So I guess that Alexander Galloway has a piece in Critical Inquiry calling for SR/OOO theorists to stop eating kittens. Apparently he arrives at the conclusion that we’re all kitten eaters and supporters of all that is egregious about capitalism because some of us make the claim that political claims and ontological claims are distinct kinds of claims and that we should be able to talk about the being of jellyfish and be committed to their existence without immediately jumping into a discussion of the politics of discourses about politics. As can be seen, such a claim immediately entails that one nihilistically endorses the capitalistic exploitation of humans, the planet, and indeed, the very destruction of the two. I think this is all confused silliness, of course, but if you’re interested in some good reasons to his article see here, here, and here. I’d say more, but I’m busily eating my midnight snack of live kittens, while doing bourgeois set theory and plotting the capitalist prevention of any emancipation.
December 10, 2012
BREAKING: Alexander Galloway Heroically Pleads for New Realists to Stop Eating Kittens!
Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized[15] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
December 10, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Honestly, if I didn’t know the guy had form on this sort of thing I’d have thought that this was a Sokal-esque hoax. In fairness to Galloway the argument is made clearly and with considerable precision and clarity. Unfortunately the argument he’s making is utterly ridiculous.
The first part goes something like this: Both Badiou and programmers make use of set theory. Programmers have been known to variously be and work for capitalists. Therefore, Badiou is a shill for capitalism. I don’t think I’m being too unfair in that summary. That’s basically the whole argument. Galloway claims to demonstrate a structural isomorphism between Badiou’s philosophy and capitalism but what he actually demonstrates is that programmers and some philosophers use mathematics, that sometimes some programmers and some philosophers use the same mathematics and, consequently, sometimes some of the stuff they come out what has some structural similarities. Oh, and there’s a close relation between capitalism and IT. Mind blowing stuff, eh? Take that, ideology!
Actually, that’s a little unfair. What he says is that this is “A disconcerting conclusion to be sure, that a congruity exists between how Badiou talks about ontology and how capitalism structures its world of business objects. Granted, merely identifying a formal congruity is not damning in itself. … Nevertheless are we not obligated to interrogate such a congruity? Is such a mimetic relationship cause for concern?” He doesn’t go so far as to call Badiou a shill for capitalism but the subtext is as subtle as a brick to the face. That’s what the whole argument is driving at, though it proceeds purely at the level of insinuation.
Galloway in no way demonstrates a structural isomorphism between capitalism and philosophy; rather he shows such a relationship between capitalism and mathematics, on the one hand, and Badiou’s philosophy and mathematics, on the other. That’s a two-sided triangle! The third side of it is just inferred and suggested, hinted at, insinuated, said to be ‘troubling’, ‘disconcerting’; a phantom lurking in the shadows.
This rhetorical strategy reminds me of Glenn Beck and his mad diagrams of nonsense, finding abstract, coincidental relations between anything remotely bad and anything remotely leftist and suggesting from that non-evidence that there may be some giant conspiracy behind it. The really telling similarity is when, having drawn his meaningless squiggles, he takes a step back and says ‘of course, we can’t say for sure but isn’t it interesting that this joins to that and this person met that person here,’ etc… The real madness is in the shallowness of that moment of epistemic modesty where the rhetoritician admits that he might be wrong but leaves his audience in no doubt that he thinks he’s right — ‘why, he so modest and reasonable! If he can admit he might be wrong he must be right!’
If there’s any isomorphism in evidence here it’s between insane right-wingers’ standards of evidence and inference and those of some left-wing, supposedly ‘critical’ theorists. That this ‘guilt by association’ can pass itself off as ‘critique by congruity’ is an embarrassment.
But that isn’t even the worst part of it. The worst part is the supposition that ‘the bloodlines must be kept pure’ — that if something has been used by capitalism — like set theory — then it is thereby tainted and anything else that drinks from this well is must be regarded with the utmost suspicion. Why? Who knows. That rather important part is left to our imagination.
‘Keeping the bloodlines pure’ makes about as much sense intellectually or politically as it does procreatively. There are no clean lines in nature.
I honestly don’t like to be so harsh but it’s difficult to find anything good to say about this article other than that it’s clearly written. If only Galloway wrote more cryptically maybe the baselessness of his claims would be less obvious!
December 10, 2012 at 8:45 pm
I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been following the various threads on this topic. In extended Facebook discussion this morning, Galloway defended his article by saying, “I freely acknowledge in the piece that homology is unaligned…I’ll be clear: there is no indictment of Badiou in this article. In fact, he’s the one I hold up at the end as the *exemplar*. My provocation is simply that homology and anti-correlationism don’t work together. So if harman proposes an ontology of encapsulated, withdrawn objects existing at different scales and connected in networks – that’s great, more power to him. But then he *can’t* claim to be an anti-correlationist at the same time. Why? Because he’s describing a world that’s made for us.”
I don’t think it’s astute to say that Harman describes a world that’s made “for us.” It seems like Galloway takes this as a given. The rest of the discussion was equally absurd in a lot of places, with Ben Brucato and Ken Wark saying that, “overcoming the object/subject correlation does not in itself overcome the power/knowledge correlation, or the infrastructure/superstructure correlation.” I don’t think anyone ever said that power/knowledge or Foucaultian epistemes and analyses cease to be functional because objects are equal to one another.
I’m posting this because I’m sincerely interested in people’s responses. Why does the withdrawnness of objects ential correlationism? I don’t think it does, but I’m apparently in the minority. This skips over a lot of work on how objects relate to one another. If relations are contingent, they can be severed. Thus, the terms of one entity’s existence, potentiality, or agency aren’t predicated upon another’s. Right? Why are all relations taken to be coexistentially expressive? I guess the question could be asked thusly: Does the fact that an object has its own “terms” of translation necessitate correlationism in that the terms exist only inasmuch as the object exists? Must this be extended to the relation itself? What about the object that is being related to?
It seems to me that this can largely be resolved by holding that objects withdraw from themselves at some level, so that their own inner being is never fully present to its own manifestations or enactment. Thus, an entity’s being can’t be discussed as a fully formed, fully grasped thing with a unrepentingly reflexive being.
December 10, 2012 at 9:20 pm
Beats me. Folks have asked these questions and he never responds or explains how he’s arriving at these claims.
December 10, 2012 at 10:17 pm
Guys, it is not an indictment of Badiou; it does not say that Badiou is complicit with capitalism. Please argue with what the article actually says, not with some fictitious straw man enemy you have invented. It seems like most people have simply skimmed the preamble to the article. If you read the entire article, you’ll see that Badiou is presented as an *exemplar*. I state very clearly that he *avoids* the kinds of problems discussed in the article. He is featured in the preamble because of his profound influence and the way in which he represents arguably the strongest deviation from poststructuralism and postmodernism.
Regarding my use of analogy.. this is precisely the heart of the matter. I have no intention of proving causation, connection, or collusion. I’m simply demonstrating *correlation*. This is the so-called Secondary Correlation problem. If the new realism is against correlation, why echo a secondary correlation? This is why the Malabou quote is such an important refrain for me. You can’t be an anti-correlationist and still maintain an ontology that “looks like” today’s logistical infrastructure. (and yes, i do mean “looks like” — argument by correlation is a-okay when the topic is correlation.) In short, analogy is the *crux* of the argument: realism can’t be anti-correlationist *and* correlate to the mode of production at the same time. So take your pick. Either drop the anti-correlationist stance. Or don’t propose an ontology of encapsulated, withdrawn objects existing at different scales and connected in networks.
Now, if you don’t think Harman-style OOO looks like the post-fordist infrastructure, let’s have a conversation about that. I think I can make a good case; perhaps you think I can’t. But at least we’d be having a real conversation, rather than this silly straw man laziness.
December 10, 2012 at 11:58 pm
Alex,
We’ve tried to have conversations about these things on a number of occasions. You’ve just insisted on a highly prejudicial and thin reading of Harman’s (and my) work. What you say about Badiou and the others is quite clear and incredibly sloppy. Between what you wrote in the article, on AUFS, and on fb, you can’t really go about complaining that people have somehow misunderstood you. Your “argument” is an ad hominem masquerading as scholarship and isn’t even an instance of historical materialist analysis.
December 11, 2012 at 12:12 am
If I could just add one more thing, it seems to me that some people (Terrence Blake especially) are confusing stylistic criticism with content criticism. As far as I can tell, no one has said that Galloway doesn’t have a right to use his chosen argumentative form (homology). People are instead saying that his premise of modern Continental derivatives equating with late capitalism problematic. People are critiquing the form because it can be retooled to show the fallacy of Galloway’s premise, and that begs the question of his intent. Or so it seems to me.
December 11, 2012 at 12:39 am
Alex,
I would also just add that while I know that it’s difficult for a bourgeois, idealist academic such as yourself to understand that it is not ideas and theories that determine material reality, but I would suggest that rather than treating realists, most of whom share your political commitments, as the great and dangerous threat, you might instead turn your “critical thought” to the actual world and examine economic dynamics, corporations, industry, ecology, why people tolerate these working conditions and inequalities, etc. A lot of this sounds like debates about how many angels can fit on the head of a needle. I do not use the term “bourgeois” lightly to describe you, as certainly the guy that claims that Badiou is complicit in capitalism because he uses set theory and object-oriented programming is capitalistic must recognize the irony of calling himself a materialist while using the bourgeois categories of beliefs and ideas as the foundation of their social theory, rather than looking at production, practices, and dynamics of capital. Yes, yes, it’s the theory that’s the danger! That’s an intriguing materialism you have going there!
December 11, 2012 at 4:59 am
Dr Sinthome,
I can contribute a valuable perspective here, but before I do, I’ll say that we’re dealing with a double-edged sword here – it can cut both ways.
I know object-oriented programming from my own business, which is animation. In animation, objected-oriented programming totally fucked up the art, because the moment the computer took over the animating, the movement lost its spontaneity and magic. You see an array of highly polished, smooth animations that all look the same. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why and how people would react to this situation by thinking that in this case the computer took over the human being; the equivalent of their occasional reaction to OOO as a fetishization of objects.
But on the other hand, this is completely untrue because the computer cannot take over, really, and the human author always has to intervene in the animation, to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect that is to say animated figures looking like half-real zombies. Even the most hi-tech advanced studios still have to use hand-drawn models before they cross over to digitalization. The logical conclusion, then, would be that the human is completely in control: he shapes and transforms dead matter (the objects) to get them to move.
But there’s another interesting twist. A really good animator is always aware of the fact that 1) the material he works with largely determines what the animation will do – for example, if you use a rocky surface as your background, the shapes of those rocks can suggests the idea of morphing the rock into a human face and 2) only if he opens himself to the possibility that the material (the object) can cause an unexpected shift of perspective COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY OF THE ANIMATOR’S IDEA, can he actually produce a creative piece of animation !!!
The creative process, then, is a complex interaction between the human and the object in which the object is far from passive. And the art gets more successful if one’s mind is more open to the idea of dealing with active matter.
This is the sense in which animation is truly object-oriented. This is something entirely other than object-oriented programming, even though they rest on the same principles.
December 11, 2012 at 6:14 pm
I may be missing something, but Galloway’s response in this thread, while considerably more interesting than how I first interpreted the article, still seems like a very strange argument. The word “correlation” seems to be doing a lot more work in this argument than I would think it can bear.
Here is an attempted read: Since SR claims to be against “correlationism”, that philosophy is guilty if one can find homologies, i.e. correlations, between it and things such as postfordist capitalism. This is called the problem of the Secondary Correlation. It is not a pure insinuation based on looking vaguely similar, but rather due to the philosophy being simultaneously “anti-correlationism” yet apparently correlated.
If we dropped Meillassoux’s term “correlationism” and instead used Harman’s older term, “philosophies of access”, would the argument still work? Is there a problem of the Secondary Access that one can demonstrate via homologies?
December 11, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Galloway hasn’t even done the thing he is saying he is trying to do, which is, show that capitalism has a reflective ontology that even “looks like” Graham’s speculative philosophy of unified objects where each part is an autonomous object, too, and all held together by various sensual fields of indirect contact. I see no evidence that Galloway even understands Graham’s philosophy.
First OOO is stupid. Then it’s obvious and trivial. Now the capitalist world looks just like it and, of course, that’s a good reason to be suspicious.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
December 11, 2012 at 7:31 pm
Ah, now I see that John Holbo already made the same point over at AUFS.
December 11, 2012 at 9:28 pm
Another significant point that seems to be skipped over is that there are two, 2, dimensions of correlationism: finitude and anthropocentrism. OOO in all its present incarnations only reject the latter, not the former; it’s really not anti-correlationist in an absolute sense.
December 11, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Galloway’s reasoning is basically as follows: walnuts resemble testicles, therefore they can cure sterility.
Or better yet,
Therefore walnuts are sexist.
December 12, 2012 at 12:15 am
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