Of Force and Consequence

If we are to be proper ontographers, investigating the nature of beings in the light of being, then we must give things their proper due. That is to say, things in this world are not only ‘objects’ of our consciousness – they impinge, burst forth and make differences that directly affect us and other entities even when they are obscure, partial and mediated. This affective potency is what Jane Bennett calls “the force of things”.

I consider the force, power or efficacy of things as emanations (cf. Tom Sparrow) of an entity’s material-energetic properties expressed in relation. And pragmatically reckoned, the embodied, consequential force of things can provide us with guidance and primary significances that exceed our primate intentionalities. But in order to navigate these forces and consequences - to navigate, cope and find our way in the ecology of the real – we need to think and engage things as much as possible on their own terms.

As Levi Bryant recently put it:

“[T]hing thought” is absolutely crucial to ecological thought. As Morton reminds us in Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought, ecology refers not to a thinking of “nature”. No, ecology is everywhere insofar as imbrications of objects take place everywhere. The anthropocentric index of contemporary thought has had the tendency of blinding us to ecology by locating all agency in human minds that project meanings, uses, and intentions on to objects. To investigate the world here amounts to investigating our externalized selves. As a result, we do not ask what things themselves do. Yet if it is true that being is characterized by immanence, this will not do. We need conceptual resources that will also draw our attention to what computers do to us, and not just how we use computers. We need conceptual resources that lead us to ask what chemical processes are taking place in landfills, and not just how landfills are effects of our consumption and the compulsion that arises under capital to perpetually consume new and different things. We need conceptual resources that expose thought to the differences that things themselves contribute. Thing thinking draws our attention to these strange strangers in our midst and helps us to avoid the habit of seeing them merely as vehicles of our intentions or societies intentions. [source]

Here Bryant captures the indispensible insight of the object-oriented lens: the irreducible determinations of pure difference. Every thing that makes a difference is a participant in the parliament of causal efficacy and meaningful action.

Such a ‘democratic’ consideration of temporal individuality (substantiality) opens us up to a dynamic cosmopolitics of force, affect and pervading consequences on all levels of operation and flow. The question of ‘what is to be done?’, then, becomes at once the central concern of all the sciences and humanities and their praxis.