Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (Posthumanities)

As Don Ihde puts it, “Without entering into the doing, the basic thrust and import of phenomenology is likely to be misunderstood at the least or missed at the most.”[11]

must scholarly productivity take written form? Is writing the most efficient and appropriate material for judging academic work?

I give the name carpentry to this practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice.

Scientists and engineers may enjoy a greater opportunity to pursue extralinguistic pursuits than do humanists, but since all work inevitably pledges fealty to the written word, none are safe.

Blending these two notions, carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world.

The scholar’s obsession with writing creates numerous problems, but two in particular deserve attention and redress. First, academics aren’t even good writers. Our tendency toward obfuscation, disconnection, jargon, and overall incomprehensibility is legendary.

philosophical carpentry is built with philosophy in mind: it may serve myriad other productive and aesthetic purposes,

As the novelist James Wood puts it in his review of The Oxford English Literary History, The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work—is it any good?—is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order

These examples do more than put theory into practice; they also represent practice as theory. It’s not that writing cannot be interesting. Rather, we might consider that writing is not the only method of engendering interest. If we take vicarious causation seriously, if we believe that things never really interact with one another, but only fuse or

Those ideas will, inevitably, become professionally valid only if written down. And when published, they are printed and bound not to be read but merely to have been written.