Obliterative Text Ontology (OTO)

The Obliterative Text Ontology (OTO), formulated by Thomas Glavinic, is the most structurally radical branch of Protofictional Emergence. Rather than analysing meaning or effect, it interrogates the ontological condition of the text itself. A literary work comprises not only its visible sentences but is surrounded by an invisible periphery of alternative formulations, omitted passages and latent variants – real components that can surface and replace the visible text under certain conditions.

According to OTO, the text is an unstable, multidimensional body of visible and invisible layers that self‑organises in supracycles. Key notions include the latent periphery (the unseen realm of potential text forms), obliteration (temporary or permanent fading of a passage into latency), palimpsestic clusters (overlaid text layers forming alternative paths), supracycles (large orbital structures through which motifs reorganise) and substitution units (invisible segments that can substitute visible portions without outward change).

Glavinic extends this logic to reality itself: if every literary work has an invisible periphery, so too does the world. Reality is conceived as a dynamic palimpsest of visible sequences and invisible alternatives, oscillating in endless reconfiguration. Texts, minds and worlds become a single unstable narrative field in which every perception is a partial access to a vast network of variants. OTO dissolves the traditional notion of authorship and treats the work not as a product but as an event in an ongoing process of emergent reconfiguration, offering a metaphysics of possibility where every reality is a text that continually erases and rewrites itself.