A READING COMPANION TO BOGOST’S * ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY OR WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A THING BY P. CARMICINO, M. FOUCHER, N. FRANK & J. KEMPER aonae a a Au ke INTRODUCTION WHO, WHAT, WHY? lan Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing is a short book, but also one that's conceptually and theoretically dense. Bogost writes in an evocative and stylized fashion, and allu- sions ta both complex philosophical literature and pop culture phenomena are not uncommon. It's @ refreshing and provocative read and one that often had us take to the web to look up specific refer- ences This sentiment inspired the idea of an online reading companion. In this companion, we have summa- rized all the individual chapters, hopefully establishing @ concise and coherent narrative that can help the reader in elucidating Bogost's philosophy. Furthermore, we have included illustrative informa- tion about the concepts, phenomena, individuals, and literature that Bogost mentions. We are a group of students enrolled in University of Amsterdam's New Media & Digital Culture MA pro- gramme. lf you have any questions, remarks or suggestions, feel free to contact us at nganion@grrABOUT IAN Bogost BOGOST eeathoresa g UL Se Different reward cows from Clow Clicker “Think games are just for fun? Think again.” On Persuasive Games’ website PHENOMENOLOGY or Gb! WHAT It's LIKE to] be Be a THING Bogost's words, however, also reach a wider audience, thanks to inter- views with Forbes, the Atlantic, and even the French newspaper Cour- tier International. The academic is, indeed, considered an expert in his field Ironically though, what brought Bogost under the spotlight and made him a celebrity in the industry is not his theoretical work, but an online game under the name of Cow Clicker, in which the main and only goal, as the name suggests, is to click a cow This game, developed as a critique of Facebook games such as Farm- ville, became an unexpected (and most definitely unintended) success Bogost repeats, however, that the game was meant to be a satire and insists that “players were supposed to recognize that clicking a cow is a ridiculous thing to want to do.” Cow Clicker, however, probably earned his company Persuasive Games a bit of money. The studio that he co-founded in 2003 primarily aims at developing games for persuasion, instruction, and activism or, in their words, games that can "become rhetorical tools.” An interview with Bagast on the Colbert Report in which he explains his vision of gaming can be found here Our interest in Bogost, however, is not linked to Cow Clicker’s fame or in knowledge of game theories, but to one of his most daring and intrigu- ing pieces of work: a philosophical essay called Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Bogost describes his work in the follow- ing way “A bold new metaphysics that explores how all things—from at- ‘oms to green chiles, cotton to computers—interact with, perceive, and experience one another. In order to help readers better understand Bogost’s theary, we summa- rized and illustrated the five chapters of his book You can purchase the book hereIng On Ranch in Roswell I TUESDAY. JULY & ier ROSWELL, NEW MIEXICO, RAAF Captures Fly Peatact Courfs Martial Indiana Senator Love Claims Army Is Stacking Rosell Daily Rerord Foret King Carol of No Defails of Ex-King Carot We Flying Disk "Are Revealed Roswell Hardware Man and Wite aut Report Disk Seen Tr olegenoe atice of ‘Rpmtartanent qroup “oun iy fo Tals reductions CHAPTER ONE ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY der, and gypsum Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger.” (34) PPP ase stadCorrelationism is the often unstated theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans, Philosophy TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, SUBJECTIVE REALISM ABSOLUTE IDEALISM QUESTIONS OF BEING POSTMODERNISM In the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology, lan Bogost takes us on a philosophical journey in which we explore a variety of philosophical ten- dencies. those that counter the idea of alien phenomenology and those that more closely resemble it “Culture, cuisine, experience, expression, politics, polemic: all exis- tence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff so thoroughly, so immediately, so effi- ciently that we don't even notice.” (3) Correlationism, a term coined by Quentin Meillassoux, claims all of exis- tence is only that which is @ correlation between the mind and the world. Things do not exist unless the human mind exists to process them. The concept af correlationism can be brilliantly illustrated in Mark ‘Twain's 1903 essay “Was the World Made for Man?” Philosophies of Correlationsim Prominent Figure Qualities IMMANUEL KANT Being exists only for subjects GEORGE Objects are bundles of sense data in minds BERKELEY of those who perceive them The world is best characterized by the way GWE HEGEL it appears to the self-conscious mind — Objects are outside human consciousness eee but their being exists only in human understanding Things are never fully present to us, but only seCQUES differ and defor their access to individuals DERRIDA é in particular contexts, interminablyPhilosophies of access are those which privilege the human being over other entities. FI 4 5 i u Graham Harman Philosophy PROCESS PHILOSOPHY ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY POSTHUMANISM ENVIRONMENTAL, PHILOSOPHY ANIMAL STUDIES Anti-correlationism, of speculative realism’s main players are Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, lain Hamilton Grant, and Graham Harman While all their philosophies differ somewhat, they have one thing in com- mon: a rejection of correlationism and the abandonment of the belief that the human being is the center of all being Obiect-Oriented-Ontoloay, a term coined by Graham Harman, rejects the notion that human existence is more important than the existence of all other things. No one thing has a more exclusive status over another, everything exists equally 000 (iriple “oh”) steere a path between two separate ideas of contem- porary thought Selentific naturalism, which claims things are an ag- gregate of their most basic components (subatomic particles), and 80- clal relativiem, which bases existence as the construction of human behavior and society. Similar philosophies to 000, with traces of Correlationism Prominent Figure Qualities Rejects philosophies that value static ALFRED NORTH notions of being over dynamic notions of WHITEHEAD becoming and "things" over events in process Entities are de-emphasized in favor of their BRUNO LATOUR couplings and decouplings NIA Preserves humanity as primary actor Forest and wildlife should be seen as equal DAVE FORMAN status to humans JOHN MUIR / All beings are given equal value and moral JAMES LOVELOCK right to the planet, so long as they are living8 ® es) x ALAN WEISMAN Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us documents the things that would take place if humans were to suddenly va- D a@ X a A nish from earth, TL Ol 6] Flot \ [ale ALB] \ [ek sfc] eae OF 1 0 t é a a e s i i = q ie rT Ne| OLY) Sole! he! CI 4 e 8/7 P ele ee x Be t 4 y Z ae & xs GS hl -€ 6 [sof ml had | aoe DY 4 HA Bogost makes it clear that he doesn’t want to exclude humans completely from the OOO scope as hu- mans are part of the everything that is included in the term “objects.” He only seeks to decentralize the human as the basis for all existence “It we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate.” (9) What's it like to be a thing? Bogost purports one might use science studies to answer this question, but even this will inevitably fall short as a human agent remains at the center of analysis. Fields that fail to accurately measure up to the task of defining what it feels like for an object + Vitalism - projects a living nature onto all things + Panpsychism - the mind is a universal feature of every object's existence * Panexperientialism - the view that all matter has consciousnessBogost says of non-living objects, ‘They are weird yet ordinary, unfamiliar yet human-crafted, animate but not living just as much like limestone deposits as like kittens. In a world of panexperiential meshes, how do things have experiences?" (10, 11) Harman answers Bogost’s question by invoking the concept of vica- rious causation - objects don’t interact but connect in conceptual ways unrelated to consciousness. He uses an analogy of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fusing together, but always remaining separate. “In short, all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally.” (11) Bogost admits that this is an extreme notion to wrap one’s mind around. The ontology is such that things can take many forms but the quality of their being remains the same. Levi Bryant borrows the term “flat ontology” from Manuel DeLanda'’s original usage to mean that exis- tence is composed entirely of entities rather than clusters or groupings of things. Bryant's expands the concept, granting all objects, from the Harry Potter series to lychee fruit to love affairs, the same ontological ranking “The power of flat ontology comes from its indiscretion. It refuses distinction and welcomes all into the temple of being.” (19) Bogost revisits the ideas of scientific naturalism and social relativism as the two main system opera- tions we currently utilize. He argues that even though they have a lang history of intellectual conflict, they are both cut from the same cloth: they are both human-based; the world exists for human disco- very and exploitation Can machines think? puter’s worth can be decided depending on how well it performs intelli- This question is already spoken from the correlationist viewpoint: a com- g gent human tasks or behaviors. = 8 2 A Alan Turing rephrased this question by instead borrowing from an old parlor game in which a participant tries to guess the gender of two hidden guests by asking simple questions. He suggested replacing one of the two humans with a computer in order to see if the computer can fool the human participant as often as the other hidden hurnan This ultimately became known as the Turing test.In the Chinese Room experiment, Searle argues that the machine, in this case the man, would not actually possess a mind or be able to think intelligently. Tm jen rating Saulanles and jes to produce Chinese tBiatier don undersael Chinese. This tule book is in English. J HiME AR 4219 AG TRE PR [Whoever or whatever is in that room Is an nteligent Chinese speaker language Descendants of the Turing Test can be found throughout computer science and engineering fields. Star Treck LCARS and the Loebner Pri- ze ate two examples. John Searle critiqued the Turing Test as not ta- king into consideration human understanding and experience. He pro- posed a concept called the Chinese Room In this thought experiment a human in a closed room would be slid instructions under a door allo- wing them to manipulate Chinese characters into comprehensible sen- tences. A native Chinese speaker would think the man in the room was fluent in Chinese, even though he was just following instructions. “Flat ontology of computation (or anything else) must be specific and open-ended, so as to make it less likely to fall into the trap of system operational overdetermination.” (17) Bogost uses the example of ET The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari Video Computer System, describing an assemblage of everything ET is; there ig not one “real” way to explain what E.T. the video game is. Latour calls this irreduction, nothing is able to be reduced to any one particular thing.Imbroglio vs. Mess Latour's notion of imbroglio is any situation in which you don't know who is doing the acting. John Law's notion of mess is a methodological concept that resists organized, coherent analysis of things. For Bogost, the network that reveals itself in Latour’s imbroglio is too or- derly, while a mess is too disorderly; and both contain correlationist threads, “Whose conception of reality gets to frame that of everything else's?” (21) Bogost takes the two-dimensional flat ontology one step further and coins the phrase tiny ontology, a one-dimensional singularity that contains an infinite den- sity of both messes and networks inside a point. Similar in concept to a black hole, Harman makes the observation that every object "is not only protected by a vacuous shield from the things that lie ‘outside it, but also harbors and nurses an erupting infernal universe within.” (22) ‘Do illustrate the infiniteness of an object, Bogost uses the description of a container ship. “The container ship is a unit as much as the cargo holds, the shipping containers, the hyrdraulic rams, the ballast water, the twist locks, the lashing rods, the crew, their sweaters, and the yarn out of which those garments are kit. The ship erects a boundary in which everything it contains withdraws within it, while those individual units that compose it do so similarly, simultaneously, and at the same funda- mental level of existence."(22) Bogost prefers the term unit to object, as objects imply subjects, which is directly related to correlationsim. He also prefers it to thing, which comes with a charged philosophical history. Unit, on the other hand, remains indifferent to the things it describes; it is ambivalent, isolated, unique, and specific. A unit can encapsulate an entire system or an individual atom that Unit operation refers to how units behave and interact Bogost gives the functions "brewing tea, shed- ding skin, photosynthesizing sugar, igniting compressed fuel” as examples of unit operations“The unit reveals a feature of being that the thing and the object occlude. The density and con- densation of tiny ontology has a flip side: something is always something else, too: a gear in another mechanism, a relation in another assembly, a part in another whole. Within the black hole-like density of being, things undergo an expansion.” (26) Bogost uses the concept of sets to desoribe how units relate to one another and introduces the idea of configuration. He claims, “if everything exists all at once and equally, with no differentiation what- soever, then the processes by which units perceive, relate, consider, respond retract, and otherwise engage with one another - the method by which the unit operation takes place - is a configurative one.” (26) But ultimately, Bogost has trouble with the idea of sets, as well, for who is the one that does the counting (correlationism at play, again)? “Units are isolated entities trapped together inside other unites, rubbing shoulders with one another uncomfortably while never over-lapping. A unit is never an atom, but a set, a grouping of other units that act together as a system; the unit operation is always fractal. These things wonder about one another without getting confirmation. This is the heart of the unit operation: it names a phenomenon of accounting for an object. It is a process, a logic, an algorithm if you want, by which a unit attempts to make sense of another.” (28) Bogost suggests pragmatic speculative realism in order to philosaphize about what it’s like to be a thing, claiming if taken seriously, it could have the same grounding as soeculative fiction or magical realism "Robert A. Heinlein advocates speculating about possible worlds that are unlike our own, but ina way that remains coupled to the actual world more than the term science fiction might nor- mally suggest. Magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende suggests that the spectacular is real insofar as it actually comprises aspects of culture." (29, 30) Naive realism claims that the world is just how we perceive of or know it 4 i receiver TP objectSpeculate, from Latin speculatus, past participle of speculor (‘look out’), from specula (‘watchtower’), from specio (‘look at’) Speculative realism names nat only speculative philosophy that takes existence to be separate from thought but also a philoso- phy claiming that things speculate, and furthermore, one that spe- culates about how things speculate" (31) “Everything whatsoever is like people on a subway, crunched together into uncomfortably intimate contact with strangers."(31) We can never know what goes on between to particular units, a philosopher can understand them better by amplifying and eva- luating their background noise, or “Just as the astronomer understands stars through radiant energy that surrounds them, so the philosopher understands objects by tracing their impacts on the surrounding ether."(33)Bogost evokes Edmund Husserl's use of epoché to explain how we should consider and explore the state of abjects: in a suspension of disbelief SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligences research project Earth Speaks aims to collect messages from Internet users to see what kinds of things people would like to be sent into outer space Nicholas Rescher argued against SETI’s insistence that the signs of extraterrestrial life would resemble detectable commu- nication technology, claiming they might be so alien as to be impenetrable to us. Bogost takes this further and claims it might not just be the way in which aliens communicate that evade our understanding, but that their very idea of what life it might not be recognizable to ours “The alien is anything - and everything- to everything else.” (34) Alien Phenomenology is the name Bogost gives to the practice of object-oriented philosophy “Qur job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger.” (34)CHAPTER TWO ONTOGRAPHY “Ontography is a practice of increasing the num- ber and density, one that sometimes opposes the minimalism of contemporary art Instead of remo- ving elements to achieve the elegance of simplici- ly, ontograhy adds (or simply leaves) elements to accomplish the realism of multitude. It is a prac- tice of exploding the innards of things -- be they words, intersections, shopping malls, or creatures This ‘explosion" can be as figurative or as literal as you like, but it must above all reveal the hidden density of a unit" (58)Ontography aims to find techniques capable of chronicling objects in « fashion that is illustrative of alien phenomenology. Bruna Latour In this chapter, Bagost explains his notion of ontography. Crucially, onto- graphy is not just a theory, but a practice as wall. it's concerned with actively revealing the existence and density of objects Ontography (as Bogost uses the term) is a theoretical and empirical practice rooted in Bogost's phenomenological belief that all objects don't only exist for us, but for themselves and for one another as well. t concerns itself with finding techniques capable of chronicling objects in a fashion that is illustrative of these circumstances. Bogost proposes a set of different strategies that can serve as onto- graphical, helping us in mapping out the hidden depths and diversity of things One such technique is the compilation of (Latour) litanies: lists that group objects and concepts together purely on basis of their existence These lists don't impose hierarchy or seek logical or narrative coherence, but simply present us with accounts of things that exist in the world: in this regard, a (Latour) litany establishes a flat ontology wherein no thing holds more existential value than another. Alist of lists, or litany of Litanies “Lists, as it happens, appear regularly in Latour’s works. They func- tion primarily as provocations, as litanies of surprisingly contras- ted curiosities”. (38) Lists and litanies are devices capable of grouping together disparate elements with no implied hierarchy and with no regard for regimes of knowledge and power. The only similarity that elements share within such a litany is the fact that they exist, and that none exists more or less than the other. Bogost also uses lists litanies as a stylistic, narratologi- cal and/or rhetorical device throughout the book. David Berry, a scholar at Stockholm University, created a litany of linaties found in Bogost’s book Here are several illustrative examples of ontographic practices. * Tobias Kuhn's idea of an ontograph concerns a diagram or model that serves to simplify complex (technological) matters by reducing them to graphical representations of all elements and their relations 15The primary goal of Kuhn's ontographs is to simplify and reduce va- gueness. Latour litanies are lists that posit human beings as ‘mere! objects exis- fing on equal basis with other (nonhuman) ob- ects To illustrate OOO, we created a short film that can be considered as an ultimate Latour Lita ny, int sual and aural concepts cing both vi of units to the viewer. OOOliens: A Provoca- tion exemplifies what Bogost refers to as the "rich variety of being,” as well as the idea that everyday objects, are, itany is also evident in more ontography in the sense that it rately but also in relation rm Latour litany as an hom: pher Bruno Latour, who in his wor t wor 000liens: A Provocation, by Paula Carmicino+ Francis Spufford's The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature contains a se tion of lists in literature and celebrates the paradigmatic elements at play in list-making (as oppa- sed to the syntactic nature of narrative and grammar). Spufford recognizes the capability of lists to group disparate elements together without having to logically or narratively relate them «French semiotician Roland Barthes’ self-titled autobiography takes the form of a non-sequentially ordered analysis of his own life as if it were a text (this in itself could be conceptualized as an exer- cise in ontography; Barthes presents his life as a collection of dispai hier te fragments without imposed rchical order) Herman Melville's Moby Dick chronicles the adventures of Ishmael, a man who gets caught up in @ frenzied captain's hunt for Moby Dick, an elusive white whale With regard to ontography, Moby Dick is relevant because of its refusal to maintain a strictly anthropocentric narrative. Melville writs with failed pen and while he does describe the sailors’ ordeals, he also provid. sive accounts of the anatomy of whales, the arch inhabitants et cetera us with exter ture of ships, the character of the sea and its “It would be just as appropriate to call Moby-Dick a natural history as it would a novel ~ the for- mer is perhaps more apt, even.” (42) «Tom Jobim's Waters of March is a popular Brazilian bossa nova song that could be considered an onlography of the month of March in Rio de Janeiro. It lists a va ( vessel for many ontographical reappropriations. iety of objects and concepts ‘song’, “oak") and (according to Bogost) this emphasis on multiplicity has made it a loath ‘sul 4 Waters of March, by Tom JobimVisual ontography Anather technique described by Bogost, perhaps best illustrated by the photagraphy of Stephen Shore, is that of visual ontography. Rather than registering the world through a framework governed by human subjectivity or funetionali- ty, Shore's photographs catalog objects as they appear in the world. Shore's images depict constella- tions of objects not to be perceived as a singular coherent frame, but rather as a figuration of a varie- ty of separate (yet equal) units. Visual ontography emphasizes the notion of meanwhile rather than the idea of now; instead of narro- wing its scope and designating one particular object to be the primary subject. it seeks to document everything on an equal basis. Here are a few ewamples + Francois Blanciak’s Siteless: 1001 Building Forms is a collection of (seemingly randomly ordered, which is of enough ontographical relevance in itself) 1001 visual depictions of hypothetical architec- tural shapes and compositions, Blanciak liberates architecture from the strains of human funetionali- ty and typology and rather presents us with materialities that might or could exist. These are archi- tectural objects that exist for themselves. The illustrations found in Siteless also bring together dis- parate elements and show how these elements could relate to one another (aften with no regard for matters like gravity) Db _= — ‘' hs © SS Mf i i = -_ +m - “SL \ 4Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los An- geles, California, June 21, 1975, by Stephen Shore. Stephen Shore is a famous and influential American photographer who (besides being a pioneer in the use of color photography) is well-known for his images of (configurations of) trivial objects. Rather than framing his pictures in ways that seek to steer the viewer's atten- tion in the direction of specific persons or objects, Shore's photos pre- sent vistas of specificity Interestingly enough, as stated above, Shore was also the one who introduced color into (popular) photography — this too, one could argue, lends him status as an ontographer as he sought to present objects as they appear (rather than in a stylized black-and-white fashion) “Like painting, photography usually operates on the temporal scale of now. The landscape or the still life shows the corporeal ar- rangements of things, arrested before human perception. But Sho- e's work rejects the singularity of the now in favor of the infinity of the meanwhile.” (50)The exploded view diagram acknowledges that an object can exist both on its own and in a relational context. A third strategy that Bogost mentions is that of the exploded view. An exploded view diagram illustrates the specific relationship between the separate components of an assemblage. As such, it serves to draw the attention to the fact that objects do not exist simply in relation to us, but also for themselves and for one another. The exploded view diagram depicts objects both as separate and as related entities ‘Another technique discussed by Bogost is that of the ontographic ma- chine, rather than simply cataloguing existing objects and their rela- tions, ontagraphic machines allow us to actively engage with elements “Photographic ontography is effective as art and as metaphysics. But photographs are static: they imply but do not depict unit opera- tions. For the latter, we must look to artifacts that themselves ope- rate." (52) 20«== a Scribblenauts, @ Nintendo DS game, places players in a variety of levels and gives them the ability to call any of over 20.000 objects into being and use it fo solve the level's puzzle. The puzzles’ unscripted nature encourages fo experiment with ontology; summoning a multiplicity of objects into being and finding various uses for them. Bogost uses the game Scribblenauts as a prime example of an onto- graphic machine. Scribblenauts lets players summon objects of their choosing and subsequently encourages them to use these objects in a variety of operations. An ontographic machine, then, does not grant at- tention only to the fact that units exist, but also explores the plethoras of operations these units can engage in Rush Hour is a puzzle game invented by Nobuyu- ki Yoshigahara that has the player move vehicles on a atid in order to maneuver a red car through the playing field. Bogost encourages us to think of Bush Hour as a potential ontological do- main 2In a Pickle encourages players to explore the ontology of semantic units, cataloguing referents ond homographs, and in the process emphasizing their density rather than treating words as abstract units that merely have meaning for us. renecuon PPPPPPPPP eye a PPPPRPPPD mirror @ PPPPPPP PP headlights Lastly, Bogost covers the practice of conceptualizing language from an ontographic perspective, revealing that language is not simply an abs- tract construction that solely has meaning for us, but also a set of se- mantic units that have meaning for themselves. Ontography, in short, deploys a series of techniques that can help us illustrate how not one object exists more than another, and also how these objects are not me- rely granted existence by decree of human subjectwvity but rather exist for themselves and for one another as well Ina Pickle is @ card game that invites players to think creatively about words. In Bogost's words, In a Pickle is a "machine for producing onto- graphs about words" (58). “An ontograph is a landfill, not a Japanese garden. It shows how much rather than how little exists simultaneously, suspended in the dense meanwhile of being:” (55) thoughts: a PRPPPR PRR genie a PPPPPPPRP blimp a pepprerre 22CHAPTER THREE METAPHORISMIs that because mental states can't be So, what ist described objectively, because itis like to be albat? Well, Ireslly incoherent to speak of what subjective can't explain, experiences are objectively like, since they can be described as they appear W's, you know, ‘cuz I'm a bat, froma particular point of view? I mostly think about mosquitos. Experience cannot be reduced to physical or causal relations and is therefore a subjective matter. Bo- gost cites Thomas Nagel's essay ‘What is it Ike to be a bat’ to explain how alien experiences seem to us. Nagal’s essay about bats instructs alien phenomenology by illustrating how alien experiences are ‘even if we can map aut unit operations of a specific thing, we still cannot know what it is to be a bat, imagining what itis like to be a bat is something different than being a bat. Even if we try to erase subjective elements in the experience of things by reducing objects to their physical properties we still do not have full access to experience. For example, we can follow the neu- rochemical unit operation at haw the components of a Twinkie reacts to our taste buds but that does not describe the experience of sweetness For Nagel, the question of what it is like to be an orga- nism is to inquire about the ‘subjective character of expe- rience’. This idea of experience rests on ‘being-likeness’ it eludes the way we map experiences, a feature OOO calls withdrawal Thus things remain withdrawn, they cannot be grasped by extemal observation alone. We can imagine what it is like to be something but we cannot have the same subjec- tive experience and thus not know what is to be so- mething. External features or observations may be proof or evidence of the workings of a thing but they do not ac- count for the subjective experience of a thing or as Bo- gost says “But to understand how something operates on its surroundings, or they on it, is not the same as under- standing how that other things understands those operations"(63). 24Thomas Nagel Humans can only talk about the experiences of things by caricaturing or using anthropomorphic metaphors. By dealing with things by metaphors we have to acknowledge that we are left out in the experience of things (the sonar of a bat can be understood by the metaphor of a submarine, i.e another thing). Thus metaphors assess not the perception of things but perception itself. The Clarity of Distortion Bogost states that alien phenomenology accepts the subjective charac- ter of things fully, this is in contrast with Nagel who follows an objective phenomenology, a proposed system to objectively describe subjec- tive experiences by analogy. For humans it is impossible to describe the experiences of things without comparing them to human features. “Allien phenomenology accepts that the subjective character of experiences cannot be fully recuperated objectively, even if it re- mains wholly real. In a literal sense, the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy. "(64) We make caricatures to understand things but we do so by placing hu- man agency as a starting point to make claims about reality The expe- rience of things remain alien to us. Things relate to other things in a similar fashion for us: they use their in- ternal qualities and logics and, by metaphor, relate to each other Note that this method does not try to erase distortion like objective pheno- menology but embraces it since experiences of things are still alien to us. “[Tlo begin a process of phenomenal metaphorism, we often must break with some of our own modes of knowing. This is a mindben- der: the Husserlian epoché brackets human empirical intuition, but in metaphorism we recognize that our relationship to objects is not first person; we are always removed. It is not the objects’ percep- tion that we characterize metaphoristically but the perception itself, which recedes just as any other object does.” (67) How the Sensor Sees The way a digital camera perceives the world is by analogy of film and the human eye. By understanding how the sensor sees we can take its operationalization into account By comparing the sensor of a digital ca- mera to the human eye or film we are offered a metaphor which again underlines that the experience of things is essentially alien for humans Their workings can only be understood by metaphorically speaking about them and thus alienating them from their own experience 25Ub ee ea ELC SU a CUCL eee ee ee ce eae b dieat es tiarapie rp palletes tase Dee ee Peter nana nen eins pubbles enbblen ables u a Li ee a ea Cee eet ee et bling it to capture 100% of RGB color information directly Digital cameras use dif “Just as the bat's experience of perception differs from our under- ferent kinds of sensor standing of the bat's experience of perception, so the camera's ex- P perience of seeing differs from our understanding of its expe- rience. But unlike the bat, the Foveon-equipped Sigma DP provides us with exhaust from which we can derive a phenomenal metaphor to chronicle that experience.”(72) Metaphor and Obligation n ethical relationship with thi for exay but th it react to external factors. In arily anthro- ple, a vegeta- n have an ethical object eating m @ humay jee!” nor do thics. A plant ier words, it does not feel ll 5 relation is ni us pocentric sin always take human ethic ine princi- ple, "when we theorize ethical codes, they ar us Ther that anthropomorphising m their limits because they cannot account for ethics which logic outside of things We can only imagine our ethics with things and not the ethios of things