Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing Quotes

“Yet once we are done nodding earnestly at Whitehead and Latour, what do we do? We return to our libraries and our word processors. We refine our diction and insert more endnotes. We apply "rigor," the scholarly version of Tinker Bell's fairy dust, in adequate quantities to stave off interest while cheating death. For too long, being "radical" in philosophy has meant writing and talking incessantly, theorizing ideas so big that they can never be concretized but only marked with threatening definite articles ("the political," "the other," "the neighbor," "the animal"). For too long, philosophers have spun waste like a goldfish's sphincter, rather than spinning yarn like a charka. Whether or not the real radical philosophers march or protest or run for office in addition to writing inscrutable tomes - this is a question we can, perhaps, leave aside. Real radicals, we might conclude, make things.”
― Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

“Second, writing is dangerous for philosophy—and for serious scholarly practice in general. It’s not because writing breaks from its origins as Plato would have it, but because writing is only one form of being. The long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still bafflingly popular, opinion.”
― Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing

“The density of being makes it promiscuous, always touching everything else, unconcerned with differentiation. Anything is thing enough to party.”
― Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing

“If we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us. The Computer”
― Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing