Units and Objects

Along with several others, contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has been instrumental in rekindling the thirsty brush of philosophy, igniting a new and exciting fire in this tired old field. It has become known as Speculative Realism. Harman’s work has become tremendously influential in my recent thinking, despite my not (yet) having made this influence as apparent in print as I would like.

I just learned that Harman has launched a new blog in which, among other things, he’ll be hashing through some of his thinking for a new book on “object-oriented philosophy,” a term he’s used since at least 1999, but most notably in his books Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics. The blogging philosopher. What will they think of next?

One of the gifts of this new blog is a charmingly concise entry on the very notion of “object-oriented philosophy.” In brief, but excerpted with violence:

What does it take for a philosophy to count as object-oriented? The answer is simple: individual entities must be treated as the focus of the cosmos. … But for my purposes, an object-philosophy is interesting only when it deals with rifts in the heart of objects. … If I perceive a tree, for instance, this is not just an arbitrary bundle of qualities linked by human habit and glued together with the loose nickname “tree”. Instead, the tree is a vigorous unit despite numerous changes in the angle, distance, or mood from which I view it.

Harman’s blog in general and this definition in particular reminded me of two questions I have long considered but not yet written about seriously. Brief salvos apropos of them follow.

I have long been empathetic to Harman’s suggestion that objects become a primary concern of philosophy once more, partly because I found it helped me consider the notion of the “unit,” a key concept in my first book. Indeed, I make an explicit correlation between my “unit” and Harman’s “object” in the book’s first chapter.

Unit Operations is a book about interpreting creative works of all sorts as configurations of action and logic. It musters its eponymous concept almost exclusively in the interest of characterizing human acts. It privileges a representational interpretation of its eponymous concept But it need not, and I had always intended “unit operations” (the concept) to serve a much more general purpose.

“Unit” was to describe anything whatsoever, perhaps extending even further beyond Harman’s “object” by virtue of its ambiguity of sense. To cite myself:

while I include in my understanding of units ordinary objects such as the ones Harman favors (“person, hammer, chandelier, insect, or otherwise”), I also claim that units encompass the material manifestations of complex, abstract, or conceptual structures such as jealousy, racial tension, and political advocacy. When thought of in this way, units not only define people, network routers, genes, and electrical appliances, but also emotions, cultural symbols, business processes, and subjective experiences.

While I have not (yet, or significantly) expanded the concept thusly and in its own right, I believe I already laid the groundwork to do so in Unit Operations. Indeed, I tentatively suspect that the less specific notion of “unit,” with its implications of generic substance and nested condensation, has a role to play in speculative realism, perhaps in the sweaty folds between the thinking of Latour on objects (they exist only in relation) and that of Harman on objects (they are eternally separate).

An opening salvo in such a drive: objects are not just material things, but also conceptual ones. Or, the things we think are ideas are really only units. The peace accord is no better than the hammer; the pang of jealousy no better than the iron filing; the corporate valuation no better than the cornhusk. We can arrive at such an understanding not only through the reinvigoration of objects as a philosophical concern, but also by encouraging their colonization of matters previously limited to the domain of human experience.

If there is something especially lurid and contemporary about the concept of an “object-oriented philosophy,” it must be the fact that it shares more than half its name with a dominant computer programming paradigm, “object-oriented programming.”

In Unit Operations I made an explicit choice to use the term “unit” over “object” so as not to confuse material things like radiators and MoonPies with software things like NSMutableArray and class employee {};. Both object and object-oriented, I reasoned, have special meaning in computer science; they act as reserved words, if you will. Since the book attempts to draw connections between the humanities and computing, I wanted to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Then and since, I’ve been secretly bothered by “object-oriented philosophy” (the name, not the idea). I was reminded of this concern when I saw that Harman had shorthanded his term with the acronym OOP, one also commonly used to refer to the programming paradigm. My worry arose not from the perception that Harman had absconded with the appellation without giving it proper credit (he has never to my knowledge noted the similarity of the terms in his writing, although I know he is aware of it) but because I feared the sense of “object-oriented” native to computer science didn’t mesh well with that of speculative realism.

To wit, an object in the computational sense:

• describes a pattern, not a thing.
• exists in stable relation to its properties.
• exists in stable relation to its abilities.
• has direct access to other objects via their properties and abilities
• is not a real object
• (but can be made real, e.g. on magnetic tape or as a series of instructions on a processor stack)
• always relates to an intentional object (both because it is a designed object and because it strives to embody and enact direct modeling of the world)

Many—perhaps all—of the aspects above conflict with Harman’s understanding of objects and what it means to be oriented toward them (even if certain other properties of object-oriented programming, such as abstraction and polymorphism, might begin to approach the agitated relationship between objects and properties per Harman). The problem is one of a conflict of domains. The programmer’s understanding of “object-oriented” suggests certain ideas, ideas with tremendous cultural, commercial, and indeed hidden social influence, which conflict with the philosopher’s understanding of “object-oriented.” Unless, of course, the philosopher is also a programmer, like me.

This might seem a mere problem of rhetoric. No domain of ideas has a monopoly on terms, even if common parlance has particular ways of understanding their use. And perhaps it is just that. But even if so, a rhetorical challenge is a real one, especially given the speculative realists desire to reintroduce philosophy to ordinary life, rather than to keep it cooped up in the cages of institutions.