Book: Refugia: Radical solutions to mass displacement (Robin Cohen and Nicholas Van Hear), 2020

 Refugia

This book utilizes a novel methodology, utopianism, to discuss and analyze the problem of refugees. It is, therefore, critically engaged in critical analyzing and uncovering of the current problem and in suggesting radical solutions. Contrary to other academic studies it does not stop at the border of what it is but proceeds to what must be.

The book can be divided into three basic blocks. The first block critically discusses assumptions taken for granted by mainstream academics, the second presents the common critical solutions to the refugee problem, and the third discusses the Refugia proposal, which is the main contribution of this book.

Firstly, the authors unpack what constitutes the postulates underpinning refugee studies. They discuss state and nation-state as the only basic political units, as the polis, and they show that there are many other units - equally important to states - such as international corporates, INGOs, and rich individuals. They discuss nation-state as a concept based on territorialization and argue that de-territorialization can open a room for solution. They borrow a concept from biology, Ecotones, which is the area where multiple species interact, and suggest it as a concept that can serve to link together refugees and others. Hence, instead of being confined to territory as defined and formed by nation-state, we can think of a configuration like an archipelago, where multiple sites, cities, camps, zones of refugees are interacted with each other, with states where they exist, and with the places of origin. This connection is fluid; it de-territorializes the nation-state conceptualization of place. This archipelago is flexible and forms what the authors call: Refugia. In Refugia, we have a mobility common as, for example, a square is a common in a “normal” city and as overseas are commons today. Refugia is a connection of refugee sites, running across a background of multiplicity, fluidity, connectedness, and transnationalism. It is a project for transitional solution for refugees, which also equips them with agency. Refugia is a polis, sui generis one. This polis is not a series of cities, or sites strictly speaking, but it is fluid connections of sites, of commons, of mobile commons which could be a hotel or a hearth in a forest, of villages that are all governed by and for refugees, trespassing the national boundaries.

Review of Critical Solutions:

I counted in the book around nine critical proposals to solve or to deal with the refugee problem.

1. Arc of Protection, which is a book by Aleinkoff and Zamore. They assert the importance of agency that is endowed upon and impowered in refugees, the necessity of mobility, and the benefits of digital technology among other suggestions. 
2. Safe Heavens. Similar to the well-known safe zone concept, safe heaven is suggested as a way that international or regional intervention can provide for refugees where they can live freely and with dignity. Safe heaven is a concept that can be discussed along the spectrum of integration-incubation. While the integration pole materializes the most in Uganda, where refugees are granted wide rights, incubation is actualized the most in Jordan as exemplified by Zatari camp for Syrian refugees. This suggestion is championed by Betts and Collier. 
3. Special Development Zone. This suggestion is deeply discussed by Klian Kleinschmidt, which is close to the idea of incubation. 
4. City or island for refugees. Buzi has discussed this idea, which indicates that refugee problem can be solved by creating or assigning a spot of place for them, either it is a city or an island. Theo Deutinger, a prominent architect, has modeled this suggestion. 
5. Enclaves inside Europe for refugees. Similar to city or island for refugees, Menasse and Guerot have suggested to create enclaves inside Europe where refugees can live, practice their daily life and their identity. 
6.  Welcoming cities or Sanctuary cities. Differently from the last suggestions, which are encompassed loosely by the term incubation, welcoming cities allude to a different conceptualization that tilts towards integration more than incubation, which is an approach implying non-discriminatory segregation. Cities inside Europe should develop at attitudinal and managerial dimensions to receive and welcome refugees. This approach has been primed by Mayor Ada Colan, who has led enormous efforts to issue a manifesto in 2015 in this regard. 
7. Incubator villages instead of cities. 
8. Charter city.
9. Zatopai. A term that comes from Zatari camp in Jordan and Utopia. This suggestion was formulated by Femke Halsema and it refers to building better camps for refugees where they can practice their everyday life. 

Although this quick presentation requires a deeper analysis, we can tentatively classify these solutions or proposals in a matrix of four cells:

New Materialism 1

 Daina Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds), 2010, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics." Duke University Press.

For new materialism, the matter is not inert, passive, waiting for the rational subject, human beings, to act onto it. Matter in new materialism is, moreover, not another realm distinctive from the rational-human realm. In more precise words, both material and rational beings, sentient and non-sentient, animals and humans, rocks and programmed robots belong to the same ontology, to the same realm but with difference in degree not in kind. 

We have got used to thinking of the non-human, the non-organ, the matter as that category we can mold; it is separate from the rational, from the intellect, and it is, essentially, totally alien to the free will. This understanding is mainly rooted in Descartes's dualism: human/nature; object/subject, and so on. New materialism subverts this dualism. 

When the rational subject, the human being, faces the sea, the sea - according to the material and Cartesian philosophy - is a matter that can be exploited, discovered, used by the rational subject (who is free) in multiple ways: sailing, fishing, swimming, diving, etc. For the new materialist, the sea is not the inert matter which is totally and essentially determined (in terms of its usage) by the rational subject. The sea itself has an agency, a transformative power which unfolds as it interacts with the rational subject. The sea enables human beings to sail, to swim, and it per se determines how it can be used and by itself forms possibilities that rational subjects can actualize some and fail to actualize others. In the same way, other material, organic and non-organic objects/subjects can materialize some possibilities that the sea offers and fail to actualize others. The sea has an agency as much as we have. The sea agency and the human agency interact with each other. The sea kills. The sea allows, permits humans to move from a land to another. The sea permits a surface of wood or a wide surface of iron to float. The sea balances the atmosphere of the Earth and it harbors living entities that impact humans and non-humans. These aspects are agentic. They existed before a human being has ever existed, and they, indeed, pre-conditioned the human realm. 

The materials are not simple. When we talk about seas, we can imagine how much complexity is associated with the sea as a material: lodging wood, building ships, overseas colonization, globalization, total economic systems, and so on. When we think of cement, we reach the same conclusion. Cement has its own agency and its own transformative power that unfolds in this world by interacting with humans and non-humans. By doing so, it generates unpredictable phenomena: housing, environmental pollution, urbanization, and many political and economic repercussions. Thus, new materialism is the philosophy of non-linearity and of complexity. 

To conclude, we may start to think of the materials, the matter, as something that precedes the intellectual subject, and that the intellectual subject is always embedded in the matter and acts and thinks within it. The matter itself is not limited and finite. In the past it gave birth to the human being, to the rational subject, and it continues to give birth to the universe, making it wider than itself. The matter is that aura making the universe (i.e., the actual) more than what it is. Imagine, then, how much the matter is omnipresent and creative. The real, which is signified by the matter, is always and essentially bigger that the actual, which materializes gradually as the transformative power of the matter unfolds. We can think of the matter as a site of infinite possibilities that we can actualize some and fail to actualize other because we do not have control over it fully, as the agency of the matter itself also forms us, we the human beings. 

 

Jacques Lacan 2

 Jacques Lacan. 2014. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, Anxiety [1962-1963]. Polity. 

As we read in the ... On Worse seminar, you exist qua signifier, and subjects exist as signifiers. In this seminar about anxiety, we should elucidate the nature of the signifier more deeply. 

The signifier transforms, moves, or introduces the subject to another signifier. It does not transform or introduce the subject (the subject as the self, the Other, or any other "objects," see the Note in ... Or Worse)  to an end, to a final stage where it can be finally delivered, understood, analyzed, and anatomized. Rather, the signifier throws the subject to another signifier, to another maze, to another world of fogs. The signifier delivers the subject to another train and not to a final station. Hence, the subject as it exists, it becomes enmeshed into a quasi-infinite queue of signifiers. Simply put, the subject can never encircle itself; it is an open circle. The subject cannot be itself fully. 

In addition to that, the subject cannot exist by its own being; it needs the Other (...Or Worse), which Lacan calls the generative signifier. Then the subject finds itself in the Other (which is also a signifier); however, since the signifier throws and infinitely delivers the subject to another, the subject becomes a signifier whose traces are effaced in the Other. The subject cannot trace back its significance, and the Other must not know the subject; the Other belongs to the unconscious not to the consciousness according to Lacan. In other words, the subject exists only in the Other, but this Other does not formulate a milieu in which this subject can find its starting point, or which this subject can meet again its/his birth, or where the subject can fully trace back all the signifiers that it/he has passed through. The Other is sand that always mystifies the subject's feet steps. (This is why we cannot by nature see our backs).

Having said that, the subject discovers that it lacks itself and it cannot exist without the Other, and even with this Other, it cannot be itself fully (Lacan uses the barred S as a symbol of the lacking subject, see the figure below). The Other also is not exhaustible, and parts of it remain unknown and un-tested by the subject (in Lacan's symbols, barred A). So, the subject is always lacking in the Other and the Other is always unknown in the subject. What remains out of this dialogue is the Other's otherness; the otherness that cannot be reached by the subject but always sought by it. This Other's otherness is called by Lacan the object a; i.e., the object of desire. Then the subject always desires this a which is infinite. The object a is what the subject tries to hunt while it is forgotten and lost in the forest of the Other. 

This hunting is a demand. The subject demands hunting, which is in its very nature. However, this demand is infinite and "vacuum" since the object a cannot be reached and since the relation between the subject and the Other is infinite. Whenever this demand is filled up, is met, the subject experiences anxiety. So, anxiety is that the subject cannot anymore enjoy the game of haunting the object a. Anxiety, contrary to what many psychologists believe, is not about the missing, the absence, but it is about the omnipresent presence. Anxiety is not that a child is missing his mother's breast, but that he is always threatened by being brought back to the breast. The game of presence/absence of the mother is not the source of anxiety; rather, the threat that the mother will be omnipresently present is what generates anxiety because it precludes the subject from the object a. Anxiety is generated when we are prevented from enjoying our infinity (as signifiers). 

"The security of presence is the possibility of absence" (p.53)

The signifier throws the subject to another signifier. That means the signifier cuts the world, or marks the world, so the subject's existence becomes thinkable: If the world and the Other is infinite (in which the subject exists as a lost signifier and lacking subject), then the subject should have a mark, a cut, a signal in this world that gives its a value, that tells him that you exist now and here. Otherwise, this subject will not be distinguished from the vacuum, from the infinity. The infinity is not able to be demarcated. The subject to exist needs an ego, a demarcated entity, which is offered to him by the signifier as (this signifier) cuts the world, puts a mark in this vacuum. Of course, these cuts are infinite as the signifier throws the subject always to another signifier. This process is similar to putting marks on trees' trunks when we find ourselves lost, or thrown, in a forest. The only difference between this physical forest and the world in which the subject is thrown is that the latter's "trunks" efface the marks the subject leaves. This process is not what produces anxiety. Anxiety is engendered when we find our way in the forest and we think that we have nothing more to follow, we have nothing more to haunt, and we have nothing more for which we can be thrown and lost in this infinite "forest." When the signifier cuts the world in a way telling the subject, "Here you are, it is the home, it is the road that you cannot be lost anymore," then anxiety is born. 

Anxiety then is a function of the lack (remember the object a is always a lack that the subject cannot get). When you look at a shelf in a library and find that this site is empty, then you know that this site is a site of the lack; the books are missing forever from it and you cannot put other books to fill this emptiness. The lack is never reducible to zero, is never met (because you can mirror the world and the other infinitely to shape your ego - as two mirrors standing in front of each other - but you cannot mirror the lack, the missing). This is the difference between lack and privation. Lack is symbolic, privation is not; lack is never met or reducible, privation is. Anxiety is not the function of the missing mother, or absent mother, as this mother can always come back or can be substituted. Anxiety is the function of a symbolic, mythical mother that can never be met, substituted, or seen again because it has never been seen before. When you resist this function of lack, you fall prey to uncertainty and pain because you try to prevent yourself from haunting the infinite object a. When you take this function of lack as such, then you snatch from the anxiety not uncertainty by certainty, sharpness that ignites you to see better, to hear better, and to understand the world better; hence you move to act. 

We feel badly "anxious" when we feel that the mother, the signifier-object, is omnipresent and will never be absent; that is, the lack is what we want. When we surrender to the present mother, the anxiety makes us feel pain. When we pursue the lack, anxiety makes us feel sharper and act sharper. 

Jacques Lacan 1

 Jacques Lacan. 2018. Seminar XIX . . . Or Worse [1971-1972]. Polity.  

Click on it

It is difficult to read Lacan, and his writings are still apt to continuous and rich interpretations. Here, I am interpreting his Seminar . . . Or Worse. His main idea is about how things exist, what the real is. To elaborate more, let us start with some examples, naive questions. Why do we have two sexes, man and woman? Why do we have two statuses, death and life? Why do we have  two types of "times," day and night? Why do not we have only one sex, one status, and one period of time? The Lacanain logic answers this type of questions, accoridng to my understanding and interpretation. 

Let us start with the example of day and night. 

There is something that is mysterious, that is essentially far from our ability to grasp, something which is neither night nor day, neither dark nor luminous. This "something" cannot be grasped because it is the One, the One that includes, has, commands, generates the entire signifiers and significance; the One is the All as well, which the entire significances are in it. In other words, this something, this One signifies itself (behind our ability to grasp and see) in the signifiers of day and night together, at the same time.  This One is the Real. The Real, therefore, is impossible to be represented, to exist as it is in its reality, full reality. 

However, the One (which is neither day nor night) needs to exist, to emerge; it wants to free its signifiers. How? It exists but not through its Being (i.e., its full reality as not day and not night, as the One), but through its inexistence. 

 

The One is "that which exists but through not being" (p.117)

For the One to allude to itself, a Subject should exist. This subject is Day. (Any subject, either Day, you, or man exists qua signifier as Lacan asserts; in other words, every subject signifies itself and the One to another subject).  Then Day, as a subject, emerges. Day is a signifier that has light; in a more formal way of speaking, Day justifies the function of light. However, because Day is only half true (it is not the One), it needs another subject, the Other to exist. Can we imagine a Day without something that is not day, Night? No! The Other is a subject that does NOT have light, or the Other is the signifier that does not justify the function of light. 

"To exist depends on the Other" (p.90)

Day does not exist by itself and it needs the Other to be, to exist. Hence, Day always lacks itself. But Day also knows that the Other (Night) does not exist by itself. Both Day and Night repeat their subjects, their significance through each other. They represent what exists and what inexists as these two form an infinite queue, repeating itself forever. Why? Because the One is impossible; the Real is impossible. Neither Day nor Night is enough to tell the truth about the One. 

 "the true only ever occurs in missing its mate" (p.155)

Day is haunting Night. Day desires Night because Day seeks to meet, to touch what it lacks, the things that are represented in Night. This desire is the desire to return to the One, to fully represent the One. But this is impossible. The One, the Real, the impossible makes Day desires Night forever. The One is similar in itself to an empty hole, to what inexists (because it is impossible, and what inexists is closer to the impossible). A signifier or a subject, such as Day, seeks to fill this empty hole by the whole representation of the One. Day and Night, however, cannot exist at the same time and at the same place. They try to meet, to make a relation to fill this emptiness. But what Day and Night, each one alone, gets is their emptiness. When Day desires Night and seeks to unify with it, but it cannot, then it knows that it lacks itself as much as the Other (Night) lacks itself, so it meets only the reality of emptiness, of the impossible. That is why Lacan says:

Concept qua concept is an emptiness (p.45)

Day and Night can be represented according to Lacan in the following diagram:

Day and Night
Lacan Logic

The One, the Real, which is impossible, is represented in the up-right quarter: There is no Day that has no light; or according to the symbols I use, there is no shape that is not empty. This quarter is the quarter of no shape - no empty. It is impossible to put anything inside this quarter. It is impossible for a Subject/Signifier to meet these conditions: no shape that is not empty. Out of this impossibility, a possible subject should exist: the up-left quarter, where some shapes are not empty (or there is at least one shape that is not empty). Now, we can imagine that, in this quarter, since there are some shapes that are not empty, then there are others that are empty (Days) because some does not mean all. This quarter is called the necessary. It is necessary for existence to exist. In the bottom-left quarter, we can imagine that all shapes are possibly empty. It is called the possible quarter. There is a contradiction between the possible quarter and the necessary quarter. This contradiction is another "sign" of the impossibility, the essential lacking of whatsoever Subject might be. Finally, the bottom-right quarter is the famous formula of Lacan, Not-all. It means that not-all shapes are empty; some shapes can be full, and others can be something else (represented by triangles and filled rectangles). Not-all means that the function of light or of being empty shapes is not enough to essentialize the subject or the Other (of that subject). It again refers to the impossible that cannot be grasped by a universal quantifier (All); The One cannot be grasped by the universal All Days have light. 

This argument can be applied to any other objects/subjects: Death/Life or Man/Woman (which is what Lacan discusses). Woman does not exist is a famous "slogan" of Lacan, which means that the Subject of woman is the subject that lacks the function of the phallus: Not-all women are subject to the phallus and there is no woman that makes the phallus function wrong (so, the Woman is similar to Night in our example). Also, as I said that Night and Day cannot meet together, Lacan said that there is no such a thing as sexual relation. When we copulate - at the symbolic level - we meet our emptiness. 

Lacan logic
Bottom-left: All x (man) are possibly subject to the function phi (Phallus)
Up-left: There is at least one x (man) that does not justify the function phi
Bottom-right: Not-all x (women) are subject to the function phi
Up-right: There is no x (woman) that makes the function phi wrong (does not justify it)  

Note:

Lacan is so close to what is known as Object-oriented ontology (OOO) since he is not an idealist and does not believe that this world exists only in our minds and manifests only for the human intellect. Things exist as they beget each other and think of themselves. Anything is a signifier that throws its subject to another signifier. The subject can be a human being or any other "object" that can be signified. 

I read also the following articles to clarify this seminar: 

Zwart, Hub. 2022. Lacan's Dialectics of Knowledge Production: The Four Discourses as a Detour to Hegel. Foundations of Science. Online. 

Vanheule, Stijn. 2016. Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Frontiers in Psychology. Online.  

https://crisiscritique.org/april2019/hoens.pdf  

Object-Oriented Ontology 7. Morton 1.

 Ecology without Nature. 2007. Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press.

• I am trying to show the substance of a coat, I tear it apart, then I explain each set of its threads, then I explain the nature of the texture, then I explain the mechanism of its sewing, and then I find that the more I try to capture the substance of this coat, the more I jump to other things, and the substance becomes more obscured. If I analyze the coat, I find myself enforced to explain millions of things, and I do not get to the coat's substance, and if I keep the coat on the table, just looking at it,  the substance also is still obscured, mysterious, and hidden. 
• I am writing now and trying to explain to the reader the real "I" of me. As much as I try to discover and unveil this "I," the more I must link other "Is," other issues, other things to it, the more the substance of this "I," I sought to reach, escapes and eludes. 
• When you contact a person, think of this contact, try to arrest the real contact. You will find that contact is always in the past (p.76). When you contact, you never have it or inhabit it as it is happening; you always reflect on it only when it has gone. Hence, we always cannot fully or essentially or substantially contact! 
• I listen to music. Sounds and silences are woven together. When I try to really capture the essence or substance of this music, I find myself either capturing the moment of a sound or the moment of a silence. I know that I cannot fully capture the Music as it is. I have to kill half of it to be able to perceive it; either its silence or its sounds. 
• I see a wolf, roaming near a stream. Blood is marking its teeth, and its fur is glistering under the sun. The wolf I see is only the foreground of the entity wolf. I know that the wolf to appear as such, there must be a background of and for it: caves, sheep, bones broken in its mouth, a herd, nice dark in which it can sleep and hide, and so on. The wolf I see is only the tip of this huge or deep background. When I try to discover, unveil, reveal this background, it becomes a foreground, and I lose it again. Each foreground alludes to a background infinitely. This there above is a sign of this background, which is never captured; it is there and never can be here; it is there as much as there is mysterious, far, absent, and as much as it gives breath to the here. I know that here will never be here if there is no there. I know that I am not me if there is no others who are not me. However, these others are not substantially captured and fixed; such that, I cannot stop and point to selves, saying that "Look! they are my others." The others are there, in the background of me, and I can never fix them. Otherness should always be intrinsic to the Self, Morton asserts. 

Ecology without Nature aspires to inform us that Nature is not fixed in front of our eyes or brains, and nothing at all is fixed in front of our eyes and brains. What we think is fixed is no more nor less than the foreground of the ecology. It is only the world, the ecology, or the ambience what exists. Not me nor you, not the nature nor trees. Only ambience. Ambience is not fixed, is not captured, so it is painful. Ambience appears to us with one status: I know that music is both silence and sound, but at any moment I can only capture one, not both; "I" is not separate from others, but I can capture only one at a moment; I contact you, but I know that I either contact you and lose the substance of this contacting (as I only can understand that contact when it ends) or I do not contact you. For some reason,  appearance allows only for one thing, status, probability to occur: I flip a coin in the air, but only one side appears (when it falls down); however, we know that this side is not the whole real coin, we need to see the other side to "capture" the coin, but we cannot. This "fact" glues us to death. We cannot know fully, we cannot be a well-delineated object (or subject) separate from others: We are always invaded by the ambience, and this invasion does not appear to us fully. That is, only ambience exists, and reveals its heads (tips) while hiding its huge bodies in the background. 

Below, you can see how ambience can be studied.

Object-Oriented Ontology 6. Bogost 1.

 Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing. Ian Bogost. 2012. University of Minnesota Press.

Similarly to any text in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this book argues that a car, a human, a tree, an idea in my mind, my computer screen have the same degree, the same reality, the same strength of their being. My being, my existence is neither more nor less than the existence of the idea suddenly emerging in my mind that "aliens may exist." However, and apparently, me as a human, my computer screen, and that idea are not equal in how they exercise their existence or their being. I am not identical, nor equal, to an idea roaming in my mind. Hence, things equally exist but not exist equally. 

This basic argument of OOO leads to a striking conclusion: humans are not the center of the world, and more precisely, the classical division of subject-object is refuted. If you espouse the OOO, you should stop thinking of yourself and the world around you and of other objects you meet every day as two separate realms. It is not the rational subject vis-a-vis the Object. Everything that exists is equal in its being; thus, "we" are all objects.  That what distinguishes me as a human from other objects is not essential nor more sublime than what distinguishes a car from a turtle.

What indeed makes Bogost's argument distinct from other OOO's scholars is how he understands a thing. For him, we should not talk about things or objects but about UNITs. The words object and thing are misleading. Everything is in fact a unit.  My fountain pen is a unit, my city is a unit, a cell is a unit. Now, a unit is not an atom, is never an essence that is solid, homogenous, and one. A unit is a set. Any thing then is a set. For example, a car is set = {wires, tires, metal}; {mobility, fuel, gaz}; {engine, fire, shape} . . . and we can disclose this set (car) infinitely.  The unit car is not reducible to any particular set of its manifestation (or disclosure) and it is never the sum of them. 

So, a unit always expands, explodes, infinitely, on the one hand, as it meshes other units' sets (a car manifests or explodes as a set {fule, fire, etc.} when it meshes another set of another unit {energy, etc.}); and it shrinks into an infinite density as it "goes back" to its inside (the non-explosion side, the "non-meshing others" side, the non-manifestation side), on the other hand. Bogost sees a unit as a black hole: It is infinitely dense and it is infinitely explosive. Hence, for Bogost, there is no flat ontology, our existence is not a flat on which things hinge, but it is dotted. The existence is made of points, each point is a thing (unit), each unit is a black hole. 

Finally, to see how a unit manifest, Bogost understands things' manifestation as a fractal's expansion: 

This video shows how a thing, when "repeated," expands in a very complex manner. Similarly, a unit is a set that is internally dense, but it can expand in a fractal manner by meshing other things according to its own (inner logic). That means a car cannot mesh the thing-idea of "a bird is extinct," simply because this idea does not resonate with the logic of the unit car, so it cannot mesh it. But, a car can mesh very loosely the thing or the set Mars because it - in some degree of its manifestation - resonates with gravity, which is a set (or a manifestation of a set/unit) that is closer to the logic of the set car. In other words, units can link and meet each other even though loosely as metaphors. Hence, even the unit of "a bird is extinct" can meet very loosely the unit car eventually, but this linkage will be so weak, so unnecessary to both of these two units, the car and the "a bird is extinct."

 

Object-Oriented Ontology 5. LR Bryant 1.

 The Democracy of Objects- LR Bryant. 2011. Open Humanities Press.

Click on the Figure

Mosquito and me, a car and the carton imagined cat (Tom), Marxism as an ideology and God equally exist. They share one thing equally, existence. God does not exist more truly than me, a book on my table is not less real than a mosquito flying around a lamp, and a mere idea or an image in my mind is not less real than the moon. All objects exist on the same ontological footing. However, that does not mean they have equal "power." I, a human object, can easily get rid of a mosquito, whereas - with the advanced medicine - it cannot do the same for me. If you believe in that, then you espouse the philosophy of flat ontology.  

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is to a wide extent flat ontology. 

Flat ontology implies that there is no entity that is more real than others; hence, there is no God, there is no entity that transcends the other entities/objects (otherwise, this entity will be more real than the rest). Moreover, there is no world.  If there is a world, then this world would be the condition for other objects to exist; in this case, the world would be the most real ever. Since objects exist at the same level of the being, then they are similar at the essence; i.e., there is no object that is essentially different from others: the division of subject-object is rejected in OOO. Human beings are not subjects, which are distinct from all other objects by their self-awareness, by epistemology. No. Humans and cars are both objects, and the difference between them is the difference between two objects: A car relates itself to other objects by its qualities (move, transport, burn fuel, etc.), and humans relate themselves to other objects by their own qualities (knowledge). Knowledge and burning fuel are two ways for objects to meet other objects. I know you, I know the sky, I know how to walk; a car moves, a car burns fuels, etc. These actions are the same in terms of their existence. Only objects are what exists; no subjects. 

No Transcending Entity; No World; No Subject-Object Division 

Only Objects Exist

Pendulum

To explain Bryant's theory, I will explain an example given by him: Pendulum. The pendulum is a symbol of Object, any object. This Pendulum-object is always split: On the one hand, the Pendulum is a thing-in-itself, a real thing that does not need to appear, does not need to swing, does not need to be known, and does not need to be related to any other objects to exist. It exists by and for itself even without the need to manifest in the world. Indeed, this Pendulum is always withdrawing from the world, from itself as a manifestation, to be very much itself, to be unseen, to be un-manifestable. The Pendulum as an object-in-itself, as a real object, is a small ball and a string. These ball and string are its endo-relations; they are its system. The Pendulum is a system of a deep structure, of endo-relations: ball and string. The ball can fall down and the string can be cut. This does not matter, the Pendulum will continue to be the Pendulum as long as another ball can be linked to its string or a new string can be fixed to its ball. For a system, the endo-relations are what matters not the parts. The parts are substitutable. The endo-relations are not. Your body always loses and earns new cells, but it continues to be your body. The US can have some citizens plotting against it, but it is still the US of these citizens even when many of them die, others are born, and many abandon their American nationality. A ball can betray the Pendulum; nevertheless, it continues to be the Pendulum since the relation between the ball and the string is maintained. The object as the real object, the Pendulum-in-itself, is what is called substance. The substance cannot contact with other real objects or objects-in-themselves. The Pendulum cannot meet, interact with other objects such as a table. Why? Because the Pendulum-in-itself is always withdrawing to the endo-relations where no other object can enter. 

On the second hand, the Pendulum swings, its ball occupies many positions, it interacts with the air, it meets the gravity, and it can be hit by a human hand and stops: The Pandelium manifests, or it acts in its local manifestation. The Pendulum can appear, act itself, act its substance through its exo-relations (relations with other objects, such as gravity). It translates its substance into qualities: Each possible position of its all is a symbol of a possible or potential quality that the Pendulum can do, can act, can manifest as it responds to other objects (through its exo-relations). When qualities are produced by the Pendulum, then it transforms from being only real (a thing-in-itself) to be real and actual. 

Thus,

Any object is a split-object: 

1. real object, a system of endo-relations, a real object that withdraws from the world and from itself, a substance.
2. actual object, a local manifestation, a potential action that it produces in and according to its exo-relations with other objects. 

Needless to say, an object can be real without being actual. That is why Bryant accepts the idea of potentiality. I will explain more his theory by using another example from his book: Mug.
 

I have a mug on my table. The mug is an object. It is a split-object. On the one hand, it is the mug-in-itself, the substance mug that no other object can enter into its endo-relations. The mug appears, acts, manifests on my table by releasing a few of its qualities: it blues (more precisely than saying it is blue, we need to say it blues or it is bluing) when it enters an exo-relation with the sunlight. Its endo-relations allow it to respond to the sunlight, so it blues (is bluing), and it allows it or it endows it with the potentiality of redding (coloring itself with red) when it enters another exo-relation with red light. There are unlimited potentialities that the mug can do, can actualize according to its exo-relations. However, it cannot actualize all of these potential manifestations (or qualities) at once. It cannot blue and red and black at the same time. The Pendulum cannot put its ball in the whole potential points that it can occupy at once. This is impossible. Hence, the endo-relations of a substance allude to more power than the manifestation of that substance because the endo-relations are multiple; the object as real, in-itself, is multiple, not simple. That is why it can manifest in infinite ways. In addition to that, the mug cannot enter an exo-relation with a mosquito; a mosquito flying above it does not help the mug to show any potentiality of its qualities. 

Thus,

An object is an engine of difference (because as it acts in its local manifestation, it generates differences with other objects in their manifestation), and an object is a generative mechanism and is power. It manifests, it acts. It withdraws and it differentiates itself from others. 

The Whole-Parts Problem

Are the ball and the string parts of the whole Pendulum? No. According to the OOO, the ball and the string are objects and they exist independently from the Pendulum. Is not the ball able to betray the string and run away? It is an object. 

The ball, the string, the Pendulum do not exist in the world; they exist in each other. They produce what we see as the world, which is nothing by their actual or local manifestations. The ball manifests in the Pendulum and the Pendulum manifests in an environment that it creates (ability to swing) and in exo-relations with other produced environments, such as the gravity that is a manifestation of the Eath-object. 

The World does not exist; it is nothing more than the manifestation and exo-relations of objects.