David Roden on Assemblages and Emergence

Below is David Roden commenting on everything from micro-causality, macro-processes, and DeLanda and Kant to the crucial differences between properties and capacities. It's an interesting read from an interesting philosopher. Roden blogs at enemyindustry:

Flat Ontology II: A Worry About Emergence

by David Roden

Summary: if you want to distinguish assemblages from aggregates in a flat ontology you need a metaphysics of emergence. But real emergence may not work unless we deny that parts of assemblages are separate from the whole. This seems to undermine the point of assemblages where, it is said, the parts are logically exterior from one another can play elsewhere.

The idea of a flat ontology was taken over by Manuel Delanda from Gilles Deleuze. As Levi-Bryant notes in the Speculative Turn, it derives from the Deleuzean thesis of the univocity of being: viz that Being is always predicated of entities in the same sense (Bryant 2010, 269). A flat ontology is one in which no entity is ontologically more fundamental than anything else. Otherwise put, flat ontologies can be opposed to hierarchical ontologies:

[While] an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status (DeLanda 2004, p. 58).

In a flat ontology the powers and dispositions of an entity are explained with reference to interactions between the particulars that compose or otherwise relate to it. It is never the result of entities of one kind being pushed around by a privileged being like a god, a transcendental subject, a natural state or its associated species essences (Sober 1980).

However, the behaviour of complex entities like organisms, people or societies must be more than the sum of their micro-interactions of these are to be genuine presences in the world and not accountancy tools for tracking the aggregate behaviour of their components. The macro-level properties of complex beings must thus be emergent from and not merely resultants of these interactions. Unless a concept of emergence can explain how complexes derive their powers from their parts without being reducible to their aggregate behaviour, it is of little value to a flat ontology. Similarly, as Graham Harman emphasizes in his commentary on Delanda, a flat ontology recognizes no ontological primacy of natural over so-called artificial kinds. Both kinds of kind should be viewed as having equal ontological weight to throw around (Harman 2008, 372).

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