Object Oriented Ontology as addressed by Ian Bogost in his book Alien Phenomenology or What it’s like to be a thing, questions the characterization of being. It puts all things within networks of relations. But it also raises problems where “interactions sit outside rather than within the being of a thing”. In the context of Bogost’s theories, the word network suggests predefinition or in other terms pre-programming. I found that it was important for me at this stage in my research process to understand theory of flat ontology[1] – which “refuses distinction and welcomes all into the temple of being” in order to contextualize my project. The systems I will be working with are comprised of units that are held together by operations that underlie how these units behave and interact.
As Bogost explains, there is a potential in the theory of unit operation if we consider the simple fact that units operate. “That is, things constantly machinate within themselves and mesh with one another, acting and reacting to properties and states while still keeping something secret”. My goal is to write the speculative fictions of their processes and their unit operations, but also to prototype and create in the areas where all these OOO philosophers have gone before but where few artists have bothered to linger. I would like my thesis project to be a practice of this alien phenomenology.
[1] Flat ontology is the theory in which all things are equally things. Roy Bhaskar used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, and my own critique of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.”16 For Tristan Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. – Object-Oriented France: The Philosophy of Tristan Garcia by Graham Harman.