Interview: Ian Bogost
Do you think this is a game?!
It's a tired parental exclamation, a signifier of a relationship rolling in the deep. And, according to Persuasive Games co-founder Ian Bogost, an important political question, to be answered literally, as well as discursively. Provided we can take a break from the latest level of Angry Birds.
When we think of games, we tend to think of leisurely play. Whether it's FarmVille or HALO, the consensus seems to be, "Wii would like to play, so long as we don't have to think." Put simply, games are an escape from reality. In the interview that follows, however, Bogost argues that games have the potential to not only be part of our technological environments, but to invest reality with new forms of expressivity, unleashing lines of flight from reductionist representations that lead to an engagement with complexity. If you agree with what he has to say, you can tweet about it in 180 characters or less, after updating your Facebook status.
Q: In one of your most recent books, Persuasive Games, you dissected the rhetoric of video games, arguing that within them, new forms of rhetoric are at play. How would you describe the rhetorical strategies employed in video games, and how do these strategies differ from previous models?
Rhetoric has a storied history, and it remains one of the most active fields in the humanities, due in part to its overlap with college composition. But it had always struck me that theories of rhetoric were insufficient to account for the unique properties of computers. Just as visual rhetoric was developed to theorize the way images make arguments and express ideas differently from oratory or writing, so it seemed to me that a new kind of rhetoric would be required to effectively understand, critique, and create computational media. I call this form procedural rhetoric, because it builds on the unique properties of the computer: it's ability to execute a series of rules or instructions. In computing we call that feature procedurality.
If oral rhetoric uses speech, if written rhetoric uses writing, if visual rhetoric uses images to make arguments and express ideas, then procedural rhetoric uses processes. These processes aren't just hypermodernist bureaucracies either, they are rules of operation. Sets of such rules that come together to produce behaviors. Procedural rhetoric is a rhetoric made of rules and behaviors rather than words or images.
I start the book with an introductory example—a game first made in the 1970s for a then-popular educational computing system called PLATO. The game is called Tenure, and it was meant to be played by students graduating with teaching certificates, to give them a sense of the trials a new high school teacher might face in the first year on the job. In the game, the player has to get hired, organize a classroom, manage students, and also deal with institutional politics and interpersonal relationships in the school. The means of interaction is very simple—a series of scenarios, each with a set of choices—but the end result offers a very effective portrayal of the dynamics of a secondary school, one in which classroom teaching is often secondary to the various organizational politics taking place between different constituencies.
Procedural rhetoric is a rhetoric of models. Procedural rhetoricians build models that make arguments about how things works. And they do this not through description or illustration but through enactment. Like any argument, these models are partial, abstracted. They focus on the parts of of a system that someone wants to highlight.
In that respect, videogames in particular and computation in general are only one material in which procedural rhetoric can take form. But any sort of creative practice rooted in modeling could exhibit procedural rhetorics. Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby suggest the orrery as an example—a mechanical device that illustrates planetary motion. So, physical models are another sort of medium conducive to procedural rhetoric. So are demonstrations—the muster drills that take place aboard ocean liners are one of my favorite examples; they model an evacuation in order to give passengers a sense of how it would really go. Compare that to the verbal, written, or visual take you see on an airplane and you'll grok the difference.
It's funny you say "most recent books" though. Persuasive Games was published in 2007, which is an eternity in the corner of the world I usually run in. And in fact, it's just now starting to catch on in rhetoric circles. An interesting reminder that the world of technology and media moves at a different pace than that of the humanities, for better and for worse.
Q: Interactive games, and especially video games, are often described as a by-product of a hypervirtual culture, in which reality collapses into endless simulacra. Yet, you argue that games have the power to effect social change. In what ways can games foment change, and how are game designers taking this potential into account?
I like the example of Tenure mentioned above not only because it is effective and relatively self-contained, but also because it was already a superb specimen of procedural rhetoric in 1975. The advancement of technology isn't central to procedural rhetoric; it's just another way to express ideas, particularly complex ideas, one particularly compatible with computation.
For those who take my argument for procedural rhetoric seriously, videogames aren't fundamentally visual, even though they do obviously share a history and a present with visual representation (especially the television). Instead, games are fundamentally procedural—they involve the operation of complex systems. This is the problem with the Baudrillardian hyperrealism argument—it assumes that all simulations replace the real, rather than giving us new perspectives on it.
We're living in an era in which almost everything is bigger, weirder, and harder to pin down than we'd like to think. Pick almost any issue of considerable import: climate, the economy, health, energy, and so forth. We'd like these issues to have simple, definitive solutions, answers that can be recited in stump speeches or sound bites or tweets or status updates. But reality is much stranger and more complicated, and the only way to really get a handle on it is to admit that the moment one variable changes, another one does too. We tend to think of social issues as problems of ideological victory, but really they are enormous, complex machines, what Tim Morton calls hyperobjects.
Since games rely on procedural rhetoric as their native form of representation, they offer us a medium in which we can represent complexity as complexity, rather than simplifying it into crude shorthands or simplistic freeze-frames. Politically speaking, games will not necessarily lead us to new and better solutions—in fact, if we take them seriously, they will do nothing of the sort, since they resist solution and replace it with contingency. Instead, understanding social concerns via videogames may make us more versed in the strange comfortable discomfort of social, political, geological, and economic complexity. Videogames make us less inclined to look for answers and more inclined to ask how the moving parts of a system interact productively and unproductively. This kind of literacy—sometimes called systems literacy or procedural literacy—is essential if we ever hope to make any real social progress.
Over the years I've tried to explore this possibility space in my game design practice. I've critiqued U.S. airport security policy in games in not one, but three different games. The New York Times has published my editorial games about FDA inspectors and the ill-fated McCain-Kennedy Immigration Reform Bill. My games have addressed food safety and agribusiness, consumerism, personal debt, the global petroleum market, pandemic flu, wind energy, and the politics of nutrition. Many of these games can be played via my studio, which is also called Persuasive Games. Some of them are very small and modest, offering a surgical attack on a specific issue, like food safety or consumer debt. Others are more extensive and complex, dealing with a whole set of interrelated behaviors, like the connections between socioeconomics, public policy, and long-term physical health.
Games like these undermine the very idea of "social change," if change implies solution and resolution. Instead of social change, we may end up with something more like "social churn"—situations in which people and things constantly negotiate with one another in order to struggle toward a tentative conclusion, one that will always be swooped up again into another foam of swirling sea.
Q: I would be remiss if I didn't ask about the new frontier of gaming: Facebook applications. In your view, what is the relationship between Facebook applications as a creative medium and the technocultural principles from which they emerge, and what impact might the corporatization of these apps through companies like Zynga have on their expressivity?
I've been a fairly vocal critic of social games, particularly the Zynga-style games that some have compared to behaviorist operant conditioning apparatuses. Since your readers may not be aware of it, last year I made a Facebook game that satirized and commented upon this state of affairs, called Cow Clicker. The gist of the game is that you click on a cow, and then click again after six hours, or you pay to click more frequently. I made the game to embody a concern with the way these games treat friends (and customers) as resources to be maximized, and then create compulsive feedback loops for players to enact that maximization. I've written about this game in considerable detail, and Edge magazine recently published a feature on the game, so readers who want the whole story might want to consult those two sources.
There are lots of things I could say about Facebook games and Cow Clicker and Zynga and the like, but in the interest of being concise and concrete, I'll say this: I think we're still not really sure what Facebook is doing to contemporary culture and social practice. We think we know, to an extent, whether that thought is positive or negative. And certainly its undeniable that the Silicon Valley high tech industry believes that whatever technology provides and people use is virtuous by definition—that's the fundamental precept of technolibertarianism. But as McLuhan says, we don't fully understand a medium until we begin to move beyond it.
That provision in mind, I suspect Facebook has more in common with Archer Daniels Midland than it does with Microsoft. Just as ADM invented methods for processing grains and oils into cheap, flexible food products, so Facebook invented methods for processing human relationships into cheap, flexible social products. If you think about it that way, then companies like Zynga are more like Coca-Cola or Heinz, taking the enzymatic sociality that Facebook has provided and using it to create processed experiences. So, just as corn sweeteners, oils, and starches have become cheap, simple, and even compulsive ingredients in so many packaged foods, so the equivalents "processed relationships" are now being synthesized and deployed across platforms like Facebook.
If we take this analogy between Facebook and ADM seriously for the purposes of a thought experiment, the question that we now face is something like this: are processed relationships somehow fundamentally insidious (like high fructose corn syrup), or are they just raw materials that can be fashioned into unfamiliar yet meaningful experiences (like, say, ethanol)? We don't yet know the answer.
Q: How did you become involved with object-oriented ontology and how does it influence your overall body of work?
I had read Graham Harman's Tool-Being the moment it was published—in fact, I remember writing to pester the publisher about when it would ship, since its publication date had been moved once or twice (by no fault of Graham). So I was familiar with the fundamental ideas that Harman gave the shorthand "object-oriented philosophy" back when I was still writing my dissertation. By happenstance, Graham found me via an Amazon.com search for his books (since Amazon searches inside books for references). We exchanged emails for a time, remaining fond of and interested in each others' work from the perspective of outsiders.
Then two things happened. First, I in 2007-2009 I researched and wrote Racing the Beamwith my MIT colleague Nick Montfort. It's a book about the Atari Video Computer System (aka the Atari 2600), the first in a series we conceived of and now edit, called Platform Studies. The series invites books that discuss the relationship between the hardware and software design of computer platforms and the creative works produced upon those platforms. Nick and I dug deep into the Atari, a platform we both know and love. I'd been teaching with it for several years already, and I also use it in my creative practice (my latest game, A Slow Year, is a set of "game poems" for Atari).
After we published Racing the Beam, I felt content but incomplete. The book covers the weird hardware design of the Atari VCS in considerable (but accessible) detail in the book, discussing the way the programmer has to negotiate between the MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor and a strange, custom-designed graphics and sound chip called the Television Interface Adapter. I had been programming this weird computer for years by then. It's an alien experience—since the Atari has only 128 bytes of RAM, there's no room for a frame buffer, and the programmer must interface with every scan line of the television display, timing instructions to take place before the electron beam passes over particular parts of the screen.
I found myself wondering about all the other actors in that system, besides the electrical engineers and the programmers and the marketers and the players. What about the microprocessor, the RF transmitter, the cathode ray tube? What is an Atari game like for them? What is it like to be a computer? That was my first move toward becoming a practicing object-oriented ontologist.
The second event made that intention more concrete and less theoretical. In 2008, I was invited to keynote the Philosophy of Computer Games conference, held that year in Potsdam. All my books up until then had been philosophically motivated to some extent—Unit Operations presented an ontology of procedurality across different media, and Persuasive Games was about rhetoric. But I hadn't yet explored the being of computational objects in earnest. So I took the opportunity to work on that project for the keynote, the beginnings of what would become my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology.
In the years since, I have generalized my approach so it would apply to more than just computer parts, but my take on OOO remains concerned partly with the being of specific objects, be they media objects or more ordinary ones. I sometimes call this a "pragmatic" or "applied" OOO, but only to contrast my method with the more first-principles approaches of Harman or Bryant. Of course, all of us are interested in specific objects as well as general theories about things. In some ways OOO brings me full circle, allowing me to close the loop on some of the ideas I first advanced in Unit Operations, but to extend those beyond the corner of media and technology where I've spent most of my academic and professional career.
Q: I'll ask you the same question I asked Levi Bryant: What is your take on the ontological status of fictional objects, as well as their ability to interact with so-called 'real' objects?
I don't distinguish between fictional and real objects, at least not at the ontological level. Both Levi Bryant and I adopt the term flat ontology to describe our position; this just means that we consider all objects to exist equally. At the metaphysical level, there is no difference in the existence of warthogs, polystyrene, and Harry Potter. Clearly there are many important differences between these objects in their relation to other things in the world, but in a purely metaphysical sense, one exists no less than another.
My ontology is really, really flat. So flat that I sometimes describe it as a point instead of a plane: tiny ontology rather than just flat ontology. For me, it's important that we take being as seriously as possible, which rather counterintuitively involves letting just about anything in the club, including signs, ideas with no referent, concepts and otherwise intangible things, things that are contingent or counterfactual, and so forth. These sorts of objects interact with "real" objects all the time—I think Levi Bryant did a commendable job explaining how this works in his recent interview on this site, and I see no reason to say more about that than he did already.
Another very curious and magical thing happens when we admit the existence of fictional objects along with tangible ones: Whole swaths of being open up that we might otherwise have missed. I'll use a videogame example for kicks: Consider Pitfall Harry, who appears in the famous 1982 game Pitfall! It's tempting to think of Pitfall Harry as a fictional character, one commensurate with Harry Potter or Jay Gatsby. And that's true, that's one of the registers on which Pitfall Harry exists. But Pitfall Harry also exists as a pattern of focused electrons striking the phosphorescent surface of a cathode ray tube. And Pitfall Harry also exists as a segment of a set of signals modulated by an RF transmitter between the Television Interface Adapter and the television antenna. And Pitfall Harry also exists as several sets of eight-bit binary data tables stored on program ROM. And Pitfall Harry also exits as a set of 6502 assembly instructions that determine when, where, and in what pattern to adjust the player sprite register settings on the Television Interface Adapter such that he will appear on the screen. And at another level, Pitfall Harry also exists as a printed character on a product box, as an actor depicting him on a television commercial, and as a pen-and-ink drawing in a tie-in comic book.
Which is the "real" Pitfall Harry? Rather than undermining him into nothing more than the material structures that form him in any given case, and rather than overmining him into the perceptual, cultural, or social apparatuses that create or comprehend them, I'm content to allow all of them to exist equally, although we may have different reasons for being concerned with any one example at a given moment.
Q: Finally, given your work in object-oriented thought and computer games, what utility does the relationship between humans and technology have for conversations about human finitude and causal relations in an increasingly posthuman world, if any?
The example of Pitfall Harry above may have seemed silly at first, but I think it offers a useful lesson in the strange overlaps between the world of technology and the world of humans. We have long imagined the world as one split between human and world, nature and culture, technical and natural, living and inert, among other categories. But it doesn't take much pause at all to see that the real story of existence is much stranger and more wonderful than those coarse categories allow us to see. There's no reason that everything can't be considered a technology, just like everything can be considered an equipment (as in Heidegger, but via Harman's interpretation that extends it beyond Dasein) or a medium (as in McLuhan, whose anything-goes ontology of media has still not been fully grasped). Then everything whatsoever has a strange, secret, withdrawn existence that we can't fully grasp, but about which we can speculate.
Technology shows us that posthumanism isn't a statement about a machinic future (transhumanism), nor is it a kind of all-encompassing virtual mush (antihumanism). Instead, a true posthumanism would be one that accepts that humans exist no more or less than catacombs, erector sets, and papadam. Humans can use our relationships with technology to understand this situation better, through speculating on the weird existence of things. If anything, my own close encounters with technology have only served to make me even more attuned to a greater range and number of other things in the world. Philosophy should be a kind of tinkering as much as a kind of thinking. And not just an abstract, idealist mental bricolage, not just the deconstruction of ideas and comportments, but a literal tinkering, the actual disassembly and creation of things of all kinds. Metaphysics should be the practice of metaphysicians, who get their hands dirty with the details of being. Philosophy thus becomes a kind of engineering.
Ian Bogost is Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches in the undergraduate program in computational media and directs the graduate program in digital media. Affiliated with the college's GVU Center, Bogost has written several books on the expressivity and cultural significance of computer games, including Persuasive Games (2007), Unit Operations (2008), Racing the Beam (2009), and How to Do Things with Videogames (forthcoming, 2011). Follow his work at www.bogost.com and on Twitter at twitter.com/ibogost.
Posted by Kris Coffield at 7/9/2011 3:15 PM 
Categories: Interviews
Tags: ian bogost ooo video games interviews
Categories: Interviews
Tags: ian bogost ooo video games interviews
So, I'm going to extrapolate, I don't think erroneously, that Bogost rejects the divide between entertainment and utility as far as games are concerned. Would that be correct?
From there, I'm vary curious about the aesthetic dimension of games. Bogost touches on the idea of experiences of objects other than ourselves, viewing them as metaphysically no less important than humans. Assuming it's from here that he derives the idea of an 'alien phenomenology' (which I've read nothing on, just to be honest) that addresses the experience of other objects, mindful of the human-object gap, or 'withdrawal'.
Is such a project purely transcendental, in that we can't discover the empirical sensibilities of an object other than ourselves? For example, to experience the wind as a leaf, I would need to inhabit the properties of the leaf, such that I was relating to other objects as the leaf. But if that's impossible, can we ever unearth what a priori knowledge exists for another object? I don't think so, and I'm wondering if it's the gap that Bogost is seeking to explicate.
This feeds back into a broader question that I have about the formation of sensibility. Taking seriously, and literally, Deleuze's idea of 'becoming', I have a hard time affirming that sensibility is innate, and instead would argue that it is (perhaps always) contingent. Yet I don't want to disavow an object's materiality. Within the realm of video games, I'm curious as to how Bogost would respond to this dilemma. In other words, does the developmental capacity of video games affirm the relationality of sensibility?
At a popular level, I'm also curious about that his response to that question informs his thinking on more popular subjects, like whether or not violent video games induce real-world violence, though I'm not sure he'd mark a distinction between violence in the one and the other.
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There are a few threads in this comment. Let me see if I can reply quickly to each.
First, you're right that I don't accept a divide between entertainment and utility in games. That's already present in my earlier work but my forthcoming book How to Do Things with Videogames argues for a McLuhan-inspired "media microecology" that looks at spectrums of purposes and uses when considering the maturity of a medium.
Second, the Alien Phenomenology book isn't out yet, so you're not the only one who hasn't read it! We OOO adherents contend that something is always withdrawn in objects, held in reserve, inaccessible to the outside. The speculative project respects this inaccessibility without making transcendental appeals. We can't inhabit the leaf, but we can find evidence for its being. Speculation is required to address the gap.
Third, I'm not sure I understand the question about sensibility versus materiality.
Finally, as for videogames and violence, one cannot simultaneously hold that games have effects on people's political ideas and actions but that videogames cannot incite "negative" ideas and actions. That said, the idea that there is some automated, involuntary process by which games produce violence is as idiotic as claiming that the complexity inherent to games also produce positive views on complexity. Art is and should be dangerous.
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With regarding to sensibility versus materiality, I'm just asking whether or not the aesthetics of video games can be considered in terms of affectivity or sensibility, not just expression, and how the two relate. In this sense, I'm construing 'affect' in terms of actants, such that a shift in affect involves not just an emotional change, but a new will to act.
So, do video games carry a potential for falsifying the idea that the real-world, or social world, and all of its actors are static, that their reactions to and relations with processes, and perhaps all objects, are innate, morphogentic?
Moreover, are new forms of given knowledge or knowledge independent of experience made extant by playing games as a result of affective shifts?
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Ah I get it now. Short answer: yes! Expression/rhetoric/representation is one lens through which games can be considered interesting objects, but not the only one.
One of the arguments in favor of games as theoretically beneficial affective objects is argued by my friend and colleague Jane McGonigal in her recent book, about which I have both praise and reservations (see http://bogo.st/kl)
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Levi Bryant wrote on this subject a few days ago, actually, and I find his comments pertinent to this thread. Citing an article detailing how certain types of video games boost women's spatial cognition, Bryant discusses how such differences are morphogenetic, rather than - as you say - innate or "hardwired."
Particularly useful is his discussion of the difference between the transcendental aesthetic and the empirical aesthetic, in which the former involves discovery through thought sans experience, while the latter involves discovery through experience. Thus, for Bryant, the transcendental aesthetic is "a form of sensibility that precedes any particular experience and that structures all experiences."
From here, one can argue (as you and Ian do) that playing video games is an interaction between entities that forges new a priori sensibilities, and deliberately entangles the work of creativity with its affective gaze, unearthing what I believe to be a much more object-oriented poetics (but more on that in a later post).
For more, see Bryant's post: http://bit.ly/qhHxGo.
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I really like the idea of 'procedural rhetoric', whereby the primary instrument of persuasion is rules or a system of rules. I wonder, though, can procedural rhetoric be said to interact with other forms of rhetoric within computer games?
Take the Final Fantasy series, for example. Not a serious game like some of the others described in this interview, perhaps, but a nonetheless popular game that is modeled around a specific narrative. The game itself has rules and I think one can safely say that such rules - in battle, in terms of increasing a player's skill, acquiring items, etc. - govern interaction. That said, the basis of an RPG is the narrative, the story, the character development, all of which conjure Aristotelian pathos and ethos. In fact, one could discuss at length the ethos of communities formed around specific games, be it Final Fantasy, Everquest, World of Warcraft - the latter two being MMORPGs without ending, in which the identity of many players is injected in the disposition of their in-game avatars.
How does procedural rhetoric manipulate and/or redeploy other rhetorical forms, and specifically how does it reframe basic pathos and ethos, bearing in mind that these are products of an intended audience (as much as the author of a persuasive act) that are, in a sense, value-adding?
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Right, procedural rhetorics are very often strapped to or blended with other forms of rhetoric, most often visual ones. In Persuasive Games I talk about the need to create "tight coupling" between the system and its visual (or it could be textual, etc.) presentation to produce coherent works.
It's worth distinguishing this sort of multipart rhetorical system from what rhetoricians sometimes call "multimodality," which I fear puts different media forms on equal footing. There may be text in an image, just as there may be imagery in a procedural system, but the function of one is altered by the others, particularly if one becomes primary.
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An 'alien phenomenology' auscultated through games would pluralize theory, and herein lies what I would view as one of its primary virtues. Too often, I think philosophies of radical difference - which I presume OOO to be - fall prey to false homogenization, rupturing themselves from within by reducing all variants of an idea - subjectivity, difference, signification - to a singular variant of that idea. For instance, many philosophies of difference that I've come across locate the differing mechanism in phenotype, discourse, or performance, excluding any other mechanism.
If I'm understanding Bogost's 'tiny ontology', a central point of his thinking is not to unfold existence on to a singular table, but to allow existence to continue unfolding and refolding on its own accord. From there, I think one can push theory beyond singular explication into plural terrain, such that theory becomes a contingent product of multiple actants.
I wonder, though, if the pluralization of theory overturns procedural rhetoric. Not in the sense that the concept is invalid; on the contrary, it's quite brilliant. Instead, a deliberate emphasis on plurality, in this sense, emancipates and multiplies relations that models and rules attempt to capture and delimit.
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It's useful to distinguish metaphysics from other kinds of philosophy... in this case rhetoric, but also ethics. There's been rising intent in the rhetoric community to define an "object-oriented rhetoric," but I'm not sure if that's possible at the level of rhetoric, save for a rhetoric that would be informed by an object-oriented ontology, which would be welcome indeed. Put differently, rhetoric and ethics might operate on the inside of objects. That doesn't mean they are inaccessible--remember that for us, "Georgia" or "the media" are objects as much as are cantaloupes.
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When we're talking about fictional objects, can we distinguish the medium of transmission from the 'fictional' aspect of the object? To use the "Pitfall Harry" example, the binary date and modulated signals exist in the real world, and so does their technological expression, for that matter. But the character does not. Yet people interact with, manipulate, and are influenced by the character, meaning the fictional character has real-world effects. Thus, I have a hard time figuring out where to draw the line.
I suppose this is why Bogost practices a flat ontology, but I'm wondering where we draw the line between fiction and reality from the perspective of his 'tiny ontology'.
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Even the admission of the existence binary data and modulated signals suggests a change in the way we consider fictional. Fictional objects, like any other, turn out to be weird containers full of far more than we'd previously been willing to admit. There is no line!
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What is it about McLuhan that hasn't been grasped? I can see how he'd be useful to object-oriented discussions, in particular his idea of 'the figure' and 'the ground'. If I recall correctly, McLuhan obfuscates the line between the two, asserting that is made intelligible within and inextricable from its socio-historical context. Moreover, an expression creates its own context. In the same vein, one could argue that the expressivity of a video game, or a relation between objects, creates its own context, based on the spatiotemporality assumed by an object., thigh this may be an overly deterministic reading of McLuhan.
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It's true that McLuhan's figure/ground distinction is a useful way to see things set off from other things. But for me, the really useful innovation in McLuhan's metaphysics (which is how Levi and I plan to present it) is the Tetrad, which appears in Laws of Media, a posthumous work.
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McLuhan is great, but very difficult reading. I'm very interested to know where Bogost takes his thought. I just ordered a book called 'The Digital McLuhan' that updates McLuhan for the age of new media (which he predicted). Haven't yet received, but I wonder if there will be any parallels with Bogost's rendering.
The part of McLuhan I find most apt to my flawed and admittedly incomplete understanding of object-oriented thought is that of 'hot' and 'cool' media. Hot media, like movies cater to a single sense above others, dominating the receiver's interoperation and experience. Cool media, on the other hand, do the opposite, mandating greater viewer participation and abstract reasoning.
I liken this to Bryant's fourfold classification of objects, and would argue that hot objects are effortless immersive and lead to ordering, whereas cool objects involve multisensory relations. I recognize that this employs a certain spatial logic, but I feel like that's already in play with regard to extent to which an object withdraws from other objects in a given context.
Your thoughts, anyone?
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Levi and I are planning a book about McLuhan as a philosopher, focused on media ecology as a kind of metaphysics. I talk a bit more about it in an interview on Figure/Ground, here: http://figureground.ca/interviews/ian-bogost/
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I'm not at all well versed in the theses of Marshall Mcluhan, but I would suggest that Alfred North Whitehead holds potential for object-oriented investigations. Like many of the others who've commented, I'm new to this thoughtworld. Based on the reading I've done on this site, however, I think Whitehead's 'organic realism' or 'process philosophy' offer similar metaphysical principles.
For example, Whitehead describes elemental formation as a result of experiential occasionalism, in which present experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and, in turn, coalesce into groupings that characterize concrete objects. Crucially, present experiences secure and react to prior experiences in a non-deterministic manner, but my point is that Whitehead's metaphysics emphasizes the process by which an object is experiences, necessitating a turn from idealism.
I don't think it's too much of a leap to graft this upon objects experiencing each other immanently. If objects experience the 'concreteness' of other objects as a non-deterministic succession of grouped occasions, objects necessarily withdraw from each other, as Harman indicates. One catch that occurs to me, though, is thought you'd need to account for objects along different scales - if a concrete object is a group of smaller experiences, you have to account for both the concrete object and the comprising objects. Has anyone in OOO done that yet?
Sorry if that's an absurd question and/or train of thought. Like I said, I'm just learning about this stuff! Don't want to look like a fool!
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All of us are fans of Whitehead... he's one of the only philosophers of the last century to treat things as having equal interest as humans. The problem I have with Whitehead, from an OOO perspective, is that his thinking is too relational and temporal. I distinguish between process and procedure in Whitehead vs OOO in a short paper, which you can read here: http://bogo.st/kd
About objects at different scales... there's some disagreement among the OOOers regarding which sorts of objects are "real," but for me the usefulness of flat ontology is that it allows us *not* to make an ontological distinction between things of different scales. As the rhetorician Alex Reid recently put it, "an object is other than the sum of its parts."
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I actually have encountered some of Bogost's work before, mostly in class. Since he's been responding to some of the comments on this thread, I wonder if I could entice him to briefly discuss his notion of 'carpentry', which I understand to be part of his unpublished 'Alien Phenomenology'?
From what I gather, 'carpentry' refers to the need to replace purely textual discourse with a metaphysics of practice; that is to say, a philosophy that constructs things - concepts? actual objects? either or both? - that explicate the kinetic creative potential of things, or how things create the conditions of their own existence. Is that even close to correct? If so, I think the use of McLuhan is appropriate and obvious, since, as Marisol mentioned, he discusses how media create their own contexts. Tangential question: If a thing can create the conditions for its own existence, can it also create the conditions of possibility giving rise to its existence, or is this too much of a regression?
What makes the idea of carpentry (as it was presented to me) difficult is that I'm not certain what Bogost means by 'thing' in this context, though I assume it would be any 'thing', as all objects exist equally within tiny ontology. So, I can conceive of creating a videogame that self-refernces its metaphysical potential in this sense, but what about other 'made' things, like laws, or ideas, or wine? It's pretty well known that the author of this site is an anti-trafficking advocate who helps victims of sexual slavery, has even taken a bullet for it. Within that context, is carpentry possible, or is it a distinction between more passive objects and active, involved object formation that explains how things relate to other things and make their own object-worlds?
Disclosre: Object-worlds is not my term! Anyway, I'm interested in unpacking this idea, or set of problems, which, to me, relate to the undoing of textual ubiquity, whereby everything is reduced to, rather than informed by, discourse, and sometimes sadly a singular discourse at that.
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Oops, I responded to the wrong thread somehow. Answer is below.
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Yup, you've got the basics... the idea is that metaphysics can be a practice by which many different sorts of objects of philosophical discourse can be produced. Texts are among these, of course, but so are many others--computer programs, for example, or food, or really anything whatsoever, depending on the metaphysician's aims and talents.
The distinction between "ordinary" objects and those of philosophical carpentry is one that we'll have to experiment with to understand fully. But for me, the distinction is that objects of carpentry are created for philosophical discourse primarily or exclusively, not first for art or eating or what have you.
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So, one could think of gardening as a form of carpentry? Or music? For example, some people create based on philosophical principles, reflected in various types of experimental music, like minimalism. That could be construed as carpentry, right? In other words, carpentry involves making things with primarily philosophical purposes, but that doesn't have to be the only purpose or effect?
What I'm struggling with is the issue of intent, and how intentionality is divined. In other words, if I create something, a text or otherwise, with a philosophical purpose, how are others to understand my intent? It seems to me that objects created through carpentry could be misconstrued, if that makes sense. If I compose a song with a philosophical intent, what's to stop someone from saying it's actually a song about experimenting with notation, chords, lyrics, or a critique of social orders? Or even to make money by creating "music (art) for music's (art's) sake," if you will?
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Sure, gardening is a possibility. Or music. Who knows? It's all fair game as far as I'm concerned.
The problem of intent is real, and my answer above isn't yet sufficient, but it's a start.
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I'm very confused, having just read something on Levi Bryant's website about what makes objects "real." According to Bryant, objects that are dependent upon other objects (he uses the example of a nightmare, dependent on the dreamer), aren't "real." He calls them "relational entities." He goes on to say that siblings and parents also aren't "real," since they depend upon familial relations.
Thus, there seems to be a break in his thinking. Relations are less real than the objects doing the relating, that I get. But if we extrapolate outward, dependency can describe a lot of different things. For example, classes don't exist because they're dependent upon students and teachers, or lessons. The outer wall, it seems to me, would be something like, "Objects don't exist because we can only ever know an object through our relation to it." See what I'm saying?
Basically, this line of thought recuperates Kant's Copernican Revolution because it predicates the ontological state of object on the epistemological rendering of their relations, thereby emphasizing not the realism of objects themselves, but the relations between objects. I'm probably overstating things a bit; maybe Bryant can correct me if he reads this.
Where do you draw the line? How is my "sister" not real? What are the implications of "sisterhood" not being a real thing? Perhaps most importantly, how can this be reconciled with Bryant's assertion in a previous interview that fictions are "real" if they have effects and exist in the minds of more than one person (in which case his nightmare would still not be "real")? Sorry if I sound so critical. I'm really, really not trying to be. I'm just confused.
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Yeah, I read that too, and I didn't get for the same reason you did. Family relations - sisterhood, brotherhood, spousalship, parents - have real effects. Take the idea of "parents," for example. Being a parents involves numerous rights and responsibilities with regard to a child, including legal rights, tax breaks, responsibilities for schooling, etc. Aren't those things, even if just construed as effects, enough to qualify "parent" as a thing? Moreover, doesn't "parenthood" exist in the minds of more than one person - not the parent and child, but teachers, other relatives, government officials, and others?
A further question, here, is: Are emotions not real things? Is that what Bryant is getting toward? As in, the "love" existing between a parent and child is a relation between the two objects, parent and child, but not exhaustive or constitutive of either object? That I would get, but in that case, the focus is on the relational process.
I'm thinking Bogost's 'tiny ontology" doesn't allow for the distinction Bryant is trying to make. Just my two cents!
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To me, Bryant is interrogating whether or not "relations relate," though not in those terms. That's an important point, I think, and one that hasn't been sufficiently explained in object-oriented ontology, especially when we get into ideas like "material traces."
In answer to that question, i tend toward the affirmative. Processes can be intertwined, though the objects embedded within or acting on those processes are probably the ones doing the intertwining. Nonetheless, "parenting" can be intertwined with "educating," for example, meaning that the acts of each can influence each other.
Of course, that repeats the question: If something has real effects and involves multiple objects, it that thing "real?" But I think the trick is separating questions of ontological reality from those about relations and processes. An object is not a process, not a relation. In fact, OOO maintains that no process or relation within which an object is active exhausts the nature of the object. Hence, withdrawal. If we look at things from that perspective, Bryant could be revised to say that "parents" and "siblings" and "nightmares" are not real "objects," but denote real "processes," or even "real effects" of relations between objects. Not "relational entities," mind you, but relational "effects," for lack of a better term. Oh, here's one: "Special effects." <--- How's that?
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Just a quick comment to note that Levi and I differ on this, as you will see in Alien Phenomenology when it's published. I have a very loose and fast understanding of reality.
That said, Levi's not saying that the ontological state of a thing is dependent on epistemological renderings.
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With respect to some of the comments made here, it's important to note that none of the object-oriented ontologists I've featured are interested in policing how their thoughts are deployed (I think; feel free to disagree, thinkers). As Timothy Morton indicated, it's more interesting to see how ideas develop than try to control their evolution.
In fact, the first thing that drew me toward OOO was not the philosophy itself, but its insistence on exactly this type of engagement. I come from a very open-minded department, sort of a theoretical laboratory if you will, where researchers are constantly testing, adapting, combining, and creating new theories to address various problems. In other words, we try to bridge the gap between theory and practice - isn't that what 'carpentry' is about, in its most elemental form?
Additionally, it's important not to look at OOO as a monolithic ideology, since it stands in opposition to, you know, monolithic ideologies. The recently released "The Speculative Turn," edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, really brings this point home, and I highly recommend it. So, be careful imposing Harman's theses on Bryant and Bogost, and vice-versa. While they share basic principles, they often move in different, though equally fascinating, directions.
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