Alexander R. Galloway

The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism

This essay begins from another. In a recent examination of the ideological conceits of current conceptions of the brain, Catherine Malabou asks: “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?”1 Such is the conundrum, in its essence, that I want to explore. While Malabou’s query is chiefly about the brain, it resonates far and wide because it goes straight to what is wrong with some philosophical thinking appearing these days. Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? I am speaking, on the one hand, of computer networks in general and object-oriented computer languages (such as Java or C ) in particular and, on the other hand, of certain realist philosophers such as Bruno Latour, but also more pointedly Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and their associated school known as speculative realism. Why do these philosophers, when holding up a mirror to nature, see the mode of production reflected back at them? Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?This essay begins from another. In a recent examination of the ideological conceits of current conceptions of the brain, Catherine Malabou asks: “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?”1 Such is the conundrum, in its essence, that I want to explore. While Malabou’s query is chiefly about the brain, it resonates far and wide because it goes straight to what is wrong with some philosophical thinking appearing these days. Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? I am speaking, on the one hand, of computer networks in general and object-oriented computer languages (such as Java or C!!) in particular and, on the other hand, of certain realist philosophers such as Bruno Latour, but also more pointedly Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and their associated school known as speculative realism. Why do these philosophers, when holding up a mirror to nature, see the mode of production reflected back at them? Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?

Are Some Things Unrepresentable

Jacques Rancière, in his essay ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, puts forth a challenge that is ever more pertinent to our times. What constitutes the unrepresentable today? Rancière frames his answer in a very specific way: the question of unrepresentability leads directly to the way in which political violence may or may not be put into an image. Offering an alternative to Rancière’s approach, the present article turns instead to the information society, asking if and how something might be unrepresentable in a world saturated by data and information. Thus one approaches the issue of transparency and secrecy here from the perspective of the relative perspicuity (or opacity) of data visualization. Two theses structure the argument, first that ‘data have no necessary visual form’ and, second, that ‘only one visualization has ever been made of an information network’. The tension between these two theses leads to a disconcerting conclusion, that the triumph of information aesthetics precipitates a decline in informatic perspicuity. One is obligated therefore to call for a strong reinvigoration of poetics and hermeneutics within the digital universe, so that representation as such can take place, perhaps for the first time.

Radical Illusion (A Game Against)

There are two voices in the work of Jean Baudrillard, the early voice, which lasted less than 10 years, and the mature voice, which lasted about 30. The first voice is younger and more conventionally leftist. It was fully embedded in the intellectual debates of the late 1960s. A committed Marxist, the younger Baudrillard wrote on labor and needs, use-value and production. But after this period as a young man, Baudrillard transitioned into a very different thinker in the middle to late 1970s. He developed a whole new theoretical vocabulary that was completely in tune with that decades historical transformation into digitization, postindustrial economies, immaterial labor, mediation, and simulation. His theories of play and games are at the very heart of this transformation. Through a close reading of several texts, this essay explores Baudrillards interest in play and games through the concepts of seduction, the fatal strategy, illusion, and what he called the “principle of separation.”

Global Networks and the Effects on Culture

This analysis aims to derive general principles for under-standing the information age through an examination of the global computer networks that facilitate it. Computer networks are created via shared technical standards called protocols. These protocols exhibit several key characteristics, including openness, flexibility, robustness, and voluntary adoption. While computer networks such as the Internet were originally invented to avoid specific social and political threats during the height of the cold war, today networks suffer from a host of new vulnerabilities. Computer viruses provide a case study for understanding these new vulnerabilities and the future political challenges posed by networks of all kinds.

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Does the whatever speak

Wendy Chun, Tara McPherson, Rayvon Fouche, Curtis Marez, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Anna Everett, Christian Sandvig, danah boyd, Ernie Wilson, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Eszter Hargittai, Alondra Nelson, Peter Chow-White, Troy Duster

A Network is a Network is a Network: Reflections on the Computational and the Societies of Control

In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the implications of undertaking media theoretical work for critiquing the digital in a time when networks proliferate and, as Galloway claims, we need to ‘forget Deleuze’. Through the lens of Galloway’s new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, the potential of a ‘non-philosophy’ for media is probed. From the import of the allegorical method from excommunication to the question of networks, they discuss Galloway’s recent work and reflect on the implications of computation for media theory, thinking about media objects, and critical theory.

Networks, control, and life-forms

In this paper we explore the technological, philosophical and political aspects of networks through a series of condensed, interrelated analyses.

THE AUTISM OF REASON

Abstract Instead of a “meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a “return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelles work is presented here as a kind of “meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kants two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as “merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an “autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One.

“Carnivore personal edition”: exploring distributed data surveillance

The goal of this paper is to offer, in straight forward terms, some practical insight into distributed data surveillance. I will use the software project Carnivore as a case study. Carnivore is a public domain riff on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s software “Carnivore,” which was developed to perform electronic wiretaps of email. As founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG), and lead developer on the Carnivore project, I will describe the technological, philosophical, and political reasons for launching the project. I will also offer an account of the development cycle of the core engine, identify trends in “client” interface designs, and present a series of design challenges that still remain.