of realism, not a liability, because it allows the

political to persist inside its own autonomous sphere, unsullied by the nitty-gritty questions of Being and appearing. Yet the

uncoupling of the ontological realm from the political realm is not entirely neutral, for it arrives less as an innocuous attempt to tidy up the cluttered landscape of philosophical discourse ( so that

one’s talk of Being will not be tainted by one’s talk of politics ) than as an ideological strategy bent unwittingly or

not on the elimination of competing discourses. Recall what must be discarded when overturning correlationism. One must discard

phenomenology certainly, but one must also throw out social constructivism and the various fields that rely

on a socialconstructivist methodology including much of second- and third-wave feminism, certain

kinds of critical race theory, the project of identity politics in general, theories of postmodernity,

and much of cultural studies. Phenomenology has a politics, to be sure: beyond the ravages of modern life, the return to a

more poetic state of being guided by care and solicitude. Social constructivism has one too: throw out the violence of patriarchy, logocentrism, and all the rest. Have no illusions, this is what is at stake with the recent return to the absolute evident in theoretical discourse from Meillassoux to Badiou, and even evident in other authors such as Žižek and Susan Buck-Morss.14 To be sure, certain of these theorists understand the stakes and therefore scaffold their newfound universalism with a robust and often militant political theory—Badiou and Žižek, one shall re- member, are in no uncertain terms advocating communism, and Buck- Morss herself has a robust

political consciousness. Fading violets they are not. The question becomes more pressing however when a

philosopher uncouples Being from politics in order to withdraw from the project of political

critique altogether.

Answers to ontology first/discourse first