All observable evidence indicates that nature is not and never has been in a state of equilibrium. Careful observation has always revealed nature to be in a perpetual state of change. If we are to take the flux of nature seriously, we would then have to understand sustainable practice as a willful act that seeks to maintain an artificially constructed equilibrium with maximum benefit for human occupation over the long term. Because nature itself is not stable, the stability would have to be forced. If the sentimentality associated with the mythological image of nature is eliminated, the aesthetics of gentle stewardship and bias against artifice would go with it, leaving nothing but impossible questions regarding what exactly constitutes maximum benefit for human occupation, and the even more difficult questions regarding how to construct and enforce such conditions. The flux and instability of nature is an astonishingly problematic condition because ecological system theories, despite their many successes, have never been able to fully account for change in networks of relations. This is where the philosopher, Graham Harman, introduces an important observation that “relationism” leaves no room for conditions in excess of those relations (by its own definition), and therefore provides an inadequate account of how change comes about. To quote Harman:
“All of these positions overmine the object, treating it as a useless substratum easily replaced by direct manifestations. Though we claim to be speaking of objects, they are really nothing more than palpable qualities, effects on other things, or images in the mind. But there are problems with relationizing the world in this way. For one thing, if the entire world were exhausted by its current givenness, there is no reason why anything would alter. That is to say, if there is no difference between the I who is what he is and the I who is accidentally wearing a yellow shirt from India at this moment, then there is no reason why my situation should ever change. An injustice is thereby done to the future.”
Making this provocative observation, Harman goes on to espouse greater focus on the development of an ontology of objects, and objects alone, abandoning ontologies of the mind in relationship to the world (Husserl’s phenomenology, for example among many others). In this new object-oriented ontology, the human being is a being like any other (an object like any other). The provocative extension of this line of thought is the necessary conclusion that objects withdraw from one another. To explain this initially cryptic idea, it is necessary to be briefly reminded of the problem previously pointed out concerning relationism. If an object could be completely exhausted by a summation of its relations, there can be no way for the object to change its relations. Therefore, there must always be something about the object that is in excess of its qualities and relations. There will always be some “dark nucleus of objects” (as Harman puts it) that is withdrawn from access by other objects. The being of the object is always more than its relations. If we pause for a moment and apply this ontological insight to the current discussion, we can suppose that the architectural object—if it is indeed unified—is always more than any summation of its internal relations. The architectural object, like any object, would have that “dark nucleus” that cannot be exhausted by a list of its qualities. Going further, this object-oriented ontology would have to throw the being of any relational model into doubt. Though networks and fields may continue to be eminently useful models of understanding, they carry with them a flawed ontology. In the end, the field is not real in the same sense that the object is. None of this suggests the abandonment of all field models, however, we can conclude that field models cannot be legitimized as a deeper way of understanding the thing in front of us; it is, upon analysis, quite the opposite. We can continue to incorporate field models for their usefulness, but should remind ourselves that they are artificial constructions.
David Ruy, Returning to (Strange) Objects (2012)
landscape theory 