immanence

The word ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies.

Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being” or “of the nature of being,” or the study of “what is and of how it is.” I prefer to call it “the study and understanding of reality in its differing contours, dimensions, and modes.” So what does that mean?

Let’s take a random list of items: the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain falling outside my window as I write, the number six, a copy of The Book of Mormon found in a drawer in room 613 of the New York Downtown Marriott, gravity, Jesus’s resurrection on the third day, Spiderman, an earworm of Pere Ubu’s “Chinese Radiation,” and the Red King.

Each of these is real in some sense or other: for instance, as a tangible object, as a concept (a type or category, a theory, et al.), as an event that either occurred or was imagined to occur, as a possibility, etc. Some of their realities may overlap.

But distinguishing between their different “realities” is not always obvious, and is likely to diverge based on perceivers’ cultural assumptions and other factors. There may be a real reality — something singular, fundamental, and irreproachable — beyond the perceptions, agreements, and disagreements we humans might have about them, and we may or may not be able to “access” that real reality. But that — the idea that there exists a “deeper” reality to which we do or do not have “access” — is itself an ontological claim. One could claim instead that that there are multiple realities and we only have access to one or a limited number of them, never to all of them; or that real reality is some sort of spacetime manifold we finite cogs-in-its-wheels couldn’t possibly experience or understand; or that “reality” itself is an incoherent concept, so nothing we say about it could possibly be coherent.

And since we have no clear and obvious basis on which to completely reject any of these claims, we can either (a) discuss, consider, dispute, and work through these possibilities and their implications, (b) continue with our lives in the trial-and-error ways that got us where we are, or (c) give up. Most philosophers choose a mix of (a) and (b). Most non-philosophers prefer (b), until they get to the point where it’s obviously not working well for them. Then they might fork over to (a) or to (c).

Why might it not work for them? And why is any of this important, anyway?

Because a lot of the things that are important to many people in the world — things like the climate crisis, grotesque social injustices, the existence of evil in our midst, the Rapture, the possibility of liberation from suffering, or the need to respect the authority of the King, the Law, Tradition, or Science — are the kinds of things whose ontological status people disagree about. So if you want to get anything done about them — like solving the climate crisis, getting people to stop sinning, or overthrowing the capitalist system — you need to deal with ontological difference (or what in another context has been called iconoclash).

Back to that list, then.

Parsing through it can be easy or difficult. A “common-sensical” consensus might hold, for instance, that some of those things are “real” (say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain, gravity, the number six) and some are “fictional” (Superman, the Red King). Others — like Jesus’s resurrection on the third day — are contested precisely because some put them in the first category and some in the second.

But that kind of differentiation doesn’t get us very far, especially when the things we argue about fall into that third category. (Did Jesus resurrect on the third day? What does that even mean? And what do we know about him, beyond the stories people have told for a long time, like a game of telephone with unreliable scribes?)

The more important point is that each of the things on that list is more than simply either real or fictional, let alone true or false. The Brooklyn Bridge is an actual bridge, designed, built, and maintained by a certain set of urban authorities, but it is also an image, a concept, a point on maps, a discourse (or metaphor), a site or node within larger relational networks (the idea of Brooklyn, mental images of New York City, online image databases, and so on). The bridge itself is something experienced physically by those crossing it, swimming under it, or flying over it. It’s also something that has enabled a certain spread of roads and traffic, construction and commerce, connectedness and differentiation (are you from Brooklyn or from Manhattan? why is it more expensive to live on one side than the other?). The bridge is deeply woven into the social and environmental history of one of the most densely populated urban centers on the planet.

The number six, on the other hand, is everywhere and nowhere. It is in Alpha Centauri and it is in your head. Anyone or anything that counts might be able to conceive it, in some sense, but if we were asked to locate it, we would have to point to things (six steps, six fingers) or draw a sign that someone unfamiliar with Indo-Arabic numerals would fail to connect to the concept we’re referring to. Six, in other words, has a conceptual or theoretical existence. It is the kind of thing A. N. Whitehead called an “eternal object,” which is always there in potential, but nowhere in actuality until it has “ingressed” into a real situation. Math is all about the reality of potentials. Abstractions are, in this sense, as real as anything, and realer than many things, but they cannot be grasped except through representation, figuration, and thought. Sixness is a concept, not an object. Yet in its consistency — for instance, in the fact that four plus two always equals six — it has a coherence that may elude that of any physical object.

Superman, on the third hand, is “less real” (on our real-vs.-fictional spectrum, which we’ve already rejected) than the number six, but “more real” than that earworm of Pere Ubu’s song “Chinese Radiation.” Superman is an idea embodied in comic books, movies, Hallowe’en costumes, and children’s imagination (a lot of children, a lot of imagination(s)… which raises the question: what is imagination? — sshh, that’s what my next book is about).

Our imaginary dualist may wish to assign Superman to the “unreal” side of the ledger, but to the extent that the idea and image of Superman have informed people’s behavior — not just their reading and movie viewing, and the wallets of the producers of those movies, but also their action in situations that call for heroic acts — Superman has changed the world.

The same is obviously true for Jesus, whose resurrection on the third day (whether it literally happened or not) has inspired civilizations, wars, revolutionary movements, mountains of architecture, and countless acts of kindness, generosity, judgment, ridicule, violence, and other things. If there is a religion called Christianity but not (yet?) a religion of Supermanity, that’s only because the ontological value we ascribe to “religion” requires a certain level of adult commitment to organized action on behalf of the thing that is its object. Superman hasn’t attained that level. Jesus has, as has the Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard (for a much smaller set of people), and other real or perceived supermen.

By contrast to both Jesus and Superman, that earworm of a song by Pere Ubu is a relatively rare occurrence, intermittent when it does appear, and fairly inconsequential. But the song exists — it can be streamed, hummed (with some effort), grooved to (though not exactly danced to), and played (differently). Every time you or I hear it in our mind’s ear, it will be a different variation on the mix of rhythms, sounds, hedging, warbly lyrical inflections, and words that were recorded in a Cleveland studio on a day in 1977 after a certain number of rehearsals, jam sessions, and “aha” moments, and then spliced together with a live recording to create the version that appears on The Modern Dance.

He’ll be the red guard
She’ll be the new world
He’ll wear his grey cap
And she’ll wave her red book

Musical ontologists will debate what it is that makes it the particular track, song, tune, or composition that it is.

If you’re getting the sense that the “reality” of something has to do not just with what it is, but also with what it does — how it is perceived and how it affects other things — then you’re onto process-relational ontology.

To understand the “work” each of these items has done in the world requires understanding each of them as a thing that acts and affects, that gets taken up into action, that is always there in potential — at least now that they’ve been mentioned and “made.” Their reality consists of their uptake by the real events that make up the universe — events of uptaking (what Whitehead called “actual occasions”) by creatures like us (i.e., anything that can take account of and respond to things) — each of which passes on certain potentials that become available for further uptaking.

In this sense, every thing on our list — the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain (this rain), the number six, The Book of Mormon in room 613, et al. — is real in that it is a thing that can be conceived and with which other things can be done. Each is, in this sense, a construct — not, mind you, a social construction (in that glib sense that it’s something a society constructs by talking about it), but a relational construct in the full sense of being constructed in and through relations that have shaped it as such and such a thing with such and such capacities.

Gravity is like that, too. Gravity is a concept with a certain history. But the regularity that concept aims to describe — the attraction of smaller objects for much larger objects, such that the former (say, people) “fall into” the latter (say, planets) — has likely been around as long as “gravitable” objects have been around. That history has become so deeply embedded within things that we can, to all intents and purposes, no longer avoid it (except through anti-gravity technology). Whether we call it gravity or not is irrelevant (as science warriors have long acknowledged), except and unless calling it that enables us to do new things with it (which “constructivist” historians and sociologists of science have long insisted).

None of the items in my starting list is mere “fact” or mere “fiction.” All, to use Bruno Latour’s provocative term, are factishes; they mix factuality (like what the concept “gravity” aims to describe) with fetishistic, or imaginal, investment on the part of someone or other (like what gives gravity its gravitas, or the ways it is used to settle, or continue, arguments — all of which is because these are things we can talk about, think about, feel about, and do things with). All have been fabricated — some by people, others by the early universe, or by cellular activities or evolutionary processes or tectonic forces or whatever — but always in ways that endows them with certain capacities that may never be fully unpacked and known.

The point of ontological thinking is to be able to distinguish the kind of reality each has, could have, and will have. And if the process-relational, or process-semiotic, conception of reality (an ontology of its own) — the one I articulate on this blog and in my books (Ecologies of the Moving Image, Shadowing the Anthropocene, and the forthcoming The New Lives of Images) — is correct, then ontology is not something we merely describe and debate. It is something we live. Our actions and practices shape the world, create its contours, and define its modes.

Ontology is performed through our practical commitments — by which I mean through the commitments that all active entities, all actual occasions that together make up this (or any) universe, put into motion with every act we take. Each act is a semiotic step, an interpretive, relational, and consequential move on the chessboard of the universe that responds to that universe and adds to it, an act by which the many become one, and are increased by one.

Reality, then, is something like the negotiation between the Red King (you thought I’d forgotten him?), who dreams us, as Tweedledum and Tweedledee insisted to Alice — and the tears we cry in defiance of his dreaming.

And ontology is the work done to get better at that negotiation, which never ends.

Part of that work is learning how others have done it, more or less successfully, over longer periods than you or I. (And have done it in particular places, with specific climatological and ecological affordances, developing viable indigenous knowledge systems in the process.)

So, what, then, or who, is the Red King?

Now we’re getting somewhere.