The Joy of Carpentry

Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing is a philosophical inquiry into what it might be like for a thing to experience. While ontology since Hegel has generally considered being in-and-for itself and for-others, this method of inquiry always presumes a humanist centrality that Bogost finds problematic. There are an infinity of beings which operate irrespective of human beings and consciousness. His project proceeds critically if informally: he advances his position as much by sniffing out any residue of anthropocentrism that might be found in other philosophical inquiries as he does by offering any sustained methodological approach of his own. Nonetheless, Bogost practices what he calls “speculative realism,” namely, a mode of inquiry that not only considers existence as separate from thought but “a philosophy claiming that things speculate and, furthermore, one that speculates about how things speculate.”

Bogost primarily situates himself alongside Graham Harman and Bruno Latour, particularly in terms of their anti-correlationism—namely, the propensity in philosophy to reduce being to a problem of human access. The correlationist sees being as something which must exist for humans. In opposition to this reductionist approach, the speculative realist utilizes object-oriented ontology (OOO), which essentially seeks the democratization of all ontological entities such that no one being has privilege over any other; human beings exist equally alongside any other being (tacos, batteries, hair follicles, nebulas, fictional characters, what have you). Bogost’s brand of OOO sees things as discrete units that interact with other things but retain an utterly alien experience of the world irreducible to any other ontological existents. Therefore, while all things have equal ontological status in general, they are unequal in their respective existential points of view on the world. Bogost proposes the term “unit” in place of “things,” “object,” or “beings” to express this multiplicity: “A unit is never an atom, but a set, a grouping of other units that act together as a system; the unit operation is always fractal.”

Bogost’s phenomenology begins with ontography, the means by which object relations can be displayed. Ontography is a manner of arbitrarily placing units side-by-side. Random lists and exploded views in product assembly instructions serve as examples of the ways in which we can visualize and express unit relations. They undermine the correlational position by frustrating the human proclivity for organizing things along anthropocentric lines. Nonetheless, the notion of conceptualization itself is already fraught with an inescapable anthropocentric premise. Indeed, any unit is unable to transcend its own unit-centrism, humans being no exception. In order to conceive something inconceivable, Bogost suggests, one must ultimately resort to analogies and metaphors. Metaphorism is the means by which we can express what might resemble the experience of a thing and how it interacts with other things.

The third chapter opens with a critique of an NPR interview on the subject of why people write, the purpose of which is to transition to an equally critical stance on the academic disciplines of the liberal arts, philosophy in particular. The point is a rather roundabout way to say that philosophy ought to build like a carpenter and be practical and not merely argue endlessly over arcane abstractions. Carpentry—Bogost’s term for this philosophical building—“entails making things that explain how things make their world. Like scientific experiments and engineering prototypes, the stuffs produced by carpentry are not mere accidents…. Instead, they are themselves earnest entries into philosophical discourse.” While this may sound nice in theory, in practice, it seems somewhat impotent. For instance, Bogost describes a website he designed for a 2010 conference on the subject of OOO in which he programed the webpage to randomly search the Internet for images so that each time one clicked onto the page, a new and arbitrary image would show. This was an example of a kind of ontographic carpentry, inviting the viewer to bear witness to the endless variation in which units can relate...