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Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media
Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies.
313 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2013
7 people are currently reading
289 people want to read
About the author
Levi Bryant
11 books28 followersLevi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Bryant has also written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 20, 2014
There is a contradiction in this text between Bryant's desire to inherit and carry further certain progressive post-structuralist themes and his allegiance to the regressive schemas of object-oriented ontology. Despite espousing non-foundationalism and conceptual experimentation Levi Bryant does have a foundational level and vocabulary, Bryant's concepts, while rather unstable, are still foundational due to his having borrowed the form of its metaphysical heuristics from obect oriented ontology, which poses an ontological foundation with its withdrawn objects. Bryant has now distanced himself from the strong withdrawal thesis, preferring to talk in terms of units instantiated recently by machines, and appeals to what may be called "weak" withdrawal, a naturalisation of Graham Harman's strong metaphysical withdrawal, which has the disadvantage of subtracting objects from the play of material causality.
The official meta-language of object-oriented ontology reduces everything to objects and their relations. To be precise we should call these entities proposed by the OOO meta-linguistic model "meta-objects". No doubt confused by the systematic ambiguity of his own vocabulary" Harman sometimes gives examples of "objects" an impossibility in a system where objects are withdrawn, unknowable, invisible, untouchable. Levi Bryant's instantiation is quite different in that for him these meta-objects are "matter" or "nature" or "units" or "machines". Note that this is not a discovery about the world but a semantic stipulation of what Bryant chooses to call his instantiated objects. As with Harman's object-oriented philosophy Bryant's matter-oriented ontology has no engagement with the world whatsoever, but is a vast ramified pun on the word "object" conflating its meta-ontological and its ontological sense.
Tf one takes out all the polemics containing caricatures of Continental philosophy or of "epistemology" if one removes all the subjunctive evoking of what one "might" say or "would" look at, of what "perhaps" is to be found, there remains precious little in Bryant's texts. His examples are mere conceptual possibilities, subjunctive confirmations of verbal posits. Levi Bryant is unable to live up to the goals of his own philosophical project, and his texts are a dissatisfying mixture of conceptual incoherence, critiques of nonexistent adversaries, confusion between stipulative definitions and concrete theses about the world, abstract ramblings about "objects", combined with undevelopped “possible” examples to give the appearance a concreteness that may come and that never does.
Instead of simply decreeing a priori, by semantic stipulation, that everything is an object (or a unit, or a machine), shouldn't one approach this as an empirical question? Such a far-reaching claim should be given enough testable content to be susceptible of scientific investigation. Can one have a democracy of immanence outside the transcendent fiats, so as to respect the empirical specificities of the world? We need more empirical research and less semantic stipulation (in clear: word-magic).
The official meta-language of object-oriented ontology reduces everything to objects and their relations. To be precise we should call these entities proposed by the OOO meta-linguistic model "meta-objects". No doubt confused by the systematic ambiguity of his own vocabulary" Harman sometimes gives examples of "objects" an impossibility in a system where objects are withdrawn, unknowable, invisible, untouchable. Levi Bryant's instantiation is quite different in that for him these meta-objects are "matter" or "nature" or "units" or "machines". Note that this is not a discovery about the world but a semantic stipulation of what Bryant chooses to call his instantiated objects. As with Harman's object-oriented philosophy Bryant's matter-oriented ontology has no engagement with the world whatsoever, but is a vast ramified pun on the word "object" conflating its meta-ontological and its ontological sense.
Tf one takes out all the polemics containing caricatures of Continental philosophy or of "epistemology" if one removes all the subjunctive evoking of what one "might" say or "would" look at, of what "perhaps" is to be found, there remains precious little in Bryant's texts. His examples are mere conceptual possibilities, subjunctive confirmations of verbal posits. Levi Bryant is unable to live up to the goals of his own philosophical project, and his texts are a dissatisfying mixture of conceptual incoherence, critiques of nonexistent adversaries, confusion between stipulative definitions and concrete theses about the world, abstract ramblings about "objects", combined with undevelopped “possible” examples to give the appearance a concreteness that may come and that never does.
Instead of simply decreeing a priori, by semantic stipulation, that everything is an object (or a unit, or a machine), shouldn't one approach this as an empirical question? Such a far-reaching claim should be given enough testable content to be susceptible of scientific investigation. Can one have a democracy of immanence outside the transcendent fiats, so as to respect the empirical specificities of the world? We need more empirical research and less semantic stipulation (in clear: word-magic).
March 8, 2016
engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/16/470.htm
August 26, 2025
When I started reading this book, I found it immediately engaging. Especially Bryant’s way of describing bureaucracies and making us reflect on the role of structures, organizations, and media (e.g. Luhmann) is interesting. Also in relation to activism and resistance: how one might position oneself against the power of large organizations or governments, he is opening interesting perspectives.
As I continued I missed the depth of OOO and does not quite reach its full potential. On the other hand, I also missed the philosophical innovation of Deleuze=> concepts like virtual genesis, counter-effectuation, Body without Organs, deterritorialization, the dark precursor, and nomadic thinking, which map so powerfully the interplay between the virtual and the actual. Perhaps it’s there between the lines, but you really have to search for it (?).
The book starts strong, but toward the end (the last hundred pages) I felt somewhat lost. Bryant keeps introducing new types of machines and processes (yet in an interesting way!) , without ever providing a synthetic overview or even a simple chart that could serve as a guide. You almost need an external medium to structure it all, and I honestly didn’t have the time or patience for that.
Short: a valuable thought experiment, especially in the first 100–200 pages. After that, it loses some focus for me. The book is stimulating and opens up new ways of thinking, but it lacks the radicality and clarity I find in other thinkers. Still, I am interested in reading more of Bryant.
As I continued I missed the depth of OOO and does not quite reach its full potential. On the other hand, I also missed the philosophical innovation of Deleuze=> concepts like virtual genesis, counter-effectuation, Body without Organs, deterritorialization, the dark precursor, and nomadic thinking, which map so powerfully the interplay between the virtual and the actual. Perhaps it’s there between the lines, but you really have to search for it (?).
The book starts strong, but toward the end (the last hundred pages) I felt somewhat lost. Bryant keeps introducing new types of machines and processes (yet in an interesting way!) , without ever providing a synthetic overview or even a simple chart that could serve as a guide. You almost need an external medium to structure it all, and I honestly didn’t have the time or patience for that.
Short: a valuable thought experiment, especially in the first 100–200 pages. After that, it loses some focus for me. The book is stimulating and opens up new ways of thinking, but it lacks the radicality and clarity I find in other thinkers. Still, I am interested in reading more of Bryant.
December 14, 2023
More of a reference book than a throughout read. I recommend to cross read with Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World and The Democracy of Objects
June 7, 2018
The best in speculative materialism I have yet come across. I engaged with why I think it is so important, specifically towards those interested in my own field of geopolitics and international relations in much greater detail here:
https://geotrickster.com/2018/06/07/g...
https://geotrickster.com/2018/06/07/g...
August 29, 2020
Great overview of a new exciting field. Many good examples and entertaining read.
Want to read
September 27, 2020from email chain with S. White. Promising, "a more speculative approach to Systems.".
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews