We like to act as if the world revolves around just a single thing, or at best a handful of things. We think that most things do not truly exist in and of themselves, because they are all just reflections of another more important and central thing. This is a comfortable thought, because it promises us clarity and control. Hence our tendency to reduce (large parts of) the world to, for example, natural laws, God, the brain, the economy, subatomic particles, or our genes. By doing so, we hope to distil the complexity and diversity of reality into a single eminent ‘control room’.
Using the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, his dissertation shows that such reductionism is always false. Not a single entity is ever the mere effect of something else. On the contrary. Whether we take a memory, a device, an ocean or a festival, any given thing is first and foremost itself unleashed into the world as a force or a machine.

Arjen Kleinherenbrink (Apeldoorn, 1984) is a metaphysician and philosophical anthropologist. His research concerns thinkers who deny human beings a privileged position in the world, but rather regard ourselves as equal things among things. His main interest here is philosophies attempting to theorise how human and non-human entities are always enmeshed and intertwined in complex, unpredictable and surprising ecologies.