Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

by Ian Bogost

Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing , Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor. Providing a new approach for understanding the experience of things as things, Bogost also calls on philosophers to rethink their craft. Drawing on his own background as a videogame designer, Bogost encourages professional thinkers to become makers as well, engineers who construct things as much as they think and write about them.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Science, Academic, Design, Unfinished

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.

He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames as well as the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost also released Cow Clicker, a satire and critique of the influx of social network games. His game, A Slow Year, won two awards, Vanguard and Virtuoso, at IndieCade 2010.

Reviews

[Ed Summers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be quite accessible and totally incomprehensible at the same time. It was kind of a surreal joy to read. I liked how it flipped the artificial intelligence research agenda of getting machines to think (like people), to getting humans to imagine what it was like to be a thing. I also came to appreciate Bogost's variation on Latour's litanies, so called tiny ontology. And I really appreciated his emphasis on making things to guide thinking or philosophical carpentry ... and the importance of cultivating a sense of wonder. His use of real examples and case studies to demonstrate his thinking was also very helpful--and sometimes quite humorous. I'm wandering back to Latour to read We Have Never Been Modern based on some discussion of it in this book.

So, in the spirit of tiny ontology here are some random quotes I highlighted on my Kindle:

To be sure, computers often do entail human experience and perception. The human operator views words and images rendered on a display, applies physical forces to a mouse, seats memory chips into motherboard sockets. But not always. Indeed, for the computer to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they experience? What’s their proper phenomenology? In short, what is it like to be a thing?

Theories of being tend to be grandiose, but they need not be, because being is simple. Simple enough that it could be rendered via screen print on a trucker’s cap. I call it tiny ontology, precisely because it ought not demand a treatise or a tome. I don’t mean that the domain of being is small— quite the opposite, as I’ll soon explain. Rather, the basic ontological apparatus needed to describe existence ought to be as compact and unornamented as possible.

For the ontographer, Aristotle was wrong: nature does not operate in the shortest way possible but in a multitude of locally streamlined yet globally inefficient ways.[ 41] Indeed, an obsession with simple explanations ought to bother the metaphysician. Instead of worshipping simplicity, OOO embraces messiness. We must not confuse the values of the design of objects for human use, such as doors, toasters, and computers, with the nature of the world itself. An ontograph is a crowd, not a cellular automaton that might describe its emergent operation. An ontograph is a landfill, not a Japanese garden. It shows how much rather than how little exists simultaneously, suspended in the dense meanwhile of being.

Yet once we are done nodding earnestly at Whitehead and Latour, what do we do? We return to our libraries and our word processors. We refine our diction and insert more endnotes. We apply “rigor,” the scholarly version of Tinker Bell’s fairy dust, in adequate quantities to stave off interest while cheating death. For too long, being “radical” in philosophy has meant writing and talking incessantly, theorizing ideas so big that they can never be concretized but only marked with threatening definite articles (“ the political,” “the other,” “the neighbor,” “the animal”). For too long, philosophers have spun waste like a goldfish’s sphincter, rather than spinning yarn like a charka. Whether or not the real radical philosophers march or protest or run for office in addition to writing inscrutable tomes— this is a question we can, perhaps, leave aside. Real radicals, we might conclude, make things. Examples aren’t hard to find, and some even come from scholars who might be willing to call themselves philosophers.

[Steve Rainwater · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a strange book written by a video game designer trying his hand at philosophy.

The author manages to re-invent Alfred Korzybski's idea of General Semantics and gives it the new name of "Object Oriented Ontology", using terminology borrowed from software developers. At the same time, the author falls into the very trap Korzybski warns about when he said "the map is not the territory". I'm guessing the author never read Korzybski or heard of General Semantics, so it's probably not a hard mistake to make. Korzybski's work on the relationship between words and things was never mainstream and these days, the only people who remember General Semantics are likely hard core fans of science fiction authors like Robert Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, and A. E. Vogt, who based a number of their stories on the idea. Both Bogost and Kozybski also probably owe a bit of a debt to Gottfried Leibniz's idea of characteristica universalis, a universal language or "calculus for thought" that could be used for describing ideas, objects, and relations in a way free of biases and inaccuracies.

Korzybski gives an example early in his book of a pencil and the word pencil. He compares how two different people who both use the word pencil, describe the actual object - both are correct in a limited way but the features they each use are completely different and a third party who had never seen a pencil, would not even understand that both are describing the same object and would have no way of guessing the properties of the real object. He proposes a more precise and universal way of describing objects, entities, ideas, and the relationships between them. To do it right would require a more precise language but he proposes a method that works in existing languages with the aid of various structural diagramming tools.

Bogost goes through the beginnings of a similar exercise using something from his own experience, a video game based on the movie E.T. He spends several pages giving examples of how we might describe the game and how those descriptions are incomplete and/or inaccurate. Unlike Korzybski, Bogost does not go on to propose a solution, probably due to the limited size of his book - Alien Phenomenology is a modest 136 page vs Korzybski's "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics" which clocks in at 806 pages.

The book's subtitle "What it's Like to be a Thing" leaves the reader with a bit of a mystery. It's obviously a reference to Thomas Nagel's book, "What is it like to be a Bat?" which is a query into the nature of consciousness. But Alien Phenomenology never addresses the question of consciousness at all and most of the book is about "objects" or non-conscious things and how they relate to each other. My conclusion is that Bogost has fallen into the trap of thinking that if we could fully and accurately understand the relationship between things - like say a bat and its environment - that we would then know what it's like to be a bat. This is the classic danger Korzybski warns about with that well-known phrase "the map is not the territory". No matter how accurate you can make your representation of the territory, the map remains a different thing - it can tell you about the relationship of features in the territory but it is not the territory. Likewise knowing fully about the relationship of a bat (or anything) to its environment and being able to describe it perfectly and unbiasedly, while useful, will not tell us what the conscious experience of being a bat is like.

So the book was a bit of a disappointment for me. But I did have a certain fascination in seeing the book unknowingly redevelop forgotten ideas from the 1930s that are now found mostly in classic science fiction novels. My recommendation is to go back and read Korzybski or Leibniz if you're interested in the subject matter.

[Karl Steel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, everyone doing theory: a VERY fine book can be done in fewer than 200 pages. Use this as a model in future, especially if you want to be read.

Some favorite bits:

“speculative realism is an event rather than a philosophical position: it names a moment when the epistemological tide ebbed, revealing the iridescent shells of realism they had so long occluded.”
“all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally. The funeral pyre is not the same as the aardvark; the porceletta shell is not equivalent to the rugby ball. Not only is neither pair reducible to human encounter, but also neither is reducible to the other.”
“The power of flat ontology comes from its indiscretion. It refuses distinction and welcomes all into the temple of being”
Unit “is an ambivalent term, indifferent to the nature of what it names. It is also isolated, unitary, and specific, not simply the part of a whole or ontologically basic and indivisible like an atom.”
“units operate. That is, thing constantly machinate within themselves and mesh with one another, acting and reacting to properties and states while still keeping something secret.”
“Since units remain fundamentally in the dark about one another's infinite centers, the unit operations that become relevant to them differ”
“Everything whatsoever is like people on a subway, crunched together into uncomfortably intimate contact with strangers”
“Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens” [except see what context does, via Harper's Index]
“Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.”
“The tire and chassis, the ice milk and cup, the buckshot and soil: things like these exist not just for us but also for themselves and for one another, in ways that might surprise and dismay us.”
“For the ontographer, Aristotle was wrong: nature does not operate in the shortest way possible but in a multitude of locally streamlined yet globally inefficient ways.”
“anthropocentrism is unavoidable, at least for us humans. The same is true of any unit (for the bats, chiropteracentrism is the problem”)
“Objects try to make sense of each other through the qualities and logics they possess. When one object caricatures another, the first grasps the second in abstract, enough for the one to make some sense of the other given its own internal properties.”
“No matter how we may feel about eating or abstaining from meat, appeals to feeling and suffering exemplify the correlationist conceit: the assumption that the rights any thing should have are the same ones we believe we should have; that living things more like us are more important that those less like us; and that life itself is an existence of greater worth than inanimacy.”
“Metaphorism is necessarily anthropomorphic, and thus it challenges the metaphysician both to embrace and to yield to the limits of humanity.”
“It's possible to generalize, of course. For example, one could argue that no matter what sort of thing a unit is, it ought to have the right to be preserved and not destroyed. This is an impractical sentiment, however, because beings often need to eat or molt or burn or dissolve.”
Aristotelian final causation tends to be human-oriented
“Take another, weirder case: theories, concepts, and memes. Is there an ethics of ideas? Not an ethics for their application, as by human hands advancing a political cause, but an ethics for the interactions of ideas as such? When I utter a phrase, does it owe more than its utterance? …. When I encounter a catchy chorus on the radio or a clever edition of a web comic, does its desire to propagate create duty?”
“When we ask after the ethics of objects, we are really asking if moral qualities exist as sensual qualities. I'll float a categorical response: no. When the vegan eat the tofu, she bathes in its moisture, its blandness, its suppleness, its vegetality. Yet the soy does not bathe in her veganism.”
“An object enters an ethical relation when it attempts to reconcile the sensual qualities of another object vis-à-vis the former's withdrawn reality”
“Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what he gives us is not really ethics but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that he gives the name 'ethics'”
“Object ethics...can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.”
“Ethical judgment itself proves a metaphorism, an attempt to reconcile the being of one unit in terms of another. We mistake it for the object's withdrawn essence.”
“If anticorrelationsim amounts to a rejection of only one correlation and an embrace of multiple correlations, then centrism is inevitable—whether it be anthropocentrism, petrocentrism, photocentrism, skylocentrism, or any other.”
“things render one another in infinite chain of weaker and weaker correlation, each altering and distorting the last such that it sense is rendered nonsense. It's not turtles all the way down, but metaphors.”
AVOID ACADEMIC MUMBLESPEAK!! “a sentiment of precision while, at best, delaying the moment when the writer actually has to be precise.”
“Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist's carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact's operator to gain some insight into an alien thing's experience.”
“We apply 'rigor', the scholarly version of Tinker Bell's fairy dust, in adequate quantities to stave off interest while cheating death.”
“To wonder is to suspend all trust in one's own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinion, and to become subsumed entirely in the uniqueness of an object's native logics—flour granule, firearm, civil justice system, longship, fondant.”
“Let's leave rigor to the dead.”

[Stephen Case · Rating 4 out of 5]

What else is there, here, anywhere right now? Anything will do, so long as it reminds us of the awesome plentitude of the alien everyday. (134)

I have been interested in things for a long time. I remember on a visit to an art museum as an undergraduate being fascinated by a scuffed section of worn wooden floor in a corner that I thought deserved as much attention as the exhibits. It seemed to carry such a weight of narrative. Likewise at a conference in Wisconsin I found an old, painted heat register in a corner of a museum next to a forgotten chair, and I was struck by its quiet gravity. For me, objects became a way of connecting to the stories that had washed over them like waves. Who else had seen, touched, forgotten this?

I am attracted to environments in a similar same way: who has been here before? Wandering through the empty halls of the Union League Club in Chicago or the streets of Oxford or Venice, the details of pavement or chipping plaster or window or stone seem so heavy, so linked to human stories and remembering but so resolutely independent of me and my own. My photography often seeks to highlight these details.

In the natural world that human touch is more distant, but especially in my Midwestern home it is never absent: who else has walked this way or will again? Who else is weaving prairie, trail, ash tree, railroad embankment, rutted farm road, wind-turbined horizon, and cumulus into the human story?

All of these considerations though are intensely anthropocentric. I find significance and beauty in these things because I’m constantly linking them to the human narrative, even when they strike me primarily due to their distance to my own personal narrative: I’ll never know all the details of this particular grove of poplars or this weathered barn, but they would have no significance at all if I wasn’t here to wonder about them. Would they?

For Ian Bogost, this is just another example of our tendency to view everything through a correlationist lens: to see the ontological significance of things from an anthropocentric view. Bogost sees this reflected in both the scientific endeavor (which seeks to harness and utilize the universe for human use) and the humanities (which evaluate everything according to the human narrative):

[B]oth perspectives embody the correlationist conceit. The scientists believes in reality apart from human life, but it is a reality excavated for human exploitation. The scientific process cares less for reality itself than it does for the discoverability of reality through human ingenuity. Likewise, the humanist doesn’t believe in the world except as a structure erected in the interest of human culture. Like a mirror image of the scientist, the humanist mostly seeks to mine particular forms of culture, often suggesting aspects of it that must be overcome through abstract notions of resistance or revolution. “Look at me!” shout both the scientist and the humanist. “Look what I have uncovered!” (14)

I don’t know that I buy Bogost’s critique of the scientist, as I think it’s often the scientific endeavor that yields insights that do the most to challenge our anthropocentric views. For instance, during a show about exoplanets in the planetarium years ago, thick with scientific descriptions of stone and surface temperature and wind speeds, a friend of mine asked not the how do we know question of science but the what does it mean question of philosophy. What does it mean that there are these physical places where rocks are being weathered and clouds are drifting through skies that we will never experience? We want to maintain that they are physically significant (I might even say holy, in the eyes of an orthodox materialism). But they are outside the mediation of mankind. This is part of my fascination with Bogost’s philosophical view, known as object oriented ontology (OOO): it seems a compelling way to grapple with some of these questions. What do I do with the reality of objects that have no bearing whatsoever on the human narrative?

Bogost’s work is short, compelling, and more engagingly written than any piece of philosophy I have read in a long time. I won’t be able to do justice to his treatment, which also provides a helpful introduction to the handful of other philosophers that are pursuing this line of thought. In short, Bogost argues for a flat ontology, a way of perceiving the world in which objects and their relationships are given as much ontological significance as possible, regardless of their relationship with the human perspective:

In a flat ontology, the bubbling skin of the capsaicin pepper holds just as much interest as the culinary history of the enchilada it is destined to top. (17)

And quoting Harman: object-oriented philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen, eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects with each other . . . For we ourselves, just like Neanderthals, sparrows, mushrooms, and dirt, have never done anything else than act amidst the bustle of other actants. (39)

There are some obvious issues with such a view, for one thing the apparent paradox that Bogost never really qualifies what he means by “thing,” so that at times he’s talking about discrete physical objects but at other times he discusses ideas or even systems or institutions (“criminal justice system”) that are human constructs. It’s difficult to see how one can argue for the independent significance of objects that clearly only arise through the human narrative itself. Likewise, it’s hard to take seriously a philosophy that discusses how objects might perceive each other or that tries to deconstruct objects into their smaller units when those units at times only have conceptual existence in the human mind.

To be fair, Bogost recognizes both the alienness and the difficulty in his task, and he qualifies much of what he is doing as speculative analogy or even poetry, with an intention more of challenging the way we think about the world than arriving at actual insights on the nature of things.

Speculation isn’t just poetic, but it’s partly so, a creative act that beings conduct as they gaze earnestly but bemusedly at one another. Everything whatsoever is like people on a subway, crunched together into uncomfortable intimate contact with strangers. (31)

This is why Bogost’s work is interspersed with poetry, which ironically returns us to the anthropological centricism of humans interpreting their universe. Yet that’s okay for Bogost, as long as we recognize the creative endeavor of attempting to interpret the universe but without stubbornly maintaining ourselves at the center. It’s a sort of philosophical, ontological Copernican revolution, and its results of course will inform our poetry and our expression, as Bogost provides multiple examples of.

Bogost more than anything wants us to be aware, to appreciate the things for themselves, as he appreciates antiquated computer systems not simply for what they represent about human ingenuity or design but because (as offered in some of his most compelling examples) they have intrinsic value and they are worth the effort expended in analyzing their function for its own sake. Bogost is an engineer-mystic, and he writes what a philosophical treatise should be at the core, a discussion of things that are, of ways to see the world.

Object oriented ontology is compelling to me because it emphasizes the reality of the world, of distant galaxies and the axial spin of the quaking neutron stars in those galaxies, the condensation of methane and the whorls of cloud and the fragmented feldspar on the moons of gas giants in those galaxies—the reality of those things outside the reach of my own knowledge. A flat ontology says they are all equally significant, utterly regardless of human cognition. They must remain alien, as alien and unknowable in their essence as the plastic molded Lego lid or the woven textile couch cushion or the jadite cup and saucer beside me. They have their own existence, yes, but also their own unknowable stories, tensions, relations beyond me. And why not? I am after all one who rides largely unaware of the processes in my own body and mind, a sliver of consciousness in a rambling, unknown house. Everywhere there is wonder and ignorance.

Bogost again, quoting lines by Zhdanov:
Either the letters cannot be understood, or
their grand scale is unbearable to the eye—
what remains is the red wind in the field,
with the name of rose on its lips.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 1 out of 5]

What to say about this book? Nothing good, definitely. It starts with a fairly serious if whimsical question, "What is it like to be a thing?" (shades of Thomas Nagel), but loses itself in a cavalcade of irrelevant philosophical flatulence.

As an STS scholar, I take the equivalence of human beings and things seriously. Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things actually sounds like an interesting idea. But even if we erase the divide between human and non-human, there still seem to be some bifurcations in the world: things and signs, atoms and bits, entities with intentional stances and those capable solely of reaction. A philosopher should examine these common-sensical distinctions, and the ways in which they are wrong. A true unitary theory would be a wonder. That is not in this book.

I'd hoped to see an approach by which we might approach the existence and quality of things: objects, technologies, artifacts, and so-called nature. Instead, Bogost throws out a few sparkling bon-mots in a sea of disconnected anecdotes and generally sloppy thinking. A subject that should be approached with immense care is treated with disrespect.

The only reason I finished this book was to honestly describe how bad it was.

[Kamakana · Rating 2 out of 5]

130912: first review. this is kind of the opposite to husserl: easy to read but not too convincing, so i give it somewhere between two and three. some interesting ways of philosophy, some ideas, even some from husserl. and made me think i should read meillassoux again…

the idea that philosophers or metaphysicians should do rather than talk in writing papers only, should be like doctors of thought, seems mistaken to me. there may be too much critical detail disputes to establish this or that prof or idea- he works in the field so knows but perhaps exaggerates. there is only our human tradition of primarily written ideas that can be examined rather as ideas than as objects in the world- as biology, chemistry, physics- and words themselves contain by contrast and composition, human ethical values. pleasant as it might seem, the world does not ‘mean’ to itself but only to humans. or something like that...

afterword after 6 years, something i find more convincing if you wish to de-center humans:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Chris Nagel · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you ever wanted to know why video game designers should not pretend to know about philosophy, you could read a few pages of this book. Otherwise, if you ever wanted to know what it would look like if that book were written by your computer geek pal from college who used to get into endless and pointless conversations about concepts like "reality," only to come up with stuff like "it's like real... ity, you know?" you could read a few pages of this book. Otherwise, if you ever wanted to know what it would be like to read a book that stuffed words like "weird" and "strange" and "bizarre" into every available space -- defined here as spaces not already occupied by name-dropping and sound bites -- then you could read a few pages of this book.

[Daaren Durga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short moments of "Oh, yup! I know exactly what he's talking about!" lead to "But why is this important?" These moments are surrounded by a murky mix of whatever.

[meowdeleine]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X...

[Chris Linehan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book simply by its title. I’m not particularly interested in aliens, or phenomenology for that matter so why the combination of the two words drew me in is a bit of a mystery. While there was a bit of this book I found wildly fascinating (you could say I experienced a bit of wonder from time to time), I found chunks of it to be rather tedious.

My father worked as an IT manager when I was growing up. When I was very young I marveled at the giant computers, some the size of my bedroom. I was fascinated by a coke machine in his office, by both the seemingly infinite source of soda and the way it spit water and syrup out at different intervals to magically produce the elixir that I was barely allowed to drink at home. Later, When I was in high school I used to play pool with some of his employees who were in the generation between myself and my father. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, they embodied the popular stereotype of the IT worker, but those two were sharks. While I may have clandestinely mocked their possession of expensive pool cues that they carried in special brief cases, I enjoyed when they let me join in their cutthroat games. While I never reached their skill level, I became quite respectable on the table. Sometimes though, I found the conversation that accompanied the game to be painfully boring, and I learned that I did not want to work in IT when I grew up. This book reminded of those halcyon days!

Bogost described being metaphorically akin to black holes, our understanding of being metaphorically linked to astronomers studying event horizons and the like. This was fascinating, illuminating and drew me in. I receded when he got too jargony, too ITish. I vividly remember a certain summer afternoon when I was dominating a game of pool when the conversation drifted from sports or music to the technical specificities and difficulties associated with upgrading the T1 at the university where my father and his employees worked. I became so bored and distracted that I ended up losing the game from a position of strength that ought to have been unassailable. I’m convinced that it was strategic on my competitors’ part. I think Bogost employed a similar strategy in writing this book.

As a thought experiment, OOO , speculative realism and the litany of other philosophical buzzwords Bogost employees is interesting. Unlike my father’s pool hall hustler employees’ discussion of fiber optics, networking and other various IT concepts, I found much of the intriguing part of this book becomes irrelevant when it is pushed beyond the experimental phase and into the implementation. There really isn’t much utility for it. However, It is also possible that like the IT workers, the book simply goes over my head…

[Kyle D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I felt predisposed to not appreciate and ended up appreciating despite myself.

That is, when I hear people talk about object-oriented ontology, I get a little bit defensive; I'm pretty sure I don't mind putting people and their interests at the center of philosophical study, making me one of the correlationists that Bogost argues against.

But this book helped mellow me out a bit. His lively, easy writing style goes a long way, but also his tone, his very fair way of engaging with a number of viewpoints without sounding mean or crazy. And his views don't seem to negate the importance of the human, they simply suggest that some speculative philosophy about the experiences of things can be profitable as well, especially in certain situations. Solid.

My favorite chapter was by far his chapter on what he calls "carpentry," in which he questions why scholars rely so much on the written word (especially when so many of us write so poorly) and suggests that instead of talking about philosophy, we do philosophy. For goodness sakes, yes. This book is worth grabbing for that chapter alone--but the whole thing is so short, succinct, and even (!) fun that you'll end up reading the whole thing in a couple days regardless.

[Joseph Method · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly written but nevertheless bewildering introduction to a topic that made me want to read the books on his bibliography. There's a lot of showing and assertion, but not a lot of argumentation. Had trouble determining if what I was reading was simple truth or gibbering insanity. Tend toward the former, but I'm going to read Latour and Harman to make sure.

[Dominic · Rating 3 out of 5]

the school system in my state has decided that the reading curriculum should be 70 percent technical manuals, because companies are having trouble finding employees who can read manuals with high comprehension levels.

meanwhile, this book is super relevant to animists.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Idk if it's just this book, but if I were to judge Ian Bogost on this one book, I'd never read anything of his ever again. Man comes off in such a racist, jingoist manner. But like....that's most of OOO theorists as far as I can see.

[Michiko · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book at times opened new, joyful pathways in my brain but would then cram too much academic puffery into them. Some of it was wonderful. A lot of it was a slog. Looking anew at things through object-oriented ontology can be challenging and fun. Difficult to recommend but glad I read it.

[Darcy French · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that enthralls from start to finish. A fascinating look at the world we perchance live in. Not intended to be any more than it is, the book is a great introduction to an object oriented approach the our interaction with "the great outdoors"

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, brief, pertinent. Shame that the first bit reads a bit too much like a PhD thesis and that the second bit is not bulked up with more examples of philosophical carpentry.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like most manifestos, Alien Phenomenology carves a little epoch out of the 21t century. Bogost's commitment is to an one-way mirror inclusivity: all objects, conceptual and physical, are interrogated and said to have perspectives which can only be imagined when looking at that one-way of the other. All these objects are composite pieces with their own distinct non-human perspectives. You see the image on your screen as a block of light and text, but the screen itself sees it as lines of pixels rapidly excited in real time, and the pixels see the screen as an army of pixels blinkering, and so on. Furthermore, the screen has its own unique relationship to the sky you're holding it under and to the book you read on the screen, and other relationships explode equally out from there - including the relationships between the Magudanchavadi block, I Will Always Love You and Other Greatest Hits, Sawine River, Tillandsia walter-richteri, and so on.

This unintuitive, almost neo-animistic, conception of the world Bogost calls flat ontology: "An ontology is flat if it makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats all equally." He also describes this as "weird realism" and I think that fits best with this wondrous, estranging vision of the world.

At the end of the book, when he ascribes the notion of philosophy not just to scholarship but to action itself (what he calls "carpentry" after Object-Oriented Ontologist Graham Harman), it became clear to me what this reminded me of: Joseph Kosuth's "Art After Philosophy." Where Kosuth wanted to turn the philosophy of art into the practice of art, Bogost wants to turn the philosophy of perspective into the practice of perspective. It is fundamentally about engaging all parts of the world on their own terms, to commit oneself to awe at the weird reality of the world.

That said Alien Phenomenology is a surprisingly readable book - setting aside Bogost's outsized commitment to rhetorical tics and the occasional technical explanation that he runs through a tad too quickly. A background in 20th century philosophy probably helps for the more particular conceits, but I went to this straight from The End of Phenomenology without having trouble with the broader ideas. In fact I feel excited again. It makes me want to take literally that tropeish Nietzsche aphorism: "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." What does the abyss see in me, and what does the darkness of the abyss see in it? It never ends.

[Hans Otterson]

This is the second time I've read this, and with its connections to ontology, process philosophy, art, programming, and The Plenitude, it remains as fascinating and baffling as the first time. If you want to do some intellectual work that produces wonder and weirdness, this is the book for you.

I do think Bogost could produce an updated second edition that communicates some of his ideas a bit better. A more extended discussion of philosophical carpentry with more examples is at the very least in order.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most definitive book I have read on the subject of phenomenology, but I do find some glee to be found here in Bogost's exploration of a sense of being rooted in objects. I do think some of the claims here feel a bit dated though and the concept of a flat ontology itself seems a bit too refined to prove fruitful in a world inundated with complex shifting relationships across competing temporalities that shape individual perceptions of daily life. I can see this book blowing the mind of someone in their early 20s though.

[Steve Kemple · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The alien isn't in the Roswell military morgue, or in the galactic far reaches, or in the undiscovered ecosystems of the deepest sea and most remote tundra. It's everywhere. In place of the correlationist's idealist stipulation, we can propose a new realist codicil to append liberally, like hot sauce on chicken wings: meanwhile. What else is there, here, anywhere right now? Anything will do, so long as it reminds us of the awesome plentitude of the alien everyday. "

[Asaad Badawi]

Geeks and tech dudes doing philosophy. I am infatuated with the core idea, but he lost me at some point. Felt a bit like hearing someone talk about ultra-specific things they are so passionate about that they skip a lot of basics a layman would need.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads like Marshall McLuhan but it actually has fun. The whole thing commits to a bit that deserves attention, but it doesn't quite belong with the literature it discusses. I was entertained nevertheless.

[Kathy Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this gets a bit dense, it's highly entertaining.

[Ton-Nu Nguyen-Dinh]

https://muse-jhu-edu.ezp-prod1.hul.ha...

[ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ · Rating 3 out of 5]

It gets wearisome, and the writing is mediocre, but the ideas are important and need to be proliferated.

[Aditya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too intellectual and philosophical for me. Took me 30+ hours to read 150 pages wow.

[Marcelo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cada argumento que leía quería gritarle a la cara a Bogost. Literalmente el pavo sostiene que hacer ontología es hacer listas de cosas. No puedo más.

[camille! · Rating 4 out of 5]

let's go outside and dig in the dirt!

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alien Phenomenology is a bit of a strange book; it's a summary and continuation of some of the big discussions in object oriented ontology, and as such follows in the footsteps of Harman, Latour, Morton, and Bryant. It's also a point on the trajectory that Bogost's books have been building towards for some time, and contains traces of Unit Operations, Racing the Beam, and How To Do Things with Videogames (among others). In a nutshell, the book argues that we should consider things less from a human-centered view. And for that matter, less animal-centered or life-centered. Rather, we should think of life and nonlife together as things. The first chapter is probably the most dense, as it introduces the subject and the basic arguments regarding it: how it differs from scientific naturalism and social relativism, how it calls for recognizing that the thing always recedes from view, and that we can never understand it fully. Chapter two is on what Bogost calls ontography, which is different ways of describing or depicting things without resorting to humanist perspectives: as lists, as unexplained images, as exploded piecemeal images, as artifacts that couple things tightly (unsurprisingly, given his backgrounds, the artifacts are games: Rush Hour, Scribblenauts, and In a Pickle). Chapter three is metamorphism, and talks about how things relate to each other, and how those relations can be understood (incidentally, this seems a standard outline for OOO discussions: chapters on explaining what things are are followed immediately by chapters explaining how they relate.) Chapter 4, carpentry, argues that theorists can't just talk about OOO, but need to practice it, and he offers some examples on how that works. The final chapter, wonder, emphasizes the radical perspectives that come with OOO, or considering the world in an alien phenomenology. I'm still not 100% sold on OOO after reading this; it still seems a bit too generalized a concept for my taste. And on a more literary note, I don't think I'd recommend this as an introduction to Bogost or OOO. While it could be read on its own, I think it makes a much better companion piece, once you've read enough of the things he's referring to to understand some contexts he doesn't have full room to flesh out. Still, it's one of the better accounts I've read on OOO in that Bogost goes a step further to describe not just what it is, but how one would go about practicing it.