on DeLanda’s reversals of terminology

Something that came up in recent correspondence bears on the fact that DeLanda sometimes uses terminology in the exact opposite sense from how it is used by his predecessor. Two examples come immediately to mind, and I post them here in case they help clarify some debates.

1. “flat ontology”. I don’t know who first coined this term, but my guess is that DeLanda picked it up from Roy Bhaskar. However, Bhaskar and DeLanda mean exactly opposite things by this term.

It is DeLanda’s positive sense of the term that has become familiar in continental philosophy readers. Here, “flat ontology” means “treating all entities equally.” In that sense Latour could be viewed as a flat ontologist, Levi Bryant in The Democracy of Objects is a flat ontologist, and so forth. (But not me, not quite. Real and sensual objects for me are not on the same plane of reality.)

In Bhaskar, however, flat ontology is a bad term, and it means something different from what it means in DeLanda. In Bhaskar (you should all read his A Realist Theory of Science if you haven’t) “flat ontology” refers negatively to the kind of ontology that flattens everything out into its accessibility to humans.

2. “redundant causation”. DeLanda first uses the term, to my knowledge, in A New Philosophy of Society. He uses it there as an anti-reductionist term, and quite interestingly so. What he means is that one of the signs of a true emergent reality is that the causal processes that led to its formation do not entirely need to be preserved in order for that thing to exist. If your BMW had 175 fewer atoms than it actually does, this would not make it a different BMW.

By contrast, “causal redundancy” is generally used in analytic philosophy (as far as I know) as a pro-reductionist term. For example, a baseball smashes a window, but the notion “baseball” is redundant, since we can already understand the window as being smashed by all the atoms in the baseball. (Metzinger treats both the “self” and “objects” as redundant in this way, though I don’t recall his ever using the term “redundancy” in Being No One, and I perhaps did more thorough a reading of that book than has been done even by its admirers.)