In A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Joseph Catalano writes:
For Sartre, the reality of class is more than a subjective awareness that we are united with others and less than a supraconsciousness in which we all already share… We… experience [my emphasis] our membership in a class, because our class structure already exists as a fundamental structure of our world. (135 – 136)
From an object-oriented perspective, this is already the wrong way to theorize the existence of class. If class exists, it is not an experience or the result of an experience (though it can, perhaps, be experienced), nor is it dependent on individual persons identifying with a class. Rather, classes are entities in their own right. In mereological terms, classes would be larger scale objects that are autonomous or independent of the smaller scale objects from which they are composed.
As such, class would be an example of what Timothy Morton has called a “hyperobject”. As Morton puts it,
…hyperobjects are viscous—they adhere to you no matter how hard to try to pull away, rendering ironic distance obsolete. Now I’ll argue that they are also nonlocal. That is, hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space such that any particular (local) manifestation never reveals the totality of the hyperobject.
When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sens [sic.]. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such. Nowhere in the long list of catastrophic weather events—which will increase as global warming takes off—will you find global warming.
As a hyperobject, classes are massively distributed in time and space, having no precise location. Moreover, classes are withdrawn from other objects– e.g., the people that “belong” to a particular class –such that we can be entirely unaware of the existence of classes without this impinging, in any way, on the existence or activity of class. Indeed, it is precisely because classes, like any other object, are withdrawn, precisely because they are hyperobjects massively distributed in time and space, that ideology is able to convince us that classes don’t exist or that there are only “individuals” (mid-scale objects of which persons are an instance) that create their own destinies. Here, of course, the term “individual” is placed in scare quotes not because individuals don’t exist, but rather because the term “individual” all too often functions as code for persons, ignoring the fact that individuals exist at a variety of different levels of scale. In other words, a class is no less an individual than Jack Abramoff.
read on!
While classes are hyperobjects, individuals, or entities in their own right, this does not entail that classes don’t have to be produced. Classes are the result of antipraxis or the material trace of millions of human practices that, in their material trace, take on a life of their own, structuring the possibilities and activities of persons. Choices of where to live, of how roads and public transportation are placed, jobs that are available, linguistic dialectics into which one is born, etc., etc., etc. take on a life of their own, structuring and dividing human relations such that the wealthy become more wealthy, children of the wealthy are likely to themselves become wealthy, the poor and middle class remain poor and middle class, and so on. There is a whole spatio-temporal geography here, a network structure, around which classes emerge as entities in their own right.
Class as an entity in its own right comes to function as a statistical sorting entity, as its endo-structure functions as a regime of attraction functioning as a gravitational field for those persons or human bodies that find themselves within its orbit. Just as every object is a system that transforms perturbations into system-specific events, contents, or qualities according to its own endo-structure, classes treat human bodies as perturbations that it then molds and structures according to its own endo-structure. Along the beautiful beach in Nagshead, North Carolina you will find a band of sea shells and small stones. This band of sea shells is the result of a regime of attraction structured around ocean life and geology, the incline of the sea shore, the specific force of the waves pounding against the shore, and so on, generating a machine or system that picks up sea shells and stones of this particular size and shape (no smaller and larger) and distributes them at this particular point on the beach. This is how it is with class. The field of antipraxis, millions of small decisions, sort human bodies in particular patterns, reinforcing boundaries between them negentropically, and both affording and constraining possibilities.
The question, then, of how we experience or are conscious of class is distinct from the question of how class exists. As an entity in its own right, no one need know anything about class for class to exist and function. Class can exist and function just fine without anyone identifying with a class or being aware that they are caught up within the mechanisms of class. How else could so many act contrary to their class interests, going so far as to even deny that class exists, if this weren’t the case? Rather, the question of our experience and consciousness of class is a question of how we can become aware of the regime of attraction within which we are enmeshed and begin to act on it. Here the issue is similar to the one Morton raises with respect to climate as a hyperobject. Part of the problem with climate is precisely because, as withdrawn, we aren’t even aware of its existence and therefore are unable to act on it. We are aware of weather without being aware of climate. Climate requires a sort of leap and a detective work that ferrets out all sorts of traces. So too in the case of class.
Larval Subjects . 
November 18, 2010 at 6:03 pm
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2010/11/levi-on-hyperobjects-as-class.html
[…He’s done it again. Somebody call the police! This is just too many good ideas to have in a week…]
November 19, 2010 at 1:31 am
Another incredible post, Levi. I especially love the room this opens for class to be composed of frissions of contradiction in which the actions of those organised within a specific class can be contrary to their class position even as they are of the regime of attraction that situates them within the hyperobject of their class. The point it brought up for was the question of fissions of contradiction: the peculiar way, that is, class reinforces its integrity – and especially the middle class – through these contrary acts. Now, on the one hand, what I don’t want to do is instantly rub out the autonomy of persons your argument allows for – as a sort of determinism in which the antipraxis of class is all there is to be said about the organisation of humans as objects and the objects of human actions feels really important. But if class is able to translate contrary acts back into itself, is it really the case that class is always withdrawn? Here, I’m tempted to cite Badiou’s rebuttal to the Deleuzian belief in a society of control with the point that a society of control transforms into the police at the first sign of serious trouble. While I have little doubt, say, that David Cameron is not standing around in his undergroound lair like Mephisto, plotting his nefarious class war with open, cartoonish relish, while his wealthy co-conspirators clink snifters and chortle, there is a real sense in which he is identifying quite directly with the hyperobject of class, precisely through the ideology that would lead him to outrageously believe (or feel the need to pretend to believe) – as he has claimed – that he’s a member of ‘the sharp-elbowed middle class’. Somewhere, Lacan makes the point that the most curious aspect of ideology is that we have to know what we do not know in order to make it efficacious. In which case is the crime of the capitalist class not that it consciously strives to make class unconscious as it is far more empowered by the privileges of class to be able to identify the interests of that object which it does not know? In this sense, it may be like climate for climate change activists, insofar as their combination of leap and detective work leads to the comprehension of a fact not given to the immediate realm of experience and knowledge. Except I’d argue that the difference here is that class as hyperobject is something – at times – the upper class finds it can handle and handle quite disproportionately well – and that this capacity for them to handle their class interests is itself a power of class. This leads me to my last thought: with your excellent metaphor of a statistical sorting machine and your simile to the beach in North Carolina, I was left to wonder: if class is an object of such immensity, could we ever hope to abolish it in the strict communist sense? Much like the seashells on that shore could hardly aim to abolish the ocean that distributes them, must we abandon classlessness? It feels as if there is an implicit very ‘realist’ and very non-idealist sense that we must, in this sense. Yet we know climate can be destroyed by praxis – much to our detriment. If class becomes all antipraxis, it is ineradicable: less object than the absolutism of the world you’ve said does not exist. In that sense, my uncertainty is directed at whether class can be defined only as “the result of antipraxis or the material trace of millions of human practices that, in their material trace, take on a life of their own, structuring the possibilities and activities of persons” or whether it must include the key sense that people can deliberately take on this life of their own as directly, though not necessarily non-ideological, the stuff of their own life. In fact, could this stand as the very definition of what makes practice inert in the practico-inert? Thanks so much again for this massively stimulating post.
November 19, 2010 at 1:58 am
Really enjoyed this post, once I got over the vague confusion I felt at hearing the words ‘class’ and ‘object’ in the same paragraph not referring to system design (my dayjob). What I find especially attractive about is that it returns the way we talk about class to its proper level; too often nowadays the term is bandied around as just another piece of identity politics.
Tangentially – thinking again about my programming confusion – I wonder what kind of object-oriented programming language is most closely related to OOO. Seems to me that tightly structured languages like Java or Objective C, while dealing in objects and implementing encapsulation (or in OOO terms withdrawal) are too bound up in Platonic idealism; every object is merely an instance of a class (ideal form). Whereas – if I’ve been following you correctly – OOO is more like a freeform (object-oriented yet classless) language such as JavaScript, where everything is an object, whose properties are also objects – seems more like a flat ontology.
November 21, 2010 at 6:08 am
@Joshua. I like the tangent. How bout the relationship of PHP (hyperobjects) and HTML (objects). ¿Where does CSS fit in?
November 21, 2010 at 10:40 am
Like a number of other recent posts on this blog, the material on class prompts the question of the relationship of OOO to various forms of scientific realism. Clearly, for realism about classes, the existence of classes is independent of subjects’ capacities to know about or experience class. At the same time, knowledge claims are made about class in this post and since we can agree that classes (if they exist) are too big and temporally extended to be perceived, it seems that they must be inferred from observing patterns in social data which can be explained by a sorting mechanism. So realism about class here seems to be based on inference to the best explanation. I don’t think there’s anything particularly objectionable about this, but it doesn’t seem to be particularly radical either – this is the kind of thing that Putnam was arguing for in the sixties.
Of course, if we take the Harman line that withdrawal is an ontological matter and that objects are completely unnaturalizable, transcendng our epistemic capacities in principle, then we get something distinctly odder and more radical-sounding. But then, we are no longer licensed to be realists about things like classes or ideologies because the only reason we have for believing in them is the adequacy of the theories in which they figure.
November 22, 2010 at 4:13 pm
[…] rubric for rethinking the production of ‘individuals’ and class relations. Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant has made notes to precisely this end, acknowledging the extent to which classes can be […]
November 23, 2010 at 5:14 am
[…] in the gravitational orbit of another entity, a vampiric, devouring entity, that, as I argued in my last post on class, is a hyperobject or object in its own right. Indeed, the woman translates this object in her own […]
November 23, 2010 at 11:29 pm
[…] Its really interesting to see how Morton, Bogost, Bryant and Harman are applying OOO to so many different areas. Amongst other areas of integration, Harman is going to have a go at piercing the epistemological distinction between real and sensual objects. Bogost is developing a fantastic videogame design project, that forces the user to confront avatars themselves, on their own terms. Because Morton’s already developed such important ecological work, its fantastic to see how OOO is transforming his own ecological thought. And finally Bryant is dealing out important post after post on the impact of object mediation (Sartre and anti-praxis), social group collectives and political agency. […]
December 17, 2010 at 9:27 pm
@joshua & nathan
i think it might be Ruby that fits the mold best.. in Ruby, a class is an object itself, not a higher-order set of objects. i was just reading this book on Ruby and came across this great sidebar:
“The term real world gets thrown around a lot in discussions of programming. There’s room for debate (and there is debate) as to whether this or that programming lan- guage, or even this or that kind of programming language, corresponds more closely than others to the shape of the real world. A lot depends on how you perceive the world. Do you perceive it as peopled with things, each of which has tasks to do and waits for someone to request the task? If so, you may conclude that object-oriented languages model the world best. Do you see life as a series of to-do items on a check- list, to be gone through in order? If so, you may see a strictly procedural programming language as having closer ties to the characteristics of the real world.
In short, there’s no one answer to the question of what the real world is—so there’s no answer to the question of what it means for a programming language to model the real world. Nor is it necessarily as important an issue as it may seem. The world you construct in a computer program is at heart an imaginary world, and limiting yourself to making it seem otherwise can be overly constrictive.”
January 19, 2011 at 2:26 am
[…] relevance of this move to political issues, we can see in a post like this from Larval Subjects, in which Levi Bryant (one of The Speculative Turn’s editors) draws the distinction between the […]
February 25, 2011 at 7:32 am
[…] Class and Hyperobjects « Larval Subjects .: “” […]
March 16, 2011 at 2:09 am
[…] relevance of this move to political issues, we can see in a post like this from Larval Subjects, in which Levi Bryant (one of The Speculative Turn’s editors) draws the distinction between the […]
April 24, 2011 at 10:30 pm
The objective status of a class (under capitalism) is simple: either one owns sufficient means of production and free capital (self-valorizing value) that one does not have to work to produce and circulate commodities, or one has no other commodity to sell but his own labor. Either bourgeois or proletarian. Class has very little to do with income brackets. Of course, there are gradations: the petit-bourgeois from the grandes bourgeoisie, and lumpenproletariat from other proletarian elements. In terms of subjectivity, class consciousness is determined by the extent to which an class is subjectively conscious of its own objective position. Then, as Lukacs says, can the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history.
May 2, 2011 at 10:33 am
[…] development policies and even caste (which can be articulated as an object in a similar way to class) were not considered by some head office staff to be a significant part of the […]
August 1, 2013 at 8:23 am
Hi, I’m just coming to this concept now so I’m unsure of where I stand on the idea. Would ‘Ideology’ (through Althusser) be an example of a Hyperobject? Bound up with its subjects whom participate with it in ISAs- unaware of its existence that they participate in, which is mutually determining on their own objectness?