Object-Oriented Ontology 6. Bogost 1.

 Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing. Ian Bogost. 2012. University of Minnesota Press.

Similarly to any text in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this book argues that a car, a human, a tree, an idea in my mind, my computer screen have the same degree, the same reality, the same strength of their being. My being, my existence is neither more nor less than the existence of the idea suddenly emerging in my mind that "aliens may exist." However, and apparently, me as a human, my computer screen, and that idea are not equal in how they exercise their existence or their being. I am not identical, nor equal, to an idea roaming in my mind. Hence, things equally exist but not exist equally. 

This basic argument of OOO leads to a striking conclusion: humans are not the center of the world, and more precisely, the classical division of subject-object is refuted. If you espouse the OOO, you should stop thinking of yourself and the world around you and of other objects you meet every day as two separate realms. It is not the rational subject vis-a-vis the Object. Everything that exists is equal in its being; thus, "we" are all objects.  That what distinguishes me as a human from other objects is not essential nor more sublime than what distinguishes a car from a turtle.

What indeed makes Bogost's argument distinct from other OOO's scholars is how he understands a thing. For him, we should not talk about things or objects but about UNITs. The words object and thing are misleading. Everything is in fact a unit.  My fountain pen is a unit, my city is a unit, a cell is a unit. Now, a unit is not an atom, is never an essence that is solid, homogenous, and one. A unit is a set. Any thing then is a set. For example, a car is set = {wires, tires, metal}; {mobility, fuel, gaz}; {engine, fire, shape} . . . and we can disclose this set (car) infinitely.  The unit car is not reducible to any particular set of its manifestation (or disclosure) and it is never the sum of them. 

So, a unit always expands, explodes, infinitely, on the one hand, as it meshes other units' sets (a car manifests or explodes as a set {fule, fire, etc.} when it meshes another set of another unit {energy, etc.}); and it shrinks into an infinite density as it "goes back" to its inside (the non-explosion side, the "non-meshing others" side, the non-manifestation side), on the other hand. Bogost sees a unit as a black hole: It is infinitely dense and it is infinitely explosive. Hence, for Bogost, there is no flat ontology, our existence is not a flat on which things hinge, but it is dotted. The existence is made of points, each point is a thing (unit), each unit is a black hole. 

Finally, to see how a unit manifest, Bogost understands things' manifestation as a fractal's expansion: 

This video shows how a thing, when "repeated," expands in a very complex manner. Similarly, a unit is a set that is internally dense, but it can expand in a fractal manner by meshing other things according to its own (inner logic). That means a car cannot mesh the thing-idea of "a bird is extinct," simply because this idea does not resonate with the logic of the unit car, so it cannot mesh it. But, a car can mesh very loosely the thing or the set Mars because it - in some degree of its manifestation - resonates with gravity, which is a set (or a manifestation of a set/unit) that is closer to the logic of the set car. In other words, units can link and meet each other even though loosely as metaphors. Hence, even the unit of "a bird is extinct" can meet very loosely the unit car eventually, but this linkage will be so weak, so unnecessary to both of these two units, the car and the "a bird is extinct."