Object-Oriented Ontology’s Endless Ethics

Cristin Ellis (bio)
The University of Mississippi

A review of Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.

It is reported that, while out on a stroll with friends one day, the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody walked into a tree limb. Picking herself up, she explained to her concerned companions, “I saw it, but I did not realize it.”[1] This story’s appeal lies in its succinct, slapstick debunking of Transcendentalist claims to omniscience: whilst enjoying the view as a “transparent eye-ball,” Peabody got poked in her real one. For scholars in the small but energized field of Object-Oriented Ontology, however, Peabody’s myopia could more broadly be said to exemplify, albeit in cartoon form, a kind of object-blindness that in fact plagues the entire tradition of post-Kantian philosophy.

Spearheaded by the work of philosopher Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (“OOO”) takes issue with Kant’s conclusion that, since the object-in-itself is beyond human perception, the question of object ontology lies outside of philosophy’s purview.[2] It argues that, by exiling object-being from the field of inquiry, Kant’s Copernican Revolution sentenced philosophy to a narrow anthropocentrism, sponsoring a tradition that unjustly privileges human perception as the only available gauge of reality. OOO proposes to remedy this error by framing a new metaphysics that would restore unmediated object-being to the sphere of philosophical speculation. This is not to say that OOO proposes to solve the problem of human finitude—and here is one of many ways OOO diverges from other metaphysics associated with Speculative Realism, the philosophical movement of which OOO is a branch.[3] On the contrary, OOO freely concedes Kant’s point that the ontology of objects is inaccessible—being, in Harman’s words, infinitely “withdraws from human view into a dark subterranean reality” (Harman, Prince of Networks 1). Instead of overturning Kant, OOO universalizes the problem of finitude, arguing that all instances of relation—human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate—are subject to the conditions of mediation. On this view, a billiard ball’s encounter with a felt bumper is no less mediated than Peabody’s encounter with a tree limb. OOO would argue that both Peabody and the billiard ball “prehend” (in Whitehead’s term) their worlds according to rules particular to their constitution. Thus OOO strives to combat philosophical anthropocentrism by insisting that human experience is only one of billions of modes of perceiving the world. That it happens to be our mode does not justify the decision to preclude philosophical speculation about others.[4]

In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost’s enticingly slim and conversational new contribution to OOO, Bogost contends that media studies are uniquely suited to take up this challenge of imagining object “perception.” Since Alien Phenomenology is therefore not a book of object-oriented philosophy per se, but rather a book about object-oriented methodology, it will likely be of more use to those already familiar with OOO than to those seeking an introduction to object-oriented philosophy. Wondering if “scholarly productivity [must] take written form,” Alien Phenomenology envisions an alternative philosophy that would involve fewer precarious sentences and more instructive objects. In this applied practice, objects would serve as “philosophical lab equipment” for exploring and exemplifying theory (89, 100). 

For Bogost, this shift from argumentation to objectification is particularly critical to the future of object-oriented studies. That is, while Bogost suggests that all philosophy might benefit from a move away from academic writing (which he finds hopelessly prone to “obfuscation, disconnection, jargon and overall incomprehensibility”), he argues that OOO is particularly disadvantaged by academia’s “semiotic obsession” insofar as this has had the tendency to aggrandize linguistic over other modes of representing the world (89, 91). By contrast, Bogost observes, if we wish “to approach the nonsemiotic world,” we must do so, in Levi Bryant’s words, “‘on its own terms as best we can’” (qtd. in Bogost 90). That means blending conventional philosophizing with extralinguistic techniques to investigate the perspective of objects. To this end, Alien Phenomenology demonstrates what an applied OOO might look like by assembling an ecstatic yard sale of objects—from diagrams and photographs to bossa nova lyrics, light sensors, and data visualizers—which, as Bogost reads them, help to “illuminate the perspective of objects” (109). 

There is, however, something distinctly perverse about this project. As Bogost explains, “even if evidence from outside a thing…offers clues about how it perceives, the experience of that perception remains withdrawn” from human access (63). “Alien phenomenology” thus names a philosophy which can only exist as a speculative practice, and never as an achieved or verifiable knowledge. The aim of knowing “what it’s like to be a thing” therefore remains strictly aspirational; alien phenomenology invites us to hypothesize endlessly about what must nevertheless, by definition, lie beyond our grasp. 

So why bother? Why should we undertake a philosophical endeavor that Bogost himself describes as “benighted meandering in an exotic world of utterly incomprehensible objects” (34)? At times, Bogost envisions the possibility of attaining a speculative approximation of object perception, as when he argues that, although “the alien phenomenologist’s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand,” it may nonetheless yield “a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience” (100). But absent an explanation of how one might hope to assess the accuracy of a likeness whose referent is strictly unknown to us, this argument risks collapsing alien phenomenology back into the empiricism it denigrates. Much more compelling are Bogost’s and Harman’s defenses of OOO on the grounds of its ethical force. They suggest that the very futility of the alien phenomenologist’s effort to “[ferret] out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone” may yet constitute his ethical triumph, for by foundering against the limits of human knowledge he shows us just how parochial our understanding truly is (Harman, Prince of Networks 213). Only then—chastened, at a loss, dusting flakes of tree bark from our hair—might we finally begin to appreciate the “awesome plenitude of the alien everyday” (Bogost 134). Accordingly, Alien Phenomenology closes with a climactic chapter on wonder, that attitude of equal parts ignorance and astonishment from which, Bogost concludes, we may at last learn “to respect things as things in themselves” (131).

In moments like this, OOO begins to emerge as a new or vastly more extensive form of multiculturalism—a kind of deep ecology if ecology also included manufactured objects (like billiard balls or nuclear waste) among the categories of being it sought to respect. The centrality of this ethical impulse is similarly evident in the emphatically moralized terms of Harman’s critique of the Kantian tradition, which he refers to as “a Hiroshima of metaphysics,” a “crime against humans and non-humans,” and a “global apartheid” against non-human being (Prince of Networks 103, 102). Rhetoric like this clearly suggests that OOO’s disagreement with Kant (or with humanism more generally) is more ethical than philosophical. In the way that racism is a moral crime against certain humans, so humanism is criminally prejudicial to pandas and comets and cigarettes for Bogost and Harman.

But if OOO thus asks to be assessed as an ethics, then its most pressing tasks remain before it. First, it will need to justify more explicitly why and to what ends we should undertake the project of ethical extension it enjoins. This will also entail explaining what ethical standing will look like once it is transformed from a privileged status to a status universally accorded to literally everything. Second, it will need to find a way to make its case in a way that avoids being merely self-defeating. It may be that no one is particularly interested in arguing the case against more respect—surely there is no one who thinks the world would be worse if we spent more time treating everything as “worthy of consideration for its own sake” (Bogost 129). But OOO’s argument for itself cannot simply be that it does no harm to wonder at objects. It has to believe that it does harm not to wonder—that the world would be a better place if we honored the ontology of things by wishing we could know more about them. But better for whom—or, more to the point, better according to whom? Here OOO risks undercutting its antihumanism with an ethics that can’t help but be a human (if not a humanist) ethics. As a practical matter, things are even more complicated by the fact that, after all, OOO’s imperative is underwritten by the formerly humanist imperative not to treat others merely as instrumental means. But even if this weren’t the case, it would still be true that because OOO can’t, by definition, offer ethical arguments based in the experiences of the objects (whose being we cannot know), it will have to offer them in terms of the very humans it wants to see beyond. Without answers to these questions, OOO risks being a philosophical tradition that is post-humanist in name only.

Footnotes

[1] We have this story from a letter by Harriet Hosmer to Cornelia Carr (April 22, 1854); cited in Bruce Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 261.

[2] Graham Harman is the chief architect of OOO, the foundations of which he lays out in his first two books, Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002) and Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (2005). His prolific output over the past decade also includes studies that clarify the relation of his work to that of adjoining contemporary philosophers, including Bruno Latour (in Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, 2009) and Quentin Meillassoux (in Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 2011).

[3] Harman explicitly identifies OOO as a variety of Speculative Realism, a movement which houses a variety of metaphysical projects united by their shared opposition to the anthropocentrism of post-Kantian philosophy—its insistence that philosophy is prevented, by the unavoidable mediation of human perception, from gaining knowledge of reality as it exists beyond human thought. But the commonality amongst Speculative Realists effectively stops there. For instance, as Harman himself acknowledges, the differences between his own work and that of Quentin Meillassoux, the most prominent philosopher currently associated with Speculative Realism, could hardly be more glaring. Whereas Meillassoux argues that mathematical reasoning in fact allows us to “think what there can be when there is no thought,” Harman, despite his opposition to Kantian finitude, does not ultimately deny the limitations of human access to reality as such (After Finitude 36). Instead, OOO opposes the philosophical habit of treating human finitude as a reason to foreclose speculation about those noumenal realities which we cannot directly perceive.

OOO also bears a functional resemblance to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as well as other varieties of processualism currently housed under the large tent of New Materialism. Both OOO and ANT, for instance, reject the uniqueness of human being and instead endorse a “flat ontology” positing the equality of being across all phenomena—human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, extant and abstract or fictional. As a result, OOO and ANT (as well as New Materialism) function to counteract the historic privileging of the human over other forms of being, and seek to resituate human-being amongst a diverse and lively array of nonhuman entities and agencies. However, OOO diverges from Latour’s and other processualist approaches insofar as OOO takes an essentialist view of object being (objects are prior to their relations) whereas for processualism, relations are prior to objects. For an account of OOO’s relation to ANT, see Harman’s Prince of Networks; for a concise comparison of OOO to New Materialism, see Jane Bennett’s “Systems and Things: A Reply to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43:2 (Spring 2012), pp. 225-233.

[4] Despite references to object “perception,” OOO distinguishes itself from panpsychism: as Harman puts it, in OOO, “real objects have psyche… insofar as they relate” with other objects (Prince of Networks 213). Invocations of object “experience” in OOO are thus meant to be taken strictly in this limited, though admittedly counterintuitive, sense.

Works Cited

• Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Reply to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 225-233. Web. 16 Sep. 2015.
•  Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Print.
•  Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. Print.
•  —. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. Print.
•  —. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Print. 
• —. Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Print.
•  Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
• Ronda, Bruce. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.