Ian Bogost - Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

Alien Phenomenology

or What Its Like

to Be a Thing

Ian Bogost

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Portions of the book were previously published as The Phenomenology of Videogames, in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, ed. Stephan Gnzel, Michael Leibe, and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam: Universittsverlag Potsdam, 2008), 2243.

Particle Man, words and music by John Linnell and John Flansburgh. Copyright 1991 TMBG Music. All rights on behalf of TMBG Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Company, Inc.

Waters of March, original text and music by Antnio Carlos Jobim. Copyright 1972.

16-bit Intel 8088 Chip from You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, by Charles Bukowski. Copyright 1986 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher.

Copyright 2012 by Ian Bogost

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bogost, Ian.

Alien phenomenology, or What its like to be a thing / Ian Bogost.

(Posthumanities ; 20)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4529-0039-1

1. Ontology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Phenomenology. I. Title. II. Title: What its like to be a thing.

BD331.B5927 2012

111dc23 2012001202

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

Particle man, particle man

Doing the things a particle can

Whats he like? Its not important

Particle man

Is he a dot, or is he a speck?

When hes underwater does he get wet?

Or does the water get him instead?

Nobody knows, Particle man

They Might Be Giants, Particle Man

Contents

[ 1 ]

[ 2 ]

[ 3 ]

[ 4 ]

[ 5 ]

[ 1 ]

New Mexico offered me a childhood of weird objects.

When the weather is clear, the Sandia Mountains to the east of Albuquerque drip the juices of their namesake fruit for a spell each evening, ripening quickly until the twilight devours them. At the ranges southern foothill, apple trees take the place of watermelons. There, in the hollowed-out Manzano Mountain, the U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Command once stashed the nations largest domestic nuclear weapons repository, some 2,450 warheads as of the turn of the millennium.

One hundred miles due south from the Sandias rests Trinity Site. There, in the summer of 1944, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, and Robert Oppenheimer placed dollar wagers on the likelihood that testing an implosion-design plutonium device would ignite the atmosphere. Today, the site opens to the public on the first Saturdays of April and October. Families caravan in from the nearby cities of Socorro and Alamogordo to picnic on roast beef and roentgens.

At the southern edge of the Sangre de Cristos, down which blood runs at dusk instead of nectar, different munitions lay buried beneath Sharpshooters Ridge: buckshot from Union buck-and-ball muskets of the 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass.

Its a small sample of the world that sat unconsidered beneath, above, around, behind, and before me: mountains, fruit, atmospheric effects, nuclear warheads, sandwiches, automobiles, historical events, relics. A few entries logged in the register of one tiny corner of the universe.

Yet no catalog of New Mexico would be complete without the aliens. Two short years after Oppenheimer incanted from the Bhagavad Gita at the fireball that would ignite suburbia, Roswell Army Air Field personnel allegedly recovered a crashed flying saucer, as well as the bodies of its anthropomorphic passengers. In the reports and conspiracy theories that followed, the craft, corpses, and debris were often called nothing made on this earth, although each element remained conveniently identifiable as spacecraft, equipment, or invader.

Roswells are the aliens who looked for us. West of Socorro, we look for them. There, amid the desolate plains of the San Agustin Basin, lounge the twenty-seven antennas of the Very Large Array (VLA). They stretch twenty-five meters across and point up toward the big, blue sky like so many steel calderas. When linked like a school of tropical fish, the VLA antenna is used for various experiments in astrophysics, including the study of black holes, supernovas, and nearby galaxies. But many prefer to think that the occasional use of the array by organizations like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) constitutes the primary purpose of the instruments. Radio telescopes listen to the sky; SETI collects and analyzes the data in a hopeful search for electromagnetic transmissions suggestive of extraterrestrial life. Its a field called astrobiology, one unique in the research community for possessing not a single confirmed object of study.

Meanwhile, to the northeast of the buried buckshot at Glorieta Pass, past the mountains whose crests draw the blood of Christ, beyond the ski resorts and the hippie enclaves and the celebrity ranches lies the Raton-Clayton field, where the corpses of hundreds of volcanic scoria cones laugh silently at the fatuous trendiness of both musket and plutonium, as they have done for the fifty thousand years since their last eruption.

To the south, across the fields cousin lava flows at Carrizozo Malpais, beyond the Trinity Site, the gypsum dunes of White Sands shift in the wind. Like a iekian daydream, they form a seashore that stretches across 275 square miles without ever reaching the sea. Once an alternate landing site for another tool to study the cosmos, the space shuttle, that vessel landed here only once, on March 30, 1982. The cleanup proved too onerous, as NASA was forced to extract gypsum from every last crevice of the Columbias body, like a nursemaid might do to a corpulent boy after a raucous day at the beach. When the spaceship shattered silently over Texas twenty-one years later, the White Sands gypsum still shifted, going nowhere.

Just to the west, in Doa Ana County, the hot, dry sun increases capsaicin levels in the green chile crops that grow around the tiny village of Hatch. Tumbling in vented steel cylinders, chiles crackle over the open flame of roasting. Eventually their skins blister and brown, then blacken. Peel separates to reveal the bright green meat beneath, as if drawn open like the wounds of the mountain-Christ. They cover plates of enchiladas as shrubs cover the hundreds of square miles of their high desert home.

Why do we give the dead Civil War soldier, the guilty Manhattan project physicist, the oval-headed alien anthropomorph, and the intelligent celestial race so much more credence than the scoria cone, the obsidian fragment, the gypsum crystal, the capsicum pepper, and the propane flame? When we welcome these things into scholarship, poetry, science, and business, it is only to ask how they relate to human productivity, culture, and politics. Weve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising, one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuffs with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expression, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff so thoroughly, so immediately, so efficiently that we dont even notice. How did it come to this, an era in which things means ideas so often, and stuff so seldom? A brief excursion into philosophys recent past reveals the source of our conceit.