monads and undermining

From Twitter (which I find to be a bad place for a conversation):
Edward Butler ‏@EPButler
@t3dy When Graham Harman uses Bruno as an exemplar of “undermining” objects, it is clear that Bruno’s monadology is being overlooked.
Hardly. A monadology is one of the textbook examples of an undermining theory. You don’t have to believe in a single unified world-lump to be an underminer.

Here’s another example of a classic undermining theory: atomism. All larger entities can be explained in terms of the workings of simple underlying physical pieces. The plurality of these atoms does not prevent the theory from being an undermining theory.

As Aristotle already notes in the Metaphysics, there are two separate kinds of undermining theories, both of them traceable to the pre-Socratics. There is the kind that selects some privileged physical element as the root of everything else. And there is the “apeiron” sort of theory that thinks something deeper and more formless than any specific physical element is needed.