Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media
By Levi Bryant
Introduction
✅ Bryant’s Core Problem: Materialism Has Lost Its Matter
Bryant argues that materialism needs to be renewed because:
1. Critics attack it as reductive and mechanistic, claiming that human culture,
thought, or society exceed material explanation.
2. Defenders misuse it by reducing "materialism" to:
• history understood as discursive history,
• practice understood as discursive practice.
In other words, many “materialists” today only talk about symbols, ideology, performance,
narrative, and culture—ignoring literal matter.
As a result, the word materialism has been hollowed out to mean little more than “socially
constructed” or “contingent,” not tied to physical stuff, processes, and forces.
✅ The Disappearance of Matter
Bryant critiques the dominant (especially Continental) use of materialism for erasing:
• the agency of physical systems,
• infrastructure,
• environments,
• energy flows,
• bodies,
• technology,
• geography.
He gives many concrete examples of what's ignored in discursivist “materialism”:
• caloric intake,
• transportation networks,
• pollution,
• architecture,
• road design,
• diet,
• energy systems,
• geology,
• labor exhaustion,
• climate systems.
Instead, Marxism and critical theory became obsessed with:
• language,
• ideology,
• signification,
• subjectivity,
• discourse.
Thus, matter “evaporated” from materialist theory.
✅ The “Discursivist” Trap
This shift was partly due to influential readings of Marx, especially on commodity fetishism,
where:
• objects were read purely as crystallizations of social relations.
• critique became about unmasking the human meaning behind things.
So physical things were treated as mirrors or vehicles of the social, not as actors with their own
power. To speak of material agency became naïve.
✅ Consequences
🔹 Analytically
• Only discursive power is recognized.
• Physical systems—turnstiles, transportation layouts, electricity grids, natural obstacles—
are ignored.
• This blinds theory to non-human, non-linguistic forms of domination and organization.
🔹 Politically
• Critical theory became incapable of grappling with climate change, ecological collapse,
and infrastructural realities.
• Everything was reduced to representation, narrative, or ideology.
Even ecocritics focused on environmental discourse instead of real systems like bees, crops, oil
extraction, or carbon emissions.
✅ Bryant’s “Conversion”: From Discursivism to Object-
Oriented Thought
Before 2006 Bryant himself was entrenched in discursivist materialism (Žižek, Lacan, Derrida,
Adorno, structuralism/post-structuralism).
What shook him out of this?
Playing SimCity 4.
The game made him confront how infrastructures, pollution, traffic, electricity, zoning, disasters,
and physical layouts actually structure social relations—beyond discourse or belief.
This experience led him to:
• object-oriented ontology,
• The Democracy of Objects,
• the concept of onto-cartography.
✅ What Bryant Means by “Matter”
His materialism is intentionally naïve:
• Matter = “stuff” and “things.”
• Ideas only exist in physical media (brains, paper, data banks).
• Even meaning is materially stored and transmitted (fiber optics, signals, air).
He emphasizes:
• multiple kinds of matter,
• emergent discrete entities (“machines”),
• processes and interactions over essences,
• skepticism toward philosophical definitions of ultimate matter (leave that to physics).
✅ What Is Onto-Cartography?
Onto-cartography is a way to map how different “machines” (both discursive and physical)
interact to structure worlds.
Key claims:
• The world is made of machines (entities that take inputs and produce outputs).
• Machines exist at multiple scales and can be organic, technological, geological,
discursive, etc.
• Societies are ecologies of machines.
• Power is renamed “gravity”—the force by which machines structure the movements and
relations of other machines.
The task is to describe:
• why systems persist,
• how assemblages organize life,
• where change can occur,
• how to intervene strategically.
✅ Relationship to Existing Theory
Bryant does not reject discursive theories, but says:
• their insights are valid when limited in scope,
• their failure lies in overstatement,
• material forces and infrastructures must be integrated.
He proposes onto-cartography as a meta-framework that can “port” existing political and
ethical critiques (Marxist, feminist, ecological, post-colonial, queer, anarchist, etc.) into a more
materially grounded ontology.
✅ Scope and Chapters in Brief
He previews the rest of the book:
PART I: MACHINES
What the world is made of
1. Everything is machines
2. Operations and flows
3. Alien phenomenology
4. Assemblages and entropy
PART II: WORLDS
How worlds form
5. Ecologies of expression and content
6. Space as paths; time as rates of flow
7. Power as gravity (objects shaping relations)
8. Geophilosophy, ecology, overdetermination, and agency
The overarching aim:
To give political and ethical thinking a material, ecological, and infrastructural ontology,
rather than a fundamentally discursive one.
✅ In One Sentence:
Bryant argues that “materialism” has become purely discursive, losing sight of actual physical
stuff and non-human agencies; he proposes onto-cartography as a renewed, realist materialism
that maps how physical and discursive entities (“machines”) interact to structure power, society,
and ecology, making real political change thinkable again.
