A response to Graham Harmans Marginalia on

Radical Thinking
Sunday, June 3, 2012 Alexander Galloway
https://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-
graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/

First let me say that, while this post will likely come
across as confrontational, I do have a respect for Harman,
particularly for his intellectual energy and literary output.
Ive never met him and cant count him a friend, but I
have corresponded with him on a few occasions. I must
admit that his philosophy and politics (or lack thereof)
leave me cold. A bit of context: my dissertation of 2001,
which became my first book in 2004, is an analysis of
networks as political systems, so I feel I have a lot to say
about the topic of objects and networks. Im also a
computer programmer and, similar to someone like Ian
Bogost, have actually coded the kind of object-oriented
systems that OOO describes. (To his credit Harman rejects
this association, claiming that his OO has nothing to do
with computer sciences OO. But thats a flimsy argument
in my view, particularly when the congruencies are so
clear. As Zizek might say, channeling Groucho Marx: if its
called a duck, and quacks like a duck, dont let that fool
you it really is a duck!)
I already wrote a bit about some shortcomings of the new
realism particularly with Meillassoux. And I have a
forthcoming long article that expands my position, in
which I argue that SR/OOO is politically naive because it
parrots a kind of postfordist/cybernetic thought, and that
this constitutes a secondary correlation between thought
and the mode of production that SR/OOO cant explain.
Shaviro, Bogost, and Bryant have all read this paper
privately, but as I said, due to the ridiculous slowness of
academic publishing, its still forthcoming.
Again, I do respect Harmans energy, but like David Berry
and Christian Thorne Im more and more concerned about
the political shortcomings of OOO. A case in point is this
recent interview with Harman titled Marginalia on
Radical Thinking. Harmans comments in this interview
coalesce a number of different threads in OOO, and for
me galvanize precisely what I see as some of its main
challenges.
So what exactly are Harmans political instincts? Lets use
this paragraph as a starting point:
Harman: I saw parts of the Arab Spring up
close, and the events of that period taught me
something, as genuine events should. There
were plenty of protest movements throughout
my time in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak,
against torture, against the Emergency Law. And
one could always agree with these criticisms
while still thinking that for now, Egypt is
probably better off than it might be under other
circumstances. But in January 2011, I like others
was shocked into realizing suddenly what a
wrong-headed attitude that was. Mubarak
became for me, retroactively, something terrible
that always had to be thrown out all along. The
Revolutionaries showed me this through
provoking a brutal response that showed the
truth of the situation in Egypt, which I now see
that I had accepted too lazily as a given. Indeed,
I had been guilty of a failure of imagination,
which is what philosophers should always be
ready to avoid. The killings by snipers, the use
of plainclothes thugs on camels and horses, and
the cynical machinations of Mubarak in response
to calls for his ouster, may simply have brought
 the pre-existent life of the Egyptian dungeons
onto the street, as one of the human rights
groups remarked at the time. But it took the
events on the street to shake me from slumber,
and I have not yet recovered from that
experience.

I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois

position that people from the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt
have called depoliticization and neutralization. It shows
Harmans anti-political position quite clearly. Today we
might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although
Harman of course has no interest in being badiousian in
the first place!). The reason is because he has no
opposition to the state of the situation. By his own
admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the
confrontation with the state has taken place, after he
witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold
on to power. Thats a classic case of liberal neutralization
(dont rock the boat, we just need to go along to get
along, this is the best of all possible worlds, ontology
shouldnt be political, etc.). This is thus not a political
desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional
response at the sight of blood. But such palpitations of
the sensitive bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed,
do not a politics make.
By contrast, Badious position is so useful today because
he says that its all about the *first* antagonism, not the
last. To be political means that you have to *start* from
the position of incompatibility with the state. In other
words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of
the situation. The political is always trenchant in this
sense, always a cutting or polarization. Hence the
appeal of Badious theory of points which forces all of
the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision
of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt
and Negri say something similar when they show how
resistance is primary vis-a-vis power. For his part
Harman essentially argues the reverse in this interview:
ontology is primary (OOO is not the handmaid of
anything else), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance
is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should
applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but
its still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows
where.
If youre still skeptical just use the old categorial
imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman,
the revolution would never have happened. Thats
political neutralization in a nutshell. In other words there
is no event for Harman. And here I agree with Mehdi
Belhaj Kacems recent characterization of Tristan Garcias
ontology, modeled closely after Harmans, as essentially
a treatise on Being Without Event.
Its also symptomatic that throughout the interview
Harman assumes that the political means liberation.
Liberation may be involved with certain kinds of political
projects. And certainly liberty and freedom are appealing
social virtues that should be promoted when appropriate.
But political means liberation only for a liberal. (And lets
not forget that liberalism itself is quite limited historically
and more or less coincides with the history of western
capitalism.) A more expansive view on politics will quickly
reveal that the political means something else. The
political means *justice* first and foremost, not liberation.
Justice and liberation may, of course, coincide during
certain socio-historical situations, but politics does not
and should not mean liberation exclusively. Political
theory is full of examples where people must in fact
*curb* their own liberty for the sake of justice. This is why
people like Zizek and Badiou talk about discipline and
militancy, but not so much about liberty as such.
This brings out a secondary problem with OOO in that it
falls prey to a kind of Citizens United fallacy..
everything is an object, and thus Monsanto and Exxon
Mobil are objects on equal footing just like the rest. Like
other (human) objects, Monsanto is free to make
unlimited campaign donations, contribute to the
degradation of the environment, etc.
The way out of this problem, at least for Bogost and
Bryant, seems to be a kind of cake-and-eat-it-too Animal
Farm koan: that all objects are equal, but some objects
are more equal than others. This seems to be rather
nonsensical, since on the one hand they want to reject
correlation and put all objects on equal footing, but on the
other hand retain a pop science view of the world in
which some equal-footed objects nevertheless have more
gravity attraction than other equal-footed objects. What
this produces is a kind of marketplace ontology that
essentializes and reinforces hierarchy even as it claims to
circumvent it. The only thing worse than inequality is an
inequality founded in equality. But thats capitalism for
you: everyone is equal in the marketplace except for, ta-
da, the 1%. Or American race relations: we take these
truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,
but, ta-da, in comes Jim Crow. Or protocological control
online: universal adoption of networking standards
between peers, but, ta-da, Google owns you. In other
words inequality rooted in equality is not a very
liberating political theory.
Harman and these others in OOO often take pride in
calling this a democratization. But now lets be clear, it
is actually an anti-democratization, in two ways. First
because it removes the point of decision from people (the
demos) to the object world at large. So the word simply
doesnt make sense in the context of OOO. In fact the
closest English word we have for Harmans cosmology is
bureaucracy (rule by office furniture), but
pragmacracy (rule by things) or hylecracy (rule by
stuff) are probably closer to Harmans intent. And second
because it allows certain objects to have more natural
gravity than others, thus in essence letting their
votes count double or triple.
So despite their protestations OOO still doesnt have a
reliable way to distinguish between good and bad
objects. In other words OOO doesnt make much room for
a theory of judgment, since its busy kneecapping the
human. And this is why weve seen that OOO cant seem
to produce the two things that philosophy has always
grounded in a theory of judgment: an aesthetics and a
politics.
(We should of course cite the evolution of Harmans
position, and his flirtations with aesthetics: metaphysics
may be a branch of aesthetics, and causation merely a
form of beauty [Towards Speculative Realism, 139].
Shaviro picks up on this in his essay The Actual Volcano,
where he argues that Harman is essentially a modernist
who is ultimately focused on the sublime.)
Its easy to see how a non-flat ontology allows for a
theory of judgment. If things are non-flat then theres
always some kind of dynamic or asymmetry to rely on.
The dynamic could be the human or it could be God.
It could be some other kind of arbiter like nature or the
natural state of things, or even the essence of the
thing, to which it must accord. Politics in a non-flat
ontology is so easy its basically cheating.
However its harder to see how a *flat* ontology allows
for a theory of judgment. The most notorious flat ontology
that we know of today is that old friend capitalism: all
things are reduced to objects on equal footing with
everything else, be they wool or machine or man;
everything has a use-value which recedes and is masked
over by the sensual skin of exchange value; no arbiter
impedes the endless flow of objects through circuits of
exchange, no arbiter except that ultimate mystical
medium, the marketplace. This is obviously the world of
Latour, and now more recently the world of Harman
(likewise De Landa falls prey to some of these same
pitfalls, as he lauds a kind of market ontology, a kind of
deleuzian awesome-ology of emergence and becoming).
Harman has of course denied on several occasions that
his ontology looks like capitalism, but if it quacks like a
duck
I dont know if flat ontologies are bad per se, but they are
certainly dangerous, particularly in this day and age,
because they can be so easily co-opted by power. Hence
the most successful flat ontologies are the ones that
fortify their flatness with some newfound political
dynamic. The two best examples I can think of here are
Deleuze and Laruelle. Deleuze because of his timeliness
and his sense that deterritorialization (in the late 60s and
70s) would really be the most political thing that could
happen faced with the then current form of power as
territorialized capitalism, territorialized patriarchy,
territorialized subjectivity, etc. His flatness was thus a
*strategic* flatness. Although that was forty years ago
now, and already in the early 90s when he wrote the
control society essay near the end of his life, he was
perhaps realizing that power had already co-opted his
rhizomatic relational ontology in new ways. And in fact
today its not that difficult to show how deleuzian
ontology is quite compatible with capitalism (i.e. how
Google or Facebook valorizes multiplicity and distributed
networks, etc.).
Laruelle is the other good example, only now because of
his profound untimeliness. Laruelle has a kind of flat
ontology after all, being the original anti-correlationist,
twenty years before Meillassoux made the tactic
fashionable. But of course Laruelles flatness is *so* flat
that it becomes one, unilateral, deterministic, etc. And
here we see again how the deepest form of justice might
actually have nothing to do with liberation, but rather
with a kind of ontological determination, a kind of
destiny (to use an extremely unfashionable word). Its
also why Laruelle has been roundly excluded by everyone
involved in OOO, both the insiders like Harman and
Bogost, but also some of the outliers like Shaviro. Laruelle
starts from many of the same assumptions that OOO
endorses to reject correlationism, to introduce
democracy into ontology, such ideas all come from
Laruelle but Laruelle actually walks the walk! He
actually follows these axioms all the way to the end of the
line. And what he discovers is a profoundly weird kind of
realism. But also a profoundly political one in my view
Laruelle is one of the most radical political thinkers of
recent years. Lets not forget that Harman never rejects
correlationism. On the contrary he merely democratizes
correlation so that all entities including humans follow the
as-structure. I think this is ultimately why Harman and
OOO cant handle Laruelle. (See for example Harmans
now notorious review of Laruelles book Philosophies of
Difference in which he muddles and misreads even the
most rudimentary axioms in Laruelle.)
If we look at the argument from The Exploit (the second
book on networks I wrote in 2007 with Eugene Thacker),
Harman is stuck in step two of the three historical steps
we describe. That is, hes willing to admit that theres a
new hegemony of flatness, even a new hegemony of
relation/networks. Thats precisely what we describe in
the opening section of The Exploit as the new symmetry
position, or the networks contra networks position. This
is more or less the position of a kind of global
Latourianism or even a global Deleuzianism, where both
power and resistance are flat, networked, and rhizomatic.
But what Harman is unwilling to do is to take the third
step, which requires the superimposition of a new
asymmetry. This is what we call the exceptional
topology, or for short the exploit.
Step two is essentially the position of todays liberal
the dot-com exec, the Obama supporter, the OOO
philosopher, those who ultimately desire a kind of
capitalism-with-a-friendly-face. But this is not a political
position proper, or at the least we cant really call these
kinds of people leftists. (Which is fine, since Harman
doesnt want to be called a leftist in the first place!) Only
step three is todays political position proper. This is
where you will find the Occupy movement, Wikileaks and
Anonymous, radical feminism, Tiqqun, Act Up, anti-racist
campaigns, anti-capitalist parties, and so on.
Maybe in the end its a very boring tale to tell, because
its just the same old story. Its the liberals versus the
radicals. The New Philosophers versus the old Marxists.
The third way liberals versus the Leninists or Maoists. The
reformers versus the revolutionaries. Its OOO versus
Zizek/Badiou/Laruelle/whomever. Im not trying to change
the debate, I just want it to be clear. Harman is not the
vanguard of radical thinking, whatever that means. And
Harman is most certainly not a political thinker of any
caliber. In fact its the opposite. Harmans self-stated goal
is to remove politics from ontology, creating a new kind of
pure ontology in which, as he says in the interview,
philosophy should not be the handmaid of anything else.
So we have to ask the old question again: Does Harman
descend into the street? And if not, should we trust what
he says about being? In the age of Occupy and Monsanto,
of Citizens United and ecological collapse, of the Obama
drone assassinations and unpaid online microlabor
theres a litany for you! I think the answer is a
resounding no. Lets hope that OOO wakes up soon and
realizes that a philosophy without a political theory is no
philosophy at all.
-
[Note: My several previous attempts to address the
political question in OOO have all been met with, shall
we say, some skepticism by those involved, whether it be
on Facebook, on blogs, or in personal correspondence.
When theyre not accusing me of bad faith or attacking
me personally they usually either (1) put their head in the
sand and pretend the political question will go away as
they hunker down with the ontological purism argument
(La trahison des clercs!; ontology shouldnt be polluted
by politics in the first place!), (2) position themselves as
victims of a leftist faculty cabal who forced them to
read too much Haraway and Butler in graduate school, or
(3) simply ignore me and go play somewhere else. So let
me issue a preemptive challenge to OOO: surprise me!
how about an *actual* response that *actually* addresses
the political question? My guess is it wont happen
although, if anyone, Bryant is probably the one to do it.]