Alien Phenomenology

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

The goal is to describe the world as it exists, and as it is acted upon, by each individual object/thing/”machine?” as it exists in its environment, e.g., “What’s it like to be a computer, or a microprocessor, or a ribbon cable?” (p 9 ¹ ). OOO views a thing as being at a different level from its parts — composed of them but not simply representing their sum. One aspect of OOO apparent from the get go, is that there is no hierarchy of objects, all objects are worthy of consideration and all interact with their environment in their own particular way.

Flat ontology
The grounding aesthetic of OOO is: all things equally exists yet they do not exist equally.This implies that what an object isis polyvalent. Bogost discusses eleven different views of an old Atari computer game E.T. (p. 17) ², ranging from 6502 ³ opcodes to a collectable, all of which he posits as being viable Objects of analysis, with some necessary but not sufficient relationships between them. What’s newest here isn’t the idea that the E.T. Game can be a collectable, and as such is worthy of analysis, or even that an object has a number of potential axes of analysis available, but that the E.T. Game consists of opcodes burned into a PROM ⁴ and, as such, it is also worthy of analysis.

Bogost proposes using the term unit rather than Object since Object is so overloaded, especially if you come at things from a computational background (since I share this background, I agree). He frames this discussion in terms of units held together by operations. The definition of operations is taken from systems theory “the basic process that takes one or more inputs and performs a transformation on it.” These definitions inherently keeps focus at the right level, e.g., “you heat the PROM a bit, the plastic expands and the metal expands a bit more. You heat the PROM a lot and it catches on fire.” Forcing the analysis to stay on the level of charred plastic and twisted metal, without worrying about the resultant decrease in value of the collectable.

A difficulty is that, even when on a particular aspect of the unit’s existence, it is hard to know what to include and what to ignore given our inherent cognitive difficulty in determining what is of immanent importance to the unit. His own example: “For the problem of the being of the udon noodle or the nuclear warhead consist precisely in the ways those objects exceed what we know or ever can know about them” (P 30) Bogost then continues with discussion of how these units “perceive” the world, which is (obviously) completely dependent upon how the world can impact the unit, e.g. speaking to them in a normal tone of voice doesn’t do anything. (again, to reiterate, there is no assumption that the unit is conscious at any level)

Bogost goes on to posit Carpentry as an activity that can ground this phenomenology. Carpentry, is defined as making things that speculate how things understand their world. This is hacking in the best sense of the word: set something up, see what it does, perturb an aspect of its environment and see how its behavior changes. The “something” constitutes the unit being analyzed and the environment that gets changed in a way that is practical, given your equipment (you’re not going to get far if your Carpentry involves changing Planck’s constant). I find Carpentry valid as far as it goes. However, Carpentry, per se, doesn’t address the question of what we’re trying to get at when we do Carpentry. A good example of this is his discussion of his “image toy.” This toy pulled random pictures from Flickr and posted them on a conference web site. He follows this with a narration of the issues that ensued when the “toy” pulled up some sexist images making them appear as part of the official conference announcement to some visitors (who unsurprisingly found the images offensive).

This is exactly the point at which we hit the issue: What is the question that we’re trying to address here? I doubt anyone is shocked that a random image grabber would pick up sexist images from flickr. However what does that tell us? In my mind it is a demonstration of the distribution of sexist images on flickr it doesn’t “give immanence” (an activity I’ll call immanencing) to anything else. For Carpentry to be a successful paradigm it needs to demonstrate something that might disrupt our “correlationist” understanding of the world, but this being a Catch-22 kind of world, it needs to do it in a way that’s worthy of our attention.

Now I’m all for extending the “no armchair philosophers” program of the Churchlands’ in this way. The more we attempt to ground our theories in data and develop tests to get the data to ground our theories, the better. The goal being as complete a grounding as possible. This requires more that just immanencing but immanencing for, or immanencing to. Now this might show me to be a diehard correlationist, but it’s I don’t think it uncalled for to ask for a reason why I should devote a chunk of my finite attention span to it.

In contrast, Bogost’s implementation of a video interface is a start in the right direction. In his implementation, the output is a slowed down version of the color specified by the module, which is then extended to cover the entire screen. The net effect is that the screen transitions from one solid color to another solid color at an irregular interval, demonstrating just how different the experience of the device is from our perception of the end result. This is a solid start, but I’ll admit that the result seems overly correlationist to me — the interface never experiences green per se, and the differences it experiences in its output signal are likely uncorrelated with our color experiences. I’m not saying that since the interface doesn’t experience color, the display shouldn’t be in color, but rather that the display output should be designed to correlate the relative differences “experienced by” the interface to the relative differences experienced by the viewer in color space.

It is interesting to think about what this display really represents from the standpoint of the interface: the state of the voltage of one wire of the entire module. Only the voltage, for that is what’s transmitted, not the motion of a portion of the interfaces as it microscopically flexes with the magnetic field, nor it’s heat distribution over time as it goes from just being turned on to having been played for 8 hours on a humid summer day etc..

The (open) question that this raises in my mind is what is the difference between this activity and a more conventional simulation activity. For example, what if we were to perform our Carpentry building upon existing work simulating bacteria motion, using that as a tool for philosophical inquiry e.g., this study of Listeria Bacterial motion?

Both approaches have their drawbacks: the bacterial motion is a simulation only ⁵. On the other hand, it is a simulation of a system that has evolved with no human input and can be matched with observed behavior. Which gives us a (somewhat translucent) window into a phenomenon that is as grounded as possible.

Carpentry involving the interface module on the other hand, allows us a clearer picture of how the interface is responding — our window onto the processes more transparent, but the danger is that our selection is something more important to us rather than something that is important to the interface.

The ideal is something that is both important to the unit and of interest to the humans.