Exploded Views and Onto-Specificity

Levi Bryant has another outstanding post up titled, “Heterontology”, that cuts right to the bones of a proper ontographic project. In fact, it’s becoming clearer to me that, despite some minor objections, I am increasingly in support of what Ian Bogost and Bryant are articulating.

Here is Bryant arguing for an overcoming of “the object” in philosophical thought - the idealized signifier that glosses over the specific nature of real-world entities:

“…the point is to force ourselves to confront the bewildering diversity of what exists. Us philosophers, us theorists, have a rather nasty habit of referring to things like “the object”, “the subject”, “matter”, etc. There are those, often of a Hegelian bent, that see the example as beneath the splendor of philosophical thought, as a failure to achieve “the concept”. However, the truth of the matter is that “the concept” is always, in its practical deployment, a disguised example. Adopting a pretentious rhetoric of the pure concept independent of all empirical or particularist contamination, the theorist claims to be thinking the “as such” of “the object”, “the subject”, “matter”, etc., claiming to get at that which is common to all objects, all subjects, all matter, and so on. Yet, lurking within the latent text of the theorist’s manifest text is always a privileged example of “the object”, “the subject”, “matter as such” that comes to serve as the prototype of all objects, subjects, and matter…

There is something messianic in [talking about abstract ‘Events’], indicative of a yearning for a non-contaminated pure and free point within assemblages that somehow detaches or subtracts itself the messiness of the world and therefore attains an Archimedean point free of ideology. Again, the problem here is that it draws our attention away from the nuts and bolts of situations, how these compositions are structured and organized. Instead we fetishize an “evental declaration” or a Bartleby-like act and say to hell with any concrete analysis or understanding of situations. We sure as hell don’t engage in the sort of careful historical analysis that Marx develops in Capital or that Diamond develops in Guns, Germs, and Steel, or that Foucault develops in his later work.”

I think the kind of commitment to specificity (or what i like to call ‘onto-specificity’) Bryant argues for here is precisely the kind of commitment needed in order to understand the multi-scaled complexity and affect dynamics at play in real social situations. The ‘devil’ is in the details, as they say, and it is only in the temporal unfolding of actual encounters between things (flesh, buildings, texts, bacteria, technologies, etc, etc.) and assemblages, where we get to know how particular situations come into being; how they are perpetuated, and how they are affected and affect things in the world.

This particularity of things is also why I advocate so strongly for locating the efficacy, or potency, or powers of entities (or objects) and assemblages within their inherent and immanent properties, as they unfold in relation. There is, for me, no point outside of immanent temporal actuality (an actuality not necessarily given to a cognizant entity) where we can isolate ‘essences’. We can abstract points of reference from dynamics systems and reify them, or mathematically represent entities as virtual phase states or attractors, but without the temporal composite ‘materials’ (or properties) of actual entities or assemblages there is no-thing upon which to speculate, or ascribe essential, or withdrawn, or primary qualities to. Everything, in other words, is ‘local manifestation’ first and virtual, or ideal secondarily abstracted.

To pile on, Bryant’s entire argument against the “yearning for a non-contaminated pure and free point within assemblages that somehow detaches or subtracts itself the messiness of the world” is EXACTLY the sort of argument I would like to make against ‘transcendental metaphysics’ in general. Not only is the search for some ontological ‘structure’ in the world abstracted from the mix and mangle of particular things superfluous to being and coping in a world of particulars, but its outcome can only ever be a reflection of what is undeniably derivative from hominid brains.

However, this does not mean that experience and world are correlates! The world itself poignantly makes its own case for its independence from our thinking it through our encounters of obstruction or mortality - and indeed through what Meillassoux charmingly refers to as ‘arche-fossils’. Non-human entities have their own efficacy, and traces of those realities are indeed everywhere.

Instead, what the irreducibility, particularity and property efficacy of things and assemblages entails is that ontography – as epistemic an methodological project – is prior to ontology, and completely anathema to transcendental metaphysics.

But where does one begin developing a proper ontographic imagination? Bryant, following DeLanda and others, suggests starting by considering all existing entities from an equal ontological vantage:

“...the heterontology of flat ontology argues for the existence of a plurality of different types of entities ranging from atoms to fennel to institutions, signs, works, artistic artifacts and so on. OOO doesn’t wish to restrict the variety of entities we find in the world, treating all other entities as derivative of some foundational sort of entity such as atoms or language or intentions of a transcendental subject, but rather to expand the domain of what counts as an entity, a genuinely real being, and to think of interactions among these entities in a composition.”

Ontography, then, is the methodological praxis of heterontological sensitivities.

Riffing off Ian Bogost’s notion of an “exploded view”, Bryant suggests that in order to get at the nature of things we will first have to sort through the various scales and compositions of objects and assemblages to find out exactly how the world hangs or does not hang together:

"Exploded view schematics show how things are put together. And in knowing something about how things are put together you also learn both where the weak parts of that composition lie and what points need to be strengthened.

One crucial point to note is that exploded view schematics are absolutely specific. They don’t speak in generalities like “capitalism” or “racism” or “sexism” or “grills”, but rather of how this particular composition is put together."

It seems the ‘exploded view’ is precisely the kind of analytical holism required for a world of complexity, where the mesh of encounters between ephemeral objects create spasms of actual affects and events, each with their own particular properties and efficacy, shaping and unfolding the historical (cosmological) ecology of things.

Towards the “things themselves” indeed.