Object-oriented Ontology Research Articles

„Imagine” / Wyobraź sobie… Dostrajanie jako dźwiękowe praktyki spekulatywne

This article offers a creative reading of the classic composition <i>Imagine</i> (1971) by Yoko Ono and John Lennon from the perspective of theoretical propositions associated with speculative realism, and in particular, with the concept of hyperobjects by Timothy Morton. As a result of the artistic-theoretical collaboration, the text includes a discussion of Rafał Zapała’s word and music works, which were created as part of a joint practical-theoretical workshop. They illustrate the titular practice of tuning, the idea of which is to change the visual perspective of interaction with the world – understood as the dominant way of experiencing reality – to a sonic one, allowing for a different participation in the surrounding environment. The project encourages the readers to re-spond creatively to the content of the article with instructions and tasks to perform on their own. Key-words: speculative realism, hyperobjects, object-oriented ontology (OOO), listening, sound imagery

Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro

Reviewed by: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro Roger Luckhurst Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It. Steven Shaviro. Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Goldsmiths, 2021. 181 pp. £17.50. This elegant and lucid book modestly offers eight chapters of eight close readings of science-fiction texts, structured around questions of life and embodiment—or what the British sociologist Nikolas Rose would call “the politics of life itself,” as it becomes a scientifically manipulable, controllable, and commodifiable thing with the advances of the biosciences. In typical Shaviro style (this is his eleventh book), the short stories, novellas, novels, and one Afrofuturist hip-hop album considered are principally instruments for [End Page 126] reading science-fictional futures in a philosophical mode. These are not genre studies or cultural histories of sf texts but, as the minimalist introduction states, texts read as “thought experiments” (1). The readings here share a theoretical frame and reading practice with those critical theorists loosely associated with speculative realism or object-oriented ontology (OOO), such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker. Indeed, Harman’s pleasingly odd exercise in close readings of Lovecraft’s stories in Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) might be the model for Shaviro’s approach here. Eugene Thacker talked about writing not a philosophy of horror, but about the horror of philosophy, its very limits, pushing to expose the unthought of its system of thought, using Gothic fiction and occult grimoires as theory-fictions to break open the constraints of disciplinary knowledge. Similarly, Shaviro is not writing philosophy through sf, but reading sf as a kind of philosophical speculation, thus testing the limits of both philosophy and literary or textual criticism. Whether you get on with this mode or not, these close readings are always worth the time and will be vital reference points for those exploring these texts and writers. The first two chapters explore the limits of the Kantian philosophy of human cognition in two texts that stage dramas of explicit breeches of Kant’s transcendental frames of human thought. These are Charles Harness’s “The New Reality” (1950) and Adam Roberts’s audacious working out of Kant’s limits of philosophy in The Thing Itself (2015). The philosophical ground of this attempt to think beyond the Kantian frames of thought will be familiar to those well-versed in their OOO or willing to spend time with post-post-post-structuralists such as Quentin Meillassoux. This is the critique of limits of correlationism, the fatal mistake, so the OOO crew argue, introduced into Western philosophy by Kant that the world can only be understood through human frames, given the phenomenological prison of our limited conceptions of time and space. Sf as a vehicle for post-Kantian thought can stage moments of the sublime that exceed Kant’s act to recuperate even these moments of cognitive limit or collapse. These moments in sf hint at genuine alterity, or else dramatize the impossibility of representation of what Meillassoux calls “the great outside,” that rich world of things themselves that carry on perfectly well beyond human limits. So far, so familiar: Shaviro has expertly explored this conceptual terrain in previous works, such as The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014) and Discognition (2016). Chapters three and four focus on Clifford Simak’s “Shadow Show” (1953) and Ann Halam’s Dr Franklin’s Island (Gwyneth Jones’s 2002 YA rewrite of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau [1896]). This pair explores how “life itself” might become a manipulable object of oppressive conjunctures of bioscience and corporate capitalism, while suggesting that there is a kind of darkness or alien alterity to life that escapes this capture. These are science-fictional spins on work in Gothic or horror studies that explore how terror can be generated out of this sense of life as an alien vitalist force that surges up and through the human body, transforming and remaking it. But where Lovecraft’s response is a reactionary and racialized terror at hybridity or [End Page 127] trans-species genetic transfer, Simak’s short story exposes the Cold War ideological fusion of biological sciences with the militiarization of research...

I ♥ Oklahoma! by Roy Scranton

Reviewed by: I ♥ Oklahoma! by Roy Scranton Agnes Hanying Ong (bio) Roy Scranton, I ♥ Oklahoma!, Soho Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-61695-938-8, eISBN: 978-1-61695-939-5, 278 pp., $25.00 hardcover, $17.00 paperback Roy Scranton's humorous road novel, I Heart Oklahoma!, is as proto-historical in its admittance to narrative as it is, simultaneously, dis-narrated against it. An ever-reincarnating succession of characters ultra-depicts a wind-strewn American heartland, which lends itself the idea of progress leading but to environmental destruction that the main character, Suzie, personifies, as a form of hyperobject. Suzie is Suzie, a jaded writer, and also "Suzie revolver… metal flesh," as well as "Suzie America," polyamorous pile of weapons expressed with fervent tanks. In this polycentric careen of a text, the only constant seems to be Jim, a filmmaking dilettante that greets all that exists in his world with hypercritical derision. It is around Jim that a trio is formed, as Suzie sends her cat away and joins him and Remy in a 1971 lime green Valiant. The three embark on a journey, to film themselves barreling across a continental landscape scalped by the positivistic myth of industrial success, its accelerated projection of Hegelian world-destructive equivalences, and its Malthusian spree. The absurdist stoicism that these semi-hardened characters embody and let come forth, in their demonstrated full awareness of rationalistic futilities, seems to be a through line in Scranton's work. It is eerily reminiscent of the multiple ways he has written broadly about the occupation of Iraq, during which he found himself in charge of weapons while going through a seemingly Beckettian motion of waiting for, and expecting, fatal violence to occur, all of which [End Page 125] culminating in a permanent state of befriended despair. But instead of caring for weapons, in the novel, Remy and Suzie concern themselves with remaining reeled into Jim's own vortex of aimless artistic aspirations that pass for educated subjugation of who the latter can convince to involve. Objects are heavily present in the novel. Scranton's preoccupation with revisiting the ontology of objects itself, perhaps due to his time as a soldier in Iraq, is apparent in phrases such as "dirty socks dumped in rest-stop trash cans," or "condoms jammed in ATM money slots." In a war zone, every object is a threat, a possible camouflaged explosive, a questionable thing with potential to cause something other than what it appears, or is believed, to be for. There seems, also, to be an argument for how porous boundaries of objects in the world are. In the novel, how objects seem only to relate to one another through the "likeness" each of them presents to the world are transliterated into the ways the characters are rendered alive and extant—Remy is a genderqueer Jesse which is also Jesse II; Trump's dream of the South is realized through cage kids, while a Russian orgy that takes place at Kanye's house is subsequently, and diegetically, mythologized in Dream Ballet—a chapter-long epigrammatic tribute to the bizarro nightmare of a namesake sequence in the musical classic, Oklahoma!. There is the marionette-opera-inspired tagline, "The Rape Metaphor," which follows in content as not a metaphor, an inversion of Magritte's not-a-pipe. Time scale, too, is an object, a whole trope of an object by turns attenuated and set palpably sprawling, while still textured by temporal landmarks containing real and made-up historical trivia, altogether ironizing the inescapability of narrative as a human condition ("Lee advanced toward Gettysburg … Miley Cyrus announced she'd converted to Islam and would be making the hajj"). I Heart Oklahoma!, no doubt, is a fun read that while spherically camp in the sense of imminence throughout, flows silken like chant that has been broken into well-timed pauses by the vast, white spaces between chapters. Altus, where the character Suzie is from, in real-life Oklahoma came by the name, meaning "high" in Latin, after a flash flood in 1891 drove its residents to higher ground. The novel raises many an existential question, particularly in the ongoing midst of real-world ecological collapses...

New Ecological Realisms: Post-apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

New Ecological Realisms: Post-apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

“It’s People in the Swamp”: Du Bois against the Democracy of Things

AbstractW. E. B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), which has been called a “spiritual epic of cotton,” was inspired by Frank Norris’s “epic of wheat” The Octopus (1901), though the connection is rarely explored. This essay argues that Du Bois offers a crucial critique of Norris’s novel, specifically in contesting the ways Norris naturalizes capitalist exploitation by depicting the nonhuman power of the wheat and the railroad as the plot’s prime movers. Du Bois’s exposure of the forces allied against Black political power in the rural South and in the nation’s capital, and his utopian vision of collective world-building, offers an insistently human-centered rebuttal to Norris’s vitalist fantasy of salvific wheat. In so doing, Du Bois helps expose the limitations of, and model alternatives to recent calls by critics (aligned with New Materialism, Actor-Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology) for a “parliament of things” or a “democracy of objects”—related claims for the supposed political radicalism of according nonhuman and human agents equal weight.“For Du Bois, the nonhuman world . . . may well have a kind of animacy, but its power is too tightly entwined with racial capitalism for it to serve as a democratizing check on human power run amok.”

White Material: Ivory tiles, white womanhood, and white supremacy in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Sharp Objects

Jean-Marc Vallée’s HBO miniseries, Sharp Objects (2018), follows Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) as she returns to her childhood home in Wind Gap, Missouri, to investigate the murders of two young girls. This article explores a specific type of object related to the systems of violence that reveal themselves over the course of the miniseries: ivory tiles. Here, the ivory tiles affixed to the floor of Camille’s mother’s, Adora Crellin’s (Patricia Clarkson), master bedroom both reveal and influence sinister behaviours of the household’s women. In employing concepts inspired from Thing Theory and Object-Oriented Ontology, as well as critical theory, this article examines how the ivory tiles possess multilayered excesses that constitute an object’s thingness. The foremost excess that informs the ivory tiles’ thingness, I contend, is its relationship to white supremacy. It is not only the tiles’ material history that informs its relationship to white supremacy, but how, through outlining the forms of agency things possess under Thing Theory, the tiles are able to reveal the forms of violence that are structured within the domestic sphere of the Crellin home. A product of violence, the ivory tiles as things speak back to the design of white supremacy.

Seeing Serially: Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology Encountering Serial Drawing

ABSTRACT Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology prioritises aesthetics as first philosophy, and finds increasing interest from those working across art, architecture and the humanities in general. This article tests the application of Harman’s ideas by applying them to a thorny issue related to the domain of serial art, and serially developed drawing in particular. The issue concerns the productive role of the beholder in constituting the serial artwork as a unified thing, wherein it appears manifestly deeper than the sum of its physical parts. Referring to an artwork produced by contemporary artist Stefana McClure, I build upon prior propositions on serial art put forward by Christy Mag Uidhir and Nicolas de Warren to make the case for seeing serially. This uses Harman’s understanding of aesthetics to claim that imagined iterations constitute an integral element to serial drawing, brought into play when the beholder reflects upon the loose relationship between the array of qualities the artwork palpably presents and its withdrawn reality as a unified object.

Structures, Objects, and Reality. Part 2

This paper continues the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of ontic structural realism, which begun in the first part of the paper. Non-eliminative versions of this approach are considered, which try to find a compromise between the ontology of structures and the ontology of objects. It is shown that the semirealism of A. Chakravartti and the constructive structural realism of T. Cao have a number of limitations caused by the authors’ desire to strictly distinguish between the nature of the existence of objects and structures. Then the version of the relationship between structures and entities is presented. Firstly, two concepts are divided according to their content: “object” and “entity”. Second, to solve the problem of causality, I suggest that the nature of entities and structures lie in their ability to act. It is this ability that I propose to use instead of the popular concepts of “causal powers”, “causal properties” or “dispositions”. Third, instead of a rigid alternative to ontological primitives – either essence, or causal relations, or structures – the concept of ontological pluralism and inherited existence is proposed. There each entity is represented as a derivative of another structure and, in turn, creates other entities and structures. Thus, both structures and entities at each level of the complexity hierarchy partially inherit the ability to act and a certain degree of existence from the structures and entities of the previous levels. Finally, I am trying to clarify the modal aspects of the ontic structural realism. Following the popular interpretations of quantum theory, the ability to act, and hence the existence of structures and entities, are considered separately in two worlds – potential and actual ones. The potential world is associated with a set of possible objects and structures of quantum theory, and the actual world is associated with a set of real (observable) objects and structures of classical physical theories. The transition from the potential to the actual world is proposed to be considered as a primitive metaphysical event. The proposed concept partially overcomes the objections to ontic structural realism, thereby strengthening its position in the discussion about the reality of quantum objects.

Contemporary Cognitive Psychology: What Theories Do

This paper continues the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of ontic structural realism, which begun in the first part of the paper. Non-eliminative versions of this approach are considered, which try to find a compromise between the ontology of structures and the ontology of objects. It is shown that the semirealism of A. Chakravartti and the constructive structural realism of T. Cao have a number of limitations caused by the authors’ desire to strictly distinguish between the nature of the existence of objects and structures. Then the version of the relationship between structures and entities is presented. Firstly, two concepts are divided according to their content: “object” and “entity”. Second, to solve the problem of causality, I suggest that the nature of entities and structures lie in their ability to act. It is this ability that I propose to use instead of the popular concepts of “causal powers”, “causal properties” or “dispositions”. Third, instead of a rigid alternative to ontological primitives – either essence, or causal relations, or structures – the concept of ontological pluralism and inherited existence is proposed. There each entity is represented as a derivative of another structure and, in turn, creates other entities and structures. Thus, both structures and entities at each level of the complexity hierarchy partially inherit the ability to act and a certain degree of existence from the structures and entities of the previous levels. Finally, I am trying to clarify the modal aspects of the ontic structural realism. Following the popular interpretations of quantum theory, the ability to act, and hence the existence of structures and entities, are considered separately in two worlds – potential and actual ones. The potential world is associated with a set of possible objects and structures of quantum theory, and the actual world is associated with a set of real (observable) objects and structures of classical physical theories. The transition from the potential to the actual world is proposed to be considered as a primitive metaphysical event. The proposed concept partially overcomes the objections to ontic structural realism, thereby strengthening its position in the discussion about the reality of quantum objects.

Između pejzaža i hiperobjekata - mapiranje viskoziteta borske flotacione jalovine

In contemporary architecture and related disciplines, the understanding of landscape is undergoing transformative changes due to ecological emergencies. Rather than perceiving landscape as a static form, it is regarded as an open process, suggesting its complete comprehension may be elusive. Consequently, alternative models that surpass traditional picturesque representations are emerging within the field of landscape representation. Furthermore, different theoretical frameworks are being employed to grasp the supposed geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a framework that falls under the speculative realism school of thought. Within this theoretical lens, Timothy Morton introduces the concept of hyperobjects, referring to entities that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries and profoundly impact life on Earth. Hyperobjects manifest through diverse phenomena such as global warming, radioactive materials, nuclear waste, pollution, etc. They possess five defining characteristics: viscosity, nonlocality, time undulation, interobjectivity and phasing that may be further interpreted in the architectural discipline. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on hyperobjects and their essential characteristics while exploring their connections to various architectural landscape concepts. Moreover, it seeks to conduct a design-driven research experiment focused on an alternative viscosity representation in Bor, a flotation tailing in Eastern Serbia.

To the Concept of “Sound Object” in Musical Theory and Composition Practice of the End of the 20th — the Beginning of the 21st Century

The article is devoted to the concept of “sound object”, fundamental category for music of the late 20th — early 21st century. It is considered from the standpoint of Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of concrete music, Helmut Lachenmann’s concrete instrumental music, Dennis Smalley’s spectromorphology, James Tenney’s gestalt theory, and is also interpreted within the philosophical framework of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Bruno Latour’s actornetwork theory. The works of Beat Furrer, Peter Ablinger and Georg Friedrich Haas are also analyzed. The conclusion from the research is that in order to interpret the concept and phenomenon of a sound object in modern compositional practice, which is extremely diverse, musicological methods are not enough, and therefore, an appeal to modern philosophy can contribute to a more accurate interpretation and help analyze the objects of modern sound world in all their diversity.

«Затерянные в космосе» от 1965-го к 2018-му: формирование киборганических сообществ

Comparing the representations of a family in the 1965–1968 scientific television series Lost in Space and its 2018–2021 remake, the article explicates the worldview principles of the family building as a cyborganic community from the perspective of contemporary philosophical anthropology. The conceptual framework is based on Donna Haraway’s work on identity and community formation. Her ideas are considered in the context of new ontologies. The article attempts to ontologize the anthropological issues. Here, the interpretation of Donna Haraway’s approach is not limited to feminist theory or gender studies and correlates with such philosophical projects as Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technology, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Dilan Trigg’s phenomenology of horror and Timothy Morton’s object-oriented ontology. Both the 1965–1968 TV series and the 2018–2021 remake demonstrate that the family is the basis of society, equally necessary for survival on the Earth and on other planets. Both TV series represent a “planetary” family, that is, an exemplary family reflecting all of humanity. However, the worldview principles of assembling the family as a community differ in the two series. While in the original series, the representation of the Robinson family does not transcend the boundaries of the modern discourse of a family, the assemblage of the family in the remake unfolds within an approach that goes beyond the legacy of modernity and emphasizes cyborgization and the cyborganic community building.

Сложностно-ориентированная повестка дня для институциональной экономической теории

Institutional economics has been at the peak of its scientific capabilities long enough to reach midlife crisis. Despite its growing interdisciplinarity and other positive trends, the field is now struggling with the lack of “big ideas” and inertia of its methodological approaches. The article considers the potential of the complexity-oriented paradigm in institutional economic theory. Firstly, one of the promising avenues for future research is to focus on the institutions of digital capitalism. They are much more complex than the institutions of industrial society and their analysis requires a move beyond the reductionist perspective. Digital technologies are both transformational and institutional technologies, which makes them suitable for testing new complexity-centric approaches. Secondly, there is a number of methodological steps that could be taken in order to overcome the reductionist approaches, for example, reconsider the concept of institutional evolution in light of the paradigm of extended evolutionary synthesis or bring the human actor model in line with the enactivist (dynamic-interactionist) paradigm. Finally, there is an obvious need for a serious revision of the philosophical foundations of institutional analysis. The article puts forward new principles for studying economic institutions, based on the ideas of post-structuralism, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, social constructionism and performativity theory, process philosophy and enactivist philosophy of mind. Introducing these new perspectives to economics will help us expand institutionalist imagination and supplement the standard institutional methodologies with more advanced interdisciplinary approaches.

Towards an Object-Oriented Organization Theory: The Role of Entrepreneurial Objects in Organizational Emergence

Avant-garde entrepreneurship studies have contributed to organization theory through a strong process ontology on the creation of new potentialities for organizing; however, this has also further diminished scholarly attention to organizations as objects. It follows that the core entities of organization theory—real organizations—matter very little for theorizing organizational emergence. Based on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO), we develop the argument that objects, not unlike processes, can be entrepreneurial. Laying the ground for an object-oriented organization theory (OOOT), we posit that increased attention to viewing entrepreneurship as a quality invites organization theory into the weird reality of organizations as emergent autonomy-seeking objects. This becomes possible by way of a non-literal knowledge sustained by the commitment of another object that is neither reduceable to its components (including process itself) nor actions (including all forms of the relational determination of organizations). We close by discussing the uniqueness of OOOT through the example of Sun Ra and the Arkestra.

Object Ontologies, Relationality, and Collaborative Aesthetics: Purloined Things in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere

Object Ontologies, Relationality, and Collaborative Aesthetics: Purloined Things in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere

«Метаонтология» Питера ван ИнвагенаПредисловие переводчиков

Peter van Inwagen (b. 1942) is one of the living metaphysicians who has made a substantial contribution to both theoretical (ontology and metaphysics of material Objects) and special metaphysics (in discussions on the problem of free will and the personal identity problem). With rare exceptions there are no works of van Inwagen in Russian. This publication is intended to correct this shortcoming to a certain extent. We present to the Russian-speaking reader a translation of one of his classical works – the paper Meta-Ontology (1998), which constitutes a significant milestone in the development of analytical ontology: in it the so-called “Standard View” in ontology is summarized and for the first time the concept of “Meta-Ontology” is given in as name for the section of analytical metaphysics, which has as its subject the meaning and the sense of the very being, or existence.

ВЧЕРА И СЕГОДНЯ: О ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ ОБРАБОТКЕ ПРОШЛОГО

The introduction to the archival collection “To Revive the Past Through Pedagogy: On History and Historicism in Children’s Literature” starts with a close reading of Yesterday and Today, a picture book for children, which the poet Samuil Marshak and the artist Vladimir Lebedev published in 1925 with the private press Raduga in Leningrad. Relying on clear binary schemes, the book presented temporal distinctions (yesterday/today) as a combination of differential features. Belonging to different time frames was presented not simply as a matter of chronology; also, it was read as a manifestation of cultural differences (old/new), that is, as differences constructed and appropriated through time, and, simultaneously, as a clear expression of historical differences (outdated/progressive), i.e., as differences that were rooted in a specific and therefore irreproducible context. The historical juxtaposition of the world of yesterday and the world of today was conceptualized in Yesterday and Today as a juxtaposition of two different orders of things — the things of the past vs. the things of the present. However, in the finale of the book this early Soviet version of the object-oriented ontology was transformed into something else: everyday objects reemerged as social symptoms. The order of things was re-coded as a metonym of a social order: behind everyday objects of the past and the present, there were “for- mer” and “new” people, lurking. This contrastive multilevel juxtaposition of yesterday and today diffused the linearity of history; the continuity of the material, intellectual, and social progression was subjected to purposeful fragmentation and polarization. And the habitual obviousness of the gap between “yesterday” and “today” was called upon to justify the organic — and therefore natural — essence of such fragmentations and breaks. Yesterday and Today was among the first Soviet books for children to articulate the contrastive method of the early Soviet historicism in a graphic and accessible way. The book’s poetics of historical discontinuities, gaps, and shifts provided an important foundation for the literary treatment of history in the early Soviet period. Moreover, the method of contrastive juxtaposition of the past and the present, of the good and the bad, of the heroic and the cowardly would be quickly turned into a popular narrative formula of Soviet literature for children. By grounding things and people in distinctive temporal settings, this early Soviet version of historicism could successfully organize the multidimensional and heterogenous coexistence of distinctive practices, mentalities, and symbolic frameworks. Incompatible things, styles, and ways of life were placed in their book on their own — separate — pages, as if to emphasize their historically discordant relations. The poetics of historical discontinuities evolved into a politics of historical incompatibility of heterogenous things, styles, and ways of life. By the middle of the 1930s, the poetics of historical discontinuities would be revised and reframed. A desire to juxtapose the past and the present would be replaced by the desire to demonstrate historical continuity. As an organizing model, “yesterday and today” would still be in use but its meaning would dramatically change: “today” would be perceived as a natural continuation of the revolutionary “yesterday.” “Gaps,” “breaks” and “shifts” would be pushed out by “stages” and “steps.” Historical allegories would make historicism ideologically useless and aesthetically irrelevant.

Social Business Object Ontology (SoBOOnt): A formal description of a novel concept for social features

In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of “social features for process-oriented business objects” that extends existing research on the Social Network of Business Objects (SoNBO). In SoNBO, data is extracted from heterogenous source systems in the form of business objects and a user-specific knowledge graph is generated and used as a navigation structure in a web application (the so-called SoNBO Explorer). Up to now, the SoNBO Explorer has been limited to information retrieval and access, which is now enriched with interactive functionality, the so called “social features”, that allow the user to add content and thus interact with the information objects. The solution builds on the idea of “social profiles” that are used to represent people in Enterprise Social Networks and extends this idea to business objects. People and objects become (equal) nodes in a knowledge graph on which the user can perform (social) functionality (e.g. following, liking, commenting, tagging, etc.). This way the idiosyncratic functionalities of human-centred collaboration software is applied to process-aware ERP systems. We present the formalisation of our concept in the Social Business Object Ontology (SoBOOnt).

The image of a synthetic in the Alien franchise: the phenomenology of human-robot interaction

In the article the representation of a synthetics image in the Alien franchise is analyzed. The analysis was carried out in the context of human-robot interaction. The methodological basis of the research is the tool-analysis developed by M. Heidegger (fundamental ontology) and rebuilt by G. Harman and T. Morton (object-oriented ontology). During the analysis of the Alien franchise, the dynamics of scientific and technological progress in the field of robotics presented in the films and the main ways of programming the anthropomorphic robots of the saga are shown. As a result, several main images of synthetics were revealed: a robot-subject, as close as possible to a human being in its abilities; a robot is an obedient machine that follows the orders of its creator and corporation; a robot who can be the part of society, because it can "read" the social context; a robot is more human than a human. As a result, in films, robotics as an industry is in decline, and synthetics having really become better and more human than people refuse to obey: they burn their modems and dissolve in society, become indistinguishable from people. The article concludes that as a result of the development of the plot the emphasis in the saga shifts from robotics to cyborgization. And despite the fact that the films retain a humanistic setting (the cyborg Ripley 8 is the exception, not the rule) the dynamics of the rapprochement between Aliens and humans and their machinerization demonstrate the fragility of the border between humans and non-humans. A transition to post-humanistic practices of coexistence of people and non-humans is being built. In the "Alien 4" which shows the practices of communication between people, synthetics, (a hybrid of Ripley and Aliens) a transition is being built to post-humanistic practices of coexistence between people and non-humans.

Культурные трансформации цифровой эпохи в контексте объектно-ориентированной онтологии

The article highlights the main trends and factors of transforming the dominant cultural space at the present stage of information technologies development, accompanied by a permanent crisis in all spheres of public life. The subject of research is considered in the context of object-oriented ontology from the perspective of understanding the phenomenon of information culture, that, implementing to the space of modern culture, stimulates globalization and heterogeneity, forming ‘cyberspace’ territory that determines heteropolar dynamics of cultural transformation vectors: those which are created by a person, and those which are socially dangerous. The authors interpret the problems of transformations and risks of the formation of the information society cultural space as a dilemma of technologies (regulations) and value meanings of creating culture as a reality of human existence. The article notes the position of object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism in the problem field of philosophical thought and in the theoretical understanding of the socio-cultural aspects of contemporary digital space. The paper also focuses on fixation and comprehension of real and sensory objects as simulacra, foundations and origins of simulation in digital and non-digital cultural space and applications of certain social practices. Cultural space in a rapidly developing information technology society is fundamentally changing its axiological, cognitive and regulative coordinates. In conclusion, we systematize important factors of cultural transformations considered in the paper, and associated with the object-oriented comprehension of new variable possibilities of information and communication technologies in a digital society: interactivity of networks, virtualization of reality, ontologization and objectification of medial constructions of the image of the world, “cyber-performatization” of society, the dominance of digital mass culture, as well as challenges to man, new forms of alienations manifested in the location of the ‘interactive infosphere’ of cultural space.