OOX: Metaphysical vs. Materialist Ontologies of Objects

This is a paper I wrote for a seminar on archaeology (specifically on the field's philosophical premises with respect to the relationship between history, the past, and artifacts) in 2020. Not perfect, and I adored my professor for that seminar, but fuck OOO!

Object-oriented programming is a useful paradigm to organize data and model an interactive system. In A Theory of Objects, Abadi and Cardelli enumerate three components of a mechanical model to simulate a system: analysis, design, and implementation (Abadi 7). All three aspects involve the use of objects, in different senses. The authors illustrate this through a mechanical model of the solar system. Analysis involves the modeling of the sun and its orbiting planets, floating in space. Although it is understood that the planets orbit around the sun, the behavior to rationalize this is not innate to the planet-models themselves. Design involves the modeling of planetary orbits using mechanical tracks and gears. There is no such physical track on which the planets orbit around the sun, but the orbit model serves to simulate that physical behavior. Implementation represents the use of batteries and springs to propel the planet-models along their orbit-models around the sun-model. The inner workings of the power sources is abstracted from the system at large (ibid). When any observer views the model of the solar system, they only see the planets moving on their physical tracks. Only the power sources, the designer, and God know about the inner mechanics of the model abstracted away from the observer.

Abadi and Cardelli summarize the object-oriented paradigm: “The proper analogy is between software objects and objects in a ‘real model’ that one may imagine building, rather than objects in the ‘real world’” (ibid). As such, the paradigm asserts itself as a representation of a representation. Yet, it asserts homology between the software model and the mechanical model, while both models are characterized as failures to fully represent their subject. The mechanical model with its tracks and gears and batteries cannot actualize the reality of planets orbiting along their invisible paths, propelled by the gravity of the sun. Neither can the software model: through the instantiation of both planet objects and orbit objects, it equivalizes the two as digital objects whose physical actuality are only known to the informed human eye. All in all, both models are avatars of the solar system in different media. As representations, of course they cannot fully encompass every aspect of their subject, but this is cliché. The gap between model and reality needs to be reconsidered and turned over.

Models and Realities

The solar system is a scientific model meant to describe the planets and their orbit around the sun. The planet is an element of this system, a heavy ellipsoid mass suspended in orbit around a star. An orbit is a circular path of motion, in this case induced gravitationally by the mass of a star, which is a huge ellipsoid made of plasma. Like planets, stars are made round by their own massive gravity, but they are vast and dense enough to cause other elements to orbit around them, including planets and comets. One can go into more or less detail, but this is basically good enough. Except for those aspects which the simple system does not explain—how does gravity cause mass to coalesce into these ellipsoid shapes?—the system is self-contained and self-explanatory. Indeed, it sounds like the solar system described through the lens of object-oriented ontology, or OOO. Yet, it is simply scientific description which, as Graham Harman and his critics have noted, claims to be based in objective descriptions just as OOO. It is an admirable task to unify science and philosophy by appearing to pull the rug from underneath the subject/object binary which has sustained western philosophy from Plato to Kant.

The aim of OOO is to neither undermine nor overmine an “object”, which for Harman is simply that which exceeds its parts (Harman 2016). Despite almost certainly borrowing the term “object-oriented” from Abadi and Cardelli, Harman’s work has little in common with the object-oriented programming paradigm. The aim of object-oriented programming is to write software models or programs in a manner homologous to mechanical models: “The object-oriented approach to programming is based on an intuitive correspondence between a software simulation of a physical system and the physical system itself. An analogy is drawn between building an algorithmic model of a physical system from software components and building a mechanical model of a physical system from concrete objects “ (Abadi 7).¹ The term “object-oriented” indeed refers to this systematic homology between this approach to programming and to mechanical simulation. Self-admittedly, it is a tool for modeling rather than an assertion of reality. The programmer knows that behind the digital objects are billions of little flip switches, but they restrict themselves to the syntax and semantics of object-oriented programming when they are more comprehensible than ones and zeros.

The utility of object-oriented programming led to its widespread adoption as the hegemonic programming paradigm: not because it was closer to reality than other paradigms, but because it lent itself well to graphic user interfaces like those found on Windows and Macintosh. Functional programming languages like Haskell and Wolfram Language are still widely used by data scientists because of their ability to solve complex arithmetic problems which object-oriented programming languages cannot solve without bloating. Ultimately, all languages compile to machine code, and then to microscopic ones and zeros. Every object and operation apparent to the user is only virtual, an imaginary pretense for the systematic flipping of switches. Nevertheless, digital objects exist for both the programmer and the user. As Harman might say, computer applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Word are objects that can neither reduced to their unreadable machine code nor to their utility for the user. The objectivity of these virtual things is agreeable, but the nature of this objectivity is not. Harman rejects the common philosophical binary of subjects and objects. Instead he defines an object as that which cannot be reduced to its own components or to its relationships with other objects. There are also no privileged subjects for whom objects exist; instead, objects exist in themselves and any relations between objects obfuscate their self-contained essence. Although OOO finds proponents in those like Levi Bryant who have a background in Lacanian psychoanalysis, OOO runs contrary to the Lacanian notion that there are neither subjects nor objects. That is, difference exists only through a linguistic frame so-called reality, as opposed to OOO where there exists difference as such composed of discrete non-privileged objects.

What Is an Object Anyway?

OOO claims to do away with subjects in favor of an equalized field of objects. Contrary to object-oriented programming, Harman uses the term “object-oriented” to refer to this objective equality. He demonstrates this throughout his book, Immaterialism, with the examples of Pizza Hut and the Dutch East India Company. For Harman, a “specific Pizza Hut restaurant is no more or less real than the employees, tables, napkins, molecules, and atoms of which it is composed, and also no more or less real than the economic or community impact of the restaurant, its headquarters city of Wichita, the Pizza Hut corporation as a whole, the United States, or the planet Earth” (Harman 2016, 16). Thus any object is precisely as real as its components. The essence of Pizza Hut is not even located in its own brand name, although that may be one of its components. Pizza Hut’s essence is the elusive remainder left behind when all of its parts are thrown away. That is, if Pizza Hut emerged from the symbiosis of its elements, Pizza Hut is the excess itself that emerges from this composite. Harman summarizes this point: “Everything has an autonomous essence, however transient it may be, and our practices grasp it no better than our theories do” (ibid).

Harman employs a useful analogy to biological endosymbiosis, the process by which prokaryotic bacteria joined with smaller prokaryotes to form eukaryotic cells with mitochondria (ibid. 93-94). Yet, this biological analogy seems to represent a heresy for OOO on the level of partialism for the Christian Trinity. Indeed a eukaryote is a cell that possesses an enclosed nucleus and several mitochondria.² Biological endosymbiosis did result in a new organism whose parts are semiautonomous and possess their own DNA. However, for microbiologists, the eukaryote is precisely this composition: there is not a fleeting essence of the eukaryote that resists categorization when one enumerates its parts in the same way Harman says that a particular Pizza Hut restaurant cannot be understood simply from the sum of its own components.³ Regardless, like the three-leaf clover, it will suffice as an analogy for something otherwise elusive. Harman is correct to say that, even for eukaryotes, there is a thing that evades both our own comprehension and that of other objects.

Harman considers OOO a generalization of Kant’s greatest innovation: the thing in itself. Kant criticized dogmatism because human observation cannot fully comprehend things as they actually are; there is an impossible gap between observer and object (Harman 2020). However, Harman argues that Kant fails to make the even greater leap, which is that the comprehensive essence of any object is inaccessible to any other object (ibid). Hence Harman’s ontology does not completely discard the vocabulary of the subject-object binary to appropriate the latter term for its own use. Instead, it generalizes Kant’s innovation such that everything is an object with an elusive essence. In this sense there is no privileged subject for whom the thing in itself is incomprehensible: there are only objects whose essence eludes other objects. For this reason, as with Harman’s ontology of the Dutch East India Company, OOO analyses sound similar to encyclopedic articles. OOO is the explicit declaration of the implicit assumptions made by modern science and categorization.

Ontological Difference

From the perspective of the designer, the task of modeling is to create a puppet for an anonymous dwarf to play chess from inside. This process is called encapsulation in object-oriented programming: abstracting away processes so that the user does not have to see the messy bits underneath the hood. It is like how the exchange of commodities is abstracted through the institution of currency, so that people neither have to barter nor consider the value of things through their specific history. Thanks to encapsulation, programmers too can decide how much ugly stuff they want to see, just like biologists can discuss the human body on cellular, organic, and systematic scales. This is the function of a model: to fully comprehend a system, except for the parts which the model necessarily takes for granted. Thus the history of a commodity can only really be gleaned from the imperfections which indicate a forgotten history outside of exchange. Similarly, the failures of object-oriented programs are apparent when arithmetic problems become too bloaty to solve. The elementary school solar system model does not explain black holes or binary stars. The biology of cells leaves questions about bodily systems or entire multicellular organisms unanswered. The simple solution is to expand the model to encompass more elements, often by incorporating multiple models together into one comprehensive system, but this still leaves gaps. The field of data science does not deal with stars and planets any more than astronomy deals with boolean algebra and time complexity. Of course, someone could define such an intersection, but that would just be another conjunction of models with its own domain and weaknesses. Models restrict themselves to represent things to themselves. This is simple enough, and cliché enough.

The design of models is driven by the lack of knowledge, particularly to explain why things are different. Where does a thing fit in relation to something else? This is not the drive of knowledge to take unknown things and give them names. Rather, this is the drive of the thing which has been given a name, but does not know why. It seeks out knowledge rather than acting on behalf of knowledge. Thus model design or language design is hysterical. Identifying with incompleteness, it sees discrete things and wants to know more and know why they are different. The task of making a model is very different from the task of making things fit with the model. It could be considered more sincere, but really the two things are just diametric to each other: the hysteric and the university.

OOO does not embody either of these tasks. OOO asserts that other ontologies fail to consider the thing in itself. OOO is not obligated to explain why there are discrete things, nor does it seek to categorize things into a presupposed sets of relations. OOO takes 'things' for granted, so to speak. Harman prefaces Immaterialism with a comparison of new materialist to immaterialist ontology: unlike for new materialism where “Everything occurs along continuous gradients rather than with distinct boundaries and cutoff points”, for immaterialism “Everything is split up according to definite boundaries and cutoff points rather than along continuous gradients” (Harman 2016, 14-15). There is a discursive model at work within OOO that is distinct from the hysteric’s investigation and the university’s categorization. This discursive model is distinguished in that it does not perceive itself as such.⁴ It takes things for granted; it takes difference for granted. Harman is correct when he perceives the tendency of theories to undermine, overmine, or “duomine” things: “Works of art and architecture are misunderstood if we reduce them downward to their physical components or upward to their socio-political effects, despite occasional attempts to do just that. There is something in these works that resists reduction in either direction, pushing back against the literal paraphrase of which knowledge always consists” (ibid, 12). The immaterialism of OOO lies in its assertion that things exist. This appears to be an ironic thesis in conjunction with Zizek’s notion that “the true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it. The only consistent position is that the world does not exist” (Zizek 97). For Harman, it is right to say that the true formula of immaterialism is not that the world does not exist, but precisely that there is some noumenal reality outside of any observer’s distorting perception of it. Hence, the contradiction between the OOO perspective and the Lacanian ontological perspective is not whether or not there is an arbitrary subject/object binary that privileges human observers. Instead, it is whether difference exists as such, or if it only exists through the arbitrary framework of a model or language. Either there are incomprehensive things in themselves, or beyond models there are no such things in themselves.

Object-Oriented Materialism

For Lacan, the thing in itself exists as a fleeting presence only perceived when language fails. It exists when something is undermined, overmined, and duomined, but it cannot be known outside of this failure of comprehension. Hence the thing in itself resides outside of the discursive Symbolic realm. Yet, despite being like a birthmark from the Real, a reminder that the Symbolic is always incomplete and never encompassing, it is really an element of the Imaginary. The thing in itself is the elusive component that an object possesses as part of its apparent wholeness.⁵ Yet, from the perspective of the object, to look at the world from the eyes of a pencil or refrigerator, it does not possess the aura that its observer perceives it to have. Despite being nondiscursive, the thing in itself only emerges through interactive relations. The thing in itself emerges when neither a sociological nor an engineering perspective can fully comprehend a work of architecture. The thing in itself emerges when a programming paradigm cannot solve a problem it was not designed for. The thing in itself emerges when Pizza Hut, the United States, and capitalism cannot be found at the restaurant, at Washington D.C., or inside the factory. The thing in itself is the very soul of the object, and yet it is nowhere to be found.

Thus the major point of contention between Harman and Lacan is whether indeed there is a thing in itself. For Harman, yes: language and theories and modeling cannot do the thing in itself justice because they privilege an arbitrary perspective, often that of a human observer. For Lacan, no: the phantasmic thing in itself emerges because of the arbitrary observer’s mere presence (perhaps, a wave-function collapse of the Real into the Symbolic). This is consistent with both the labels of immaterialism and materialism, far more than Harman would say for the second category. By asserting that objects cannot be reduced to their components, that discrete things exist on equal terms, and that there is nondiscursive ontological difference, Harman advocates a fully immaterialist stance that this is a world of the ethereal thing in itself. This ontological difference is inscribed in the immaterialist world itself, for the total field of discrete objects is directly inaccessible to any of its elements looking outward. For Lacan, it is not that there is not more than meets the eye: instead, that which the eye would not meet only emerges because there is an eye. This is a fully materialist stance which does not assert the binary of subjects and objects. Rather, it asserts that subjects and objects presuppose and mutually generate each other. Even that famous difference only exists arbitrarily in itself, as the phantom of language.

Yet there is useful potential in the phrase “object-oriented”. Returning to the original programming paradigm, where once the phrase indicated that a model is designed to simulate another system in its various parts, it should be turned on its head. “Object-oriented” can instead indicate that reality itself (in the Lacanian sense) has the structure of a model. Indeed there is nothing that can be said without overmining, undermining, and duomining. When the only difference between discrete things is thus ineffable, it is the task of ontology to actively investigate its own limitations. It is not enough to be fully aware of them and nevertheless describe, categorize, and observe things. Driven by the elusive thing in itself, one must interrogate pure difference and create new negativist knowledge at the heart of difference. This infinite traversal can be termed object-oriented materialism.

Traversing Interfaces

Archaeology is aptly called the discipline of things, old or not. The shift from archaeology as uncovering the lost thing to contemplating the thing itself has expanded the field’s horizons beyond its original intentions as the handmaiden of history. This has enabled archaeology to study the remnants of the present as much as the long-standing vestiges of the past. If things are central to archaeology, the question of ontology is central to the field. Harman has basically called OOO archaeology par excellence, as the purest concentration of what the field could be. OOO is said to give objects their full credence, their full existence in themselves. This empowers archaeology to traverse the objective field, not influenced by the privilege that other objects are thought to possess over others. Harman thinks like he writes: clearly and discretely, like an encyclopedia article.

Let us delineate the gift economy in terms of OOO. There exists the gift economy, which is composed of but not reducible to its participants. Marcel Mauss notes that the economy’s participants were not individuals, but parties of people who exchanged with other parties (Mauss 1925). Thus there exists many exchange parties, whether as families or clans or tribes. There necessarily exists multiple people inside these exchange parties, though each party is not reducible to its members. Each member is attached to a person. By this, I am leaning into language and borrowing the notion of composition over inheritance from object-oriented programming. A person is not a member of an exchange party, but a person possesses a role inside the party through which they interact with the other members. Moreover, this role is not reducible to the relations between members, but is an element unto itself. Hence there may be an overall system composed of a person’s party role and their other psychical components, all facets to which the overall person is not reducible. This categorization is fairly orthodox to OOO, except for the insistence on object composition which is perhaps even more object-oriented.

OOO asserts that all of these types—the economy itself, the parties, the party members, the overall individuals involved—are all discrete categories that cannot be reduced to their interactive relationships or their internal elements. The party member is more than the mere individual who takes on that role, and is more than their sex or their productive niche. The exchange party is more than the collection of members who are organized into production, and is more than an economic subject who interacts with those of the same type. The gift economy is more than its participants of exchange: like Smith’s invisible hand, it is the ghost of the economy that dictates to whom honor is deservedly given because of their “generous”, although not altruistic, contributions. The ghost also drives parties to ruin, giving too much until they finally become dependent on others. OOO asserts that the essence of all of these types is homologously elusive and inaccessible.

Just like how there is the system of the individual inside of the system of the party inside of the system of the economy, the overall system may be incorporated into a larger system of other elements. Yet nevertheless, as Harman would point out, this would be reducing the system to something more than itself. A materialist turn would acknowledge that indeed this system exists in itself but also that existence-in-itself is a linguistic category that arbitrarily presupposes itself. The atoms that make up the cells that make up the organs that make up the individual that makes up the party member are unaware of the “upper” levels of existence-in-itself, which Harman would agree with.⁶ A materialist turn on this analysis would be that these types are arbitrary, i.e. the gift economy and its elements exist only as symbolic terms situated within and generated by their own contextual system.

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1. Abadi and Cardelli are incorrect in referring to object-oriented programming as an analogy, not a homology, for mechanical models. Although they take place in different media, their function and purpose are admittedly the same. They are descriptive models to simulate reality. ↩︎

2. An article published by Current Biology found that there does exist one (non-primitively) amitochondrial eukaryotic organism (Karnkowska et al). It is evident that eukaryotes do not necessarily require mitochondria to live! However, it is not mitochondria that are essential to the definition of the eukaryote, but the presence of an enclosed nucleus; nevertheless, all eukaryotes except for this one possess mitochondria. ↩︎

3. Interestingly, the composition of objects is a principle of object-oriented programming. It is preferable for objects to contain other objects as components than for one type of object to be “derived” from another type, in the way that dogs and cats are both types of pets. Rather than being derived from a Pet type, fully absorbing its contents, a Dog type might instead contain a reference to a specific Pet object through which a Dog object performs Pet functions. For object-oriented programming, both composition and derivation are important principles of defining object types. The former is analogous, but not homologous, to Harman’s notion of symbiosis. ↩︎

4. The author is tempted to label OOO as a master's discourse of one signifier addressing other signifiers, whose own subjective vantage eludes itself.  ↩︎

5. In particular, the thing in itself is the Lacanian objet petit a which only appears to the subject who lacks self-cohesion, as all subjects do. On this scale, the thing in itself only exists for the observer because the observer is differentiated toward the Other. In other words, the thing in itself is not inaccessible because it is the thing in itself: the thing in itself is the thing in itself because it is inaccessible. For Lacan, difference only exists in this so-called linguistic framework. ↩︎

6. I do not list these types with the intention of ascribing higher levels to any of them, although they are generally spoken of in that regard. Rather, these are all different existences which merely interface with all the others. These systems exist only in themselves. ↩︎