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Interview: Levi Bryant

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Vultures are known for munching on the dead. So, what happens when the vultures become the dead, en masse? Kris Coffield is an independent political theory scholar from Hawaii and legislative director for the IMUAlliance. His research interests include objectoriented ontology, political aesthetics, critical theory, (in)securitization, biopolitics, indigenous politics, jurisprudential poetics, issues of governmentality and international relations. Email: fracturedpolitics@gmail.com Though it may seem like an improbability, it happened in India, where, in the last decade, populations of the Oriental white-backed vulture, long-billed vulture, and slender-billed vulture declined by as much as 95 percent. Since many vultures play a key role in Parsi "sky burial" ceremonies and carcass decomposition, their loss disrupts entire ecosystems, altering animal interactions and increasing rates of certain diseases. Too easily and frequently, vulture endangerment has been dismissed as a by-product of a culture that extends legal protections to cattle. As Levi Bryant contends, however, cultural explanations fail to account for the impact of extradiscursive realities that evade the boundaries of human subjectivity. Culture is at work, yes, but it's not all that is at work. In an effort to untangle reality from the limits of discursive critique, Bryant has crafted his own form of objectoriented ontology, called "onticology," which he explains below. Q: You've written that modern continental philosophy's focus on discourse and textuality, which you identify as an "anti-realist trend," fails to fully account for twenty-first century events, such as ecological catastrophe and the commingling of technology and corporeality. What is the "speculative turn," and how does it attempt to redress the inadequacies of recent continental thought? Perhaps the best way to understand the speculative turn is by contrast with the critical turn. The critical turn, first announced by Kantbut already evident in one form or another with figures like Descartes and Humewas marked by a shift from metaphysics to epistemology where we are first to interrogate our access to the world prior to making any positive claims about the being of the world. The key question of the critical turn was what entitles me to such and such a claim? For example, if I claim, with Newton, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction," what is it that entitles me to claim this? How do I know this? Clearly I dont experience every action and reaction, yet I nonetheless hold that this is a necessary truth. How is it possible to make such a judgment and know that it is true such that it necessarily holds for all times and places? We can understand the critical turn as interrogating our access to such truths and evaluating whether or not we are entitled to our claims. It is a reflection not on what is, but on how we know what is. In other words, the critical turn is the reflexive turn. Historically we can see why the critical turn arose. On the one hand, Europe was wracked by religious warfare among the different factions of Christianity. It was a gristmill in which people were tearing one another to shreds. These religious orientations were, in their turn, premised on the claims of dogmatic theology. In part, the critical turn can be seen as an interrogation of whether or not we can really know these things and what, exactly, we can know in the domain of theology. If it could be shown that we lack any access to the domain of the divine, then the authority of these positions could be undercut, they could be relegated to the domain of belief or faith, thereby rendering them personal and bringing them out of the domain of politics. This would contribute to peace. Here we get the great critiques of religion and superstition in figures such as Spinoza, Hume, Diderot, and Kant. On the other hand, we had the rise of the new science. The critical turn could be seen as an inquiry into the nature of knowledge, how we know, and the limits of knowledge as a ground for scientific knowledge. The critical turn was a reflection on knowledge. Rather than naively making claims about the world, the critical turn instead reflected on the mind that knows, how it knows, and the limits of that knowledge. This orientation of philosophy produced countless variations. Thus in Kant we get a reflection on the nature of mind and how it structures reality. Later we got the phenomenologists who bracketed the reality of the world and instead reflected on lived intentionality. We then got those who took the linguistic turn, reflecting on how language structures reality. In all these cases, reflection was not a reflection on the world itself, but on our access to the world, our minds, our language, our intentionality, our history, and how these things structure reality. These positions have inevitably tended toward anti-realism, or the thesis that we can only speak of the world as it is for us, and can never know whether the world is this way in itself. The world becomes bracketed and instead the focus is on mind, power, and language. There is much to be commended in the critical turn and clearly the speculative realists are not calling for a return to pre-critical philosophy where, for example, it is held that the existence of God can be proven, the immortality of the soul, and so on. However, it is my view that the critical turn has had systematic effects in social and political theory that foreclose the exploration of the role played by certain factors in social assemblages. We focus on all those things that fall on the human side of the equation (mind, power, meaning, language) and treat the entities of the world as mere vehicles of our significations, as in the case of Baudrillard in his marvelous System of Objects. Here, objects are merely screens upon which we project our meanings, intentions, power, and language, giving them the structure they have. Objects themselves dont do anything, but merely carry our intentions in much the same way that theres nothing intrinsic to a dollar bill that makes it a dollar bill, but rather it is human intentions and social forces that make a dollar bill a dollar bill. Take the way we analyze a text under the critical turn, for example. The first step is to bracket what the text is about or the way in which it naively purports to reference the world. Once we have bracketed the referential dimension of the text, we adopt what might be called a surface reading." A surface reading is not a superficial reading, but rather a

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kriscoffield kriscoffield And...a repeat early morning tweet, just to be safe: interstitialjournal.com. It hath a Twitter, too: @Interstitiality. 9 hours ago reply retweet favorite kriscoffield For the record, my bill, SB 2576, doesn't carry a financial liability of any kind, but it's got a FIN tag. So, we limbo. 23 hours ago reply retweet favorite kriscoffield Senate must approve the budget before bills with w/ fiscal liabilities can be passed. Thus, we wait. 23 hours ago reply retweet favorite kriscoffield In case anyone missed my early morning tweet, here's the new my journal: interstitialjournal.com. It hath a Twitter, too: @Interstitiality. 23 hours ago reply retweet favorite

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reading that brackets the way the text refers to the world and instead investigates how the text constructs its object. In this way it critiques the reality of the object and shows the socio-linguistic forces at work in the construction of the object. For example, we might show how gender is constructed through discourse and thereby render new possibilities for living our sexuality available by de-naturalizing gender and sexual orientation. Once again, there is much to commend in these techniques and strategies and I, personally, have no desire to abandon them tout court, but they do have their limitations. In particular, the critical turn gives the impression that the sole site of political engagement that seeks to produce leftist change is the domain of ideas. Insofar as objects are vehicles of discourse, ideas, language, etc., and contribute nothing positive of their own, it follows that it is enough to critique ideology to produce change. Change the ideas and you open the space of change. Ideology critique is absolutely indispensible, but it is not enough. In my view, we are not only trapped in the prison-house of ideology, but our lives are also restricted and oppressive conditions are also reproduced by all sorts of material conditions as well. We need a theoretical framework that both allows us to integrate the discoveries of the critical turn and that is also capable of treating nonhuman entities as positive realities (and not mere vehicles) in their own right. In my view, the speculative turn, above all, allows us to speak of entities apart from humans, as entities in their own right, rather than as mere vehicles of our language, discourse, concepts, and so on. Take the example of the vulture apocalypse thats been unfolding in India for the last couple of decades. You find everything here. About fifteen years ago, vulture populations in India began declining precipitously, reaching near extinction levels. This has been a serious issue. In India there are carcass fields where the bodies of cows and other animals are dumped when they die. They are disposed of in this way rather than buried or burnt for religious reasons. Likewise, Zoroastrians do not bury or cremate their human dead for religious reasons, but rather place them in a place called The Tower of Silence where they decay. The vulturesand there was a time when there were millions of themserved a vital function by eating these carcasses and the bodies of the dead. With the decline of the vultures, dog populations exploded as they began eating the cow bodies in the carcass fields. There were two consequences of this. First, epidemics of rabies emerged. Second, leopard populations began to explode and attacks on people rose because the leopards began hunting the dogs and entering villages. What caused the population explosion that has brought vultures to the point of extinction? It turns out that the vultures were suffering from visceral gout brought on by a mild pain killer given to cows known as diclofenac. It is against Indian law to kill cows or cause them pain, so farmers would give their cows this pain killer to ease their suffering. When the cows finally died, the pain killer would then enter the vultures that ate their carcasses. Fortunately, the Indian government has now banned the use of this drug in livestock. In this example we find a complex network of entities: humans, cows, vultures, dogs, leopards, laws, religious beliefs, governments, and the pain killer diclofenac. Clearly culture in the form of religious beliefs and laws play a crucial role in this collective. But this state of affairs is not merely an ideology, a narrative, or a discursive construction. It has elements of ideology, narrative, and discursive construction, but leopards, dogs, vultures, diclofenac, human bodies, etc., are absolutely real. If we focus on the human side of the equation alone we will miss all these. How many of our political struggles are poorly understood because we are so focused on the ideological and discursive that we miss these other realities? How many political opportunities are missed because we believe it is enough to critique and thereby dont attend to how enhancing something like water supplies and sanitation, for example, might change the lives of people and create material circumstances in which they can challenge oppressive social structures? We need, I believe, a theoretical framework strong enough to encompass both these discursive elements and these material elements. It is precisely this that my onticology aims to deliver. Q: Object-oriented ontology, or onticology, doesn't disavow human agency or human structures, but situates humans as one being among many others on an immanent plane. How, then, does onticology deal with the question of how knowledge is formed with regard to the autonomous reality of objects? Epistemology has tended, implicitly, to adopt the model of the mirror when posing questions of knowledge. This schema is common to both nave realist and anti-realist epistemologies. To know an object is to mirror that object. We call this representation. In nave realist epistemologies, the mind or discourse mirrors objects as they are independent of us. In anti-realist epistemologies it is pointed out that mind, discourse, language, and so on projects itself onto the world such that what we take to be reality independent of us is really our own alienated projection. I reject this schema. On the one hand, following Graham Harman, I argue that objects are withdrawn. Ill have more to say about this in a moment, but for now its sufficient to note that 1) withdrawal is not unique to humans, but rather all entities are withdrawn from one another. Carrots are no less withdrawn from the Earth than they are withdrawn from humans. Following Kant we can thus say that no object ever encounters another object as it is in-itself. Rather, every object encounters every other object as phenomena." Where Kant saw this as unique to the relation of the human mind to objects, object-oriented ontology treats this as a ubiquitous mode of relation for all objects regardless of whether or not humans are involved. Consequently, 2) objects cannot be represented as they are in themselves. What we know are not objects as they are in themselves, but objects in terms of what I call their local manifestations." I distinguish between two dimensions or aspects of objects: their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. The virtual proper being of an object is its withdrawn dimension and consists of its powers, capacities to act, or potentials. The local manifestations of an object are the actualized qualities of an object under particular conditions. These manifestations are local because they occur under particular local material conditions. They are manifestations because they are the actualization of particular properties or qualities. My thesis is that the substantiality of objects does not consist of their qualities, that objects are not bundles of qualities, but rather that it consists of their powers, or what an object can do. Qualities, by contrast, are acts on the part of objects. Take the example of fire. On the one hand, fire possesses all sorts of virtual powers or capacities for acting in a variety of ways. On the other hand, fire can manifest itself locally in a variety of ways. On the planet Earth fire dances toward the sky, leaping upward. On the international space station, by contrast, fire flows in waves like water due to the lack of gravity. Rolling like waves and dancing upward are two local manifestations of one and the same thing that occur under different environmental conditions. Now lets return to the representationalist model of mirroring. We will notice two things: First, knowledge is conceived on a model of passive specularity or looking at the world. These are theories of knowledge that privilege vision or looking at things without interacting with them. And looking, as Kant outlines so well in the Critique of Judgment, is a stance of passivity or non-action. We behold the spectacle without engaging it. Second, these models tend to privilege qualities. To know an object is to know its qualities. Thus, for example, in models of knowledge based on relations of genus and species we might begin with the genus animal and divide it into the species of two-footed and fourfooted. Being two-footed and four-footed are qualities. To know a particular animal is therefore to know its qualities. Knowledge here is basically modeled on our ability to identify and recognize, as in the case of taxonomical grids. Although vision is clearly a component of knowledge, I believe it is, in many respects, the most insignificant dimension of our knowledge. I suspect philosophers have historically been led to representational accounts of knowledge modeled on mirroring due to the privileged class position they have tended to enjoy separating them largely from manual labor, as well as the sedentary lifestyle that comes with scholarship. Such modes of life tend to privilege vision. The problem with this model is that it thoroughly distorts knowledge acquisition as it actually takes place in the sciences, affective/cognitive development from childhood to adulthood, and learning. To know an object is to know its powers and we infer the powers of an object by acting upon it and discerning how it acts or locally manifests in response to our action. The great discovery of the Scientific Revolution was the

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experimental method. The experimental method broke down the old opposition between theory and practice, siding with the servant boy in Platos Meno, and discovered that we will only ever know the world through acting upon it. In acting upon entities through instruments and the variation of the circumstances in which entities exist we provoke various local manifestations in entities are therefore able to develop a diagram of their powers or capacities. Take CERN. The supercollider is not secondary to our knowledge of particles, but rather is an instrument for acting on particles under high energy conditions that produces local manifestations (the events that take place when particles collide) allowing us to infer the sorts of entities that exist and their powers or capacities for acting. What we learn is that if x takes place, then y will take place. What we know is thus not objects per sethey are, after all, withdrawnbut rather what might be called action schemas. The qualities or local manifestations of an object are themselves the result of interactions between objects. These local manifestations are, in their turn, acts on the part of the object. Take the blue of my coffee mug. As I respond to this interview I am sitting outside in the sunshine. In this light, my coffee mug is a particular brilliant shade of blue. Were I to go inside and sit at my desk, the blue of my mug we be deep and dark, losing the brilliant blue it enjoyed in the sunlight. Our tendency is to say that the mug is blue. Yet in reality whatever particular shade of blue the mug embodies is an event that takes place in the mug through its interaction with various different wavelengths of light. With different wavelengths you get different colors. All qualities, I hold, are of this interactive nature. Our knowledge is a knowledge of these exo-relations, these interactions among objects. Q: There's some debate, it seems, over whether not imaginary objectsIan Bogost once used the example of Harry Potter and others have discussed national bordersare real, to be given status within objectoriented ontology. What's your take on this, and how do you determine the reality of an object more generally? My position on fictional objectnot imaginary objectshas generated a lot of controversy. I hold that fictional objects are real entities in their own right. What do I mean by this? I certainly dont mean that there is a human being named Harry Potter that exists, eats, pays taxes, and that we could someday meet. That would be absurd. My point is that texts arent simply about something, but also are something. We must distinguish between the referential dimension of any text or what it is about and its status as a being in its own right. Referentially Harry Potter doesnt refer to anything. There are no entities depicted in the text that exist out there in the world. The events that took place in the text did not take place, and so on. Nonetheless, as a text, Harry Potter is a real thing that circulates throughout the world and does all sorts of things. Lets return to the example of India. At the risk of offending people, its unlikely that cows are reincarnated ancestors. That is, its likely that this belief is false. Nonetheless, this belief circulates throughout the world producing all sorts of real effects such as preventing people from eating cows, leading them not to bury and burn cows, leading them to inject them with diclofenac to ease their suffering, and many other things besides. Insofar as fictions are capable of producing real effects and insofar as they dont reside in any one person's mind, I argue that they ought to be called real. Here its important to distinguish between the reality of an object and how we know the reality of an object. The reality of an object is quite independent of whether or not it produces any effects or differences in the world. An object might not affect any other object, human or otherwise, and still be entirely real. However, I argue that we infer the reality of an object through the differences or effects it produces. Returning to the issue of knowledge, we infer the existence of an object through varying the circumstances in which it acts. We can, however, be mistaken in these inferences. Phlogiston is a good example. Johann Becher proposed the existence of another object, phlogiston, within objects to account for their combustibility and ability to rust in 1617. Phlogiston would be that object that is lost when objects burn or rust. So here we have the inference of the reality or existence of an object based on a difference: the loss of weight. The problem was that we subsequently discovered that many metals gain weight when burnt and that they also gain weight when they rust. This led scientists to abandon the theory that phlogiston exists. There is no royal road to the discovery of objects. We can be mistaken as to whether or not certain objects exist, can confuse different types of objects with one another (fictional objects can, for example, be confused with material objects, as in the case of evoking Zeus to explain lighting), and can believe that we are before one type of object when we actually encounter a plurality of objects. Q: What is the "withdrawal" of objects and how does this ground your notion of dark or quasi-dark objects? Moreover, how might these objects figure within emancipatory political projects, if at all? Is use the term withdrawal in a somewhat different sense than Harman. For Harman, withdrawal means that objects are independent of all their relations such that they never touch or relate to one another. For me, by contrast, objects are capable of relating, but are also external to the relations in the sense that they can break with current relations and enter into new relations. With Harman I thus hold that objects are independent in the sense that they are not constituted by their relations, while contrary to Harman I hold that objects can enter into relations with other objects. For me, withdrawal thus means two things. On the one hand, withdrawal refers to the virtual dimension of objects. The virtual dimension of objects or their powers is forever withdrawn from other objects. Not only do objects have all sorts of powers that may or may not ever lead to manifestations or actualizations (a person might never get a tan because they live their entire life locked in a dungeon), but also powers as such are never themselves manifested. That is, the qualities an object manifests never resemble the powers that it possesses. On the other hand, withdrawal, for me, refers to the way in which objects relate to one another. Objects never directly encounter other objects as they are, but rather encounter other objects in terms of their own enclosure or organization. Take the example of hitting a piece of wood and a stone with a wooden mallet such as is used when playing the zylophone. The sound (a local manifestation) the mallet produces is different in the case of the stone and the piece of wood. This is because the organization of these entities are produced. The point is that in interactions causes are never transmitted univocally, but rather the entity being affected by another entity always contributes something to the local manifestation that is produced. Now I tentatively distinguish between four broad types of objects: Dark objects, dim objects, bright objects, and rogue objects. The concept of dark objects allows us to think objects that are so utterly withdrawn that they produce no local manifestations whatsoever. We, of course, have no idea whether or not dark objects exist because if they do they dont manifest themselves in any way. Theyre entirely unrelated. The point is that their existence is an ontological possibility if it is true that objects are withdrawn. Dim objects would be objects that only lightly manifest themselves in an assemblage of objects. The neutrino is a nice example of a dim object. Because it has a neutral electric charge it passes through most familiar matter without producing any effect whatsoever. Our vultures would also be an example of a dim object as they have almost completely disappeared in India. It only occasionally interacts with more familiar forms of matter producing a brief flash. Bright objects would be objects that strongly manifest themselves in situations. Cell phones, for example, are today a very bright object, appearing ubiquitously throughout the world and producing all sorts of profound changes in how people live and interact with one another. Finally, there are rogue objects. These are objects that arent locked in any particular assemblage or constellation of objects, but which rather wander in and out of assemblages modifying these assemblages in a variety of ways. Scientists have recently discovered planets that arent attached to any particular solar system, but wandering throughout the galaxy. Its hypothesized that black holes of this sort might exist as well. Solomon Maimon is an example of a rogue object due to how he wandered about Europe, careers, and intellectual spaces. Rogue objects are possible because objects are external to their terms. The concept of withdrawal, local manifestation, and dark objects have, I believe, a variety of political implications. In my sorting of objects into dark objects, dim objects, bright objects, and rogue objects, Im deeply indebted to Badious logic

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of appearances as developed in Logic of Worlds and elsewhere. Badiou defines the existence of an object in terms of the intensity of its appearance in a world or situation. While I hold that whether or not an object manifests itself in a world is irrelevant to whether it exists or is real, Badious conception of appearance nonetheless is helpful in comprehending the distributions of power in political situations. Dim objects, for example, are often oppressed objects that are limited in their power of acting in a situation. Here we might think of the position of workers and wage earners in American politics. From the standpoint of government policy they scarcely appear at all. This sorting of objects can help to draw our attention to these distributions of power, the mechanisms by which the manifestation of certain objects is dimmed, and strategies we might adopt for increasing the intensity of their manifestations. Q: How is the question of difference conceived within onticology and how does it relate to processes of becoming, particularly with regard to nonhuman beings? We often think of difference as a difference between two things. We say, for example, that sunflowers are different than daisies. Here we begin from the premise of self-identical beings that can then be distinguished with respect to their qualities. Here difference is conceived in terms of negation. A difference signifies that something is not something else. By contrast, following Deleuze, I have tried to think an affirmative and positive conception of difference. In this connection, beings are differences in and through existing, they differ from themselves, and they produce differences. Lets take the first and third form of difference first. Suppose that there was a universe in which the only thing that existed was a single sound or musical note. In this universe, no other thing exists beyond this note; no particles, no planets, no stars, etc. In such a universe, there would be nothing for this note to differ from, nor would there be anyone to hear the note or experience it, yet this note would still exist and would be a positive difference in its own right. The point here is that a difference need not differ from anything, it need not be distinguished from anything, in order to be the difference that it is. In Deleuzes example, the temperature at which water boils is a pure positivity, an irreducible reality in its own right, even if no other temperatures ever occur from which this temperature might be distinguished. Clearly such differences are very difficult to talk and think about because we must distinguish things to refer to them, but that is not grounds for suggesting that such differences dont exist. The limitations of our ability to talk about such things doesnt legislate whether or not they exist. If beings are to exist and are withdrawn they must possess such differences. Otherwise, they would be nothing at all. Affirmative difference must therefore precede negativity or negation and entities must sustain themselves in and through their differences. Second, I argue that entities differ from and in themselves. Difference should be understood not as a static adjective, but as a verb or activity in the process of differing. In my view, the substantiality of entities is such that they are perpetually self-differing as a result of the processes unfolding within them. That is, they are all perpetually in a process of becoming. For this reason I see no opposition between substance and process, being and becoming. To be a substance is to be a process. To be a process is to be a substance. Becoming is a way of being and being is a way of becoming. Every entity is haunted by its own internal entropy or tendency to disintegrate. When we hear the term entropy our tendency is to immediately think of heat death. But entropy is actually a measure of order over time within a system. Highly ordered systems have a low degree of entropy, while highly disordered systems have a high degree of entropy. Highly ordered systems are what I call objects. Over the course of time every object faces the specter of entropy or the threat of disorder. It is this that leads objects to differ from and in-themselves. In order for an object to continue to exist it must, at every moment, sustain its order and these processes are processes of self-differing. The identity of an object is a product of its self-differing. In this respect, we have objects which are capable of actively fighting entropy, such as organisms, tornadoes, and societies, while on the other hand we have objects that only passively resist entropy, such as rocks, stars, and so on. Yet in all these cases there is a self-differing becoming that constitutes the substantiality of the object across time. We shouldnt think of the substantiality of objects as a fixed and static thing, but rather as a thread across time that carries its history along with it. Finally, in many circumstances objects have the capacity to produce differences by affecting other objects. Not all objects can affect all other objects. Put differently, objects are only selectively open to one another. I cannot, for example, assemble my daughters toy chest by talking to it. My daughters toy chest is closed to speech and therefore cannot be affected by speech. Rather, I have to use my hands and tools, my body, to affect her toy chest. Objects are selectively open to other objects in all sorts of ways and this selective openness defines the manner in which they can be affected by other objects and can affect other objects. Q: Finally, given onticology's view that objects are composed of other objects, are objects severable or reducible to the relations comprising themselves, in your view, and, if not, what impact could this mereological hypothesis have upon our understanding of political systems, as well as those operating within and constituting such systems? The tendency of contemporary leftist political theory is to understand objects as constituted by their relations such that objects are nothing in and of themselves apart from their relations. From the perspective of Marxist and ecological thought, this tendency is understandable. Neoliberal political thought conceives us as independent, self-enclosed agents or subjects such that we are entirely responsible for our own lives and are not influenced or limited by social circumstances. For the neoliberal, the person born in extreme poverty in a trailer park in Appalachia and the person born to a multi-millionaire enjoy exactly the same freedom. If the person born in the trailer park grows up and continues to live in poverty, thats their fault and results from a failure to work hard. Likewise, those opposed to environmental activism tend to present events in the environment as unrelated to one another. Not surprisingly, leftists and environmentalists are keen to emphasize relations, arguing that relations are internal to and constitutive of objects, as relational networks are key sites of struggle. The problem is that if relations are internal to and constitutive of objects, its difficult to see how any change is possible. As Harman has argued, relationism is actually a right-wing position, not a leftist position. Harman contrasts the example of Burke and the Jacobins during the French Revolution. It was Burke who argued that relations are internal to objects such that there is a natural organic order of society. By contrast, the Jacobins argued that we can break with existing regimes of relations so as to reform society. We see this pattern operative throughout the history of conservative thought. Plato argues for a natural organic order of society in which people within society are naturally ranked in various ways. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church Fathers argued for a natural order of society where people are ordered in a necessary way. Defenders of free markets perpetually argue for the naturalness of these markets, claiming that catastrophe will occur if we intervene in any way. Right-wing thought perpetually argues that relations are intrinsic and natural features of beings, rather than contingent arrangements. There are, it is said, natural orderings between men and women, different ethnic groups, different classes, and so on. If change is to be possible, then it is necessary that entities be capable of breaking with their current relations and reordering them. An adequate theory of leftist political change thus requires two elements: It must explain how it is possible to break with existing relations and it must explain how entities are limited or trapped in particular fields of existing relations. The theory of withdrawal gives us the minimal ontological conditions for breaking with relations. Insofar as entities are independent of their relations, insofar as relations are external to objects, every object can, in principle, break with their relations. In this regard, an entity can be part of a larger scale object such as a society or institution while nonetheless being an independent entity in its own right. As such, it is capable of challenging the larger scale object to which it belongs and breaking with that object. Of course, breaking with that object might generate very unhappy consequences, as in the case of a mouse placed in a vacuum. In the vacuum, the mouse dies while remaining a mouse. Local manifestation, by contrast, explains how objects can be highly restricted by the relations they enter into with

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other objects. Recall that local manifestations are, by and large, products of an objects interaction with other objects. My skin prickles when the air conditioning kicks on. The shape of my body is, in part, dependent on atmospheric pressure. Atmospheric pressures, air conditioning, etc., are elements in a regime of attraction. Our social world is a regime of attraction that structures our local manifestations in a variety of ways. The Appalachian living in utter poverty in a trailer park exists in a regime of attraction populated by other people, the availability of food and education, the availability of jobs, access to key technologies like the internet that have become indispensible, ideological fictions such as the idea that language capacity is reflective of intelligence and ability, and so on. These elements in the persons regime of attraction function in a manner similar to gravity, guiding them throughout the world in particular ways just as the gravitational bending of space-time causes a satellite to orbit the earth in a particular way, leading them to locally manifest or develop in particular ways, and so on. These relations are external to such a person, but nonetheless preside over their local manifestations in key ways, making it difficult to escape their orbit. The key is not to reify and naturalize either these regimes of attraction nor the independence of smaller scale objects. The problem with neoliberalism is that it conceives us as constitutively free, ignoring regimes of attraction in which we exercise our freedom and action. It fails to recognize the social gravity that leads us to orbit in the world in particular ways. The problem with much leftist politics is that it paradoxically reifies relations, treating them as constitutive, rather than recognizing that they are external and contingent. The concept of regime of attraction draws our attention to those contingent external relations that draw us into particularly hard to escape social orbits, leading us to investigate the mechanisms by which these regimes function and allowing us to begin devising strategies to break the strength of those orbits. Just as rocket engineers must devise all sorts of strategies and techniques for escaping the gravity of the earth, political theorists must learn to be creative like engineers, refusing to merely critique regimes of attraction (i.e., analyze their mechanisms), and take up the mantle of developing technologies that might allow us to break with these regimes. Critique is an element, but it is not enough. Levi Bryant is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in Frisco, Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence and co-editor of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. His latest book, The Democracy of Objects, will be released by Open Humanities Press later this year. Follow Bryant at www.larvalsubjects.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/onticologist.
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Posted by Kris Coffield at 6/29/2011 3:27 PM Categories: Interviews Tags: levi bryant objectoriented ontology interviews Previous Post

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Craig Whitehead wrote: 6/29/2011 9:47 PM Actually, I think the imaginary/fiction/consciousness question drives us away from Harman's position. For me, object-oriented ontology expands beyond the politicization of human subjectivity, but doesn't necessarily answer all of the question that arise within human-centered thoughtworlds. This is one of those cases. If one holds that objects cannot relate to one other, one must view imaginaries as translations. That's all fine and good, but those translations precipitate actions in and upon reality. For that reason, I drift toward Bryant's account of fiction-as-reality that produces real world effects. I like the example of a national border that Kris used in his question. A border isn't something we can see. It might be marked by a sign or on a map, but when you reach the line between the United States and Canada, you don't see a physical product one can spatiotemporally define as "border." Yet, nations and their citizens treat borders as real things, with very, very real consequences - read the debates about birthright citizenship, lately? To the

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extent that a borders, invisible and intangible as they may be, are politically consequential, induce various actions and behaviors in reality, they should be considered 'real', as Bryant notes. I do wonder what happens to this line of thinking when it reaches a singularity, though. Here, Bryant is careful to note fictions that "don't reside in any one person's mind." Therefore, he seems to make what I can only speculate is a relational distinction; since an individual fiction occurs in a void, it relates only to itself and not to others. In other places, however, Bryant allows for the possibility of non-relational objects as real - ontological reality is distinguished from relationality. I'm confused on this point. It seems to me that a singular fiction, one held by a single person, can have real effects. Schizophrenic patients, for example, could have hallucinate voices that compel them to commit acts of very real violence. Is the hallucination real? Bryant, it seems, would say no, and that seems proper, though partially on ethical grounds. At the same time, many have killed in the name of God, rendering normative distinctions of reality irrelevant to the acknowledge of ontological status. So what makes the one any more or less real than the other, since they both affect reality? To take a different example, if I come up with a hypothesis about the why dark matter exists that no has considered, say a new type of particle, and I craft experiments based on that idea, but don't share the specifics of that idea with anyone else, is the purely speculative idea not real because it's only in my head, even if I'm using money and resources to test my hypothesis in the real world? These are not critiques, so we're all clear! I'm fascinated by this movement and I'm amazed that we're getting both of its main progenitors back to back! What an intellectual high! Reply to this

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