Object-oriented Philosophy Research Articles

Extensible, not relational: finding bodies in the landscape of electronic information with wireless body area networks

This article examines a medical biotechnology known as a wireless body area network (WBAN) as a way to discuss how electronic information infrastructure is spatially extending human bodies into physical landscapes. The term extensible body is introduced, framed by the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. WBANs are sensors placed on or inside of the human body to measure, record, and transmit data about the biological processes of a medical patient. I argue that these body-data should be considered components of bodies themselves, not representations of them. Further, I argue that the geographical discourse on relationality should be less about object relations and more about object extensions. Harman’s explication of the “quadruple object,” and specifically his use of real and sensual objects makes this possible. This questions the spatial beginnings and ends of categorical objects such as bodies and information, the implications of which could have profound impacts on how policies are framed in sectors such as public health, environment, planning, and medicine. The notion of extensibility is crucial in theorizing how, and where, the Geoweb exists as a spatial-technical assemblage of objects and information. The case of WBANs shows that a theorization of the Geoweb must include the built infrastructure of data storage as a spatial extension of being human.

An outline of object-oriented philosophy.

This article summarises the principles of object-oriented philosophy and explains its similarities with, and differences from, the outlook of the natural sciences. Like science, the object-oriented position avoids the notion (quite common in philosophy) that the human-world relation is the ground of all others, such that scientific statements about the world would only be statements about the world as it is for humans. But unlike science, object-oriented metaphysics treats artificial, social, and fictional entities in the same way as natural ones, and also holds that the world can only be known allusively rather than directly.

Death and Texts

This article examines the various limits of knowledge in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale as a critique of finitude in object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism. The phrase “death shall be dead” is the form of the receding limits that emerge when finitude is revoked, the lack of content that is a sign of a finitude still to come. The materialisms of the Tale assert a limit that does not arrive because they begin with the inexhaustible limitations of form.

Force‐full: power, politics and object‐oriented philosophy

In this paper we construct an object‐oriented approach to power and politics. Building on the work of Graham Harman, we argue that objects are engines of power, able to fully shape the contours of existence through the production of difference and affectivity in the world. We present four key points to underpin our argument. First, we define an object by expanding on the Heideggerian idea that objects are split between their ‘present qualities’ and ‘absent qualities’. Second, we discuss why objects are irreducible to scientific naturalism or social relativism. Third, we contend that the world is ‘policed’ by objects that act as phenomenological viruses. And finally, we explain that such policing is never exhaustive and autonomous forces are constitutive of new commons. We conclude that a speculative metaphysics is vital for building new geographic understandings of objects and power, and a politics of action – one brick at a time.

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Political geographies of the object

This paper examines the role of objects in the constitution and exercise of state power, drawing on a close reading of the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire, an unconventional crime drama set and shot in Baltimore, Maryland. While political geography increasingly recognizes the prosaic and intimate practices of stateness, we argue that objects themselves are central to the production, organization, and performance of state power. Specifically, we analyze how three prominent objects on The Wire – wiretaps, cameras, and standardized tests – arrange and produce the conditions we understand as ‘stateness’. Drawing on object-oriented philosophy, we offer a methodology of power that suggests it is generalized force relations rather than specifically social relations that police a population – without, of course, ever being able to fully capture it. We conclude by suggesting The Wire itself is an object of force, and explore the implications of an object-oriented approach for understanding the nature of power, and for political geography more broadly.

Building Type Production and Everyday Life: Rethinking Building Types through Actor-Network Theory and Object-Oriented Philosophy

The aim of this paper is to reconceptualise ‘building type’ in order to better account for its general role in society and everyday life. The paper merges the concept of building type with actor-network theory and object-oriented philosophy in order to develop the concept of ‘territorial sorts’ as a way of widening building-type research and making it more useful for investigating how building types are actually produced, not just in terms of the work done by different kinds of authorities, such as architects, engineers, and building regulators, but also in terms of the ongoing practices and power relations of everyday life.

Object‐oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency:BrunoLatour,GrahamHarman and the material turn

This paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by the Royal Commission into the 2009 'Black Saturday' bushfires during which 173 people died in the Australian State of Victoria. Often inspired by Bruno Latour's material-semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. In Latour's approach no object is reducible to something else - such as nature, the social, or atoms - it is instead a stabilized set of relations. A Latourian approach allows us to highlight how the Royal Commission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the 'natural' from the 'social'. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations. Graham Harman, in his object-oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a 'relationist' metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of 'objects' to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements of Harman's ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material-semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.

Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser's Object-Oriented Maternities

This response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) puts the book in conversation with recent speculative realist thinking and object-oriented philosophies. Drawing on the democratizing onticology of Levi Bryant, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, and Jane Bennett's political ecology of matter, I argue that Baraitser develops a “vibrant maternality” and an object-oriented feminism that gives nonhuman actants their due in a constellation of relations between maternal subjects and the objects they encounter.

The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism

This article sketches the outlines of an object-oriented literary criticism, contrasting it with several familiar critical schools. We begin with a summary of two new philosophical trends: speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. The latter approach offers new arguments for the autonomy of objects from their relations, and allows us to consider whether various approaches to literature do justice to this autonomy. The New Criticism insists on the independence of the text, but only at the price of destroying the independence of its internal elements, due to its excessively holistic vision of the textual interior. New Historicism famously embeds the text in its cultural and material surroundings, thereby over-relationizing it, which is found to be philosophically untenable. Deconstruction leads to similar difficulties through its misinterpretation of identity as a form of presence, thereby disallowing any independence of things. In closing, some suggestions are offered for new methods of criticism capable of living up to the unity and autonomy of both the text and its internal elements.

New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter

In the midst of theoretical debates and traditions concerning “materialism” (also new), “realism” (speculative) and “objects” (object-oriented philosophy), one of the most important things to reali...

Systemic Complicity as a Politics of Artistic Practice within the People's Republic of china

ABSTRACTOffering close readings of key works by artists Liu Chuang, Jiang Zhi, Wang Yuyang, and Zhang Liaoyuan, this article proposes a curatorial view of criticality in the contemporary Chinese context that is broadly understood by its practitioners as mutually exclusive with political or social engagement. It then attempts to consolidate a set of principles and key concepts that underpin the cultural conditions that allow for this understanding in order to trace possible new ways forward for the political and/or critical in future cultural production, ultimately taking cues from media theory and object-oriented philosophy by way of suggesting that the social status of art will need to shift before any new route can emerge. The article concludes that aspects of the currently dominant trope of criticality may serve as a platform for the products of artistic practice to speak more clearly and critically than artists themselves are now able.

Objects and interaction

Framed by the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead and the more recent work in object-oriented philosophy of figures such as Steven Shaviro and Graham Harman, this article develops an object-oriented approach to understanding interaction. By way of illustration I explore interactive artworks from Ken Rinaldo, Wolfgang Müench and Kiyoshi Furukawa, and Paul Sermon, which emphasise the intersection of a layer of technology in our sensory and physical experiences of the world. In order to develop an object-oriented exploration of these works, and our day-to-day interactions with technology in a broader sense, I explore digital interaction as a process that involves the transductive relationships set up between objects and the milieu in which these objects find themselves. Central to this argument is setting all objects, including human users, technology and artifacts, on the same ontological footing.

Object-oriented philosophy and the comprehension of scientific realities

Object-oriented philosophy and the comprehension of scientific realities

Object-oriented philosophy and the comprehension of scientific realities

In this essay I focus on Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks, the first treatise entirely devoted to address the metaphysics of Bruno Latour. I explain how Harman highlights the philosophical roots and principles of latourian object-oriented philosophy. Furthermore, I analyze how Harman emphasizes both a new secular occasionalism as well as the new form of realism within Latour’s conception of reality featured as relationism. Besides, I also stress that Harman does not only defend the philosophy of Latour enthusiastically. This philosopher compares his own metaphysical commitments and his fourfold theory of reality to the one-fold theory found at Latour’s philosophy.  Finally, I assess Harman’s review of Bruno Latour’s work and I argue that some problems within Latour’s conception of reality are better understood when they happen to be explained in terms of the philosophy of science. I tackle briefly this task in what concerns the very comprehension of Latour’s occasionalism.

Thought, Untethered. A review essay.

Thought, Untethered. A review essay. Scott C. Richmond (bio) Graham Harman , Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Washington: Zero Books, 2010. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. In his little book on "the ontology of film," Stanley Cavell imagines that photography satisfied "the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another" (21). Individuality had become isolation, consciousness came unhinged from the world, and philosophy had to renounce a concern with the things. From outside the field of philosophy, photography's pictorial realism embodied a new solution, both aesthetic and technological, to a centuries-old philosophical problem that thought itself was no longer capable of resolving. Now from within the field of philosophy, for the last decade or so, a group of philosophers has been attempting a specifically philosophical solution, speculative realism. Speculative realist philosophers challenge the necessity, even the propriety, of philosophy's renunciation. Citing the rampant decadence of "postmodern skepticism" and the small-mindedness of analytical philosophy's concern with mind, these philosophers amplify, transform, radicalize, and exalt in Husserl's famous slogan, "back to the things themselves!" This movement has gone under a few different names, but has settled on speculative realism after a 2007 conference of that name. It has become institutionalized enough that two new volumes propose to evaluate where it is and how it got there: Graham Harman's collection of essays and lectures, Towards Speculative Realism (Zero Books, 2010), and an anthology edited by Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek along with Harman, The Speculative Turn (re.press, 2011). My agenda in this review essay is twofold: to evaluate the broad contours of speculative realist thought as they are presented in these two volumes, focusing on two exemplary philosophers in particular, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux; and to show that, however far removed from—even antagonistic to—the concerns of aesthetic, political, and cultural criticism speculative realism may be, it has significant if unexpected stakes for contemporary critical theory. Speculative realism explicitly rejects what I want to call the "humanistic" concerns of much of contemporary continental philosophy and its inflection in critical theory of the sort practiced in literature, film, art, and cultural studies departments. But the terms of this rejection, and the problems it entails or discloses, are instructive for those of us whose speculative practices take place within the domains of culture and the arts. In particular, the deep but perhaps obscure affinity between speculation and aesthetics in speculative realism can serve as an opportunity to reopen, and possibly to transform, our ways of understanding our own critical work and the kind of traction it can have on cultural and aesthetic objects. Graham Harman is easily the most readable of the speculative realists, and TowardsSpeculative Realism is particularly readable. It is a collection of lectures and previously unpublished essays from 1997 through 2009. The great virtue of this book is as an introduction to Harman's thought, and to his object-oriented philosophy as a variant of speculative realism. It presents in redacted and often exploratory form many of the ideas that were the foundations for his monographs, including Tool-Being, Guerrilla Metaphysics, and Prince of Networks. In these books, he often presents his case as though he were reporting incontrovertible results--a style of writing and thinking that is likely a virtue in popularizing a philosophical position. However, because of this, his thinking can feel at times a bit like a conceptual machine which, once you turn it over, keeps going by itself until it runs out of gas (or you do). By contrast, because many of the entries in Towards Speculative Realism come in the earlier phases of his philosophical process, this volume presents Harman's remarkably creative thinking less conclusively, in the course of its evolution over a decade. Less certain of itself, this work shows Harman asking, rather than answering, questions. While there's evidently nothing new in a retrospective volume like this, both the proximity of...

Transforming of an existing structural analysis program to the object-oriented framework

The object-oriented philosophy abstracts out the essential immutable qualities of the components of the finite element method into classes of objects. It facilitates easy modification capability without creating a ripple effect on the whole program and reduces the necessity of knowledge of the source code to a minimum level. This paper presents a prototype implementation of the development of a flexible computational platform based on an object-oriented approach and its application in a FORTRAN environment, which facilitates use of previously developed components. IDARC3D which is capable of linear and nonlinear, static as well as dynamic analyses of multistory three-dimensional buildings with, or without, energy dissipation devices developed in FORTRAN with conventional programming practices has been transformed to the object-oriented framework. By using the new object-oriented platform, some representative examples were analysed and the results were compared with the well-known software facilities.

The Abstract Reality of the "Hardcore Continuum"

The debate around whether the “hardcore continuum” (henceforth HCC) – see the previous article by Jeremy Gilbert for the background – should be classified as a “theory” or a “fact” has raised important issues about the relationship between music criticism and theory. What I propose to do here is offer a brief defence of both the HCC and of theory. Put very schematically, the recent objections to the concept of the “hardcore continuum” culture seem to take two basic forms: (1) there never was such a thing as the hardcore continuum in the first place; and (2) there was such a thing as the hardcore continuum, but it is no longer relevant to today’s dance music. Ironically, given the professed anti-theoretical intentions of many of the objectors to the HCC, both these objections cannot be resolved by appeal to facts, since both very quickly raise deeply philosophical questions – questions that, as it happens, are at the centre of intense current debates surrounding speculative realism and objectoriented philosophy. The reason that appeals to a supposedly direct, pre-theoretical “experience” must fail is that both the objections turn on the question of what a “thing” is, a question, which to say the very least, has philosophical implications. Empiricism, even in a far more sophisticated form than the so-called “buffoon empiricism” espoused by Dan Hancox at the “Hardcore Continuum” symposium at the University of East London on 29th April 2009 precisely ran aground because it could give no convincing answer to this question. Indeed, it is one of the problems on which British empiricism ran aground: far from being a flux of primary qualities and raw sensations that is cut up into objects only after the fact, the very “experience” that empiricists privilege is already impregnated with “thinghood”. Once you subtract generalised concepts not given in immediate sensations, you don’t end up with the concrete certainties that buffoon empiricism appeals to. Instead, as Berkeley ingeniously demonstrated, the material world itself disappears (there is no sensation that corresponds to “matter”; it has to be inferred as the cause of those sensations). David Hume found that the self and causality would also disintegrate, since they are not experienced as sensations either. Thus, the appeal to direct sensation would not end up in a lumpen commonsense, but in a psychosis. The first objection must give an account of what a “thing” is, without assuming that such a definition is already given to us by unreflective experience. The hardcore continuum was something that Simon Reynolds identified in the 1990s, but named retrospectively. In his presentation at FACT in Liverpool,1 Reynolds used what would come to be a controversial analogy, arguing that the HCC is a “fact” in the same way that Australia – the land mass, with its flora and fauna, as opposed to the politically-constituted “nation” – is. I want to argue here that Reynolds’ tactical retreat from theory is a mistake. However, I wouldn’t want to go as

On the implementation of object-oriented philosophy for the design of a finite element code dedicated to multibody systems

The principal objective of this paper is to describe one approach to the design and implementation of a multibody systems analysis code using an object-oriented architecture. Emphasis will be placed on the adequacy between object-oriented programming and the finite element method used for the treatment of three-dimensional multibody flexible mechanisms with large rotations and large strains, within a given formalism and given hypotheses. We will show that the object-oriented programming greatly simplifies the choice and the implementation of other formalisms concerning polyarticulated systems, thus conferring high flexibility and adaptability to the developed software.

Optimise: A Computational Environment for Teaching Optimization in Electrical Engineering

This paper presents Optimise, a computational optimization environment tool for education in electrical engineering. Optimise has been developed using software engineering process and object-oriented programming philosophy. This educational tool incorporates a set of deterministic and stochastic methods and also a set of computational intelligence techniques. Optimise offers a friendly interface that allows the students to practice the theory learned, and also to verify and compare the features of the optimization methods. A general view of the software is presented, describing its modules and class libraries. Some optimization problems are discussed to illustrate the flexibility and power of Optimise as an educational tool.