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Object-oriented Ontology and Archive Photographs:

TOWARDS ECOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING

Paavo Järvensivu & Karoliina Lummaa

shades of irony in ads, magazine articles, and political speeches. Many people see a hidden winking smiley when they hear the phrase “sustainable growth.” Dis-tancing, irony, and doubt which leans on intellectualism are the attitudes of our time, as science studies scholar Bruno Latour has noted (Latour 2004; see also Morton 2013b, 19). We assume commercialized ways of life and buy status objects under the cover of slight self-irony. In reality, we do not notice existing objects or their qual-ities and powers. It is as if we have become stuck in an endless language game and are happy just to stand by when, during a short period of industrialization, hu-mankind burns away all the fossil fuels which have be-come stored underground during millions of years.

The ways in which we consume natural resources and treat non-humans show that the world along with its objects is lost to us. Object-oriented philosophy, which is based on Graham Harman’s groundbreaking work, and which e.g., Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, and Ian Bogost have further developed, demands a change to this situation. According to this theory, we need to stop and think about the basis of coexistence—the being of different objects. In order to better understand the world, we need to learn to know how objects interact with each other.

In this article we are looking for tools in object- oriented ontology for thinking about and approaching different objects. The purpose of such tools is to build an ecological understanding and to help rebuild those

WHER E DO WE GO WHEN WE GO OUT IN NATUR E?

T H E H I G H L I G H T S of Finnish nature, along with up-to-date info on activities and services, can be found at outdoors.!. The website tells you to go out hiking and !nd recreation in magni!-

cent spots. What kind of connection does this nature have to the nature one sees from the cab of a harvester? Or with the nature that lives in us in bacteria form? What do these natures have in common with the nature whose basic functions are about to collapse during the next decades because of our consuming habits?

Information on different kinds of animate and inani-mate objects, which our living environment is made out of, is available in unforeseen quantity. We know that a range of diverse creatures is vital for human existence. Despite this, we leave all these wonderful and necessary objects in the background when we go to work, to the shops, or back home. The table we produce for the warehouses of IKEA or Isku and which we pick up for our kitchens does not remind us of the trees which we encountered in the forest. The foodstuffs bought from the shops do not seem to have anything to do with the creatures such products are made out of. The causalities between everyday production, consuming, and nature have been blurred into near invisibility.

During the past decades, critical social sciences and humanities, as well as art, have developed ever more so-phisticated strategies for the analytical unpacking of discourses and all kinds of reference relationships over-all. The average citizen notices effortlessly different

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connections which have been broken by the develop-ment of Western philosophy on the one hand and the fossil economy on the other hand (see Salminen’s essay at the beginning of this section). Alongside object- oriented philosophy we use archive photographs; in their topics and representational methods we see con-nections to Finnish ways of understanding nature, and the use of natural resources. Our inspiration has been the special quality of photographs as objects: they simul-taneously exhibit concrete objects and practices, and ways of understanding and representation, and yet also exist as concrete objects in relation to their technical-material birth.

Through the introduction of object-oriented ontol-ogy and the photographs and related ecological-onto-logical ponderings we develop an analytical framework for the archive images chosen for the biennial, and per-haps for other works as well.

THE ONTOLOGY OF OBJECTS

Around and even within us humans there exists a mani-fold group of objects. Their existence does not depend on whether we happen to take them as targets of our

thinking or action. A human individual is, on an onto-logical level, an object among other objects. According to object-oriented philosophy (Harman 2011), objects are autonomous, and cannot be reduced to anything else, for instance nature, energy, matter, or "ow. As a branch of philosophical thought, object-orientedness is ontological thinking; its starting point is objects in themselves: there are bolts, black holes, dollars, seagulls, quarks, shares, nuclear power stations… Lists of this kind are a method for the !guring out of the bits and causal relations which make up our reality. Humans are one of those objects in this brutally honest philosophy which strives to break out of anthropocentric ways of seeing the world. Existence renders objects equal, although their being may be different, and they may work and affect other objects in different ways. As Ian Bogost puts it, “all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally” (Bogost 2012, 11).

The ontology of objects challenges the basis of West-ern thinking, the categorical division between human subjects and natural objects. If this challenge is dif!cult to accept at !rst, it is important to remember that the raising of human beings as subjects above objects is only a historically established point of view. The binary

Photograph from the portfolio Maa/Earth (1991) by Jyrki Parantainen. Courtesy of the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.



opposition of human subjects and non-human objects is the legacy of 17th century rationalism, which discarded the animistic view of the world as consisting of moving objects and forces (Latour 2010, 481–482). Bruno Latour emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of rationalism: one must believe in action without agency (idem. 2010, 482). Although countless naturecultures prove the con-trary to be true, we hold on to this paradoxical world-view because of its continuity and stability (idem. 2010, 483). Things seem to go our way when we make believe that we are in charge of everything; in the light of the belief in technological development we consider our-selves in control of an endless supply of resources as well. In this way we form a relationship to passive non-human nature from our own point of view only. Our relationship with nature is de!ned solely as a circular work of cultural construction, in which human beings understand the nonhuman world through certain con-ceptualizations, think and act on the basis of these ideas, and consequently perceive the nonhuman world and their own work through these conceptual and physical frameworks. The circle is perfect and working, and the non-human has remained silent.

In reality, the everyday familiarity of objects is an illu-sion, in which objects behave in more or less predicta-ble ways, and we do not need to pay them all that much attention. Why is this illusion coming apart just now? Object-oriented thinkers place their philosophy tem-porally and locally in the world of the Anthropocene.

Global warming and the revolution away from the fossil economy are forcing out those objects which make up our coexistence. The nature and the climate that we think we know are transforming from one state to an-other, which is still unknown to us. Through the devel-opment of science and technologies we have built and found objects and things which transcend our temporal and conceptual understanding, and threaten our exist-ence: melting icebergs, radioactive waste, black holes, and global unrestrained capitalism cannot be persuaded to remain in the background of the rational human sub-ject, to be steered objects. They have their own in"uen-tial existence. (Morton 2013b, 38–52.)

In object-oriented philosophy, the world is seen from the point of view of the ontological properties of ob-jects. First of all, objects are perceived as withdrawing. All objects can only experience each other from their own starting points—there is no general or overriding perspective. One cannot know other objects as such, in their entirety; their core is ever receding. Objects show themselves to others in certain guises, in certain lights. We are ever making interpretations and representations out of objects, but as we know, a picture of a stone, for instance, is not a stone. Even the most thorough descrip-tion of a stone, be it artistic or scienti!c, is not a stone. Even if we take another stone to help us with our expla-nation, that would not be the same stone we were trying to analyze. We can feel and smell a stone and experi-ment with an equivalent type of stone, but in the end we

Inari, Saariselkä (ca. 1965–1970). Photograph by Matti Saanio Courtesy of the Finnish Museum ofPhotography, Helsinki.



are left with descriptions of sensory experiences and reports on experiments run on certain stones. A human can never have a direct access to other objects; we can only approach them indirectly, for instance through photographs and their interpretations.

The same receding quality holds true with all objects: in an ontological sense, they never touch each other di-rectly. Another important ontological quality has to do with causality. Due to the withdrawing quality of ob-jects, causality takes place in a sensory or aesthetic di-mension (Morton 2013a). When a harvester makes a clearing, it affects different objects in different ways. If we stay with the mechanical concept of causality, such as we are taught in secondary school, it is hard to under-stand what happens when the harvester does its job. Its effect is not only the mechanical movement of particles: it is inherently dependent on the way the actions of the machine seem from the perspective of each affected ob-ject. Each forest animal feels and interprets differently the noises of the machine and the forces it affects the earth with—which may carry far. An entire tree meets the machine differently than a tree stump. In the neigh-borhood of the future clearing, the harvester will per-haps cause anger, whereas the owner of the forest in question will be delighted of future income. For its operator, the harvester creates a special environment, which in its modern manifestation wraps extreme per-formance around a computer-like control panel.

Because of the withdrawal of objects, and the sensory or aesthetic nature of their causal relationships, object-oriented philosophy has generally abandoned the idea of a totality which would bring all objects together. The third quality of the ontology of objects is worldlessness. Objects create a space and time of their own; outside these there is no background or next dimension which would put them into context. Levi Bryant calls his on-tology “"at ontology”: a world which would bring all objects together does not exist, and objects themselves do not form any kind of constellations, groups, or net-works; in an ontological sense they exist separate from each other as detached points, as if on a two-dimensional level (Bryant 2011a, 270–290). In the same way, Timothy Morton denies the existence of nature as some kind of collective system. Single non-human objects from cells and viruses to scorpions and deserts do affect each other, but there is no higher level of being, or self-regu-latory, or humanly controlled natural totality (Morton 2007; Morton 2010). Thus we need to pay attention to the objects themselves, not to some background sub-stance—which is sometimes thought to coincidentally form everything we see—and not to any "ows or net-works which transcend objects. The miracle of being lies exactly in the tension between an object’s with-drawn essence and its appearance which opens up to another object in a unique way. Objects are profound - ly strange to each other, and in fact strange to them-selves as well.

Although object-oriented philosophy picks up con-ceptually isolated objects and looks at reality from the point of view of their uniqueness and irreducibility, it does not deny their interactions or relationships. Con-versely, the ontology of objects is fundamentally about coexistence which is made up of objects being born, remaining, and being destroyed. Timothy Morton calls this kind of collection of objects a mesh (Morton 2010, 28–68). It is a web-like tapestry of entities with no hier-archy, edges, or centre. In object-oriented philosophy, such conceptualizations of the interactive relationships often have a background of environmental ethics: the diversity of life and the biological relationships related to it have a value independent of humans (see e.g., Bryant 2011a, 23–24; Bogost 2012, 7–9).

THE OBJECT R EL ATIONS OF THE ECONOM Y A ND POLITICS

The knowledge of natural objects has changed over the centuries according to various technological-economic, cultural, and political circumstances. Today, in the Fin-land of lakes and forests, we are in a situation where the scenery is dominated, particularly south of Lapland, by deforested clearings and !elds of trees born in nurs-eries. Forestry without clearcutting has for a long time been seen as non-pro!table, although its possibilities have only been studied in the 2000s. According to the latest, multidisciplinary forest research, Finnish forestry is not only unsustainable both ecologically and sceni-cally, it is also less pro!table than continuous cover for-estry (e.g., Jalonen et al. 2006).

In the 17th century, the scarcity of forest-based re-sources was seen crucial in the economic development of Western Europe (Kuisma 2013, 79). The role of forests and other natural resources in production was well known both intellectually and experientially. Still, the point of view of one logger on the state of forests could be geographically very limited: they were not necessar-ily aware of the national or international situation. Now-adays, at least in the industrialized countries, everyone has access to fresh and extensive research on the state of ecosystems, even on a global scale. At the same time, the connections between natural resources and consuming have largely been lost. Our belief in the fact that any raw material can be replaced with another, and that there are no limits to the availability of such materials, has spread terribly wide.

At the initial stage of a tree’s transformation into raw material and product, a human encounters it through the sensors of a harvester. The driver of the vehicle is in this way more in touch with the machine than the tree undergoing the operation. Technological mediation may have always been present on some level, but here the question is also of scale and qualitative differences: axe, saw, chainsaw, and harvester are experientially dif-ferent objects: they place human and tree into a different



relationship with each other. Over the long process of metamorphosis, the tree is seen sometimes through technical requirements, sometimes through economic goals. A top-level manager does not even necessarily dif-ferentiate between different products and the raw ma-terials they require; they apply the leadership models they have learned regardless of the !eld, and rely on the expertise of their employees. Such people read forests mainly in the form of standardized pro!t indicators.

Breakages between natural objects and human indi-viduals or organizations can be seen clearly on societal and political levels. Society is steered by the goal of eco-nomic growth, although at the same time the objective is to reduce the consumption of natural resources. In political discussions, the attention is not drawn to any particular production or consumption: rather, all pro-ductive activity is handled using the same hypernyms. Conspicuous consumption, which rolls in the pleasure of wasting, cannot be distinguished from necessary feeding, living, or transport. The !eld of economics, the

goal of which has been de!ned as the ef!cient alloca-tion of resources, treats the emissions born of produc-tion and consumption as externalities—something which touches only the so-called third party, not the buyer or the seller—and thus discounts them. GDP, which serves as an indicator of economic growth, does not take a stand on what is being produced, or what the positive or negative effects of this production are; it merely shows the domestically produced “added value” in euros. Although economic questions—questions about resources—famously de!ne modern politics, they have been fundamentally disconnected from their material bases.

The car park sign in the above image refers simulta-neously to a past and future scenery: the past forest is still almost visible, and the future progress with its tar-mac base can also be reached. According to a review article published in Nature (Barnosky et al. 2012), Earth’s biosphere is approaching a sudden transition from our present state to another one, the living qualities of

Tervetuloa/Welcome (1983). Photograph by Mikko Savolainen. Courtesy of the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.



which are still unknown to us. One of the ways scientists observe the factors leading to a change of state is simple in its principles: they analyze the size of the planet’s area which is directly molded by people, either for farming or cities. These areas have not been designed with the requirements of di-verse natural objects in mind; they are almost exclusively based on mono-cultures. When intertwined natural objects are forced apart, their condi-tions for living grow narrower. As this kind of development spreads into new areas, the probability for the biosphere’s change of state grows. Scien-tists predict that over a half of Earth’s land area will be directly molded by the year 2025; this prediction does not take into account the indirect effects of global warming, for instance. The article states that we should increase our literacy of early warning signs. A photograph can help us see around us signs we would not otherwise notice. There is a constant battle over the analysis of these signs: an increasing understanding of the coexistence of objects challenges dominant conceptions of what development or pro-gress really are.

THE POWER SPHER ES OF NON-HUMA NS

A photograph is a generous medium for thinking about objects. If we ap-proach a photograph as a representation based on cultural constructions, it begins to express these constructions—for instance, ways to place a tame bird “naturally” on a piece of wood in front of a window and to crop the image so that the crow is in the middle, an object of the camera and the viewer’s gaze. Alongside the practices of cultural representation and recep-tion, and the human actions which repeat and mould them, an image of an animal does and gives other things, too.

The magic in Onni Lönnroth’s crow picture is born out of the movement of the bird’s head. It is typical of crows, like all birds and vertebrates, to ob-serve their environment by turning their heads to see, to hear, to smell… This unique movement of a living creature has been captured on !lm: the life that went on in a succession of moments remains in the image just as it happened. The crow has looked both into the room and out of the window. The photograph captures not only the movement itself, but also a trace of this non-human creature’s intentions or thoughts: the way it evaluates dif-ferent spaces—the yard and the room.

Varis pöydällä/Crow on a Table (1910). Photograph by Onni Lönnroth. Courtesy of the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.



In addition to a human and possibly also an animal presence, there is a third component in the bizarre mo-ment of taking a picture: the materialities and technolo-gies of camera and photograph, which like any other tools for artistic expression lend their own non-human powers to the result. What a human is trying to say with a photograph is only a part of what is seen in an image. Technologies, such as the production of photographs, which depend on machines and different materials, can be seen as a type of non-human spheres of power. The question is about the areas of meaning-making and making a difference, in which a human is at best a par-tial actor. In the power spheres of the non-humans, agency should not be understood as intentional but as effective and affective: light, paper, camera’s technology, and chemicals are all doing their own work.

In another, more serious and deeper sense, the power spheres of non-humans refer to the areas which are en-tirely or partly wild and inhabited by non-human ob-jects. They are concrete places in which plants, fungi, and animals communicate within and between species with signs and ways Homo sapiens cannot comprehend. Pictures of animals are always a part of the non-human sphere of power, not only in the technical-material sense, but also in the ecological-organistic sense: pho-tographs contain traces of such forms of life whose ges-tures and worlds we do not fully understand.

When looking at animal pictures it is important to remember the banal fact that the objects of photogra-phy do exist without representation, without humans. But why is the presence of an animal in a photograph a banality—why is it hard to say anything critical about it, without the analysis of cultural practices and meanings? The reason must lie in the wider difference between the not-yet-meaningful and meaningful that is intertwined with the difference between nature and culture. Hu-mans are used to thinking themselves and other people as the only beings creating meaning in the world (Bryant 2011a, 20–23). Our reality is the result of human activity, both conceptually and concretely: all meanings are per-ceived and established by us, and the environment is full of the traces of our own hands and products. Non- human world is the not-yet-touched, not-yet-interpret-ed—it is an empty basis which we will !rst conceptual-ize and then build and take into use.

The banality or emptiness of meaning connected to an animal presence has also to do with the dominant Western thinking of animals as objects which lack the depths of human mind and experience. Ron Broglio, who has studied animals’ roles and meanings in art, de-!nes the human understanding of animals through the concept of “surface” (Broglio 2011). He strives to analyze anew the surface of an animal, or its living on the sur-face; in this analysis the surface does not refer to a lack in the animal, but rather humans’ inability to reach and understand an animal’s depths. In art, the contacts to animals and animalities through different materials and

material-conceptual working methods are, according to Broglio, “surface encounters.” The surfaces of canvas and paint or !lm and developer, the immaterial surfaces of concepts, and the concrete surfaces of animal bodies are placed in a dialogue which cannot be fully controlled or understood by humans. The phenomenon is similar to that of Levi Bryant’s wilderness ontology, in which the world is seen as a place where no one or nothing has primary rights or means to survive (Bryant 2011b, 19–21). The existence and worlds of animals resist capture, which moves human observation and thinking to new directions (Bryant 2011b; Broglio 2011, xvi–xxi and 100).

Lönnroth’s crow invites us to think not only the sig-ni!cation of animals, but also their placement on the twisting continuum between nature and culture. A crow brought or lured into a room is displaced, inside a cul-tural space of a human-made home. In the photograph, the animal’s movements make a ghost-like impression: the crow appears formless, even headless. The blurry head movement turns metaphorical, expressing con-fusion about which side of the glass the bird really be-longs—in the room or in the forest.

As animals that we have moved to the area of culture, and who still remain original dwellers of the forest, crows point directly to the conceptual borders of the forest. As a conceptualization of a speci!c realm of real-ity, forest is not a given, but rather culturally construct-ed and historically produced; and these processes of construction and production have moved towards vari-ous goals of pro!t. Thus, forest nowadays means game, raw materials, mushrooms and berries and associated earning opportunities, and experiential or aesthetic places of rest, adventure, and pleasure: it is not an area for uncertainties or ponderings. You are not supposed to ask questions in a forest.

Besides cultural forest constructions, there exist real areas composed of the organic and the inorganic, the realms of non-humans—those areas in which humans are put when they enter a forest. It is exactly this sheer concreteness of forests and forest creatures and pro-cesses with its several consequences and connections that makes us start again all discussions, questions, and wonderings about forests. Humans should also remem-ber that there is always someone to meet us in a forest.

Thinking about animals meeting us in the forest not only reminds us of the foundation of object-oriented philosophy—the equality of objects—but it also empha-sizes the ethical dimensions of ecological questions. The forest animals are there before us, naturally equipped to live in conditions in which we need specially manufac-tured tools and non-human or mechanical help (Bryant 2011b, 20–21). However, animal equipment has its "ip side, too: creatures developed in a certain environment need their speci!c equipment in order to survive (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 175–177). The starting point for the ecological interpretations of object-oriented ontology is that all objects have an equal right to exist. From this



point of view, as from the many viewpoints of deep ecology, we need to understand that the division of resources and areas is a true moral philo-sophical issue, which does not just touch human communities and human-made institutions or the structures of political or economic activity. Con-sequently, the social philosopher Will Kymlicka and the animal rights philosopher Sue Donaldson have suggested that the natural environments inhabited by wild animals should be regarded as sovereign states to which the native animals have inviolable rights (ibid., 169–174). As the huge elk looming in Risto Lounema’s photograph reminds us, many areas are already inhabited: there are non-human native populations.

CONCLUSION: THE POSSIBILITIES OF ART

(Natural) scienti!c methods can give us precious information on various objects and their interconnectedness; however, if we leave such knowledge to scientists, we encounter a problem with the dif!culty of assuming infor-mation and the narrow scope of knowledge. Humans are, to a great extent, creatures of habit. Although these habits vary from person to person and can be mutually contradictory—the operator of a paper machine sees a forest in a very different light depending on whether they are at work or at their

17. 04. 71 Kirkkonummi, hirviä maisemassa/17. 04 .71 Kirkkonummi, Elks in the landscape (1971). Photograph by Risto Lounema. Courtesy of the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.



summer cottage—they are !rmly set. If only scientists strive to gain new information on natural objects without others assuming the project, they will have a dif!cult, even impossible, job in breaking down the walls of habit as they report the results of their work. In addition, scienti!c methods main-ly produce a rather limited, quantitatively oriented understanding, which puts aside the experiential dimensions of objects and their interactions.

Object-oriented philosophy, which sees causalities as taking place in an aesthetic dimension, raises art and the study of art into a central position in societal discussion and change. Art thus becomes a testing of causalities, a setting of objects in experimental relations of cause-and-effect. When we strive to understand the world from the point of view of other objects, we are not only thinking analytically and categorically, but are also experi-entially tuning ourselves to these objects (Morton 2013a). Contrary to the traditional humanist understanding of humans and art, from the object ontological point of view, it seems that art disturbs human systems of sig-ni!cation. In addition to showing objects in a new light, artworks resist complete and !nal analyses and all kinds of simpli!cations which are vital to everyday communication (Bryant 2011b, 24–26). A work of art can crack open the illusion of habit which shrouds the strange encounters within the object world—encounters which may prove fateful also for human life. <<

R EFER ENCES

Barnosky et al. “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere.” Nature 486 (June 2012): 52–58.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Broglio, Ron. Surface Encounters. Thinking with Animals and Art. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2011.

Bryant, Levi R. “Wilderness Ontology.” In Preternatural, edited by Celina Jeffery, 19–26. Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2011.

Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011.Jalonen et al. (ed.). Uusi metsäkirja. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2006.Kuisma, Markku. Suomen poliittinen taloushistoria 1000–2000. Helsinki: Siltala, 2013.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact

to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248.Latour, Bruno. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’”.

New Literary History 41 (Summer 2010): 471–490.Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007.Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 2010.Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor,

Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2013a.Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.

Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013b.

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Jarvensivu Lummaa Mustarinda 2014-Libre