Sullivan and Smith and Dean can be seen as working within the tradition of the Hegelian dialectic. Smith and Dean’s iterative cycle obviously owes much to a view of thesis, antithesis and synthesis[ref]It must be noted of course that Hegel did not use these terms. They were coined by his commentator  Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus{%Chalybäus 1854}[/ref]. Research can be presented, held up against practice and a new theoretically-located practice synthesis developed that can then become the basis for the next round of dialectic progress. Sullivan’s braid too is rooted in the idea of such movement. Here the enfolding and unfolding of practice and research-theory push a project towards new knowledges and works.

Both accounts are rooted in a notion of progressive history. Smith and Dean’s iterative steps and Sullivan’s moments of unfolding can be likened to Hegel’s account of water:  “With the increase or diminution of the temperature of the liquid water, there comes a point where this state of cohesion suffers a qualitative change, and the water is converted into steam or ice. A quantitative change takes place, apparently without any further significance: but there is something lurking behind, and a seemingly innocent change of quantity acts as a kind of snare, to catch hold of the quality”{Hegel 1892 @202}. Here gradual, iterative, quantitative changes can suddenly undergo a qualitative shift.

Within practice-research there is the same sense of progress as iterative change (the sort that Harman criticises Whitehead for relying on). Moments of practice and moments of research ratchet each other up, feeding new ideas and findings back into the dialectic as it realises itself. Even if we adopt a more object-oriented vocabulary and talk of practice objects and theory objects connecting this is still presented as an iterative/dialectical relation moving forward towards greater knowledge or better practice. From an object-oriented point of view, the problem here is the framing of those objects in terms of something else, something outside,  “something lurking behind”. For Hegel (as opposed to Marx of course) the goal of philosophy is to interpret the world, to grasp its ultimate rational principles, to discover Reason or Geist.  It is this that “lurks behind”. For Hegel of course that Geist is framed in religious terms: “the truth that a Providence, that is to say a divine Providence , presides over events of the world corresponds to our principle; for divine Providence is wisdom endowed with infinite power which realizes its own aim, that is, the absolute, rational final purpose of the world”{Hegel 1953 @15}. For Hegel, Geist realises itself as history progresses.

For Sullivan and Smith and Dean too there is something lurking behind. Firstly there is the field of relations between theory and practice, the context or the methodology that gives meaning to those objects. Just as for Hegel the dialectic is built on relations between temperature and water for instance, so for practice-research the qualitative shift of progress happens because of the relation between practice and theory. It is the space (or in Smith and Dean’s case, the oscillation) between that generates the movement.

There is a second thing lurking behind, outside the object. For Hegel it was God, for practice research it is the knowledge/work that realises itself through this dialectic. Unsurprisingly in the light of practice-research’s background in the Arts, there is a work at the end of the process/progress. It may not be ‘finished’ but it is certainly realised. The dialectical relationship in the studio has created something, or more correctly the something has been realised and embodied through that process as surely as Geist is realised and embodied through Hegel’s dialectic.

My object-oriented approach rejects the narrative of progress because it rejects the relational outside. From an object-oriented perspective, there is no wider context or meta framework providing a background and there is no Geist waiting to be realised or actualised. Practice and theory objects are already actual. They are the site of connection and power. To shift attention and arguably responsibility to the system, the context or the relations, is to fail to account for the nature and operations of the practice objects, the theory objects and the practice-research object in which ‘molten core’ they connect. This practice-research object (in my case my cameras and photographic practice) is not the realisation of a process or the embodiment of a progress. Rather it is at the same level as the other objects (the protocols, photographers, the images, viewers, App stores and wireless cards). These objects connect but do not relate. The difference is that the connections happen within the objects and crucially they are not steps on the road to something else – a realisation, actualisation or embodiment.

When Harman says that “object-oriented philosophy is a proud defense of the ‘something more’”{Harman 2009 @155}, he is not arguing for an outside, a context against which objects can be opposed or through which they can be understood. He stands against anything or anyone who strays too far from the concrete[ref]There is an ongoing debate within the broad field of speculative realism about contribution Hegel can make to the anti-corelationsit project, See for instance {Žižek 2011}, {Meillassoux 2009} and Harman’s critique {Harman 2009}. My aim here is not to discuss readings of Hegel and Heidegger or even the relationship between Hegel and object-oriented philosophy, but rather critique the way in which a particular reading of the dialectic within practice-research has undermined the potential of the methodology.[/ref]. “We cannot imagine Kant or Hegel invoking such a roll call of concrete entities, which shift the weight of philosophy toward specific actors themselves and away from all structures that might wish to subsume them,” he says{%Harman 2009 @102}. The polarities that Harman use to account for objects (see Theory chapter) are aspects of objects not outside them. The something more is object-oriented not processual.

Sullivan and Smith and Dean’s retreat from the specificity and actuality of objects to a wider progress/process, becoming and realisation leads to a focus on coherence and holism which undermines the power of practice-research.

My argument is not against the dialectic[ref]After all Benjamin’s Arcades Project was built around the dialectical image as a tool for understanding and writing history. See {BuckMorss 1989}.[/ref], but merely in the way in which it has been articulated in terms of progress, relations and realisation.

The objects I connect in my cameras and imaging are actual objects. They do not depend on something else. They are not waiting to be actualised or to realise something outside. They are not looking to progress. Their connection is certainly productive in terms of governmental practices and discourses as well as in terms of my photography and analysis, all these new objects are produced in object-connections. But they too are actual. They are not a telos. By approaching practice-research from a flat ontological perspective, we are able to build cameras, take photographs and understand protocol and scopic governmentality in its actual location as well as open the objects (not some abstract relations) to intervention.

• Buck-Morss, S., 1989, The Dialectics Of Seeing: Walter Benjamin And The Arcades Project, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• Chalybäus, H.M., 1854, Historical Development Of Speculative Philosophy From Kant To Hegel, T. & T. Clark,.
• Harman, G., 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Anamnesis, Melbourne.
• Hegel, G.W.F., 1892, The Logic Of Hegel, 2nd ed. Translated by W. Wallace. Oxford University Press,.
• Hegel, G.W.F., 1953, Reason in HIstory: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Translated by R.S. Hartman. The Liberal Arts Press, New York.
• Meillassoux, Q., 2009, After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency, Continuum, London.
• Žižek, S. 2011, Is It Still Possible To Be A Hegelian Today, in L Bryant, N Srnicek & G Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism And Realism, re.press, Melbourne, pp. 202-23.

Following Jussi Parikka’s posting, thoughts towards a Media Object-oriented OnTology[ref]Perhaps we can play with the language a little further and move from a media object-oriented ontology to a medial object-oriented ontology. An ontology of the middle objects. In Harman’s model, objects connect in the molten core of other objects, in the middle, the medial[/ref].

An object-oriented ontology offers a number of ways of thinking through the complex enfolded nature of media, notably digital media. By approaching the components that make up the assemblages and topologies as objects (I’ll address the importance of how that notion of object is conceived,  in a moment) we can not only avoid foundationalism and determinism and main rooted to a realism and actualism. Furthermore, a media object-oriented ontology opens up new critical possibilities.

Firstly there is the issue of media as objects. Then there is the issue of the object as relational or non-relational.

Latour, Whitehead and the loose collection of speculative realists including Graham Harman would all agree as to the importance of ‘objects’ as a basis for critique. For all of them, objects or actants a provide a way of remaining realist and rooted in actuality – the actual existence of things and the world. This is a critique that starts and finishes in the real world with actual things (the stuff that Daniel Miller talks of), the way they (actants or occasions) work, connect (or relate or form alliances – depending on whose vocabulary you use). For both Latour and Whitehead, these objects must be addressed in terms of those relations, the processes and alliances that constitute their nature and power. In terms of jpeg, the protocol/standard is actual, ‘real’ and powerful because it is enfolded in alliances with other actants (hardware memory cards, photo management software, human photographers , non-human Web 2.0 businesses) or because it is a process, a moment of becoming, a technical instantiation of the bifurcation of nature (a rendering of light as data as image/sign). Here ‘objects’ as a conceptual tool allow one to unfold and unpick the network, those power-full relations of translation or becoming. By approaching jpeg as object within a flat ontological framework allows one to deal with its specific relations in camera and in the scopic regime without having to trace it back to a founding structure or essence. Here the focus can remain at the level of Facebook’s face recognition strategy, Google’s server farms and automated surveillance systems’ databases. The governmental relations running through those networks can be approached as object relations.

Such an approach plays well with a media-archaeological focus on how devices and apparatuses are enfolded with networks of truth and power and inscription and scopic systems. Here jpeg can be approached as specific technological object with a historical and material presence within discourses and practices of photography and wider visualisation. Here the jpeg object, like the camera obscura object, the medical imaging reosnator object, the iPhone object, the traffic camera object or the face-recognition algorithm object are material technologies of vision and governmentality. They are actual, real and connected.

It is here where Harman’s object-oriented philosophy diverges. As I have argued Harman’s OOP differs from Latour and Whitehead (as well as those taking their  work into media such as Steven Shaviro) in that it presents a non-relational ontology. Here objects withdraw from all relations. For Harman, one does not need to push the working of objects out to a wider field of relations. Rather by understanding the connection between jpeg, the iPhone, the Facebook database and governmentality in terms of objects not object-relations, one can better account for change and potentiality.

For a fully object-oriented approach, objects do not relate in some broader space of becoming or some contextual network. Jpeg and Facebook’s strategy or the wireless memory card are not joined or in some sort of assemblage-relation or ecology at some deeper or more structural level. Global info-cpaitalism is not the backdrop or even the structural space within which these objects connect. To hold to that is to move away from a commitment to actualism, to addressing objects in their actual location – a concept dear to media archaeology or to demanding a second level of objects (eternal objects) or realm of potentiality beneath objects (the “plasma”). Rather the jpeg and the Facebook object exceed (or withdraw from) their relations. They connect in real and powerful ways in terms of Facebook’s archiving of images, social graph traces and ‘data-memories’. Those connections are deeply (sic) governmental. They constitute subject positions and gender identities. They are saturated with biopower but they can approached at the level of objects and so rendered actual and open to reconfiguration and the Exploit. The objects connect in the ‘molten core’ of a new (actual) object, a new player on the scene. This “image-search-object” as a strategic object in the Faecbook/Google battle or the “image-memory-object” as a data-presence in (sic) a photo frame or corporate database seen only by machinic eyes, are actual objects open to new connections, never exhausted

If we take the key concepts and founding principles of object-oriented ontology, we can see how they add real value to our understanding of media.

The actuality of (media) objects. A refusal to move far from a view of media technologies, hardware or software as actual, as existent and real, allows media archaeology to trace material practices and discourses. The “scopic regime”, the “media ecology”, the “discourse network 1900” are fully located and grounded.

Anti-correlationism. A willingness to challenge the mutual interplay of human and world, as the basis for philosophy. “The correlationist holds that we cannot think of humans without world, nor world without humans, but only of a primal correlation or rapport between the two. For the correlationist, it is impossible to speak of a world that pre-existed humans in itself, but only of a world pre-existing humans for humans. The Big Bang is not an ancestral reality preceding human beings, but only happened in itself for us”{Harman 2009 @122}. By refusing to stray from the object or tie it to a human perception we are forced to “consult the world”, to once again remain grounded. By challenging the view that jpeg must be addressed in terms of the humans that established it, the human that uses it or sees/fails to see it, one can explore the actual, real, located and deeply powerful and significant ways in which it works and connects. It does not matter whether I can pin it down or even where it ‘came from’ what matters is what it does.

So far so speculative realist. Although Harman notes that there is much disagreement about why correlationsim is wrong. As noted above, Harman’s adds a couple of extra principles that, I would argue make media object-oriented ontology even more vibrant.

The (media) object’s withdrawal from all relations. By focusing on objects rather than a wider/deeper/broader notion of network or becoming allows our account of the “regime”, “ecology” or “assemblage” to account for specific material objects in specific material instantiations. By saying that jpeg has a status as an object beyond its instantiation “in camera” software or in a moment of becoming, paradoxically allows us to focus on its work and connections within other objects. If jpeg is more than part of a Photoshop assemblage or an automated database, if it exceeds Google’s search business, then we can approach its connections with the other objects in those spaces in their specificity rather than as in some way structured or determined by jpeg… and vice versus.

The connection in the heart of a new object. Finally to work with connections rather than relations, to remain at the ‘level’ or scale of objects and posit them as the site of connection allows for a new account of change both in terms of analysis and political practice. If jpeg’s disciplinary effects are not part of some broader or deeper network or context but are rather the workings of other objects, “contiguous entities in ‘sterile display’, but punctuated once in awhile by dramatic events”{Harman 2011 @301} that , then change can be seen in terms of sudden jumps and jolts, “not through a meaningless accretion of any-instants-whatever that float away in the canal of fluxion”{Harman 2011 @301}. This allows us to talk of the establishment of jpeg as ‘the standard’ not as the outcome of a network process or a chain of instants but effect of different real connections as “image-search-objects” became important or marketable or  “image-memory-objects” became sellable or worthy of surveillance. These objects (where governmentality is instantiated) can be explored in their concrete emergence.

• Harman, G., 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Anamnesis, Melbourne.
• Harman, G. 2011, Response to Shaviro, in L Bryant, N Srnicek & G Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism And Realism, re.press, Melbourne, pp. 291-303.

Jpeg is an object within digital imaging apparatuses, both the ones I ‘build’ and the ones for sale in the Apple Store and Jessops. It is not the only object in those apparatuses and those devices, technologies or assemblages are constructed in different ways with different object-components. What is clear though is that the jpeg standard is part of the mix or the mesh.

The question then becomes, what does jpeg do? How does it change the nature of photography within our current scopic regime? This of course leads on to questions about how it does that (an issue I will approach via OOO) but before we get t that we need to what it actually does.

I would assert that jpeg changes the nature of photography in three ways:

It changes how a photographer understands the ‘decisive moment’
It changes how a photographer understands the ‘photo work’
It changes how a photographer understands herself as photographer

These three shifts are interwoven with the past and present of photographic discourse and the governmental implications of the scopic regime within which photography has always been enfolded.

A shift to the indecisive moment, the archive and the swarm of imagers (human and non human) is enfolded with governmental issues of the stream of data and information as the site for biopower. Rather than one single data point for a subject to be pinned to, now subject positions are constantly being updated and new data-mined connections established.

Such is an assertion. The issue then become how do I prove this.

I could approach this from a purely (sic) theoretical position. My object-oriented approach would allow me to argue back from an account of how objects connect to the way in which the jpeg object inevitably rims connects with governmental objects (databases, surveillance algorithms, art critics and markets) within the heart of new objects (the surveillance stream object, the Facebook wall object etc.) The question would of course be raised about such a working backwards, a post rationalisation, allowing theory to structure evidence rather than vice versus.

A second approach would be via traditional social science methodologies. I could engage in qualitative or quantitive research with photographers to establish these shifts. I could use surveys, interviews or discourse analysis to trace the changing way photographers (amateur, professional or somewhere in the middle) understand what it is they are doing now. Even given the sort of more modest approach that John Law calls for, such a method would be open to the standard criticisms of such work: questions of my position as researcher, the extent to which my research and research practice structures the network which I am exploring etc.

I could have taken this on by using an actor-network theory model. Following Latour’s call to simply describe, I could have sought to map the shifts and new understandings through an ethnographic account of al the actants, not just interviewing the photographers but also interrogating the documents and technologies. Such an approach would certainly have allowed me to amass evidence of the relations and processes in play, the way the jpeg protocol achieved a form of hegemony, the way photographers are enfolded with their technologies – hardware and software, as well as adding a diachronic account of networks and objects in process. What it would not have allowed me to do was explore the edges of the issue. While it would enable me to amass evidence of what jpeg apparatuses do, it would not have allowed me to explore the limits of that jpeg apparatus by looking at what non-jpeg apparatuses do.

It is here where a practice-research methodology can come in. By using myself, or more correctly my practice as the subject, I can see how jpeg changes my (a photographer’s) understanding of the decisive moment, the photo work and the photographer. By building and using jpeg and non-jpeg apparatuses as a photographer I can amass evidence of those shifts and the extent to which they are connected to jpeg or connected to something else.

My first apparatus – the within protocol apparatus (consisting of code objects within a mashup and computer) – allowed me to trace my sense of what photography was and how I as photographer conceptualised that when jpeg was made the central focus and object.

My second apparatus – the outside protocol apparatus (consisting of analog objects such as a Leica, a Belplasca and Kodachrome) – allowed me to map my understanding of photography and the photographer within the current scopic regime but outside of jpeg.

The third apparatus – the beyond protocol apparatus (consisting of digital objects such as a camera, wireless card and software and hardware network components) – enabled me to not only explore the experience of jpeg photography (through simultaneously using and refusing its workings), but also explore the limits of photography itself by intervening and unsettling the network mix of which jpeg is a part.

It is only by refusing to use, using and abusing jpeg as a photographer, that I can approach the experience of jpeg-enfolded imaging. It is only by taking myself and my practice as photographer as the object of analysis that the limits and connections of the jpeg object can become apparent. As Adrian Mackenzie argues in his analysis of WiFi and wireless technologies, such technosocial assemblages, ecologies or topologies must be addressed as experience. Practice-research offers a powerful way of rising to that challenge.

What is more such a methodology offers the ‘evidence’ of how objects exist and work – as entities that exceed their relations yet connect; that are always actual; and that are powerful actants – that allows us to build an object-oriented account of protocol, software, media and imaging.

NB: edited 28.03.11 to reorder and rename apparatuses.