OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY
LUKAS ENGELHARDT ESSAY ON:
ESSAY ON: OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY KABK GD-3 PHILOSOPHY, MAARTEN CORNEL 2017
INTRODUCTION In his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant criticises the peoples’ unwillingness to step out of the borders that have been drawn for them by the powers in place. He proposes the term Enlightenment as: “man’s emergence from his selfimposed immaturity”1 with immaturity describing a state of mind in which one has the ability but not the power of will to use one’s own intellect without guidance. Kant argues that the governing institutions, be it state, police, religions or schools, would teach the individual to obey from an early age on, and throughout the rest of their lives. Through this lifelong exposure to doctrine, he concludes, people had found comfort in conforming, and had lost the willingness to contradict—the act of which would hold the potential for mankind to develop 3
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itself further, to overcome, to become enlightened. The use of the intellect as a tool of understanding the world is central to Kant’s philosophy, and he is routinely employed as one of the ten-or-so central figures of the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that he has had a defining influence on Western philosophy in the centuries to come—Kant himself has become an institution. (On the English Wikipedia, which arguably could be seen as a representation of the main-stream Western intellectual discourse, Kant’s article is the 5301st in length—out of more than 5 Million in total, and only surpassed by one other philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche) Of course it is open for discussion whether today we are less controlled by institutions than in the Age of Enlightenment, and countless philosophers have engaged in this discourse ever since. But what is more, Kantian philosophy might 4
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have become the exact opposite of what he originally proposed: An intellectual paradigm, a philosophical dogma: a set of borders in which one can comfortably remain—and in which Western philosophy has remained for almost 250 years as argued by contemporary philosophers such as Quentin Meillassoux or Graham Harman. In this essay I am going to explore the views of a non-conclusive group of contemporary philosophers and writers that vehemently deny what they see as Kant’s fundamental premise and that are loosely grouped together under the term Speculative Realism. Specifically, I am going to discuss some of the ideas in Graham Harman’s proposed Object Oriented Ontology, and their implications in philosophy, art and spirituality. SPECULATIVE REALISM The term Speculative Realism originates from an eponymous conference held in London in April 2007. The Speculative 5
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Realists can hardly be summed up as a movement since they disagree on several fundamental issues. The speakers at the conference prominently denounced two dominant assumptions in the philosophical discourse, both of which they trace back to be the central arguments of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy: correlationism, the idea that it is not possible to conceive of a world outside of the human mind, and philosophies of access, the privilege of humanity over it’s surroundings.2 The term correlationism was coined by one of the speakers, French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, in his 2008 book After Finitude. He argues that correlationism has been the central dogma of Western philosophy ever since Kant, who proposed that our reality is merely a product of our intellect, which prevents us from ever knowing reality as it is independently from us.3 Under this premise of a fundamental correlation of thinking and existing, he writes: 6
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“it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from a subject. We can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object”4 Meillassoux’s argumentation relies heavily on rationalism and science and their potential for the acquisition of knowledge. This stands in stark contrast to another speaker at the conference, American philosopher Graham Harman, an outspoken critic of the dialectic separation between humans and objects. While Meillassoux argues that it would be possible to know that which is not relatable through neo-reational reasoning, Harman disagrees and claims: “The things-in-themselves remain forever beyond our grasp, but not 7
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because of a specifically human failure to reach them. Instead, relations in general fail to gasp their relata, and in this sense the ghostly things-in-themselves haunt inanimate causal relations no less than the human-world relation”5 He calls this philosophy Object Oriented Ontology. OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY The American Philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost defines OOO as the philosophical study of existence that “puts things at the center […]. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things 8
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can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.”6 As he already mentions, OOO’s interpretation of an object is almost comically wide. Everything is an object, be it living, nonliving, artificial, or conceptual. But what an object acPhoto at hair cutter in Berlin, description of the services offered: “Ladies, tually is, is a more Gentlemen, Haircutter, Solarium, Children” complex affair which unsurprisingly stands at the near centre of the discourse. In his 2012 essay The Third Table Harman elaborates through a critical examination of the Parable of the Two Tables by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, a British astrophysicist, from 1927. 7
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Eddington argues on the example of a table that there are two copies of every object in existence—a familiar table, one that we know and experience, and a scientific table, one that can be tested and logically explained. Harman argues that both views of the table are equally wrong, since neither manage to capture the table in it’s entirety and that there is a third table, the real table, which encompasses both and more. A core principle in Harman’s definition of an object is that it cannot be broken down to be the sum of it’s parts, like a person can not be broken down to be a sum of their parents. He writes: “Even if every physical thing is made of atoms, every basketball game is also made of individual plays—yet objects are not just sets of atoms any more than a game is just a set of plays or a nation just a set of individuals. The death of an Egyptian in combat on Mohamed Mahmoud 10
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Street is tragic, yet it does not mean the death of Egypt; indeed, quite the contrary.”8 At the same time, he claims, we cannot reduce the table to our use of it either, for it could collapse and fail us, and would still remain a table; its reality goes beyond our relation to it, or that of any other object for that matter. The third table “emerges as something distinct from its own components and also withdraws behind all its external effects.”9 But Harman doesn’t talk about a Platonic idea of a table either, where every manifestation of a table remains a copy of the original. In OOO every single table remains autonomous, permanently beyond anybody’s or any thing’s reach; unverifiable, both scientifically or tangibly. One can only seek the true table, indirectly, and try to get closer to it, with11
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out any possibility of every arriving. PSYCHEDELICS This fleeting nature of an objectin-itself is one that might sound familiar to some Thomas the Tank Engine, first appeared in 1946 in an illustrated chilpeople and can dren’s book by Reverend Wilbert Awdry and since wildly popularised in a TV be illustrated on a series and several feature films. simple example. As previously stated, everything is an object in OOO, regardless of whether a sentient being—a subject of sorts— experiences them in any way.12 This includes a cup, cups in general, We can never know what really goes on inside of Thomas the Tank Engine, no philosophy, a cell matter how much we relate with it. phone or: animals. Most people have probably wondered at some point in their lives what 10
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being a cat (or a dog, or a falcon, or… ) would be like. Similarly, talking animals exist in Jewish, Hindu and Christian mythology. Of course, hardly anyone would argue that language alone would suffice to truly know a person, let alone an animal, and talking animals might actually represent more of an anthropocentric understanding of our surroundings, one that OOO rejects vehemently. Still, I would argue that these are two examples that show our desire to attain closeness to our surroundings, to understand them— and the futility of these endeavours: In the 1960s the American neuroscientist, philosopher and psychonaut John C Lilly conducted experiments on consciousness and inter-species communication by administering LSD-25 to dolphins. He was convinced that dolphins would be able to mimic human speech patterns and had the brain capacity to apply them. To some unsurprisingly, his experiments generally failed to induce any real communication on a linguistic 13
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level, though he maintains that the dolphins were far more vocal than usually and that he built a non-verbal connection with them.13 Unsurprisingly to some, simply because it seems naive to believe that an animal would perceive, think, exist-in-itself in the same way a human does, and that they would be able to tell us of their animal-ness if only the (anthropo-specific) barrier of language could be eliminated. The question that remains is how the dolphins experienced their LSD trips, and according to OOO it will be a question forever unsolved. In 2014-15 British artist Suzanne Treister hypothesised in a similar manner in her multi medial project HFT The Gardener. HFT The Gardener tells the story of fictional Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a high frequency trader from London. He becomes interested in psychoactive substances and among other things starts inserting their molecular formulae into the trading algorithms regulating the buying and selling of stocks. After get14
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ting fired from his job because of this, he creates a series of drawings, scheSuzanne Treister - HFT The Gardener - Lophophora williamsii (Peyote), mata and diagrams 2014-15 along an obscure methodology, linking psychoactive plants to the companies in the Financial Times Global 500 index by deriving numerical values from the names of the plants spelled out in phonetic Hebrew.15 HFT The Gardener consists of an impressive collection of these works and a video narrating Traumberg’s methodology, his doubts and beliefs. Treister uses his story as a clever vehicle to produce works, and to pose questions from the perspective of an outsider artist. Through connecting spirituality and esotericism with the mysterious worlds of capitalism and high-power computing she ultimately manages to pose questions about the nature of consciousness and the metaphysical fabric of the world around us. 14
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However, I find this first step, the idea to administer psychedelia to computing algorithms in the same way John C Lilly did to dolphins the most fascinating in the light of OOO. The idea to treat these mathematical processes as entities that experience their own reality, one that can even be altered through drugs, seems not only in line with Harman’s definition of the object, but to lay at the base of a new approach to a world that exceedingly governs our lives, yet eludes understanding. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE On May 6th 2010 at 2:32 pm the US stock market crashed. Trillions of Dollars were lost over the course of a few minutes—the largest loss on a single day in history—only to recover completely about half an hour later. The Austrian artist and researcher Gerald Nestler examines what was later dubbed the flash crash closer in his 2013-14 video work COUNTERING CAPITULATION. 16
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As Nestler explains, the markets today are dominated by so called high frequency trading algorithms. While a transaction executed by a human took around 12 seconds in the 1990s, today these algorithms need about 700 Nanoseconds, or 0.0000007 Seconds. As Nestler puts it: “future events collapse into a presence beyond human comprehension”16 As a result the financial industry is engaged in an arms race for the fastest algorithms while simultaneously sabotaging each other through spamming and DDoS attacks. The inner workings of these algorithms are shrouded in secrecy, and the only people that understand what caused the flash crash, the engineers, are not allowed to speak openly in order not to scare share holders. Officially everything was due to a human error, but independent forensics companies 17
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seem to agree that the practice of high frequency trading itself should be held accountable.
Microsoft’s Twitter bot Tay being racist online17
We have become accustomed to socalled artificial intelligence slowly infiltrating our lives. The internet of things, the dream of a smart, interconnected kitchen is slowly becoming reality, as Dutch Graphic Designer Vera van de Seyp lays out in her 2016 book Platform as Habitat.18 All of our devices, previously only speculatively invested with inner life by philosophers like Harman suddenly actually communicate with each other. Countless chatbots and Twitter-AI’s online aim to learn from user input and mimc human behaviour, with sometimes unforeseen consequences as 18
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in the case of Microsoft’s Twitter bot Tay that learned to be really racist through it’s interactions with Twitter users in a matter of hours.19 The problem with this understanding of technology, in an object-oriented ontological way, is that we only judge it through our relation to it, through the feedback that we get from it, much in the same way that a Stickers like these illustrate a fundamental problem we have when dealing humanistic, experiwith technology: we don’t understand it. We need labels like these in order to ence-based, underevaluate technology, in order to relate to it in terms we can comprehend. standing of a table necessarily ignores parts of the table’s reality as laid out by Harman. In 2014, artist and musician Holly Herndon took part in the Seven on Seven conference organised every year through New-York-based new media organisation Rhizome. During her lecture, Herndon talks about email clients and asks why 20
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users are generally presented with hierarchical, organised, list-based interfaces. What, she asks, if emails were alive, had agency, would move around and would feel neglected when we don’t check them?21 I would argue that this is precisely the problem that arises when applying Harman’s philosophy on our experience of technology. The only situation in which we would ever invest a technological object with such agency, which of course seems quite an absurd proposition in itself, was if it were mediated to us. But as the examples of the high frequency trading algorithms show, technology’s inner life goes far beyond what we are presented with on an interface level and, according to Harman, beyond anything we could ever comprehend. It would seem naive to render such an object’s inner agenda equal to our intention for it.
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CASE STUDY: ANIMALS AND INFRASTRUCTURE Lisa Parks is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California. In a striking lecture at the Berlin Transmediale this year she investigated the relationship between animals and technological infrastructure on three case studies. In one of them she examines how in many places in the U.S. Ospreys have started to use cell phone towers as nesting sites over the course of the last two decades.22 The relationship between the two, the birds and the towers, is interesting in itself, since the phone towers, another of humanities interventions in nature, have actually led to a growth in Osprey population due to an abundance of nesting sites, while for the companies maintaining these towers the birds become a maintenance problem. What I would like to propose though is to look at the cell phone tower as an object in Harman’s sense of the word. 21
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Clearly, even when designing, planning and building these towers our idea of it’s inner life could have not been more limited: As intended, the towers send out radio waves that provide cell phone users with reception, we could say that this “sending-ness” might make up an integral part of a cell phone tower. But evidently there is much more to a cell phone tower: it is also a home for birds, it gives shelter and security to the birds inhabiting it. This “home-ness” must then be a part as integral to the inner life of an inhabited phone tower. OOO! ART! Object Oriented Ontology has become some-what of a trend in contemporary art, with numerous works all over the world referring to it. In a piece for artspace.com, NewYork based writer and curator Dylan Kerr attempts to explain: “Artists, after all, are people who 22
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spend their time investing objects with meaning, so the notion that the objects themselves may have something to say naturally strikes a chord—especially at a time when scientific developments are both giving us a better understanding of animal’s minds and inching us closer to authentically intelligent machines.”23 And also Graham Harman in The Third Table suggests that neither a scientific, nor a humanistic perspective would suffice to grasp the world around us in it’s entirety and thus a third culture would be needed—the arts. He concludes: “[artists] attempt to establish objects deeper than the features through which they are announced, or allude to objects that cannot quite be made present.”24 The notion that we are one with the world around us, or at least on the same 23
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plane of existence, is central to many religions and spiritual teachings all over the world and seems to somewhat have been lost on the Western civilisation—a philosophy that denounces anthropoand egocentrism might not be so misplaced after all. Towards the end of the story, Hillel Fischer Traumberg, the protagonist in Treister’s HFT The Gardener, wonders whether his experiences had been real or imaginary: “Was consciousness perhaps the ultimate organising principle of the universe, merely reflected by the brain in a limited and distorted way? Was consciousness maybe a giant algorithm? And where was the universe in this algorithm? Based on his experience with high frequency trading algorithms Traumberg decided to develop a new algorithm to test these ideas. 24
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A brain thinking about a brain. Consciousness thinking about consciousness. An algorithm trying to return information about another algorithm. A brain trying to develop an algorithm about an algorithm about a universe of which it is a part or perhaps a whole or perhaps neither?�25 BIBLIOGRAPHY 1
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Immanuel Kant - What is Enlightenment, 1784 http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html Robin Mackay - Editorial Introduction to Collapse II, 2007 https://www.urbanomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Collapse_2_Introduction.pdf Levi R. Bryant - Correlationism – An Extract from The Meillassoux Dictionary, 2014 https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/ Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude, 2008 http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/after-finitude-9781441173836/ Graham Harman - The Road to Objects, 2011 http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/48 Ian Bogost - What is Object-Oriented Ontology?, 2009 http://bogost.com/writing/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog/ Photo taken by Paul Bille, 2017 Graham Harman - The Third Table, 2012 http://files.meetup.com/328570/Harman%20-%20The%20Third%20 Table.pdf Graham Harman - The Third Table, 2012 Thomas the Tank Engine, image taken from http://www.thomasandfriends.com/nl-nl/ Illustration by Japanese Illustrator Yui Abe, 2014
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Levi R. Bryant - Object-Oriented Ontology, Lacan, and the Subject, 2013 https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/object-oriented-ontology-lacan-and-the-subject/ Harold A. Abramson, M.D. - The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, 1967 https://www.scribd.com/document/26114289/The-Second-International-Conference-on-the-Use-of-LSD-in-Psychotherapy-and-Alcoholism Suzanne Treister - HFT The Gardener, 2014-15 http://www.suzannetreister.net/HFT_TheGardener/HFT_Glitch.html Suzanne Treister - HFT The Gardener, 2014-15 http://www.suzannetreister.net/HFT_TheGardener/HFT_menu.html Gerald Nestler - COUNTERING CAPITULATION, 2013-14 https://vimeo.com/103128278 Screenshot from: Tay, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter , The Guardian, 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter Vera van der Seyp, Platform as Habitat, 2016 http://veravandeseyp.com/projects/project-28-.html Tay, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter , The Guardian, 2016 Image taken from http://www.offerany.com/p-14707515519-Breeze-MOD-laptop-stickercomputer-logo-AMD-intel-core-i3-i5-i7-stickers.html Seven on Seven 2014: Kate Ray & Holly Herndon https://vimeo.com/96121408 Erich Hörl, Lisa Parks, Jussi Parikka - Becoming Infrastructural – Becoming Environmental, 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREfIXLdl9M Dylan Kerr, What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World, 2016 http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art-53690 Graham Harman - The Third Table, 2012 Suzanne Treister - HFT The Gardener, 2014-15
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