In responding to Mikhael at Perverse Egalitarianism, Dr. Sinthome addresses my same question about how the proliferation of difference would not in some way result in no difference:

I agree that we must avoid a “night in which all cows are black”, where we can only speak of chaos or noise without differentiation. I have spoken of this often on my blog. However, the thesis that there are many different types of differences or that there are a plurality of differences is entirely different than the declaration that there is only chaos. Following Bergson, I hold that chaos is a sort of transcendental illusion where one form or order is measured by another form of order and found lacking of that order.

By way of example as to what I’m getting at with the Hegemonic Fallacy, I simply want to avoid those forms of thought where, for example, it is held that everything about a person can be explained by their DNA (another form of the Hegemonic Fallacy). DNA, of course, contributes an important difference, but so do rates of development whereby proteins reach one another, the availability of materials in the environment for the assembly of cells, the altitude at which a body develops, etc. Likewise, not only does DNA make a difference, but the body that develops in part based on a particular set of chromosomes also makes a difference that can’t simply be reduced to DNA. That body is dependent on its DNA but can’t be reduced to that DNA. It too “makes a difference”. This is far from a night in which all cows are black, though admittedly it can get pretty complex.

I want to give Dr. Sinthome as much credit as is due to him, but if his main point in regards to the hegemonic fallacy is that reductionism is bad, what’s the point of the hegemonic fallacy and all of the abstract talk of objects? To an extent I agree with Mikhael that LS’s metaphysics obscures the fact that what he seems to be saying isn’t, at the core, all that interesting. If I could crudely summarize, it seems that LS’s point is this: the Ontic principle (“there is no difference that does not make a difference”) does not intend to describes Kantian Things-in-themselves (which would simply be a return to traditional metaphysics), but seeks to overcome the nature/culture divide that characterizes Modernist thinking by asserting (1) the horizontal nature of difference and (2) the “deconstruction” of objects.

In the case of these two points, the first involves the destruction of structure or hierarchy. This is another way of simply restating the hegemonic fallacy: no difference can attain a metaphysical status wherein it determines other differences (Sinthome gives Latour’s example of the Bible and the “savages”). The second point involves a critique of Kant, who, despite his attempt at limiting metaphysics to the scope of the (transcendental) conditions of possibility, nevertheless describes what is outside of consciousness (or what is for-us) as “objects,” which presupposes a modicum of organization that is itself rendered “metaphysical” under Sinthome’s “speculative realist” terms (and the same, for Sinthome, seems to be true of intuitions, but ultimately what I find disappointing about Sinthome’s reading of Kant is that it is simply boring). The other interesting problematic brought up in connection with this relates to Graham Harman’s argument, described over at Shaviro’s blog, about how:

It’s not a matter of forgetting Kant’s exclusion from the in-itself. It’s a matter of questioning why he gives humans a monopoly on such exclusion. In a sense, I’m trying to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself. A sort of Kantianism for inanimate objects.

I think this is an interesting point, but worth bracketing since I don’t understand it. But to return to Sinthome’s original discussion on object-oriented philosophy, it still seems unclear to me how the Ontic principle avoids reducing all difference to no difference. Obviously there is the whole problem of reductionism, but is this really the case when, say, one argues that the structure of capitalism is responsible for global violence? Or when we say that “class,” in a sense, determines subjective modalities more than other categories (gender, race, etc.)? Is it possible, therefore, to make the case that some differences matter more than others, while at the same time avoiding the metaphysical position that elevates one difference to an exceptional status?