I photograph not to represent but to encounter and experience object-connection. I photograph not as the privileged subject-photographer or in order to create the privileged photo-object (the decisive moment) but within a flat non-correlationist photographic ontology.
I look to work with this philosophy by photographing a democracy of objects, connecting with objects within objects.
In specific terms I look to photograph objects in assemblages – not in the sense of objects in context or with other objects as a background but in terms of how what are sometimes seen as a hierarchy of objects are best seen, and photographed as flat.
As an example I photographed discarded human-made objects. I did not approach this as ‘litter’; an invasion in a natural landscape or as a correlationist human intervention in a separate ecology; or as a sign of some wider process or history.
The broken biro on the tarmac carries a history. It was made in a factory, in a country, in a system. It has a carbon footprint, a chemical presence and half-life. But it also has a presence and actuality as I encounter it. At the subatomic level, it is in motion. Its relation to the tarmac (within its own history) is dynamic as molecules react and inter-react. The pen and the pen/tarmac assemblage (itself an object) has an agentic capacity. It does things in the world semiotically perhaps but also materially. It changes the world, the chemical balance of the environment, perhaps the psychological or aesthetic balance of the pedestrian. As the photographer object in that encounter I am inevitably in object-connections with the biro, the tarmac, the light and a myriad of other objects.
I also photographed human-created objects literally entangled with natural objects. Again this was not as a way exploring or representing ecology or relations of production.
The disused mooring ring on the canal path near the 2012 fence can ‘stand’ for old east-end industry replaced by olympic brands, security and ‘legacy’. But the ring is not just a sign of something more. Nor is it just the trace of historical and political economic processes or human impact on ‘the environment’. There is no background or context here. The ring does things in the world at an ideological scale but also at a material scale. It rusts or leaks chemicals into the soil (alongside the toxins released by 2012 excavations). But when the ring-object is addressed in a flat ontology with the grass, the long-forgotten ironworks, the canalboat, its moorings licence, British Waterways and its internal memos proposing changes to the rules for the Olympics – that network of human and unhuman actants is real, present, actual, power-full and governmental (1).
Finally I photographed the encounter between natural objects. Here there is even more pressure to address the object-connections as a network, an ecological assemblage of objects.
The leaf from one plant fallen on another can be read (in reality or in my image) as both a sign of but also an example of an eco-network, nature, Gaia. Whether seen as I walk along the path, seen in an image or never seen the two objects connect within what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. Here the ecosystem is not the field within which objects connect but an object within which they connect. The system is just a special kind of object
Of course none of these objects and object-connections, networks or assemblages require my presence as photographer. But as photographer-object I am present. My object presence changes the character of the assemblage object as does the object presence of my camera, its hardware and software. That is true whether I press the button and take a picture or not, whether the assemblage before the lens ever becomes an image (online or off) or not. Each of those possibilities are potential new objects, the site of new connections. OOPh is merely the sensibility to those connections and objects.
These were object-oriented photographic practices not merely because at the moment of taking I refused the discourse of representation or a hierarchy of objects but because I refused correlationism. I as photographer was object not subject. I was implicated in that encounter. I connected with my objects within my photographic practice and ultimately within my photograph object. I could not stop being human but I could stop privileging that position and address it as human-object. It is this sense of the photographer as one object among many that led to this project.
Within any photography practice or photograph object there are objects, object connections and objects connecting: the things before the lens and the things behind. The human photographer is one object but so are other hardware and software objects… including JPEG.
__________
1. The key distinction here between OOO and classical ANT is that for Harman these ‘separate’ objects exceed their relations. They have an actuality beyond the network. Their power is not dependent on the network or their relations.
Why should theoretically informed or even philosophical writing be inaccessible? Why should it be unclear? As a journalist and editor, clarity was the most important thing. It was what got readers to buy the paper. When I began teaching I always used to tell my students that if their writing wasn’t clear, chances were it was because they didn’t understand what they were trying to communicate. So go back, think some more until you can explain it clearly and straightforwardly to an ordinary reader.
My supervisors asked me the other day who I was writing this PhD for. Their point was to have a reader in mind. I told them I was writing for someone like myself. Not stupid but not a genius. Interested but wanting ideas grounded in things I could relate to.
Why have I gravitated towards Harman? In no small part because I understand him. His writing invites me in, takes me through the ideas and neither treats me as a duffer nor as a philosopher with 30 years reading the classics – heh I’ve been busy being a journalist, photographer, consultant, oh and Dad and cyclist. If I think back to the writers whose ideas have got me excited, they had similar accessibility (yes I know that’s a bad word for some), clarity and openness: Foucault, Stuart Hall, Latour, Christopher Norris, Jane Bennett. I’ve got a longer list of people who I know are ‘brilliant’ and who I should ‘get’ or at least engage with but… when I reach the end of a paragraph and feel stupid, well…
I used to tell my students that when they had finished a piece of work they should give it to someone to read. If they ‘got it’, chances are the student was onto something. If they didn’t, chances are the idea were not yet clear in their own head let alone on their page.
At the end of this process I’m going to give my manuscript to some ‘real people’. If they get something out of it, then I’ll be happy to submit (that’s part of the reason for this Blog and its half-baked ideas). If they say “I’m sure it’s very clever but…” then I’ll go back to the drawing board.
In that spirit, I’ve revisited a section I wrote recently. I read it as a reader and parts of it didn’t make sense. I realised I didn’t have the idea as clear in my mind as it should be. So I rewrote it. If there are any real people out there, you know where the comments box is…
The sensual and real objects and qualities… once more with feeling
At the core of Harman’s conception of a unified, autonomous object is actually the idea of two objects: the sensual and the real objects (Harman 2009, p. 190). These should not be thought of as two distinct things but rather two dimensions to the complex, powerful actant-object. Harman looks to bring together Husserl’s framework of intentional objects, the objects present to consciousness with Heidegger’s account of real objects that withdraw from access.
Husserl, whom Harman calls “an object-oriented idealist” (2011, p. 20), held that objects do not exist outside our consciousness (Harman 2009, p. 194). The camera on my desk, the CCD inside, the software ‘inside’ exist as intentional objects within my consciousness. When I sleep or fail to pay attention to them, in some sense they cease to exist. Intentional objects “exist only as passive figments encountered by something real” (Harman 2009, p. 213). It is this split and relationships between the real and the sensual that Harman’s quadruple structure seeks to unpick.1
For Husserl:
“we never see all faces of the hammer at once, but always see it from a certain angle and distance, in a certain colour and intensity of light, and always in a specific mood. In this sense the hammer only appears in the form of specific profiles or adumbrations […] It does not matter that we can never see the whole series of hammer-adumbrations—this series is not the hammer. For Husserl, the hammer is the ideal unity that makes each profile a profile of the same hammer; the hammer is not a series of appearances of any sort. Hence, our inability to run through the infinite series of possible hammer-appearances deprives us of nothing as concerns the object. Nothing is ‘hidden’ behind the adumbrations for Husserl; the hammer itself lies within each adumbration, as an eidos encrusted with accidents” (Harman 2009, p. 180).
Husserl’s intentional object is hidden from us but in a different way to Heidegger’s withdrawn object. For Husserl, the intentional object is hidden only insofar as the object present to us inevitably comes encrusted with particular adumbrations, accidents, details or qualities. These qualities, in their sensual and real forms are the other two poles of the fourfold.
The Olympic velodrome-object I perceived (or photographed) yesterday, perceive today and will perceive tomorrow always comes encrusted with particular qualities or accidents. It is always perceived in a particular light, from a particular point-of-view or in a particular mood.
In terms of protocol. I as a photographer-object and the in-camera software-object encounter JPEG. That encounter happens as I press the shutter or the Save As button or software encodes light-as-data. What the software and I encounter is the particular qualities of JPEG, particular to the encounter. Those qualities shift and change as a particular ‘quality setting’ is chosen, a particular Huffman table is accessed or a particular DCT is used. Each instantiation of JPEG is particular, but I and software perceive JPEG each time.
Harman calls these adumbrations, the particular profiles, accidents, the object’s ‘sensual qualities’ (SQ). The sensual object (SO) that human and unhuman actants encounter is in a relation with these shifting accidents. These profiles are how we access the object. But Harman points out that amid the myriad of possible view of the Velodrome or compression configurations, we recognise the 2012 Velodrome or JPEG. This he says is because the object has real qualities (RQ) that the sensual object forms a relation with. He says that if one were to strip away all the (SQ) accidents in a particular encounter or perception, “what remains is not merely an ‘empty pole of unity […] a ‘bare particular,’ in the terms of analytic philosophy. Instead, we approach what Husserl calls the edios of an object” (2011, p. 27).2
There is something (the RQ) of the velodrome that means we perceive it as the Olympic velodrome, a sensual unity, no matter the light or the weather. These features mean we know we are dealing with the Velodrome not the Aquatic Centre or even the National Cycling Centre Velodrome in Manchester. It has wooden banking, with a particular geometry, a certain length etc.
In the same vein, there is something (the RQ) of JPEG that means an object (me as the photographer, the computer chip or software) knows it is working with JPEG. We know we are encountering JPEG because it use DCT not the Wavelet Transform coding that JPEG2000 uses. The particular Huffman tables may shift but the unity remains.
Harman’s sensual objects are what we encounter. They exist only for another object that encounters them (Harman 2011, p. 48). But there is a second dimension, what Harman calls real objects (RO). These differ from sensual objects in that they are autonomous from any object that encounters them and they withdraw from all access, all relations and each other. Here Harman turns to Heidegger’s tool analysis (which he explored in more detail in Tool Being (2002)). Heidegger argues that the spectacles I use to look at this screen, my heart beating, the computer operating system and protocols are ‘ready-to-hand’ but are not present to me unless they break, stop working or fail. Objects disappear in favour of some purpose they serve (2011, p. 38)… at least until they crash.
These objects are real. They have an existence beyond the phenomenal realm. For Heidegger:
“the being of any object is always deeper than how that object appears to us. In the eyes of Heidegger, Husserl’s phenomena are merely present-at-hand in consciousness, exhausted by their appearance to us. Yet Heidegger holds that the hammer cannot be reduced to a set of visible features—not even essential ones—because these features are not what do the work of hammering in the world. The hammer as a Husserlian intentional object is always already present as soon as we acknowledge it, and is merely encrusted with non-essential features. By contrast, the hammer for Heidegger is a real entity that invisibly does its work in the cosmos” (Harman 2009, pp. 180-1).
There is a real Velodrome. It exists in the world but we cannot access it. Its reality, nature, even existence is withdrawn. We encounter it’s sensual dimension but unless the building collapses or the turnstile fails to recognise our hard-won ticket, it remains out of reach. Similarly there is a real JPEG, a unity, an object (as I have argued above) but it too is never accessible to us. It never appears. We may glimpse JPEG when the upload fails or, as in my work it is made to sit alongside RAW-encoding that breaks its transparency. The sensual instantiations we encounter do not exhaust JPEG because they are not what ‘do the work’. As I shall argue, that ‘work of JPEG’ is deeply governmental, even disciplinary and the instantiation of JPEG (its encoding and decoding) we or even Facebook’s data-mining algorithm encounter are not the full story. JPEG’s “subterranean tool-being” is weirder and more power-full than that.
Real objects withdraw from our consciousness and also from all relations. Harman talks of cats:
“The real cats continue to do their work even as I sleep. These cats are not equivalent to my conception of them, and not even equivalent to their own self-conceptions; nor are they exhausted by their various modifications and perturbations of the objects they handle or damage during the night. The cats themselves exist at a level deeper than their effects on anything. real objects are non-relational” (Harman 2009, pp. 194-5)
As with cats, so with JPEG. It exists when I sleep or when I am using a paintbrush to image. It exists beyond its sensual presence in my or an algorithm’s imaging or processing. “Real objects exist ‘whether we like it or not’” (Harman 2009, pp. 195-6).3
The ‘real object’ (RO) is “autonomous from whatever encounters it” (2011, p. 48). There is JPEG without me, Olympus or Javascript (which can only encounter or touch the sensual JPEG). When I pick up a pencil or switch the camera off, the sensual JPEG vaporises but the real JPEG does not. It still has an ontological reality, an object status.
Although the object withdraws from access, Harman argues that the RO is in relation (or ‘tension’ as he calls it) with the object’s sensual and real qualities. The shifting sensual qualities we encounter as we walk around the Velodrome or the particular Huffman table or instantiation the software encounters in a particular imaging moment, cannot just be phenomenal. These qualities must have some connection, emerge from something real. The object may withdraw or be inaccessible but it “emits […] into the sphere of presence, despite being withdrawn in its own right” (2011, p. 49). There is a relation between the RO and the object’s SQ.
The RO is not an empty unit. It is in tension with real qualities (RQ), those essential features that make the object what it is. As a cyclist I encounter the Velodrome. I ride a particular geometry in a particular temperature-controlled space. Those essential qualities define this as the Olympic Velodrome not the National Cycling Centre Velodrome. Those qualities are connected with the withdrawn RO. If the RO did not have those specific but real qualities, it would be indistinguishable from any other withdrawn object.
Harman draws on Leibniz’s argument that: “monads must have qualities, otherwise they would not even be beings” (Leibniz 1989, p. 216). Or in other words, each monad “needs a multitude of qualities to be what it is, to differ from other monads rather than be interchangeable with them” (2011, p. 49).
In the case of protocol, JPEG is not an empty unit. It has real qualities Colour Transforms, Huffman Coding, DCT, the things that make JPEG compression what it is. The withdrawn RO must have a relation to those qualities or JPEG would be no different than any other protocol… and it is.
This is Harman’s fourfold: Real Object (RO), Sensual Object (SO), Real Qualities (RQ) and Sensual Qualities (SQ). These are four poles to the unified object, four dimensions that allow us to explore objects without recourse to fields of relationality, potentiality or process. To map JPEG as a quadruple object is to see:
it as a real object present and active in the world, beyond relations, inaccessible
it as a sensual object present to human or unhuman consciousness or access, whenever energy is expanded on it but always through
sensual qualities – particular instantiations, particular Huffman tables or arrangements of coding and transformation algorithms
having real qualities – inaccessible characteristics like Huffman Coding that make it specifically JPEG not JPEG2000, Gif or WeP.
In addition those four poles are ‘connected’ through four tensions.
Harman, G., 2002, Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphyics of objects, Open Court, Chicago.
Harman, G., 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Anamnesis, Melbourne.
Harman, G., 2011, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, Ropley.
Leibniz, G.W., 1989, Philosophical Essays, Translated by R. Ariew & D. Garber. Hackett Pub. Co., Indianapolis.
1 Harman prefers to use the more ‘charming’ term ‘sensual’ for this dimension of objects. He says: “Husserl uses ‘intentional’ to refer only to the unified objects of consciousness, while excluding the shifting surface qualities of things from the intentional domain. So-called ‘sense data’ are not intentional for Husserl, precisely because they are not object-oriented. For this reason, a new unified term is needed that covers both the enduring objects of consciousness and the overly specific facades through which they are always manifest” (Harman 2009, p. 136).
2 It is important to note that for Harman these real or eidetic qualities are not universal. These are not the ‘eternal objects’ of Whitehead. Rather they are always particular to an individual object. When I press the button and encounter the sensual JPEG (that dimension to JPEG that I work with), I encounter a particular running of JPEG, in a particular moment, within a particular apparatus (JPEG’s SQ). I also encounter JPEG’s RQ, its particular digital imaging pipeline that make JPEG particular.
3 Harman is at pains to distance his reading of Heidegger from what he sees as a view that Heidegger’s withdrawn realm is a “deeper unified system of reference” (2011, p. 35) which he would see as a case of ‘undermining’. Objects withdraw not into some field or monastic lump of being but into themselves, into “private interiors, barely able to relate at all” (2011, p. 36). The reason we cannot reach JPEG, the reason it slips through our fingers and all we are left with are its traces in JFIF or EXIF files or our sensual encounters with its instantiations, is because, as with all objects, JPEG “does its work in the cosmos”. It has a reality beyond any relations or particular instantiations. This reality is not located in the specifications of the Joint Photographic Experts Group. It has a metaphysical reality: its status as object.
My photography is object-oriented. This OOPh, as I call it, is informed by the work of Harman but also by that of Jane Bennett who, in Vibrant Matter (2010a) identifies an agentic capacity in material objects1
When she starts from “one large men’s black plastic work glove; one dense mat of oak pollen; one unblemished dead rat; one white plastic bottle cap; one smooth stick of wood” in a gutter (2010a, p. 4)2 and moves on to the “quirky electron flow and a spontaneous fire to members of Congress who have a neoliberal faith in market self-regulation” at play in an electricity blackout (2010a, p. 28),3 Bennett’s litany of objects echoes Harman: “Instead of an objective nature filled with genuine realities and a subjective cultural sphere filled with fabricated fictions, there is a single plane of actors that encompasses neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns, and square circles” (Harman 2009, pp. 188-189). For both, objects are the focus.4
It is this litany of objects that was the first starting point for OOPh.
The key move for Bennett is away from seeing objects in terms of representation. Bennett echoes Daniel Miller’s argument that semiotics can be “as much a limitation as an asset” (Miller 2010, p. 12) when looking at “the minutiae of the intimate” (Miller 2010, p. 41), the ‘stuff’ or things people have, use and (in object-oriented terms) connect with (Miller 2008).5
The objects in her gutter are not some instantiation of an industrial process or structure. Of course the glove was made in particular social and economic system under particular modes of production. Its story can be read as one of globalisation and capitalism. It can be read as the trace or representation of those historical processes. But Bennett argues that the discourse of representation of tracing the power and meaning of things as signs, falls short of what is needed. “I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, object appeared as things, that is as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the context in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (Bennett 2010a, p. 5). Just as for Harman objects are never exhausted by their relations, qualities or accidents, so Bennett’s objet trouvé are more than their relations to systems of meaning or signs of something outside themselves.
It is this sense of objects as objects not signs that was the second starting point for OOPh.
For Bennett, objects are material. But that materiality is lively and active.6 Bennett’s objects are real and located. They are presences in the world but they “call to us” and have a form of agency, ‘agentic capacity’, a ‘thing-power’ that animates the seemingly inert.7 Bennett draws on a history of vitalism (Bennett 2010b) in particular the work of Hans Driesch, a early twentieth century vitalist.8 Driesch developed the concept of ‘entelechy’ as a similar animator to explain what he saw as the question of the enfolded character of nature.9 “Why then occurs all that folding, an bending…, and all the other processes we have described? There must be something that drives them out, so to say” (Driesch 1908, p. 50). Bennett says: “Entelechy is born in the negative spaces of the machine model of nature, in the ‘gaps’ in the ‘chain of strictly physico-chemical or mechanical events’” (2010a, p. 70). She is keen to stress that Driesch does not see this animating force in terms of a soul or even simply a ‘vital energy’. Rather it is located within materiality and its possibilities. Where Bennett moves beyond Driesch is in refusing to see matter as “so passive and dull that it could not possibly have done the tricky work of organizing and maintaining morphing wholes. [For Driesch] sometimes this matter is infused with entelechy and becomes life, and sometimes it is not and coagulates into inorganic machine” (2010a, p. 75). For Bennett, matter is always ‘vital’10. Objects’ vitality lies outside the human-object correlate.
It is this sense of objects as outside correlationism that was the third starting point for OOPh.
Having worked as a photo-journalist, I was professionally steeped in semiotics and correlationism. The portraits I took for magazines were representations not just of the subject but also the Subject. I carefully composed and created the images to represent not only the particular Chief Financial Officer but also the profession, perhaps even capitalism itself. I moved furniture, adjusted clothing and lighting so the object signified. Similarly the media industries I worked within were correlationist. Their business and communications models were premised on a separation between human and world. Humans manufactured content-objects that other humans read. Photographers took photos of objects, created photo-objects that attracted readers. There was nothing flat about the media. Not only in the sense of work hierarchies but also in ontological terms. Portrait subjects, images, words, page layouts and magazines were objects, some more important and powerful than others. All were things to be accessed, used and read.
I designed OOPh to work outside these two frameworks. I looked to develop an OOPh sensibility akin to Bennett’s response to the objects in the gutter. I photographed not to represent but to encounter and experience that object-connection. I photographed not as the privileged subject-photographer or in order to create the privileged photo-object (the decisive moment) but within a flat non-correlationist photographic ontology.
I began (and continue) to photograph objects (what I call ‘Things of the day”):
These objects, encountered as I worked on this project, are ‘merely’ objects. They have histories, bear the traces of political economic processes and have carbon footprints. They quite literally connect with me in terms of chemical and psycho-social reactions my body and psyche has with them. They connect with me physiologically and psychologically and I cannot escape what they represent for me or could represent for others. But that is not what my OOPh encounter with that object is ‘about’. The imaging is just another form of object connection or encounter – the fourfold and tension-filled relations Harman maps in the Quadruple Object.
The image could be seen as a report on my (and other photography objects’) encounter with the object. But the image is not the important thing. In fact it is not necessary. OOPh is a sensibility to encounters. If that becomes an image through the connection of other objects, so be it, but the photography is in the photographic encounter. As I will discuss, if that encounter is encoded in an inaccessible form (RAW), it is no less an OOPh encounter.
If my OOPh Things of The Day is not about meaning or representation, it is even less about correlation. My (object) position within the OOPh imaging pipeline is no more nor less important or basic than any other object: the lego brick before the lens, the CCD, photons of light or protocols. While of course I am active in choosing what to photograph, where, when and how, all the other actants have an agentic capacity as they connect and reconnect. They are not passive tools of a photographic overlord but vital players in an imaging encounter.
I explicitly set out to establish an object-oriented photography.11 The decisions I made were informed by that broader photo-philosophical project. As such, I looked to specifically open up the number and role of objects in the imaging. I chose to use my phone and the Hipstamatic iPhone App as my imaging apparatus. The digital imaging pipeline in operation included the objects outlined in chapter XX but the Hipstamatic software object(s)12 added a new dimension. Unlike other Apps that can apply filters (software post-processing) to the encoded light-as-data before or after rendering it as a JFIF or EXIF file, Hipstamatic allowed the particular post-processing to be selected at random. When I shook the phone before taking the image, a software algorithm object decided on the parameters of the post processing. An unhuman object suddenly became more important.13
As I began to explore the JPEG object, I started from my OOPh practice.
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1 ‘New materialism’ is less a movement and more a shared concern among different authors and disciplines for expanding the conception of the material to explore issues of agency (see the papers collected in (2010) and (Miller 2005a). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost even make a point of talking of new materialisms in the plural (Coole, & Frost 2010). It is not my intention to explore the different ontological positions, let alone the specific case studies, that have emerged under the label ‘new materialist’ but rather to explore the connections between a particular politics-based articulation of that concern. It is important to note that as with speculative realism, there is a concern among its proponents that ‘new materialism’ does not simply substitute one orthodoxy or hierarchy with another. As Daniel Miller says: “Having dethroned the emperor’s culture, society, and representation, there is no virtue in enthroning objects and materialism in their place. The goal of this revolution is to promote equality, a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction and respect for their mutual origin and mutual dependency” (Miller 2005b, p. 38).
This concern for moving beyond representation can also be seen in the work of Nigel Thrift (Thrift 2008), Brain Massumi (Massumi 2002), Rosi Braidotti (Braidotti 2002).
2 Bennett is clear that thing do not have to be impressive or somehow deserve our attention. Anything is an object and can be lively. I would agrre with Matthew Tiessen (interestingly a practice-research artist-ontologist) who says: “ if nature and things have to be exceedingly impressive to deserve our consideration we’re left repeating the expectations that gave rise to our lack of recognition for thing-power in the first place. In response to Bennett’s concerns about fear and respect my modest proposal is that things be encountered from a position of responsive humility – a position that recognizes that things are all we’ve got, whether they command respect or not (Tiessen, 2010).
3 Daniel Miller is also fond of the Latour Litany: “We start with the need for a theory of stuff as material culture… that can account for every kind of stuff: bodies, streaming videos, a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a landscape, a decay, a philosophy” (Miller 2010, p. 54).
4 Harman, while embracing the commonalities between his position and Bennett’s is less welcoming of the term ‘materialism’. “Bennett uses materialism in a way that could easily apply both to object-oriented philosophy and to the closely related writings of Latour. She takes materialism to be a suitable name for any philosophy that dissolves the usual strict opposition between free human subjects and inert material slabs. Naturally, I am all in favor of this dissolution; I simply doubt that `materialism’ is the best name for it” (Harman 2010, p. 774). Harman is aware of the historical baggage associated with the term. “What links Bennett’s position most closely with Latour’s and my own is that she opposes reduction as a general philosophical method: music and governments cannot be reduced to carbon, oxygen, metal, or some deeper alternative structure. Instead, all human and nonhuman things of every scale are placed on the same footing. By contrast with this position, materialism throughout the ages has generally been reductive, and its victim of choice has been medium-sized everyday objects. One form of materialism tears these objects down to reveal their deeper physical foundations, as if mocking them from below. Another rejects the reality of these objects for precisely the opposite reason, denying them any depth beneath the way they are given to us, as if jeering from above. Given the apparent opposition of these two strategies, it is remarkable that both are often denoted with the term `materialism’” (Harman 2010, p. 774). Bennett is clearly away of these issues and when questioned on her relation to other forms of materialism in her interview with Gulshan Kahn says: “Mechanistic materialism does not attract me; it implicitly returns us to the status of consummate agents who run the machine” (Khan 2009).
5 A similar nuanced account of things can be seen in Sherry Turkle’s account of ‘evocative objects’ (Turkle 2007). A concern for things could also be traced back through Arjun Apaduari’s exploration of how things “move in and out of the commodity state” (1986, p. 13) and Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the role of everyday things in socialization (Bourdieu 2008). Similarly Alfred Gell sought to move beyond semiotics in account of how art works “a ppear as, or ‘do duty as’, persons” (Gell 1998, p. 9).
6 Steven Shaviro draws attention to a similar idea of liveliness in his discussion of Gwyneth Jones’ novel The Universe of Things (Jones 2010). He says: “if we are to accept the ontological dignity of things, and do not reduce them to being just the illusory effects of quantum fields, then I think that we need to accept some sort of non-dualistic neo-vitalism, or what Jane Bennett calls vital materialism: the idea that ‘every thing is entelechial, life-ly, vitalistic’ (Bennett 2010a, p. 89)” (Shaviro 2010).
7 Bennett is not ashamed of the often very anthropomorphic language she uses. “We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature – to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” (Bennett 2010a, p. xvi). Harman echoes this when he says: “a bit of anthropomorphism may be needed to overcome anthropocentrism” (Harman 2011).
8 Bennett discusses Driesch and later Henri Bergson in terms of Kant’s insistence on the “unbridgeable chasm between life and ‘crude matter’” in the Critique of Judegmentand his invoking of a ‘formative drive’ or Bildungstrieb (Bennett 2010a, p. 65). Bennett argues that Griesch and Bergson extend this idea by allowing the agentic force to be present in matter not just in organisms.
9 Driesch’s work began with scientific experimentation. Perhaps he can be seen as engaging in practice-research.
10 Bennett also draws on Hernri Bergson’s ‘élan vital’, a force, an “inner directing principle” (Bergson 1998, p. 76) that underlies his idea of how life and matter are not fixed categories but tendencies of a cosmic flow. There is perhaps an interesting parallel with the idea of active and reactive forces discussed by Deleuze in his book on Nietzsche (Deleuze 1986, pp. 39-71).
11 I make no claim for the originality of OOPh. Just as Ian Bogost has argued that Gary Winogrand can be read as object-oriented:
“Garry Winogrand made photographs of the things themselves. Lots of them […] His works are not commentaries, they are precisely the opposite. Garry Winogrand makes photographs not to capture what he sees, but to see what he will have captured. That’s what it means to take photographs to see what the world looks like in photographs […] It’s too hard for most viewers to take Winogrand’s project seriously, because they’re too busy looking for social commentary in his photographs to see them for what they are: pictures that help their viewers see things in pictures. The object-oriented ontology project is just as simple, yet still just as hard: to see things in pictures and everywhere else too. To see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it” ([NO STYLE for: Bogost 2011]).
I would argue that Robert Frank seminal odyssey (2008) is a picture of American objects (hats, cigars, flags, jukeboxes and of course cars as Iain Sinclair discusses in The Genius of Photography (Kirby 1996)). The Americans is a nested work. The objects in the coffee-bar or on the street are connected within other objects. The sousaphone-object, the flag-object and the ‘Adlai’-badge-object connect as object within the parade-object. There is no decisive object, no punctum driving the story or the meaning. These object connect again and again with Frank within his camera-object, with me-as-object within my book object. These connection are not located in some external realm of signification or practice but within objects that are themselves actants reconnecting within other objects.
12 As with all software, to talk of the Hipstamatic App as an object is to talk of a nested object or what Timothy Morton would call a ‘hyperobject’. The App includes many software and protocol objects connecting within the App object. I refer to the Hipstamatic object as shorthand.
13 In some ways this randomness echoed what happened with chemical photography when one never quite knew what the lab’s chemical objects or printer objects would do to/with your latent image. Sometimes getting the prints/slides back was a similar surprise. Hipstamatic plays with this memory in its device of forcing the user wait as the ‘print’ ‘develops’.
The broken biro on the tarmac carries a history. It was made in a factory, in a country, in a system. It has a carbon footprint, a chemical presence and half-life. But it also has a presence and actuality as I encounter it. At the subatomic level, it is in motion. Its relation to the tarmac (within its own history) is dynamic as molecules react and inter-react. The pen and the pen/tarmac assemblage (itself an object) has an agentic capacity. It does things in the world semiotically perhaps but also materially. It changes the world, the chemical balance of the environment, perhaps the psychological or aesthetic balance of the pedestrian. As the photographer object in that encounter I am inevitably in object-connections with the biro, the tarmac, the light and a myriad of other objects.
The disused mooring ring on the canal path near the 2012 fence can ‘stand’ for old east-end industry replaced by olympic brands, security and ‘legacy’. But the ring is not just a sign of something more. Nor is it just the trace of historical and political economic processes or human impact on ‘the environment’. There is no background or context here. The ring does things in the world at an ideological scale but also at a material scale. It rusts or leaks chemicals into the soil (alongside the toxins released by 2012 excavations). But when the ring-object is addressed in a flat ontology with the grass, the long-forgotten ironworks, the canalboat, its moorings licence, British Waterways and its internal memos proposing changes to the rules for the 
The leaf from one plant fallen on another can be read (in reality or in my image) as both a sign of but also an example of an eco-network, nature, Gaia. Whether seen as I walk along the path, seen in an image or never seen the two objects connect within what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. Here the ecosystem is not the field within which objects connect but an object within which they connect. The system is just a special kind of object