A Critical Reading of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology — Part 01
I came across Ian Bogost like most young students of game design — ignorant and hopeful. There is a dearth of game design theory, and the small number of “game theorists” are either pragmatic industry craftspeople or pop psychologists. Bogost seemed to be a focal point for me — a writer I couldn’t understand who seemed to be writing meaningful stuff in an academic context (read: serious).
Judging by my Google searching, Bogost does not seem to invite or elicit criticism, but he certainly has readership. Consider this a philosophical commentary on his work, chapter by chapter, in this case his book Alien Phenomenology — the first entry in Bogost Studies.
The State of Things
Bogost quickly considers “correlationism”, a term developed by a contemporary French philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux, which considers that objective reality exists contingently or as a corollary to (human) minds. He uses this as a wrapper term to describe the positions of Berkeley, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. All of which can be neatly summed up as viewing the problem of “being” as one of degrees of human access to reality.
Speculative realism, and its corresponding object-oriented ontology seem to be staunchly anti-Kantian positions, in that they reject viewing the human animal as anything special (even as the human animal ponders this), and treat all objects equally. But Bogost leads off with what seems like a misunderstanding if not the establishment of a deliberate straw man. Granted he may be borrowing this mistake from the speculative realists, but he does draw the picture of a naively anthropocentric correlationist view. Things are posited to exist for humans. It’s not just that the idea is that humans can necessarily only interpret the world as subjects — not a problem of epistemic access, but, Bogost thinks, it is an ontological claim that would actually be Berekeleyan, not Kantian: The world exists because we do, because our rendering of the world actually creates it.
Citations are given for people who agree with Bogost, but for the moment, we are left with a list of the accused correlationists, and actual material from those arguing against this correlationist viewpoint.
Sorely missing is a characterization of what exactly it is they are opposing in Kant, unless the reader accepts the sketched caricature. We’re told Kantian philosophy is one of inward-thinking, one of “access”, and one which does not interact with the world. We do not, however, receive Kant’s position (but it is, a murmuring behind the text seems to suppose, quite wrong).
Speculative realism, in opposition to the Kantian view we know nothing of at the moment, is very much engaged with the real world, we are told.
To put the breaks on for just a moment, while I won’t pretend to be an expert on Kant, let’s actually consider Kant’s view before we object to it. It is a bit of a fashion choice to oppose Kant as such, as it once was to oppose Aristotle. But it’s important to note that even in our modern rejection of many of Aristotle’s views, those same views are still very much active topics in philosophy. And so it is with Kant — those who oppose him do him the immortalizing justice of ensuring his continued contribution to philosophy.
Bogost cautions against considering Kant to be a capital “R” Rationalist, an inward thinker, but goes on to do just that. He was in fact an untidy mix of rationalism and empiricism — a rationalist who idolized David Hume.
The character which Bogost thinks he disagrees with wrote, in the Critique of Pure Reason:
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.
Short and sweet, Kant seems to have understood there to be some sort of cognitive faculty at work in humans, using himself as an example via introspection. I take this view of Kant’s transcendental idealism to be convincingly tautological (self-evident) — Kant is claiming that the human world is subjective because of a necessary and very real epistemic barrier between human animals and the world around them. There is no way “out” of the body which brings you in touch with reality — further what we consider reality is our own perception of it. He does not mean that humans have limited access to objective reality, he means that all conscious subjects experience the world as themselves.
Kant considers, in his disproof of the Ontological Argument, relates that he does not see existence as a necessary quality. Nothing must exist — being is simply what anything which does exist does. That is, anything that exists necessarily exists, but nothing must necessarily exist.
Bogost, without further consideration, takes Kant to mean not that human understanding is moderated by humans — how else could it be, given that we are epistemically cordoned beings — but to mean instead that Kant claims humans create reality, that Kant’s position is in fact an ontological one.
This is in fact only an anthropocentric view if you have the rhetorical fancy to render it so, because it is in fact quite the opposite. The ability to perceive and encounter objects for Kant is not an encounter with the world, but a scouring of the world performed by the human mind. Philosophical realist positions claim that there is a mind-independent objective reality, but Kant’s position does not seem to necessitate that there not be — only that humans are limited in their capacity to perceive, and so always bound by subjective perception.
Ironically for those arguing against this idea of moderation between mind and world, neuroscience is producing a lot of work which suggests that we are not seeing the world as it is, but the body gathers data which is interpreted — with gaps, not a continuous stream — by the brain. Unconscious processing of data and the loss of information suffered during perception is not made available to the conscious mind. The usual example is of someone swinging a bat at a baseball. We’d like to think that what happens is that we think about hitting the baseball, and then we do it. In reality what seems to happen is that our body hits the baseball, and then “we” are informed about it. This, too, seems tautological upon reflection — every tried to think really hard about performing a task usually committed to reflex and muscle memory? Chances are you’ll screw up. Well, that’s sort of the idea with Kant — if time and space are anything, for Kant they are arbitrary constructs, conceptual tools, used by minds to engage with the world. Read this way, the Kantian view makes us very aware of the immense limitations of human understanding, and our willingness to identify conceptual tools nested within our own minds as being part of the world itself. Kant does not necessarily claim that humans make the world, but that humans make the human world within the world.
Bogost quickly supports his own interpretation, in lieu of informing the reader what it might be, with a method so old it might as well be a cane to lean on — and that is to claim that his view is simply a pragmatic approach to understanding actual reality, as opposed to the stuffy and theory-laden approaches of dead men. One cane, however, is not enough for Bogost, and he quickly brings to bear the support of complexity. The real world is simply complicated, and we must be real here — let’s do away with these reductionist, anthropocentric approaches from the past, and move forward by actually dealing with the complicated problems of the world. And so Bogost joins the ranks of philosophers who are here to tell it like it is, unlike those schlubs who came before.
This disdain for Kant is not necessary shared by the panpsychists, such as Galen Strawson, who are mentioned as forming a similar but, Bogost thinks, also incorrect, view. This kind of view, not unlike the Stoic belief in a Gaia-like living “fire”, there is a mind-like material which is a basic constituent of the world. Borrowing from the Stoics just as much from the Shinto religion, Daoism, or strains of Buddhism, panpsychism wants to say that everything has a mind. In doing so, I suppose the attempted move is to de-centralize the mind. The mind becomes not the epicenter of all things, the king of rationality and power, but just something that rocks and tables and everything else possess along with humans. However, Strawson in particular uses Kant (in his paper Radical Self-Awareness) to help argue something like the idea that awareness itself is enough to constitute a subject (not an organism with awareness), and that there is always awareness of awareness — there is never awareness without the awareness of “itself”. So for Bogost, someone like Strawson is still favouring sentient beings and that is…for lack of a better reason, distasteful to him.
Moving on, Bogost introduces us to a brand of object-oriented thinking which we might simply call the study and extension of Heidegger, proposed by Graham Harman. The view fits well in opposition to Kant. Heidegger is all about being, being-in-itself, or what he calls Dasein (being there), da sein (there being), etc. Heidegger’s hammer example is invoked, which more or less makes the case for our understanding of what a hammer is as being instrumental. A hammer does certain things with other things, it hammers nails, etc — it exists in a relation with these other things and derives its status as a tool in this way. Otherwise, it must simply be a glob of wood or metal. It only becomes a hammer when you use it like a hammer.
Bogost wants to de-centralize humans as the subjects of philosophy, because humans, like other things, are things. More importantly — just things. These things can have relations between one another which foster “being” — humans are not necessary for this. Unlike Bogost’s Kant-caricature might believe, humans are not special; they are simply objects with minds just like anything else. Interestingly Aristotle’s metaphysical hylomorphism position would have us believe that, while humans are the special carriers of souls in some sense, the soul is not actually part of the body — even though Bogost claims to be moving us forward in philosophical time, he unwittingly brings us back 2400 years to deal with the problems facing Aristotle’s thinking in De Anima.
Other objects, all objects, deserve an equal “status”. Why that must be anything but an assertion or a preference is as of yet unclear. The language of “status”, however, is strangely anthropocentric itself — we would be the ones granting other objects their equal status.
It is a brand of philosophical nihilism that, to my mind, carefully leaves out all the bite of a really nihilist position, so that it may sound weird but it is certainly not frighteningly pessimistic, as any anti-anthropocentric position might. It is still pursuing a scientistic goal even as it criticizes it — to understand what is really there. Nihilism does attempt this as well, but the result is of course that reality is depressive. Bogost wants us to think of object-oriented ontology as non-anthropocentric, but he doesn’t want us to be afraid.
This is either because the “truth” is merely a conceptual model to be used in theorizing about carpentry and videogames and so is not be taken too seriously…or because he believes that the de-centering of human experience is, like the ecologists he criticizes, a positive step for human understanding of the world.
It reminds me of arch-nihilist Arthur Schopenhauer's bit in On Human Nature:
The question has been raised, what two men would do, who lived a solitary life in the wilds and met each other for the first time. Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Rousseau have given different answers. Pufendorf believed that they would approach each other as friends; Hobbes, on the contrary, as enemies; Rousseau, that they would pass each other by in silence. All three are both right and wrong. This is just a case in which the incalculable difference that there is in innate moral disposition between one individual and another would make its appearance.
The difference is so strong that the question here raised might be regarded as the standard and measure of it. For there are men in whom the sight of another man at once rouses a feeling of enmity, since their inmost nature exclaims at once: That is not me! There are, others in whom the sight awakens immediate sympathy; their inmost nature says: That is me over again! Between the two there are countless degrees. That in this most important matter we are so totally different is a great problem, nay, a mystery.
Considering object-oriented ontology we might add:
If a toaster and a rock encountered one another for the first time, what would they…err…you get the idea.
Bogost next makes reference to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and A.N. Whitehead’s work on process philosophy, and notes that while seemingly similar to his brand of object-oriented ontology, they are different — in the end, both these views regard humans as something special.
He views even animal studies and ecological studies as focusing on a human relation — seeing these not as a limiting factor of our being humans, but as our bias as humans. Bogost, humbly, wants to see the world as it really is (despite being, himself, a human, whose method is rational inquiry).
In a sense, it seems that Bogost sees the best path to oppose anthropocentrism as being to say that the world would still have meaning were we not here, rather than to take the more dour but perhaps more pragmatic nihilist approach and claim that the only reason there is meaning is because we are here (and, so, because it is of our making it is unreal and false, our primacy and world an illusion laid overtop a stark, meaningless landscape).
I can’t help but position this brand of object-oriented ontology as not supporting its own weight, but exists propped up against a strawman. It is early in the book, but he suggests that “To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us.” A confounding thing to say given that he is the the one who posited it, not the “correlationists”.
If Bogost has laid anything down as grounding for his own bias, his own thing to put at the center of his argument for no things being centered upon, it is, like so many of us today, computer science. Bogost is a programmer at heart and, like Plato, has found an intellectual way to grasp at the heavens. It’s telling that, to anyone familiar with computer programming, many programming languages have object-oriented ontologies. It is perhaps no coincidence that Bogost’s comfort with programming should seep into his philosophical inclinations, even if he does not notice it.
It’s here that we are introduced to a sort of play on Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”, with something more like “What is it like to be a cathode ray tube?” or “What is it like to be a wire?” or “What is it like to be a pixel?”. Bogost is convinced that there is a way to discuss the phenomenology of a thing — the experience of a thing. Inanimate things are truly animate, even if they are not living. For the moment let’s bracket the bizarre irony of using theory to understand how theorists should have no special ontological status (if we can understand how it is that thought is not privileged, have we not affirmed its primacy in doing so?).
Flat Ontology
“In short, all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally.”
By this he means that all things necessarily exist (even, it seems, abstract objects of thought — this is what would be meant by things which don’t exist, but which are still things). But, they are different things — so necessarily they do not exist as the same thing.
Bogost claims it is not a monist position like the Parmenidean monism (that everything is one, and plurality is illusory), or Democritean atomism (that is to say, his ontology is not about one sort of fundamental kind which exists in many pieces). He is not trying to by mystical like Levinas, or what he considers to be unknowable, like Anaximander’s apeiron (boundlessness, a sort of proto-infinity which I don’t find especially indecipherable).
He takes from philosopher (and speculative realist) Levi Bryant the term “flat ontology”, which he claims is in turn borrowed from Mexican philosopher Manuel deLanda. He does not expand per se, curiously, but continues that these are also people who want an ontology which grants equal status to things.
Yet Bogost contends that what he is doing is not choosing an ontology, but finding the real one. Bogost’s problem with what he calls “Top Down” structures (a popular jargon in software development) like “the world” is that they sneak in some sort of teleology, that they seek to be explanatory. The world as such does exist, but because it supposes that “the world” is a sort of set-of-sets which holds the things within the world, it attempts to position itself above the objects it contains. So Bogost wants to say that “the world” is indeed a thing in the ontology, but that it is no greater than the things it contains. As far as I can tell at this point, the reasoning for such thinking is because the superior position is not just inherent in “the world” as an abstract concept/thing but is also viewed this way by the humans who created it. The fact that humans choose to view it this way is — again, ironically in Ian Bogost’s own privileged human view — not enough to actually give it any sort of primacy.
To be continued in Part 02.
