A Guide to Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Applications to Literature
Core OOO Concepts
Actant
Philosophy: Any entity that acts or has agency—humans, objects, forces, concepts, or fictional characters. Borrowed from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory.
Literary Application: In OOO-informed literature, actants include not just human characters but also landscapes, weather systems, technologies, and abstract concepts that drive narrative action. A storm becomes a character; a keyboard becomes an agent of resistance.
Example: In “Objects Refuse My Name,” the keyboard, screen, and blanket are actants—they act according to their own logic, not human intention.
Assemblage
Philosophy: A heterogeneous collection of elements (human and non-human) that form temporary alliances without losing their individual properties. From Deleuze and Guattari, adopted by OOO.
Literary Application: Narrative assemblages where characters, settings, objects, and concepts interact without being reducible to human psychology or social structures. The text itself becomes an assemblage of words, ideas, and material constraints.
Example: A poem about Saturday morning assembles cartoon time, geological time, immigrant language, and suburban space without subordinating them to a single human perspective.
Flat Ontology
Philosophy: The principle that all objects exist on the same ontological plane—rocks, humans, ideas, and institutions all have equal reality, though different capacities for action.
Literary Application: Narrative democracy where human characters don’t automatically take precedence over landscapes, objects, or abstract forces. Plot can be driven by non-human agencies.
Example: A story where limestone’s geological temporality has equal narrative weight to a character’s emotional development.
Hyperobject
Philosophy (Timothy Morton): Entities so vast in space and time that humans can only encounter fragments—climate, radiation, capitalism, evolution. They’re “sticky” (they attach to other entities) and “viscous” (they’re hard to separate from).
Literary Application: Narratives that acknowledge their embeddedness in vast systems that exceed any single story. Climate fiction that recognizes climate as a hyperobject we can never directly represent, only approach through fragments.
Example: Writing about “this Saturday” while acknowledging that Saturday itself is a hyperobject spanning cultures, centuries, and economic systems.
Object
Philosophy: Any discrete entity that exists independently of its relations to other entities or human perception. Objects can be physical (rocks), fictional (Hamlet), social (universities), or conceptual (numbers).
Literary Application: Literary objects include characters, settings, plots, genres, metaphors, and the text itself—all possessing reality independent of reader interpretation. A poem is an object with its own withdrawn essence.
Example: The blanket in “Objects Refuse My Name” is an object with its own temporal agenda, independent of the human speaker’s needs or interpretations.
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)
Philosophy: Founded by Graham Harman, OOO argues that all entities exist as objects with hidden depths that withdraw from complete access by other objects (including humans). Reality is object-oriented, not subject-oriented.
Literary Application: Literature that takes seriously the reality and agency of non-human entities, developing forms adequate to encounter withdrawn objects without reducing them to human concerns.
Example: Poetry that lets objects speak in their own temporal scales rather than forcing them into human narrative rhythms.
Real Objects vs. Sensual Objects
Philosophy (Graham Harman): Real objects exist independently and withdraw from complete access. Sensual objects are how real objects appear to other objects in specific encounters.
Literary Application: The distinction between a text’s real withdrawn essence and its sensual appearance to different readers. Each reading encounters sensual aspects of the text-object without exhausting its reality.
Example: A poem’s real object-being exceeds any single interpretation, though it appears differently to each reader as sensual object.
Speculative Realism
Philosophy: Movement including OOO, rejecting both naive realism and social constructivism. Reality exists independently of human thought, but we can only access it through speculation rather than direct knowledge.
Literary Application: Literature as speculative encounter with reality beyond human access. Writing becomes a mode of speculative engagement with withdrawn entities.
Example: Poems that speculate about what objects experience without claiming direct access to object-experience.
Tool-Being
Philosophy (Heidegger via Harman): The way objects withdraw into their own being when functioning smoothly, becoming visible only when they malfunction or break down.
Literary Application: Examining moments when language, narrative conventions, or literary devices break down and reveal their object-nature. The materiality of writing emerges when writing fails.
Example: “Because I couldn’t type / deliberate and precise— / the keyboard rejected my rhythm” makes visible the keyboard’s tool-being through malfunction.
Withdrawal
Philosophy: The core OOO insight that objects always exceed their relations and appearances. No object can be completely accessed by any other object, including human consciousness.
Literary Application: Literature that enacts withdrawal—texts that resist complete interpretation, characters that exceed psychological explanation, meanings that remain partially inaccessible.
Example: Writing that gestures toward experiences it cannot fully represent, like deep time or object-experience.
Temporal Concepts
Deep Time
Philosophy: Geological and cosmic temporalities that vastly exceed human temporal experience—the time of rock formation, evolution, stellar cycles.
Literary Application: Narratives that operate on multiple temporal scales simultaneously, where human time intersects with geological, biological, and cosmic temporalities.
Example: A poem where Saturday morning contains nanoseconds of electron movement and millions of years of limestone formation.
Temporal Democracy
Philosophy: The idea that different temporal scales (human, geological, cosmic) operate simultaneously without hierarchy, each according to its own logic.
Literary Application: Poetic forms that give equal weight to different temporal scales, letting each operate according to its own rhythm within the text.
Example: Structuring a poem to move between cartoon time (22 minutes), childhood time (seasons), and geological time (millennia) without privileging human temporality.
Temporal Sovereignty
Philosophy: The principle that each object operates according to its own temporal logic, independent of human temporal experience or coordination.
Literary Application: Allowing different elements of a text to operate in their own time—some fast, some slow, some cyclical—without forcing them into unified narrative time.
Example: Objects in a poem that “keep their own calendar” independent of human consciousness.
New Materialist Concepts
Agential Realism
Philosophy (Karen Barad): The idea that agency is not a human property but emerges from material-discursive practices. Matter is not passive but actively participates in meaning-making.
Literary Application: Texts where material elements (paper, ink, digital media) participate in meaning-making. The physical aspects of literature are co-creators rather than neutral vehicles.
Example: Acknowledging how the material constraints of a page or screen shape the possibilities of a poem.
Intra-action
Philosophy (Karen Barad): Entities don’t pre-exist their relations but emerge through their interactions. Different from “interaction” which assumes pre-existing entities.
Literary Application: Understanding how meanings emerge from the intra-action of words, readers, contexts, and material supports rather than existing prior to the encounter.
Example: A poem’s meaning emerging from the intra-action of text, reader, historical moment, and reading context.
Material Agency
Philosophy: The capacity of matter to act, resist, and participate in historical processes independent of human intention.
Literary Application: Attention to how material elements of writing (typography, paper, digital interfaces) exert their own influence on meaning and reader experience.
Example: How a keyboard’s resistance affects the rhythm and content of writing.
Literary Theory Applications
Ecocriticism + OOO
Traditional Ecocriticism: Often focused on human relationships to “nature” as environment or resource.
OOO Ecocriticism: Recognizes that humans and “nature” are both collections of objects in flat ontological relations. No privileged human perspective on “environment.”
Literary Application: Writing that doesn’t position humans as observers of nature but as objects among objects in ecological assemblages.
Posthuman Characterization
Traditional Characterization: Psychology-based character development centered on human interiority and motivation.
OOO Characterization: Characters as objects with withdrawn depths, existing in assemblages with non-human actants that also drive narrative.
Literary Application: Stories where landscape, technology, and abstract forces are genuine characters with their own agency and temporal scales.
Speculative Poetics
Traditional Poetics: Often focused on human experience, emotion, and social relationships.
Speculative Poetics: Poetry that ventures speculative encounters with non-human realities, acknowledging the limits of human access while attempting genuine encounter.
Literary Application: Poems that speculate about object-experience, deep time, or hyperobject reality without claiming direct access or anthropomorphizing.
Thing Theory + OOO
Thing Theory (Bill Brown): Examines the cultural life of objects and their role in human meaning-making.
OOO + Thing Theory: Objects exist independently of their cultural meanings and human relations, though they also participate in cultural assemblages.
Literary Application: Writing that acknowledges both the cultural life of objects and their withdrawn reality that exceeds cultural interpretation.
Methodological Terms
Alien Phenomenology
Philosophy (Ian Bogost): The attempt to understand what it might be like to be another kind of object, while acknowledging the impossibility of complete access.
Literary Application: Writing techniques that attempt to render non-human experience without anthropomorphizing—speculative engagement with alien forms of being.
Example: Writing from the perspective of limestone or attempting to capture the temporal experience of objects.
Onto-cartography
Philosophy (Levi Bryant): Mapping the relations between objects while respecting their withdrawal and independence.
Literary Application: Narrative techniques that map relations between human and non-human agents without reducing them to a single perspective.
Example: Poems that trace the interactions between grandmother’s language, geological time, cartoon physics, and suburban space.
Speculative Fabulation
Philosophy (Donna Haraway): Creating stories that might enable different ways of living with other entities.
Literary Application: Fiction that experiments with different forms of relation between human and non-human entities, opening possibilities for posthuman ways of being.
Example: Stories that imagine genuine encounters between humans and withdrawn objects.
For Readers New to OOO
Start Here: Begin with “Object,” “Withdrawal,” and “Flat Ontology” to understand the basic framework.
Key Insight: OOO suggests that reality is made of objects (entities) that exist independently of human thought or perception, but we can never completely access what they really are.
Literary Relevance: This opens up new possibilities for literature that takes seriously the reality and agency of non-human entities—from keyboards to weather systems to abstract concepts.
Practical Application: Try reading a poem while paying attention to how non-human elements (objects, forces, concepts) act as genuine agents rather than mere backdrop to human experience.
This glossary is a living document, updated as new concepts emerge from the intersection of OOO and literary practice. For suggestions or clarifications, engage with the ongoing conversation at Near Zero Blog.