Object-oriented ontology

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Specifically, object-oriented ontology opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. Thus, for object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their relata in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.

Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a correlation between thought and being, such that the reality of anything outside of this correlation is unknowable. Object-oriented ontology predates speculative realism, however, and makes distinct claims about the nature and equality of object relations to which not all speculative realists agree. The term “object-oriented philosophy” was officially coined by Graham Harman, the movement's founder, in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects." Since then, a number of theorists working in a variety of disciplines have adapted Harman's ideas, including philosophy professor Levi Bryant, literature and ecology scholar Timothy Morton, video game designer Ian Bogost, and medievalists Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Eileen Joy. In 2009, Bryant rephrased Harman's original designation as “object-oriented ontology,” giving the movement its current name.

Founding of the movement

The term “object-oriented philosophy” was formally coined by speculative philosopher Graham Harman in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects," (later revised and published as Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects), though he had considered delivering an object-oriented talk at the University of Toronto a year earlier, in 1998. For Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, refers to the withdrawal of objects from human perception into a reality that cannot be manifested by practical or theoretical action. Furthering this idea, Harman contends that when objects withdraw in this way, they distance themselves from other objects, as well as humans. Resisting pragmatic interpretations of Heidegger's thought, then, Harman is able to propose an object-oriented account of metaphysical substances.

Following the publication of Harman's early work, several scholars from varying fields began employing object-oriented principles in their own work. After encountering speculative realism in the blogosphere, Collin College philosophy instructor Levi Bryant proposed a volume of collected essays on the topic. Called The Speculative Turn, the project involved Harman and Nick Srnicek as co-editors. While completing the compilation, Bryant began what he describes as “a very intense philosophical email exchange” with Harman, over the course of which Bryant became convinced of the credibility of object-oriented thought.

Other advocates for object-oriented ontology include literature and ecology scholar Timothy Morton and video game designer Ian Bogost. Morton became active in the movement after his book Ecology Without Nature was favorably compared to some aspects of object-oriented philosophy. Bogost, on the other hand, had read Harman's Tool-Being while finishing his doctoral dissertation at UCLA and subsequently applied object-oriented ideas to gaming, media, and technology studies.

Basic Principles

While object-oriented philosophers pursue different theoretical trajectories and propose divergent, and sometimes oppositional, conclusions, they share several common precepts, including anthrodecentrism, a critique of correlationism, a rejection of philosophies that undermine or overmine objects, preservation of finitude, withdrawal and general silliness.

Anthrodecentrism

The rejection of post-Kantian privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Beginning with Kant's "Copernican revolution," modern philosophers began articulating a transcendental anthropocentrism, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception, and that nonhuman object relations distort their relata in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness. Thus, all object relations, human and nonhuman, are said to exist on equal ontological footing with one another.

Critique of correlationism

Related to anthrodecentrism, object-oriented thinkers problematize correlationism, which the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." Because object-oriented ontology is a realist philosophy, it stands in contradistinction to the anti-realist trajectory of correlationism, which restricts philosophical understanding to the correlation of being with thought by disavowing any reality external to this correlation as inaccessible, and, in this way, fails to escape the ontological reification of human experience.

Rejection of under/overmining

Object-oriented thought holds that there are two principal strategies for devaluing the philosophical import of objects. First, one can undermine objects by claiming that they are an effect or manifestation of a deeper, underlying substance or force. Second, one can overmine objects by insisting either that an object's existence consists merely in its qualitative apprehension or relations with other objects. Object-oriented philosophy rejects both theses.

Preservation of finitude

Unlike other speculative realists, object-oriented ontology maintains the concept of finitude, whereby relation to an object cannot be translated into direct and complete knowledge of an object. Since all object relations distort their relata, every relation is said to be an act of translation, with the caveat that no object can perfectly translate another object into its own nomenclature. Object-oriented ontology does not restrict finitude to humanity, however, but extends it to all objects as an inherent limitation of relationality.

Withdrawal

Object-oriented ontology holds that objects are independent not only of other objects, but also from the qualities they animate at any specific spatiotemporal location. Accordingly, objects cannot be exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects in theory or practice, meaning that the reality of objects is always present-at-hand. The retainment by an object of a reality in excess of any relation is known as withdrawal.

Metaphysics of Graham Harman

In Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Graham Harman interprets the tool-analysis contained in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time as inaugurating an ontology of objects themselves, rather than the valorization of practical action or networks of signification. According to Harman, Heideggerian zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, indicates the withdrawal of objects from both practical and theoretical action, such that objectcal reality cannot be exhausted by either practical usage or theoretical investigation. Harman further contends that objects withdraw not just from human interaction, but also from other objects. He maintains:

If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops. Even inanimate things only unlock each other's realities to a minimal extent, reducing one another to caricatures...even if rocks are not sentient creatures, they never encounter one another in their deepest being, but only as present-at-hand; it is only Heidegger's confusion of two distinct senses of the as-structure that prevents this strange result from being accepted.

From this, Harman concludes that the primary site of ontological investigation is objects and relations, instead of the post-Kantian emphasis on the human-world correlate. Moreover, this holds true for all entities, be they human, nonhuman, natural, or artificial, leading to the downplayment of dasein as an ontological priority. In its place, Harman proposes a concept of substances that are irreducible to both material particles and human perception, and "exceed every relation into which they might enter."

Coupling Heidegger's tool-analysis with the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl, Harman introduces two types of objects: Real objects and sensual objects. Real objects are objects that withdraw from all experience, whereas sensual objects are those that exist only in experience. Additionally, Harman suggests two kinds of qualities: Sensual qualities, or those found in experience, and real qualities, which are are accessed through intellectual probing. Pairing sensual and real objects and qualities yields the following framework:

• Sensual Object/Sensual Qualities: Sensual objects are present, but enmeshed within a "mist of accidental features and profiles."
• Sensual Object/Real Qualities: The structure of conscious phenomena are forged from eidetic, or experientially interpretive, qualities intuited intellectually.
• Real Object/Sensual Qualities: As in the tool-analysis, a withdrawn object is translated into sensual apprehension via a "surface" accessed by thought and/or action.
• Real Object/Real Qualities: This pairing grounds the capacity of real objects to differ from one another, without collapsing into indefinite substrata.

To explain how withdrawn objects make contact with and relate to one another, Harman submits the theory of vicarious causation, whereby two hypothetical entities meet in the interior of a third entity, existing side-by-side until something occurs to prompt interaction. Harman compares this idea to the classical notion of formal causation, in which forms do not directly touch, but influence one another in a common space "from which all are partly absent." Causation, says Harman, is always vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered:

'Vicarious' means that objects confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity. 'Asymmetrical' means that the initial confrontation always unfolds between a real object and a sensual one. And 'buffered' means that [real objects] do not fuse into [sensual objects], nor [sensual objects] into their sensual neighbors, since all are held at bay through unknown firewalls sustaining the privacy of each. from the asymmetrical and buffered inner life of an object, vicarious connections arise occasionally...giving birth to new objects with their own interior spaces.

Thus, causation entails the connection between a real object residing within the directionality of consciousness, or a unified "intention," with another real object residing outside of the intention, where the intention itself is also classified as a real object. From here, Harman extrapolates five types of relations between objects. Containment describes a relation in which the intention "contains" both the real object and sensual object. Contiguity connotes relations between sensual objects lying side-by-side within an intention, not affecting one another, such that a sensual object's bystanders can be rearranged without disrupting the object's identity. Sincerity characterizes the absorption of a real object by a sensual object, in a manner that "takes seriously" the sensual object without containing or being contiguous to it. Connection conveys the vicarious generation of intention by real objects indirectly encountering one another. Finally, no relation represents the typical condition of reality, since real objects are incapable of direct interaction and are limited in their causal influence upon and relation to other objects.

Expansion

Since its inception by Graham Harman in 1999, a number of theorists working in a variety of disciplines have adapted and expanded upon Harman's ideas, including philosophy professor Levi Bryant, literature and ecology scholar Timothy Morton, video game designer Ian Bogost, and medievalists Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Eileen Joy.

Onticology (Bryant)

Like Harman, Levi Bryant opposes post-Kantian anthropocentrism and philosophies of access. From Bryant's perspective, the Kantian contention that reality is accessible to human knowledge because it is structured by human cognition limits philosophy to a self-reflexive analysis of the mechanisms and institutions though which cognition structures reality. He states:

For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of philosophy to the interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive focus on how humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through the agency of the human will becomes a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions without contributing anything of its own.

To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented philosophy called 'Onticology', grounded in three principles. First, the Ontic Principle states that "there is no difference that does not make a difference." Following from the premises that questions of difference precede epistemological interrogation and that to be is to create differences, this principle posits that knowledge cannot be fixed prior to engagement with difference. Consequently, for Bryant, the thesis that things-in-themselves exist outside the boundaries of knowledge is untenable because it presupposes forms of being that make no differences. Similarly, concepts of difference predicated upon negation—that which objects are not or lack when placed in comparison with one another—are dismissed as arising only from the perspective of consciousness, rather than an ontological difference that affirms independent being. Second, the Principle of the Inhuman asserts that the concept of difference producing difference is not restricted to human, sociocultural, or epistemological domains, thereby marking the being of difference as independent of knowledge and consciousness. Humans exist as difference-making beings among other difference-making beings, therefore, without holding any special position with respect to other differences. Third, the Ontological Principle maintains that if there is no difference that does not also make a difference, then the making of difference is the minimal condition for the existence of being. In Bryant's words, "if a difference is made, then the being is." Bryant further contends that differences produced by an object can be inter-ontic (made with respect to another object) or intra-ontic (pertaining the internal constitution of the object).

Since Onticology construes anything that produces differences as being—including fictions, signs, animals, and plants—equally real, albeit at different scales, it is what Manuel Delanda has called a "flat ontology." Within an onticological framework, objects are composed of differences coalescing into a system that reproduces itself through time. Changes in the identity of an object are not changes in substance (defined by Bryant as "a particular state attained by difference"), however, but shifts in the qualities belonging to a substance. Qualities are the actualization of an object's inhered capacities or abilities, known as an object's powers. The actualization of an object's power into qualities or properties at a specific place and time is called local manifestation. Importantly, the occurrence of local manifestations does not require observation. In this way, qualities comprise actuality, referring to the actualization of an object's potential at a particular spatiotemporal location among a multitude of material differences, whereas powers constitute virtuality, or the potential retained by an object across time. As objects are distinct from local manifestations and one another, referred to as withdrawal, their being is defined by the relations forming their internal structure, or endo-relations, and retained powers. This withdrawn being is known as the virtual proper being of an object and denotes its enduring, unified substantiality. When relations external to an object, or exo-relations, consistently induce the same local manifestations to the extent that the actualization of qualities tends toward stability (for example, the sky remaining blue because of the constancy of Rayleigh scattering on atmospheric particles), the set of relations forms a regime of attraction.

Onticology distinguishes between four different types of objects: Bright objects, dim objects, dark objects, and rogue objects. Bright objects are objects that strongly manifest themselves and heavily impact other objects, such as the ubiquity of cell phones in high-tech cultures. Dim objects lightly manifest themselves in an assemblage of objects; for example, a neutrino passing through solid matter without producing observable effects. Dark objects are objects that are so completely withdrawn that they produce no local manifestations and do not affect any other objects. Rogue objects are not chained to any given assemblage of objects, but instead wander in and out of assemblages, modifying relations within the assemblages into which they enter. Political protestors exemplify rogue objects by breaking with the norms and relations of a dominant political assemblage in order to forge new relations that challenge, change, or cast off the prior assemblage.

Additionally, Bryant has proposed the concept of 'wilderness ontology' to explain the philosophical pluralization of agency away from human privilege. For Bryant, wilderness ontology alludes to the being of being, or common essence "characteristic of all entities and their relations to one another." Resisting the traditional notion of wilderness that views civilization (the "inside" world of social relations, language, and norms) as separate from wilderness (the "outside" world of plants, animals, and nature), wilderness ontology argues that "wilderness" contains all forms of being, including civilization. Accordingly, the practice of wilderness ontology involves experiencing oneself as a being amongst, rather than above, other beings. In generalizing the agential alterity of being as a foundational ontological principle, Bryant posits three theses: First, wilderness ontology signals the absence of ontological hierarchy, such that all forms of being exist on equal footing with one another. Second, wilderness ontology rejects the topological bifurcation of nature and culture into discrete domains, instead holding that cultural assemblages are only one possible set of relations into which nonhuman entities may enter in the wilderness. Third, wilderness ontology extends agency to all entities, human and nonhuman, rather than casting nonhuman entities as passive recipients of human meaning projection. Employing these theses, Bryant pluralizes agential being beyond human finitude, contending that in so doing, the intentionality of the nonhuman world may be investigated without reference to human intent.

Hyperobjects (Morton)

Timothy Morton, professor of literature and the environment at the University of California, Davis, became involved with object-oriented ontology after his ecological writings were favorably compared with the movement's ideas. In The Ecological Thought, Morton introduced the concept of hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. He has subsequently enumerated five characteristics of hyperobjects:

1. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes.
2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.
3. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce.
4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view.
5. Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive to the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement.

According to Morton, hyperobjects not only become visible during an age of ecological crisis, but alert humans to the ecological dilemmas defining the age in which they live. Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic matter (what Morton calls a "demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion"), gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies may become indistinguishable from reverential care.

Alien phenomenology (Bogost)

Ian Bogost, a video game researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of Persuasive Games, has articulated an "applied" object-oriented ontology, concerned more with the being of specific objects than the exploration of foundational principles. Bogost calls his approach alien phenomenology, with the term "alien" designating the manner in which withdrawal accounts for the inviolability of objectal experience. From this perspective, an object may not recognize the experience of other objects because objects relate to one another using metaphors of selfhood.

Alien phenomenology is grounded in three "modes" of practice. First, ontography entails the production of works that reveal the existence and relation of objects. Second, metaphorism denotes the production of works that speculate about the "inner lives" of objects, including how objects translate the experience of other objects into their own terms. Third, carpentry indicates the creation of artifacts that illustrate the perspective of objects, or how objects construct their own worlds. An example of carpentry in practice would Bogost's design of the "Latour Litanizer," a digital program that generates Latour litanies (lists of heterogeneous and often counterintuitive objects that resist representative homogenization) using the MediaWiki software platform. By rapidly dispersing a diverse array of results, the litanizer acts as a philosophical artifact that inhibits the reduction of the being of listed items to a governing prototype or truth value.

Bogost sometimes refers to his version of object-oriented thought as a tiny ontology to emphasize his rejection of rigid ontological categorization of forms of being, including distinctions between "real" and "fictional" objects.

Criticism

Some commentators contend that object-oriented ontology degrades meaning by placing humans and objects on equal footing. Blogger and cosmotheandric philosopher Matthew David Segall has argued that object-oriented philosophers should explore the theological and anthropological implications of their ideas in order to avoid "slipping into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe."

Cultural critic Steven Shaviro has criticized object-oriented ontology as too dismissive of process philosophy. According to Shaviro, the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze account for how objects come into existence and endure over time, in contrast to the view that objects "are already there" taken by object-oriented approaches. Shaviro also finds fault with Harman's assertion that Whitehead, Simondon, and Iain Hamilton Grant undermine objects by positing objects as manifestations of a deeper, underlying substance, saying that the antecedence of these thinkers, particularly Grant and Simondon, includes the "plurality of actually existing objects," rather than a single substance of which objects are mere epiphenomena.

Key texts

• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. (2009). Duke University Press.
• Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. (2008). The MIT Press.
• Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. (2011). University of Minnesota Press.
• Braver, Lee. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. (2007). Northwestern University Press.
• Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. (2011). Open Humanities Press.
• Bryant, Levi; Harman, Graham; Srnicek, Nick. The Speculative Turn. (2011). re.press.
• Ennis, Paul. Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews. (2010). Zero Books.
• Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. (2002). Open Court.
• Harman, Graham. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. (2005). Open Court.
• Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. (2009). re.press.
• Harman, Graham. Towards Speculative Realism. (2010). re.press.
• Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. (2011). Zero Books.
• Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. (2011). Edinburgh University Press.
• Harman, Graham. The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE. (2011). Zero Books.
• Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. (1988). Harvard University Press.
• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. (1993). Harvard University Press.
• Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. (1999). Harvard University Press.
• Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. (2004). Harvard University Press.
• Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. (2010). Continuum.
• Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. (2010). Harvard University Press.

External links

Blogs

• Object-Oriented Philosophy - Graham Harman
• Larval Subjects - Levi Bryant
• Ecology Without Nature - Timothy Morton
• Ian Bogost - Ian Bogost
• In the Middle - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, and Mary Kate Hurley

Journals

• Collapse - published by Urbanomic
• O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies - edited by Levi Bryant, Kris Coffield, and Eileen Joy
• Speculations - edited by Paul Ennis, Michael Austin, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, and Robert Jackson
• Thinking Nature - edited by Timothy Morton and Ben Woodward

Presses

• Open Humanities Press - Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Punctum Books - Brooklyn, New York
• re.press - Victoria, Australia
• Zero Books - United Kingdom

Lectures/Tutorials

• Speculative realism/object-oriented ontology tutorial - by Graham Harman
• History of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism - video lecture by Graham Harman
• Onticology Manifesto, Part 1 - by Levi Bryant
• Onticology Manifesto, Part 2 - by Levi Bryant
• A Lexicon of Onticology - by Levi Bryant
• Dawn of the hyperobjects - video lecture by Timothy Morton
• UCLA 'OOO' Symposium - featuring lectures by Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Nathan Brown, and Ian Bogost
• Feeling Stone - audio lecture by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
• Neoplatonism - audio lecture by Scott Wilson

Selected Interviews

• Another Heidegger Blog - Interview with Levi Bryant
• Another Heidegger Blog - Interview with Ian Bogost
• Another Heidegger Blog - Interview with Graham Harman
• Figure/Ground - Interview with Timothy Morton
• Figure/Ground - Interview with Graham Harman
• Figure/Ground - Interview with Levi Bryant
• Fractured Politics - Interview with Ian Bogost
• Fractured Politics - Interview with Levi Bryant
• Fractured Politics - Interview with Graham Harman
• Fractured Politics - Interview with Timothy Morton
• Fractured Politics - Interview with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
• Philosophy in a Time of Error - Interview with Levi Bryant
• Philosophy in a Time of Error - Interview with Ian Bogost
• Philosophy in a Time of Error - Interview with Jane Bennett