The poverty of philosophy: Realism and post-fordism

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 347-366

  Galloway, Alexander R ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84871957054     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: 15397858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/668529     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York, 2009), p. 12.
2. See, for example, Bjørn Kirkerud, Programming Language Semantics: Imperative and Object Oriented Languages (Boston, 1997).
3. David Golumbia also provides some historical background to object-oriented programming; see David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), pp. 209-11.
4. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, 2005), p. 81;
5. See James Gosling et al., The Java Language Specification (New York, 2005);
6. see in particular secs. 4.4, 8.1, and 8.2. Much more attention can and should be given to a critical theory of Java, not to mention computer languages in general. One valuable book that begins this conversation is Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (New York, 2006), in particular chapter five, "Java: Practical Virtuality."
7. See Phil Agre, "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy," in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 737-60.
8. Some of the interest in realism was sparked by the philosophical movement known as speculative realism, a complex of authors developing ideas at an April 2007 conference at Goldsmiths College comprising Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, and Meillassoux; see also issues of the journal Collapse devoted to the theme. See in particular all of Collapse 2 (Mar. 2007), as well as Ray Brassier et al., "Speculative Realism," Collapse 3 (Nov. 2007): 307-449. Levi Bryant underscores that this movement, if it is such a thing, is itself internally diverse: If, as Graham [Harman] argues, there is some unity among the Speculative Realists, this is not to be found among their shared positions but rather in what they are against. That is, the common thread linking the Speculative Realists is a dissatisfaction with correlationist and anti-realist paradigms of thought. In this respect, it wouldn't be inaccurate to claim that there are a number of "Speculative Realists" that don't refer to themselves as Speculative Realists. For example, Deleuze, under one reading, could be classified as a Speculative Realist. De Landa certainly fits the bill, as does Alfred North Whitehead. Harman argues that [Bruno] Latour fits the bill, and I would add [Isabelle] Stengers to this list as well. [Levi Bryant, "Object-Oriented Philosophy: What Is It Good For?" 5 Feb. 2009, bit.ly/5wxSS1]
9. See Manual De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London, 2002),
10. and Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, 2002).
11. See also Lee Braver's assessment of continental philosophy's long rejection of realism in Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, Ill., 2007),
12. and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C., 2010).
13. Harman's interest in objects synchronizes with a more general interest in the humanities around objects and things. See in particular Daniel Miller's work on shopping and things, Bill Brown's work on the objects of consumer culture, Bruno Latour's interest in the autonomous agency of object networks, as well as two edited collections Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, Mass., 2007),
14. and The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (New York, 2009).
15. A second, related movement has also emerged around the relative autonomy of the aesthetic realm. This is evidenced in Deleuze's aesthetic period during the 1980s, particularly his books on cinema and painting in which he explores the externalization of affect into the machinic processes of the world, or in Jacques Rancière's work on the aesthetic regime, which he characterizes through its relative autonomy. Compare also Slavoj Žižek's theory of the objectification of belief, which appears in a number of his books, as well as W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2006);
16. Barbara Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago, 2007);
17. and Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, N.H., 2006).
18. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Brassier (London, 2008), p. 5;
19. Bryant, for his part, characterizes himself as both a Marxist and a materialist, while still contributing to the discourse on speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. For Bryant, realism requires an attention to material infrastructure, over and above the realm of culture or, for that matter, the realm of being. He is therefore right to call his approach an "onticology" rather than an ontology. In this way Bryant emerges more from the Deleuzean tradition, whereas Harman from the Latourian. For further elaboration, see Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2011), esp. chaps. 4 and 5.
20. In the United States, Simon Critchley was one of the first to respond to Meillassoux's book, and the two leading figures working on continental philosophy today in Britain, Alberto Toscano and Peter Hallward, have also written responses to Meillassoux, with Hallward's essay itself eliciting an interesting follow-up by Nathan Brown. See Simon Critchley, "Back to the Great Outdoors," Times Literary Supplement, 28 Feb. 2009, p. 28;
21. Alberto Toscano, "Against Speculation, or, A Critique of the Critique of Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude (After Colletti)";
22. Peter Hallward, "Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude";
23. and Nathan Brown, "The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Harman (Melbourne, 2010), pp. 84-91, 130-41, and 142-63.
24. Žižek defends universal truth against postmodernism in a number of texts, including Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York, 2008).
25. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, 2009), writes of a theory of the subject bound not by fragmentary subjectivities but grounded in the universality of truth.
26. For an analysis of how this transformation has affected texts and textual mark-up, see Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse," Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): 49-84.
27. Terminological precision is crucial at this juncture. In this essay materialism is taken to mean historical materialism, that is, the materialist philosophy of history found in Marx and subsequent Marxist theory. It should not be confused with the definition of materialism used in certain scientific and philosophical circles, for example that used by Harman, which defines materialism essentially as a form of atomism through which small elements of matter are the foundations and ultimate arbiters of everything that exists. So for Harman materialism is a philosophical position that claims that "all macro-sized entities can ultimately be reduced to a final layer of tiny pampered physical elements that are more real than everything else" (Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics [Melbourne, 2009], p. 6).
28. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena, trans. Paul Carus (Chicago, 1902), pp. 17, 14.
29. Recall the revealing anecdote from Alfred North Whitehead on the centrality of mathematics within the history of thought. "I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-and a little mad" (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [1925; New York, 1970], p. 20).
30. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill., 1970), pp. 48-49.
31. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," "The Question Concerning Technology" and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 129-30; emphasis added.
32. See Latour, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public," in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), pp. 14-43.
33. Nina Power, "The Dialectics of Nature," bit.ly/Pn6i5o. To their credit, proponents of object-oriented philosophy such as Bogost or Bryant would likely invert the valence of Power's question, asking instead whether every entity might not be as meaningful as every other.
34. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946), in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, trans. Joan Stambaugh, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1989), pp. 290-91, 299, 301.
35. See Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," trans. Frank Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray (1947), Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1977), written as a response to Jean Beaufret but in regard to Sartre's "Existentialism Is a Humanism." This section is also notable because it contains one of Heidegger's infrequent references to Marx, whose view of history he considers "superior" (p. 243).
36. I borrow this expression from Mark Fisher's appealing book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London, 2009).
37. While the principle of "equal footing" appears across a number of contemporary realist philosophers, Harman is probably the most avid in reiterating the "equal footing" claim. The possible citations are many, but see for instance the opening pages of his recent book on Latour: "What exists is only actants: cars, subways, canoe-varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists, all on the same metaphysical footing." The garbage comment comes a bit later in the same text: "We have seen that Latour insists on an absolute democracy of objects: a mosquito is just as real as Napoleon, and plastic in a garbage dump is no less an actant than a nuclear warhead" (Harman, Prince of Networks, pp. 22, 34).
38. The most inspired contemporary articulation of this arrangement is Badiou's theory of points, in which one is induced to depart from the neutralizing depravity of flat, atonal worlds and align oneself trenchantly along a binary axis of decision. See Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Toscano (London, 2009).
39. "A point is a transcendental testing-ground for the appearing of a truth⋯. A point is the crystallization of the infinite in a figure-which Kierkegaard called 'the Alternative'-of the 'either/or', what can also be called a choice or a decision" (pp. 399, 400). Or as Hallward puts it, "A point is a place in which participation in a world may polarize into a simple yes or no, for or against, backwards or forwards and so on" (Peter Hallward, "Order and Event: On Badiou's Logics of Worlds," New Left Review 53 (Sept.-Oct. 2008): 106-7.
40. The name that Badiou gives to such flat, atonal worlds is "democratic materialism." Given how I have been using terminology here in this essay, the more accurate name for the Latourian-Harmanian parliament of objects-and here Badiou would likely not disagree-would be democratic realism. For more on Badiou's distinction between democratic materialism and dialectical materialism, see Badiou, Logics of Worlds, pp. 1-4.