Writing in the above work, Ian Bogost suggests that we might use the term ontography to refer to an inscriptive strategy that gives a snapshot of the world and the wealth of objects that constitute it, without necessarily providing a wider context of meaning. At its simplest, this would take the form of a list: "a group of items loosely joined not by logic ... but by the gentle knot of the comma" [38].
Lists are something we regularly come across in the work of object-oriented ontologists. Critics might say they take the place of argument, or are simply a form of bad writing. But that's unfair and it seems to me that lists can and do serve real philosophical importance. Further, at their best, they also have a stylistic charm that borders on being poetic.
Lists matter because, as Francis Spufford says, they allow the things that compose them to retain their independence and uniqueness by refusing 'the connecting power of language, in favour of a sequence of disconnected elements' [quoted by Bogost, 40]. This idea of things as autonomous things in themselves is crucial to OOO and it offers a welcome alternative to the now tedious idea of Deleuzean becoming with its preference for continuity and underlying monism.
As Bogost argues, the notion of becoming this, that, or the other, ultimately suggests "comfort and compatibility in relations between units" [40]. In contrast, his own model of alien phenomenology assumes radical incompatibility and disjunction, instead of harmonious flow. His use of lists, therefore, reminds us that "no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated" [40] and alien to one another.
In other words, lists don't just challenge the connecting power of language, but serve to remind us of the ontological claim that being is not one and undivided, but made up of a multiplicity of objects that may or may not relate to one another, but which never fully reveal or give themselves away.
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