boundary 2

Tag: speculative realism

  • Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    a review of Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press Forerunners Series, 2016)

    by Michael Miller

    ~

    All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever

    — Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

    Being a (in)human is to be a beta tester

    — Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Too many people have access to your state of mind

    — Renata Adler, Speedboat

    Whenever I read through Vilém Flusser’s vast body of work and encounter, in print no less, one of the core concepts of his thought—which is that “human communication is unnatural” (2002, 5)––I find it nearly impossible to shake the feeling that the late Czech-Brazilian thinker must have derived some kind of preternatural pleasure from insisting on the ironic gesture’s repetition. Flusser’s rather grim view that “there is no possible form of communication that can communicate concrete experience to others” (2016, 23) leads him to declare that the intersubjective dimension of communication implies inevitably the existence of a society which is, in his eyes, itself an unnatural institution. One can find all over in Flusser’s work traces of his life-long attempt to think through the full philosophical implications of European nihilism, and evidence of this intellectual engagement can be readily found in his theories of communication.

    One of Flusser’s key ideas that draws me in is his notion that human communication affords us the ability to “forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (2002, 4). In order to help stave off the inexorable tide of nature’s muted nothingness, Flusser suggests that humans communicate by storing memories, externalized thoughts whose eventual transmission binds two or more people into a system of meaning. Only when an intersubjective system of communication like writing or speech is established between people does the purpose of our enduring commitment to communication become clear: we communicate in order “to become immortal within others” (2016, 31). Flusser’s playful positing of the ironic paradox inherent in the improbability of communication—that communication is unnatural to the human but it is also “so incredibly rich despite its limitations” (26)––enacts its own impossibility. In a representatively ironic sense, Flusser’s point is that all we are able to fully understand is our inability to understand fully.

    As Flusser’s theory of communication can be viewed as his response to the twentieth-century’s shifting technical-medial milieu, his ideas about communication and technics eventually led him to conclude that “the original intention of producing the apparatus, namely, to serve the interests of freedom, has turned on itself…In a way, the terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as a function of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give” (2011,73).[1] Flusser’s skeptical perspective toward the alleged affordances of human mastery over technology is most assuredly not the view that Apple or Google would prefer you harbor (not-so-secretly). Any cursory glance at Wired or the technology blog at Insider Higher Ed, to pick two long-hanging examples, would yield a radically different perspective than the one Flusser puts forth in his work. In fact, Flusser writes, “objects meant to be media may obstruct communication” (2016, 45). If media objects like the technical apparatuses of today actually obstruct communication, then why are we so often led to believe that they facilitate it? And to shift registers just slightly, if everything is said to be an object of some kind—even technical apparatuses––then cannot one be permitted to claim daily communion with all kinds of objects? What happens when an object—and an object as obsolete as a book, no less—speaks to us? Will we still heed its call?

    ***

    Speaking in its expanded capacity as neither narrator nor focalized character, the book as literary object addresses us in a direct and antagonistic fashion in the opening line to Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands” (5), the book-object warns. As Cohen’s narrative tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen (whose backstory corresponds mostly to the historical-biographical author Joshua Cohen) who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen (who is the CEO of a massive Google-type company named Tetration), the novel’s middle section provides an “unedited” transcript of the conversation between the two Cohens in which the CEO recounts his upbringing and tremendous business success in and around the Bay Area from the late 1970s up to 2013 of the narrative’s present. The novel’s Silicon Valley setting, nominal and characterological doubling, and structural narrative coupling of the two Cohens’ lives makes it all but impossible to distinguish the personal histories of Cohen-the-CEO and Cohen-the-narrator from the cultural history of the development of personal computing and networked information technologies. The history of one Joshua Cohen––or all Joshua Cohens––is indistinguishable from the history of intrusive computational/digital media. “I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics,” Cohen-the-narrator laments. In other words, as Cohen-the-narrator ghostwrites another Cohen’s memoir within the context of the broad history of personal computing and the emergence of algorithmic governance and surveillance, the novel invites us to consider how the history of an individual––or every individual, it does not really matter––is also nothing more or anything less than the surveilled history of its data usage, which is always written by someone or something else, the ever-present Not-Me (who just might have the same name as me). The Self is nothing but a networked repository of information to be mined in the future.

    While the novel’s opening line addresses its hypothetical reader directly, its relatively benign warning fixes reader and text in a relation of rancor. The object speaks![2] And yet tech-savvy twenty-first century readers are not the only ones who seem to be fed up with books; books too are fed up with us, and perhaps rightly so. In an age when objects are said to speak vibrantly and withdraw infinitely; processes like human cognition are considered to be operative in complex technical-computational systems; and when the only excuse to preserve the category of “subjective experience” we are able to muster is that it affords us the ability “to grasp how networks technically distribute and disperse agency,” it would seem at first glance that the second-person addressee of the novel’s opening line would intuitively have to be a reading, thinking subject.[3] Yet this is the very same reading subject who has been urged by Cohen’s novel to politely “fuck off” if he or she has chosen to read the text on a screen. And though the text does not completely dismiss its readers who still prefer “paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth” (5), a slight change of preposition in its title points exactly to what the book fears most of all: Book as Numbers. The book-object speaks, but only to offer an ominous admonition: neither the book nor its readers ought to be reducible to computable numbers.

    The transduction of literary language into digital bits eliminates the need for a phenomenological, reading subject, and it suggests too that literature––or even just language in a general sense––and humans in particular are ontologically reducible to data objects that can be “read” and subsequently “interpreted” by computational algorithms. As Cohen’s novel collapses the distinction between author, narrator, character, and medium, its narrator observes that “the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s” (9). But in this instance, the record of one’s (or another’s) life is merely the history of how personal computational technologies have effaced the phenomenological subject. How have we arrived at the theoretically permissible premise that “People matter, but they don’t occupy a privileged subject position distinct from everything else in the world” (Huehls 20)? How might the “turn toward ontology” in theory/philosophy be viewed as contributing to our present condition?

    * **

    Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (2016) provides a brief, yet stylistically ironic and incisive interrogation into how recent iterations of post- or inhumanist theory have found a strange bedfellow in the rhetorical boosterism that accompanies the alleged affordances of digital technologies and big data. Despite the differences between these two seemingly unrelated discourses, they both share a particularly critical or diminished conception of the anthro- in “anthropocentrism” that borrows liberally from the postulates of the “ontological turn” in theory/philosophy (Rosenberg n.p.). While the parallels between these discourses are not made explicit in Jarzombek’s book, Digital Stockholm Syndrome asks us to consider how a shared commitment to an ontologically diminished view of “the human” that galvanizes both technological determinism’s anti-humanism and post- or inhumanist theory has found its common expression in recent philosophies of ontology. In other words, the problem Digital Stockholm Syndrome takes up is this: what kind of theory of ontology, Being, and to a lesser extent, subjectivity, appeals equally to contemporary philosophers and Silicon Valley tech-gurus? Jarzombek gestures toward such an inquiry early on: “What is this new ontology?” he asks, and “What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of the new Self?” (x).

    A curious set of related philosophical commitments united by their efforts to “de-center” and occasionally even eject “anthropocentrism” from the critical conversation constitute some of the realities swirling around Jarzombek’s “new Self.”[4] Digital Stockholm Syndrome provocatively locates the conceptual legibility of these philosophical realities squarely within an explicitly algorithmic-computational historical milieu. By inviting such a comparison, Jarzombek’s book encourages us to contemplate how contemporary ontological thought might mediate our understanding of the historical and philosophical parallels that bind the tradition of in humanist philosophical thinking and the rhetoric of twenty-first century digital media.[5]

    In much the same way that Alexander Galloway has argued for a conceptual confluence that exceeds the contingencies of coincidence between “the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism” (347), Digital Stockholm Syndrome argues similarly that today’s world is “designed from the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological” (italics in original, x).[6] We now understand Being as the informatic/algorithmic byproduct of what ubiquitous computational technologies have gathered and subsequently fed back to us. Our personal histories––or simply the records of our data use (and its subsequent use of us)––comprise what Jarzombek calls our “ontic exhaust…or what data experts call our data exhaust…[which] is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like” (x).

    The empty second-person pronoun is placed on equal ontological footing with, and perhaps even defined by, its credit score, medical records, 4G data usage, Facebook likes, and threefold of its Tweets. “The purpose of these ‘devices,’” Jarzombek writes, “is to produce, magnify, and expose our ontic exhaust” (25). We give our ontic exhaust away for free every time we log into Facebook because it, in return, feeds back to us the only sense of “self” we are able to identify as “me.”[7] If “who we are cannot be traced from the human side of the equation, much less than the analytic side.‘I’ am untraceable” (31), then why do techno-determinists and contemporary oracles of ontology operate otherwise? What accounts for their shared commitment to formalizing ontology? Why must the Self be tracked and accounted for like a map or a ledger?

    As this “new Self,” which Jarzombek calls the “Being-Global” (2), travels around the world and checks its bank statement in Paris or tags a photo of a Facebook friend in Berlin while sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, it leaks ontic exhaust everywhere it goes. While the hoovering up of ontic exhaust by GPS and commercial satellites “make[s] us global,” it also inadvertently redefines Being as a question of “positioning/depositioning” (1). For Jarzombek, the question of today’s ontology is not so much a matter of asking “what exists?” but of asking “where is it and how can it be found?” Instead of the human who attempts to locate and understand Being, now Being finds us, but only as long as we allow ourselves to be located.

    Today’s ontological thinking, Jarzombek points out, is not really interested in asking questions about Being––it is too “anthropocentric.”[8] Ontology in the twenty-first century attempts to locate Being by gathering data, keeping track, tracking changes, taking inventory, making lists, listing litanies, crunching the numbers, and searching the database. “Can I search for it on Google?” is now the most important question for ontological thought in the twenty-first century.

    Ontological thinking––which today means ontological accounting, or finding ways to account for the ontologically actuarial––is today’s philosophical equivalent to a best practices for data management, except there is no difference between one’s data and one’s Self. Nonetheless, any ontological difference that might have once stubbornly separated you from data about you no longer applies. Digital Stockholm Syndrome identifies this shift with the formulation: “From ontology to trackology” (71).[9] The philosophical shift that has allowed data about the Self to become the ontological equivalent to the Self emerges out of what Jarzombek calls an “animated ontology.”

    In this “animated ontology,” subject position and object position are indistinguishable…The entire system of humanity is microprocessed through the grid of sequestered empiricism” (31, 29). Jarzombek is careful to distinguish his “animated ontology” from the recently rebooted romanticisms which merely turn their objects into vibrant subjects. He notes that “the irony is that whereas the subject (the ‘I’) remains relatively stable in its ability to self-affirm (the lingering by-product of the psychologizing of the modern Self), objectivity (as in the social sciences) collapses into the illusions produced by the global cyclone of the informatic industry” (28).”[10] By devising tricky new ways to flatten ontology (all of which are made via po-faced linguistic fiat), “the human and its (dis/re-)embodied computational signifiers are on equal footing”(32). I do not define my data, but my data define me.

    ***

    Digital Stockholm Syndrome asserts that what exists in today’s ontological systems––systems both philosophical and computational––is what can be tracked and stored as data. Jarzombek sums up our situation with another pithy formulation: “algorithmic modeling + global positioning + human scaling +computational speed=data geopolitics” (12). While the universalization of tracking technologies defines the “global” in Jarzombek’s Being-Global, it also provides us with another way to understand the humanities’ enthusiasm for GIS and other digital mapping platforms as institutional-disciplinary expressions of a “bio-chemo-techno-spiritual-corporate environment that feeds the Human its sense-of-Self” (5).

    Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    One wonders if the incessant cultural and political reminders regarding the humanities’ waning relevance have moved humanists to reconsider the very basic intellectual terms of their broad disciplinary pursuits. How come it is humanities scholars who are in some cases most visibly leading the charge to overturn many decades of humanist thought? Has the internalization of this depleted conception of the human reshaped the basic premises of humanities scholarship, Digital Stockholm Syndrome wonders? What would it even mean to pursue a “humanities” purged of “the human?” And is it fair to wonder if this impoverished image of humanity has trickled down into the formation of new (sub)disciplines?”[11]

    In a late chapter titled “Onto-Paranoia,” Jarzombek finally arrives at a working definition of Digital Stockholm Syndrome: data visualization. For Jarzombek, data-visualization “has been devised by the architects of the digital world” to ease the existential torture—or “onto-torture”—that is produced by Security Threats (59). Security threats are threatening because they remind us that “security is there to obscure the fact that whole purpose is to produce insecurity” (59). When a system fails, or when a problem occurs, we need to be conscious of the fact that the system has not really failed; “it means that the system is working” (61).[12] The Social, the Other, the Not-Me—these are all variations of the same security threat, which is just another way of defining “indeterminacy” (66). So if everything is working the way it should, we rarely consider the full implications of indeterminacy—both technical and philosophical—because to do so might make us paranoid, or worse: we would have to recognize ourselves as (in)human subjects.

    Data-visualizations, however, provide a soothing salve which we can (self-)apply in order to ease the pain of our “onto-torture.” Visualizing data and creating maps of our data use provide us with a useful and also pleasurable tool with which we locate ourselves in the era of “post-ontology.”[13] “We experiment with and develop data visualization and collection tools that allow us to highlight urban phenomena. Our methods borrow from the traditions of science and design by using spatial analytics to expose patterns and communicating those results, through design, to new audiences,” we are told by one data-visualization project (http://civicdatadesignlab.org/).  As we affirm our existence every time we travel around the globe and self-map our location, we silently make our geo-data available for those who care to sift through it and turn it into art or profit.

    “It is a paradox that our self-aestheticizing performance as subjects…feeds into our ever more precise (self-)identification as knowable and predictable (in)human-digital objects,” Jarzombek writes. Yet we ought not to spend too much time contemplating the historical and philosophical complexities that have helped create this paradoxical situation. Perhaps it is best we do not reach the conclusion that mapping the Self as an object on digital platforms increases the creeping unease that arises from the realization that we are mappable, hackable, predictable, digital objects––that our data are us. We could, instead, celebrate how our data (which we are and which is us) is helping to change the world. “’Big data’ will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” the same data visualization project announces on its website’s homepage.

    While it is true that I may be a little paranoid, I have finally rested easy after having read Digital Stockholm Syndrome because I now know that my data/I are going to good use.[14] Like me, maybe you find comfort in knowing that your existence is nothing more than a few pixels in someone else’s data visualization.

    _____

    Michael Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in symplokē and the Journal of Film and Video.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] I am reminded of a similar argument advanced by Tung-Hui Hu in his A Prehistory of the Cloud (2016). Encapsulating Flusser’s spirit of healthy skepticism toward technical apparatuses, the situation that both Flusser and Hu fear is one in which “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation” (xixx).

    [2] It is not my aim to wade explicitly into discussions regarding “object-oriented ontology” or other related philosophical developments. For the purposes of this essay, however, Andrew Cole’s critique of OOO as a “new occasionalism” will be useful. “’New occasionalism,’” Cole writes, “is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves” (112). In other words, the speaking of objects makes them objectively real, though this is only possible when everything is considered to be an object. The question, though, is not about what is or is not an object, but is rather what it means to be. For related arguments regarding the relation between OOO/speculative realism/new materialism and mysticism, see Sheldon (2016), Altieri (2016), Wolfendale (2014), O’Gorman (2013), and to a lesser extent Colebrook (2013).

    [3] For the full set of references here, see Bennett (2010), Hayles (2014 and 2016), and Hansen (2015).

    [4] While I cede that no thinker of “post-humanism” worth her philosophical salt would admit the possibility or even desirability of purging the sins of “correlationism” from critical thought all together, I cannot help but view such occasional posturing with a skeptical eye. For example, I find convincing Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s recent essay “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Negotiations, Collisions,” in which she compares the drive in contemporary critical theory to displace “the human” from humanistic inquiry to the impossible and equally incomprehensible task of overcoming the “‘astro’-centrism of astronomy or the biocentrism of biology” (359).

    [5] In “Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Julian Murphet identifies four interrelated strands of post- or inhumanist thought that combine a kind of metaphysical speculation with a full-blown demolition of traditional ontology’s conceptual foundations. They are: “(1) cosmic nihilism, (2) molecular bio-plasticity, (3) technical accelerationism, and (4) animality. These sometimes overlapping trends are severally engaged in the mortification of humankind’s stubborn pretensions to mastery over the domain of the intelligible and the knowable in an era of sentient machines, routine genetic modification, looming ecological disaster, and irrefutable evidence that we share 99 percent of our biological information with chimpanzees” (653).

    [6] The full quotation from Galloway’s essay reads: “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? [….] Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?” (347). Digital Stockholm Syndrome begins by accepting Galloway’s provocations as descriptive instead of speculative. We do not necessarily wonder in 2017 if “there is a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business”; we now wonder instead how such a confluence came to be.

    [7] Wendy Hui Kyun Chun makes a similar point in her 2016 monograph Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. She writes, “If users now ‘curate’ their lives, it is because their bodies have become archives” (x-xi). While there is not ample space here to discuss the  full theoretical implications of her book, Chun’s discussion of the inherently gendered dimension to confession, self-curation as self-exposition, and online privacy as something that only the unexposed deserve (hence the need for preemptive confession and self-exposition on the internet) in digital/social media networks is tremendously relevant to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, as both texts consider the Self as a set of mutable and “marketable/governable/hackable categories” (Jarzombek 26) that are collected without our knowledge and subsequently fed back to the data/media user in the form of its own packaged and unique identity. For recent similar variations of this argument, see Simanowski (2017) and McNeill (2012).

    I also think Chun’s book offers a helpful tool for thinking through recent confessional memoirs or instances of “auto-theory” (fictionalized or not) like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), and perhaps to a lesser degree Tao Lin’s Richard Yates (2010), Taipei (2013), Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). The extent to which these texts’ varied formal-aesthetic techniques can be said to be motivated by political aims is very much up for debate, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that many of them revel in the reveal. That is to say, via confession or self-exposition, many of these novels enact the allegedly performative subversion of political power by documenting their protagonists’ and/or narrators’ certain social/political acts of transgression. Chun notes, however, that this strategy of self-revealing performs “resistance as a form of showing off and scandalizing, which thrives off moral outrage. This resistance also mimics power by out-spying, monitoring, watching, and bringing to light, that is, doxing” (151). The term “autotheory,” which was has been applied to Nelson’s The Argonauts in particular, takes on a very different meaning in this context. “Autotheory” can be considered as a theory of the self, or a self-theorization, or perhaps even the idea that personal experience is itself a kind of theory might apply here, too. I wonder, though, how its meaning would change if the prefix “auto” was understood within a media-theoretical framework not as “self” but as “automation.” “Autotheory” becomes, then, an automatization of theory or theoretical thinking, but also a theoretical automatization; or more to the point: what if “autotheory” describes instead a theorization of the Self or experience wherein “the self” is only legible as the product of automated computational-algorithmic processes?

    [8] Echoing the critiques of “correlationism” or “anthropocentrism” or what have you, Jarzombek declares that “The age of anthrocentrism is over” (32).

    [9] Whatever notion of (self)identity the Self might find to be most palatable today, Jarzombek argues, is inevitably mediated via global satellites. “The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global–what make me global” (1), and as such, they represent the “civilianization” of military technologies (4). What I am trying to suggest is that the concepts and categories of self-identity we work with today are derived from the informatic feedback we receive from long-standing military technologies.

    [10] Here Jarzombek seems to be suggesting that the “object” in the “objectivity” of “the social sciences” has been carelessly conflated with the “object” in “object-oriented” philosophy. The prioritization of all things “objective” in both philosophy and science has inadvertently produced this semantic and conceptual slippage. Data objects about the Self exist, and thus by existing, they determine what is objective about the Self. In this new formulation, what is objective about the Self or subject, in other words, is what can be verified as information about the self. In Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014), Ronald Day argues that these global tracking technologies supplant traditional ontology’s “ideas or concepts of our human manner of being” and have in the process “subsume[d] and subvert[ed] the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social beings and politics” (1). While such technologies might be said to obliterate “traditional” notions of subjectivity, judgment, and critique, Day demonstrates how this simultaneous feeding-forward and feeding back of data-about-the-Self represents the return of autoaffection, though in his formulation self-presence is defined as information or data-about-the-self whose authenticity is produced when it is fact-checked against a biographical database (3)—self-presence is a presencing of data-about-the-Self. This is all to say that the Self’s informational “aboutness”–its representation in and as data–comes to stand in for the Self’s identity, which can only be comprehended as “authentic” in its limited metaphysical capacity as a general informatic or documented “aboutness.”

    [11] Flusser is again instructive on this point, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way­­. Drawing attention to the strange unnatural plurality in the term “humanities,” he writes, “The American term humanities appropriately describes the essence of these disciplines. It underscores that the human being is an unnatural animal” (2002, 3). The plurality of “humanities,” as opposed to the singular “humanity,” constitutes for Flusser a disciplinary admission that not only the category of “the human” is unnatural, but that the study of such an unnatural thing is itself unnatural, as well. I think it is also worth pointing out that in the context of Flusser’s observation, we might begin to situate the rise of “the supplemental humanities” as an attempt to redefine the value of a humanities education. The spatial humanities, the energy humanities, medical humanities, the digital humanities, etc.—it is not difficult to see how these disciplinary off-shoots consider themselves as supplements to whatever it is they think “the humanities” are up to; regardless, their institutional injection into traditional humanistic discourse will undoubtedly improve both(sub)disciplines, with the tacit acknowledgment being that the latter has just a little more to gain from the former in terms of skills, technical know-how, and data management. Many thanks to Aaron Jaffe for bringing this point to my attention.

    [12] In his essay “Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency,” Yuk Hui notes that “the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle” (125). Drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler, Hui shows how the pharmacological dimension of “technics, which aims to overcome contingency, also generates accidents” (127). And so “as the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle…it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature” (132). Simply put, by placing algorithmic catastrophe on par with a failure of reason qua the operations of mathematics, Hui demonstrates how “algorithms are open to contingency” only insofar as “contingency is equivalent to a causality, which can be logically and technically deduced” (136). To take Jarzombek’s example of the failing computer or what have you, while the blue screen of death might be understood to represent the faithful execution of its programmed commands, we should also keep in mind that the obverse of Jarzombek’s scenario would force us to come to grips with how the philosophical implications of the “shit happens” logic that underpins contingency-as-(absent) causality “accompanies and normalizes speculative aesthetics” (139).

    [13] I am reminded here of one of the six theses from the manifesto “What would a floating sheep map?,” jointly written by the Floating Sheep Collective, which is a cohort of geography professors. The fifth thesis reads: “Map or be mapped. But not everything can (or should) be mapped.” The Floating Sheep Collective raises in this section crucially important questions regarding ownership of data with regard to marginalized communities. Because it is not always clear when to map and when not to map, they decide that “with mapping squarely at the center of power struggles, perhaps it’s better that not everything be mapped.” If mapping technologies operate as ontological radars–the Self’s data points help point the Self towards its own ontological location in and as data—then it is fair to say that such operations are only philosophically coherent when they are understood to be framed within the parameters outlined by recent iterations of ontological thinking and its concomitant theoretical deflation of the rich conceptual make-up that constitutes the “the human.” You can map the human’s data points, but only insofar as you buy into the idea that points of data map the human. See http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.

    [14] “Mind/paranoia: they are the same word!”(Jarzombek 71).

    _____

    Works Cited

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    • Altieri, Charles. “Are We Being Materialist Yet?” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016):241-57.
    • Calloway, Marie. what purpose did i serve in your life. Tyrant Books, 2013.
    • Chun, Wendy Hui Kyun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016.
    • Cohen, Joshua. Book of Numbers. Random House, 2015.
    • Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies.” minnesota review 80 (2013): 106-118.
    • Colebrook, Claire. “Hypo-Hyper-Hapto-Neuro-Mysticism.” Parrhesia 18 (2013).
    • Day, Ronald. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. The MIT Press, 2014.
    • Floating Sheep Collective. “What would a floating sheep map?” http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.
    • Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
    • –––. The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication. 1975. Metaflux, 2016.
    • –––. Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl. Translated by Erik Eisel. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
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    • Hansen, Mark B.N. Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Duke University Press, 2015.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014):199-220.
    • –––. “The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 42 (Summer 2016): 783-808.
    • Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations.” Common Knowledge  22.3 (2016):353-72.
    • Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Picador, 2010.
    • Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2016.
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    • Hui, Yuk. “Algorithmic Catastrophe–The Revenge of Contingency.” Parrhesia 23(2015): 122-43.
    • Jarzombek, Mark. Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
    • Lin, Tao. Richard Yates. Melville House, 2010.
    • –––. Taipei. Vintage, 2013.
    • McNeill, Laurie. “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82.
    • Murphet, Julian. “A Modest Proposal for the Inhuman.” Modernism/Modernity 23.3(2016): 651-70.
    • Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf P, 2015.
    • O’Gorman, Marcel. “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18.1 (2013): 31-43.
    • Rosenberg, Jordana. “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” Theory and Event 17.2 (2014):  n.p.
    • Sheldon, Rebekah. “Dark Correlationism: Mysticism, Magic, and the New Realisms.” symplokē 24.1-2 (2016): 137-53.
    • Simanowski, Roberto. “Instant Selves: Algorithmic Autobiographies on Social Network Sites.” New German Critique 44.1 (2017): 205-216.
    • Stagg, Natasha. Surveys. Semiotext(e), 2016.
    • Wolfendale, Peter. Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Urbanomic, 2014.
  • Ben Murphy – The Universes of Speculative Realism: A Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

    Ben Murphy – The Universes of Speculative Realism: A Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism

    Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (2014)

    Reviewed by Ben Murphy

    Steven Shaviro begins The Universe of Things (2014) promising a “new look” at Alfred North Whitehead “in light of” speculative realism. The terms of this preface ought to be reversed though, since what follows Shaviro’s introduction is actually a “new look” at speculative realism “in light of” some Whiteheadean ideas. This distinction is important: readers should not seek out The Universe of Things for an introduction to Whitehead qua Whitehead or even a “new look” at Whitehead vis-à-vis current issues of cultural and critical analysis. (Indeed, better options along these lines include, respectively, Shaviro’s own earlier book, Without Criteria (2009), and the more recent University of Minnesota Press collection The Lure of Whitehead (2014).) Universe, on the other hand, is better described as an attempt to map the cumulative geography of speculative realism, a philosophical movement which Shaviro stresses should be referred to in the plural: speculative realisms. Speculative realisms (and its sibling endeavors like object oriented ontology and new materialism) are perpetually in search of heterodox traditions and forgotten figures—philosophical antecedents sought for foundational credence and inspiration. And in this sense Shaviro’s incorporation of Whitehead is the latest in a lengthening line: Graham Harman recuperates a certain version of Heidegger, Jane Bennett returns to Spinoza and Bergson (among others), and, more far afield still, Ian Hamilton Grant champions Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But if these and other thinkers raid the archive to consolidate new and distinct philosophical templates, Shaviro’s survey is decidedly more evaluative than constructive. Working Whitehead into the cracks of speculative realism, Shaviro widens that movement’s internal fractures in order to expose, and at most nuance—rather than overturn, reverse, or revamp—its prevailing assumptions.

    Shaviro’s critical take on speculative realism relies on two recurring moves: first, an overarching unification and, second, a subsidiary distinction. First, in the name of unity, Shaviro stresses that speculative realisms hold in common a core desire to step outside what he—following French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux—calls the correlationist circle. As reiterated by Shaviro, the primary target implied by this phrase is Kant’s position that the world is only knowable and approachable through thought. “We” can never grasp an object “in itself” or “for itself” in isolation from its relation to us, the thinking subjects. This insistence means that any account of the world and reality is fundamentally an account of the world and reality as accessed through and by human thought. Speculative realisms are unified in wanting to get beyond this self-reflexive loop. Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Ian Hamilton Grant (the school’s four founding fathers)—as well as fellow travelers—shed the correlationist straight jacket by theorizing (or, better, speculating) about the real world, the world of the “great outdoors” (another Meillasoux coinage) or, as Eugene Thacker puts it in his “horror of philosophy” series, the world “without us.” (For a very different account which disputes whether “correlationism” refers to a fair or even a meaningful reading of Kant, see David Golumbia’s “’Correlationism’: The Dogma that Never Was,” recently published in bounday 2.) As Shaviro notes, there’s a timeliness to this “anti-correlationist” critique, since casting the philosophical net beyond the circumscribing human mind seems a deadly serious endeavor in the face of impending ecological catastrophe. Still, the warming planet is just the most obvious and palatable hook that initiates what Shaviro calls the “changed climate of thought” (4) recently amenable to speculative realism. And if both new materialism and object oriented ontology are more prone to non- or para-academic environmental and ecological interventions, then speculative realism is more interested in revisiting and recasting the history of philosophy.

    A commitment to outfoxing correlationism unites speculative realism, but Shaviro’s second move—that of division—hinges on pinpointing the particular strategies employed to achieve this revisionary project. Repeatedly in Universe, Shaviro splits speculative realism into two main factions. On the one hand, Meillasoux and Brassier pursue lines of thought that Shaviro calls “eliminativist”: for these admittedly nihilistic thinkers, correlationism is undone by the revelation that thought is “epiphenomenal, illusory, and entirely without efficacy” (73)—that thought doesn’t rightly and necessarily belong anywhere in the universe. For Shaviro, Brassier goes further in approaching the “extinction of thought” than Meillasoux, who saves thought from complete elimination by introducing a deus ex machina according to which thought and life emerge “ex nihilo” and simultaneously from a universe previously devoid of both (76). The contrast to this first faction is found in Harman, Grant, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. Instead of proposing that thought is fundamentally inimical to the universe, this coalition of speculative realism wagers that agency and thought are everywhere. Positing the “sheer ubiquity of thought in the cosmos” (82), this position reaches its apotheosis for Shaviro in a panpsychic vision where all things—animate and otherwise—are sentient (if perhaps not exactly conscious). Shaviro places himself in this second faction only after making a further distinction that separates him from Harman in particular. Whereas Harman, according to Shaviro, stresses the withdrawn nature of objects—withdrawn in the sense that the object must always “recede” from its relations (30)—Shaviro joins Whitehead (and Latour) in making a distinction between epistemological withdrawnness and ontological relations (see 105). Where an object may always hold something in reserve from what is knowable to the perceiving mind (as Harman insists), even this measure of the object that is reserved may be affected and changed by modes of contact that elude knowledge and understanding. Because of “vicarious causation” and “immanent, noncognitive contact” (138, 148) (a mode of contact that Shaviro never satisfactorily distinguishes from more popular usages of the term “affect”), an “occult process of influence” occurs that is “outside” any correlation between “subject and object, or knower and known” (148). The object, then, is not so utterly withdrawn as Harman’s narrowly epistemological account suggests. So between eleminativism and panpsychicism as extremes of the speculative realism spectrum, Shaviro says, we’re faced with a “basic choice” (83).

    Describing correlationism and the various offerings to get beyond it is standard fare for speculative realism. But what Universe lacks in originality it compensates for with breadth of analysis and consistently careful, patient exposition. Shaviro admirably treats a wide swath of speculative realists (plus quite a few philosophical giants from both continental and analytical traditions), and he does so with a tone perpetually modulated for utter clarity. Absent is any of the obfuscating rhetoric or over-the-top claims that one might expect from someone who sets out to correct Kant. In part Shaviro’s achievement stems from his own outsider status. His rich body of academic work—on everything from film studies to music video aesthetics to sci-fi infused accelerationism—as well as the light touch on display here and throughout his superb and eclectic online presence (see: http://www.shaviro.com/) stand him in good stead as a welcome interlocutor and guide. Approaching speculative realism as a kindred but not coincident thinker, he’s able to recapitulate his own coming-to-terms with ideas in a way that translates well to other sympathetic non-initiates.

    Apart from style and tone, though, Shaviro’s approach is also commendable for a self-avowed pragmatism of ideas. In an aside in the first chapter, Shaviro applauds Isabelle Stengers for the insight that “the construction of metaphysical concepts always addresses certain particular, situated needs” (33). “The concepts that a philosopher produces,” Shaviro continues, “depend on the problems to which he or she is responding. Every thinker is motivated by the difficulties that cry out to him or to her, demanding a response” (33). While a fair representation of Shaviro’s own admirably simple and workmanlike prose, these statements also epitomize the generous spirit that urges Universe. Shaviro is careful to explain the fruits and situational benefits of every idea that he treats, perhaps especially those ideas that he wants to challenge—an attractive way of grounding philosophical ideas which, being speculative by definition, sometimes feel quite flighty.

    The discussion of panpsychism that spans chapters four and five is the most exciting and original element of Universe. In part this is because it draws on a body of work in cognitive science and the philosophy of biology that Shaviro knows well and that is fresh fodder for discussions of speculative realism. His discussion in this section also has the added charm of giving itself over to the speculative freedoms afforded to speculative realism itself. As Shaviro recognizes, speculative realism is at its best when it joins with speculative fiction in the common task of “extrapolation” (10). Thus in considering panpsychism we’re teased with the notion that slime molds have thoughts (88). Less bogged down by the minutia of distinctions between this SR thinker and that, Shaviro joins a more diverse group of thinkers to consider, for instance, Thomas Nagel’s question about what it’s like to be a bat. Well aware of the absurdities attendant to a truly panpsychic vision, Shaviro lets speculation carry the day, and it’s a pleasure to follow him through a romp that ties the questions of speculative realism to a longer intellectual tradition of sometimes strange twists and turns.

    Also helpful and fresh for speculative realism—although somewhat hard to square with the rest of this book—is Shaviro’s first chapter, which shows how Emmanuel Levinas helps us appreciate speculative realism even as Whitehead’s “aesthetic” mode of “contrast” departs from Levinas’ “ethical” encounter with the Other. Where for Levinas the encounter trumps self-concern, for Whitehead both self-concern (or “self-enjoyment”) and “concern” for the Other are poles best understand in balancing counterpoint (rather than conflict). Apart from being the most detailed analysis of Whitehead’s thought—and, indeed, his thought as it changed in his long arc of writing—this opening account is valuable for SR in arguing that a commitment to circumventing correlationism need not be an ethical project in the traditional sense. In other words, in Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead, a philosophy geared towards the object world “without us” isn’t premised on care. The problem here and elsewhere in Universe, though, is the fuzzy usage of the term “aesthetic.” As I’ve suggested, chapter one deploys this term opposite Levinasian ethics in a frustratingly negative mode of definition: aesthetics is said to be what is not ethics. While gaining some clarification in the volume’s titular chapter (see 52-54), the aesthetic remains unclear even when given new treatment in a discussion of Kant that occupies the last ten pages of the book. Here “aesthetic” is set against knowledge (or epistemology) rather than ethics, and, as my discussion of Shaviro’s disagreement with Harman suggests, “aesthetic” comes to mean something like noncognitive contact, or “affect.” If these disparate senses of the “aesthetic” are related or even mutually inclusive, Shaviro doesn’t do enough to show how.

    For all its merits, Universe suffers heavily from being stuck between monograph and essay collection. One searches in vain for the absent promise that the book’s chapters can be read collectively or in isolation, approached in order or at random. Such a promise, at least, would admit that the chapters don’t serially build to anything in particular. Lacking this or any other clues from Shaviro, though, we’re faced with seven relatively short offerings that loop back on one another with frustratingly little meta-commentary. Much of the mapping of speculative realism as I’ve described it above via unification and division, for instance, appears essentially verbatim in chapters two, six, and seven. The treatment of Harman—both agreement and disagreement—in particular makes continual reappearance. The same could be said of the discussion of panpsychism, which is interesting the first and perhaps even second time but quickly turns suspect as it is recycled through chapters three, four, and five with only the trimmings changed. The mere fact that bits of argument can appear at the beginning and end of the book in essentially the same form (and with Shaviro seemingly unaware of such repetitions) leaves the reader wondering about the value of a journey that feels constrained to a treadmill. A more cynical reader might look to, and find answer in the book’s editorial meta-data, which reveals that the first three chapters are previously published. Insofar as Universe excels at any one thing, then, it may be at academic entrepreneurialism—a feat of (re)publishing in which a triplet of core essays are surrounded with the sort of rhetorical packing peanuts which actually detract from ideas that would be more forceful as standalone articles. The reader already deep inside the sweep of SR may find plenty in this extended cut edition, but those more casually interested will be better served to read independently (as interests dictate) “Self-Enjoyment and Concern” (on Whitehead, Levinas, and SR), “The Actual Volcano” (Shaviro’s primary disagreement with Harman), and “The Universe of Things” (a broad strokes and bouncy introduction to the promises and riddles of SR, new materialism, and object ontology). Each has gems of insight owed to Shaviro’s exhaustive research, and reading them apart from one another—perhaps even in their original contexts—would lessen the rather tiresome burden of trying to figure out how they all fit together.

    Ben Murphy is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on 19th and 20th century American literature, the history and philosophy of science, and critical theory. His essay on James Dickey’s Deliverance and film adaptation is forthcoming from Mississippi Quarterly (2017), and you can also find his writing at ETHOS: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics and The Carolina Quarterly. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/ben-murphy

  • Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    Bradley J. Fest – The Function of Videogame Criticism

    a review of Ian Bogost, How to Talk about Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

    by Bradley J. Fest

    ~

    Over the past two decades or so, the study of videogames has emerged as a rigorous, exciting, and transforming field. During this time there have been a few notable trends in game studies (which is generally the name applied to the study of video and computer games). The first wave, beginning roughly in the mid-1990s, was characterized by wide-ranging debates between scholars and players about what they were actually studying, what aspects of videogames were most fundamental to the medium.[1] Like arguments about whether editing or mise-en-scène was more crucial to the meaning-making of film, the early, sometimes heated conversations in the field were primarily concerned with questions of form. Scholars debated between two perspectives known as narratology and ludology, and asked whether narrative or play was more theoretically important for understanding what makes videogames unique.[2] By the middle of the 2000s, however, this debate appeared to be settled (as perhaps ultimately unproductive and distracting—i.e., obviously both narrative and play are important). Over the past decade, a second wave of scholars has emerged who have moved on to more technical, theoretical concerns, on the one hand, and more social and political issues, on the other (frequently at the same time). Writers such as Patrick Crogan, Nick Dyer-Witherford, Alexander R. Galloway, Patrick Jagoda, Lisa Nakamura, Greig de Peuter, Adrienne Shaw, McKenzie Wark, and many, many others write about how issues such as control and empire, race and class, gender and sexuality, labor and gamification, networks and the national security state, action and procedure can pertain to videogames.[3] Indeed, from a wide sampling of contemporary writing about games, it appears that the old anxieties regarding the seriousness of its object have been put to rest. Of course games are important. They are becoming a dominant cultural medium; they make billions of dollars; they are important political allegories for life in the twenty-first century; they are transforming social space along with labor practices; and, after what many consider a renaissance in independent game development over the past decade, some of them are becoming quite good.

    Ian Bogost has been one of the most prominent voices in this second wave of game criticism. A media scholar, game designer, philosopher, historian, and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has published a number of influential books. His first, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006), places videogames within a broader theoretical framework of comparative media studies, emphasizing that games deserve to be approached on their own terms, not only because they are worthy of attention in and of themselves but also because of what they can show us about the ways other media operate. Bogost argues that “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, computational—can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these general instances of procedural expression, unit operations” (2006, 9). His second book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007), extends his emphasis on the material, discrete processes of games, arguing that they can and do make arguments; that is, games are rhetorical, and they are rhetorical by virtue of what they and their operator can do, their procedures: games make arguments through “procedural rhetoric.”[4] The publication of Persuasive Games in particular—which he promoted with an appearance on The Colbert Report (2005–14)—saw Bogost emerge as a powerful voice in the broad cohort of second wave writers and scholars.

    But I feel that the publication of Bogost’s most recent book, How to Talk about Videogames (2015), might very well end up signaling the beginning of a third phase of videogame criticism. If the first task of game criticism was to formally define its object, and the second wave of game studies involved asking what games can and do say about the world, the third phase might see critics reflecting on their own processes and procedures, thinking, not necessarily about what videogames are and do, but about what videogame criticism is and does. How to Talk about Videogames is a book that frequently poses the (now quite old) question: what is the function of criticism at the present time? In an industry dominated by multinational media megaconglomerates, what should the role of (academic) game criticism be? What can a handful of researchers and scholars possibly do or say in the face of such a massive, implacable, profit-driven industry, where every announcement about future games further stokes its rabid fan base of slobbering, ravening hordes to spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours consuming a form known for its spectacular violence, ubiquitous misogyny, and myopic tribalism? What is the point of writing about games when the videogame industry appears to happily carry on as if nothing is being said at all, impervious to any conversation that people may be having about its products beyond what “fans” demand?

    To read the introduction and conclusion of Bogost’s most recent book, one might think that, suggestions about their viability aside, both the videogame industry and the critical writing surrounding it are in serious crisis, and the matter of the cultural status of the videogame has hardly been put to rest. As a scholar, critic, and designer who has been fairly consistent in positively exploring what digital games can do, what they can uniquely accomplish as a process-based medium, it is striking, at least to this reviewer, that Bogost begins by anxiously admitting,

    whenever I write criticism of videogames, someone strongly invested in games as a hobby always asks the question “is this parody?” as if only a miscreant or a comedian or a psychopath would bother to invest the time and deliberateness in even thinking, let alone writing about videogames with the seriousness that random, anonymous Internet users have already used to write about toasters, let alone deliberate intellectuals about film or literature! (Bogost 2015, xi–xii)

    Bogost calls this kind of attention to the status of his critical endeavor in a number of places in How to Talk about Videogames. The book shows him involved in that untimely activity of silently but implicitly assessing his body of work, reflectively approaching his critical task with cautious trepidation. In a variety of moments from the opening and closing of the book, games and criticism are put into serious question. Videogames are puerile, an “empty diversion” (182), and without value; “games are grotesque. . . . [they] are gross, revolting, heaps of arbitrary anguish” (1); “games are stupid” (9); “that there could be a game criticism [seems] unlikely and even preposterous” (181). In How to Talk about Videogames, Bogost, at least in some ways, is giving up his previous fight over whether or not videogames are serious aesthetic objects worthy of the same kind of hermeneutic attention given to more established art forms.[5] If games are predominantly treated as “perversion, excess” (183), a symptom of “permanent adolescence” (180), as unserious, wasteful, unproductive, violently sadistic entertainments—perhaps there is a reason. How to Talk about Videogames shows Bogost turning an intellectual corner toward a decidedly ironic sense of his role as a critic and the worthiness of his critical object.

    Compare Bogost’s current pessimism with the optimism of his previous volume, How to Do Things with Videogames (2011), to which How to Talk about Videogames functions as a kind of sequel or companion. In this earlier book, he is rather more affirmative about the future of the videogame industry (and, by proxy, videogame criticism):

    What if we allowed that videogames have many possible goals and purposes, each of which couples with many possible aesthetics and designs to create many possible player experiences, none of which bears any necessary relationship to the commercial videogame industry as we currently know it. The more games can do, the more the general public will become accepting of, and interested in, the medium in general. (Bogost 2011, 153)

    2011’s How to Do Things with Videogames aims to bring to the table things that previous popular and scholarly approaches to videogames had ignored in order to show all the other ways that videogames operate, what they are capable of beyond mere mimetic simulation or entertaining distraction, and how game criticism might allow their audiences to expand beyond the province of the “gamer” to mirror the diversified audiences of other media. Individual chapters are devoted to how videogames produce empathy and inspire reverence; they can be vehicles for electioneering and promotion; games can relax, titillate, and habituate; they can be work. Practicing what he calls “media microecology,” a critical method that “seeks to reveal the impact of a medium’s properties on society . . . through a more specialized, focused attention . . . digging deep into one dark, unexplored corner of a media ecosystem” (2011, 7), Bogost argues that game criticism should be attentive to more than simply narrative or play. The debates that dominated the early days of critical game studies, in this regard, only account for a rather limited view of what games can do. Appearing at a time when many were arguing that the medium was beginning to reach aesthetic maturity, Bogost’s 2011 book sounds a note of hope and promise for the future of game studies and the many unexplored possibilities for game design.

    How to Talk about Videogames

    I cannot really overstate, however, the ways in which How to Talk about Videogames, published four years later, shows Bogost reversing tack, questioning his entire enterprise.[6] Even with the appearance of such a serious, well-received game as Gone Home (2013)—to which he devotes a particularly scathing chapter about what the celebration of an ostensibly adolescent game tells us about contemporaneity—this is a book that repeatedly emphasizes the cultural ghetto in which videogames reside. Criticism devoted exclusively to this form risks being “subsistence criticism. . . . God save us from a future of game critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study” (188). Despite previous claims about videogames “[helping] us expose and interrogate the ways we engage the world in general, not just the ways that computational systems structure or limit that experience” (Bogost 2006, 40), How to Talk about Videogames is, at first glance, a book that raises the question of not only how videogames should be talked about, but whether they have anything to say in the first place.

    But it is difficult to gauge the seriousness of Bogost’s skepticism and reluctance given a book filled with twenty short essays of highly readable, informative, and often compelling criticism. (The disappointingly short essay, “The Blue Shell Is Everything That’s Wrong with America”—in which he writes: “This is the Blue Shell of collapse, the Blue Shell of financial hubris, the Blue Shell of the New Gilded Age” [26]—particularly stands out in the way that it reads an important if overlooked aspect of a popular game in terms of larger social issues.) For it is, really, somewhat unthinkable that someone who has written seven books on the subject would arrive at the conclusion that “videogames are a lot like toasters. . . . Like a toaster, a game is both appliance and hearth, both instrument and aesthetic, both gadget and fetish. It’s preposterous to do game criticism, like it’s preposterous to do toaster criticism” (ix and xii).[7] Bogost’s point here is rhetorical, erring on the side of hyperbole in order to emphasize how videogames are primarily process-based—that they work and function like toasters perhaps more than they affect and move like films or novels (a claim with which I imagine many would disagree), and that there is something preposterous in writing criticism about a process-based technology. A decade after emphasizing videogames’ procedurality in Unit Operations, this is a way for him to restate and reemphasize these important claims for the more popular audience intended for How to Talk about Videogames. Games involve actions, which make them different from other media that can be more passively absorbed. This is why videogames are often written about in reviews “full of technical details and thorough testing and final, definitive scores delivered on improbably precise numerical scales” (ix). Bogost is clear. He is not a reviewer. He is not assessing games’ ability to “satisfy our need for leisure [as] their only function.” He is a critic and the critic’s activity, even if his object resembles a toaster, is different.

    But though it is apparent why games might require a different kind of criticism than other media, what remains unclear is what Bogost believes the role of the critic ought to be. He says, contradicting the conclusion of How to Do Things with Videogames, that “criticism is not conducted to improve the work or the medium, to win over those who otherwise would turn up their noses at it. . . . Rather, it is conducted to get to the bottom of something, to grasp its form, context, function, meaning, and capacities” (xii). This seems like somewhat of a mistake, and a mistake that ignores both the history of criticism and Bogost’s own practice as a critic. Yes, of course criticism should investigate its object, but even Matthew Arnold, who emphasized “disinterestedness . . . keeping aloof from . . . ‘the practical view of things,’” also understood that such an approach could establish “a current of fresh and true ideas” (Arnold 1993 [1864], 37 and 49). No matter how disinterested, criticism can change the ways that art and the world are conceived and thought about. Indeed, only a sentence later it is difficult to discern what precisely Bogost believes the function of videogame criticism to be if not for improving the work, the medium, the world, if not for establishing a current from which new ideas might emerge. He writes that criticism can “venture so far from ordinariness of a subject that the terrain underfoot gives way from manicured path to wilderness, so far that the words that we would spin tousle the hair of madness. And then, to preserve that wilderness and its madness, such that both the works and our reflections on them become imbricated with one another and carried forward into the future where others might find them anew” (xii; more on this in a moment). It is clear that Bogost understands the mode of the critic to be disinterested and objective, to answer ‘the question ‘What is even going on here?’” (x), but it remains unclear why such an activity would even be necessary or worthwhile, and indeed, there is enough in the book that points to criticism being a futile, unnecessary, parodic, parasitic, preposterous endeavor with no real purpose or outcome. In other words, he may say how to talk about videogames, but not why anyone would ever really want to do so.

    I have at least partially convinced myself that Bogost’s claims about videogames being more like toasters than other art forms, along with the statements above regarding the disreputable nature of videogames, are meant as rhetorical provocations, ironic salvos to inspire from others more interesting, rigorous, thoughtful, and complex critical writing, both of the popular and academic stripe. I also understand that, as he did in Unit Operations, Bogost balks at the idea of a critical practice wholly devoted to videogames alone: “the era of fields and disciplines ha[s] ended. The era of critical communities ha[s] ended. And the very idea of game criticism risks Balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it” (187). But even given such an understanding, it is unclear who precisely is suggesting that videogame criticism should be a hermetically sealed niche cut off from the rest of the critical tradition. It is also unclear why videogame criticism is so preposterous, why writing it—even if a critic’s task is limited to getting “to the bottom of something”—is so divorced from the current of other works of cultural criticism. And finally, given what are, at the end of the day, some very good short essays on games that deserve a thoughtful readership, it is unclear why Bogost has framed his activity in such a negatively self-aware fashion.

    So, rather than pursue a discussion about the relative merits and faults of Bogost’s critical self-reflexivity, I think it worth asking what changed between his 2011 and 2015 books, what took him from being a cheerleader—albeit a reticent, tempered, and disinterested one—to questioning the very value of videogame criticism itself. Why does he change from thinking about the various possibilities for doing things with videogames to thinking that “entering a games retail outlet is a lot like entering a sex shop or a liquor store . . . game shops are still vaguely unseemly” (182)?[8] I suspect that such events as 2014’s Gamergate—when independent game designer Zoe Quinn, critic Anita Sarkeesian, and others were threatened and harassed for their feminist views—the generally execrable level of discourse found on internet comments pages, and the questionable cultural identity of the “gamer,” probably account for some of Bogost’s malaise.[9] Indeed, most of the essays found in How to Talk about Videogames initially appeared online, largely in The Atlantic (where he is an editor) and Gamasutra, and, I have to imagine, suffered for it in their comments sections. With this change in audience and platform, it seems to follow that the opening and closing of How to Talk about Videogames reflect a general exhaustion with the level of discourse from fans, companies, and internet trolls. How can criticism possibly thrive or have an impact in a community that so frequently demonstrates its intolerance and rage toward other modes of thinking and being that might upset its worldview and sense of cultural identity? How does one talk to those who will not listen?

    And if these questions perhaps sound particularly apt today—that the “gamer” might bear an awfully striking resemblance to other headline-grabbing individuals and groups dominating the public discussion in the months after the publication of Bogost’s book, namely Donald J. Trump and his supporters—they should. I agree with Bogost that it can be difficult to see the value of criticism at a time when many United States citizens appear, at least on the surface, to be actively choosing to be uncritical. (As Philip Mirowski argues, the promotion of “ignorance [is] the lynchpin in the neoliberal project” [2013, 96].) Given such a discursive landscape, what is the purpose of writing, even in Bogost’s admirably clear (yet at times maddeningly spare) prose, if no amount of stylistic precision or rhetorical complexity—let alone a mastery of basic facts—can influence one’s audience? How to Talk about Videogames is framed as a response to the anti-intellectual atmosphere of the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and it is an understandably despairing one. As such, it is not surprising that Bogost concludes that criticism has no role to play in improving the medium (or perhaps the world) beyond mere phenomenological encounter and description given the social fabric of life in the 2010s. In a time of vocally racist demagoguery, an era witnessing a rising tide of reactionary nationalism in the US and around the world, a period during which it often seems like no words of any kind can have any rhetorical effect at all—procedurally or otherwise—perhaps the best response is to be quiet. But I also think that this is to misunderstand the function of critical thought, regardless of what its object might be.

    To be sure, videogame creators have probably not yet produced a Citizen Kane (1941), and videogame criticism has not yet produced a work like Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). I am unconvinced, however, that such future accomplishments remain out of reach, that videogames are barred from profound aesthetic expression, and that writing about games preclude the heights attained by previous criticism simply because of some ill-defined aspect of the medium which prevents it from ever aspiring to anything beyond mere craft. Is a study of the Metal Gear series (1987–2015) similar to Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) really all that preposterous? Is Mario forever denied his own Samuel Johnson simply because he is composed of code rather than words? For if anything is unclear about Bogost’s book, it is what precisely prohibits videogames from having the effects and impacts of other art forms, why they are restricted to the realm of toasters, incapable of anything beyond adolescent poiesis. Indeed, Bogost’s informative and incisive discussion about Ms. Pac-Man (1981), his thought-provoking interpretation of Mountain (2014), or the many moments of accomplished criticism in his previous books—for example, his masterful discussion of the “figure of fascination” in Unit Operations—betray such claims.[10]

    Matthew Arnold once famously suggested that creativity and criticism were intimately linked, and I believe it might be worthwhile to remember this for the future of videogame criticism:

    It is the business of the critical power . . . “in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature. (Arnold 1993 [1864], 29)

    In other words, criticism has a vital role to play in the development of an art form, especially if an art form is experiencing contraction or stagnation. Whatever disagreements I might have with Arnold, I too believe that criticism and creativity are indissolubly linked, and further, that criticism has the power to shape and transform the world. Bogost says that “being a critic is not an enjoyable job . . . criticism is not pleasurable” (x). But I suspect that there may still be many who share Arnold’s view of criticism as a creative activity, and maybe the problem is not that videogame criticism is akin to preposterous toaster criticism, but that the function of videogame criticism at the present time is to expand its own sense of what it is doing, of what it is capable, of how and why it is written. When Bogost says he wants “words that . . . would . . . tousle the hair of madness,” why not write in such a fashion (Bogost’s controlled style rarely approaches madness), expanding criticism beyond mere phenomenological summary at best or zombified parasitism at worst. Consider, for instance, Jonathan Arac: “Criticism is literary writing that begins from previous literary writing. . . . There need not be a literary avant-garde for criticism to flourish; in some cases criticism itself plays a leading cultural role” (1989, 7). If we are to take seriously Bogost’s point about how the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Gone Home reveals the aesthetic and political impoverishment of the medium, then it is disappointing to see someone so well-positioned to take a leading cultural role in shaping the conversation about how videogames might change or transform surrendering the field.

    Forget analogies. What if videogame criticism were to begin not from comparing games to toasters but from previous writing, from the history of criticism, from literature and theory, from theories of art and architecture and music, from rhetoric and communication, from poetry? For, given the complex mediations present in even the simplest games—i.e., games not only involve play and narrative, but raise concerns about mimesis, music, sound, spatiality, sociality, procedurality, interface effects, et cetera—it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. If Bogost implores game critics not to limit themselves to a strictly bound, niche field uninformed by other spheres of social and cultural inquiry, if game studies is to go forward into a metacritical third wave where it can become interested in what makes videogames different from other forms and self-reflexively aware of the variety of established and interconnecting modes of cultural criticism from which the field can only benefit, then thinking about the function of criticism historically should guide how and why games are written about at the present time.

    Before concluding, I should also note that something else perhaps changed between 2011 and 2015, namely, Bogost’s alignment with the philosophical movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. In 2012, he published Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, a book that picks up some of the more theoretical aspects of Unit Operations and draws upon the work of Graham Harman and other anti-correlationists to pursue a flat ontology, arguing that the job of the philosopher “is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, their unit operations” (Bogost 2012, 34). Rather than continue pursuing an anthropocentric, correlationist philosophy that can only think about objects in relation to human consciousness, Bogost claims that “the answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude” (78). He suggests that philosophy should extend the possibility of phenomenological encounter to all objects, to all units, in his parlance; let phenomenology be alien and weird; let toasters encounter tables, refrigerators, books, climate change, Pittsburgh, Higgs boson particles, the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, bagels, et cetera.[11]

    Though this is not the venue to pursue a broader discussion of Bogost’s philosophical writing, I mention his speculative turn because it seems important for understanding his changing attitudes about criticism. That is, as Graham Harman’s 2012 essay, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” negatively demonstrates, it is unclear what a flat ontology has to say, if anything, about art, what such a philosophy can bring to critical, hermeneutic activity.[12] Indeed, regardless of where one stands with regard to object-oriented ontology and other speculative realisms, what these philosophies might offer to critics seems to be one of the more vexing and polarizing intellectual questions of our time. Hermeneutics may very well prove inescapably “correlationist,” and, indeed, no matter how disinterested, historical. It is an open question whether or not one can ground a coherent and worthwhile critical practice upon a flat ontology. I am tempted to suspect not. I also suspect that the current trends in continental philosophy, at the end of the day, may not be really interested in criticism as such, and perhaps that is not really such a big deal. Criticism, theory, and philosophy are not synonymous activities nor must they be. (The question about criticism vis-à-vis alien phenomenology also appears to have motivated the Object Lessons series that Bogost edits.) This is all to say, rather than ground videogame criticism in what may very well turn out to be an intellectual fad whose possibilities for writing worthwhile criticism remain somewhat dubious, perhaps there may be more ripe currents and streams—namely, the history of criticism—that can inform how we write about videogames. Criticism may be steered by keeping in view many polestars; let us not be overly swayed by what, for now, burns brightest. For an area of humanistic inquiry that is still very much emerging, it seems a mistake to assume it can and should be nothing more than toaster criticism.

    In this review I have purposefully made few claims about the state of videogames. This is partly because I do not feel that any more work needs to be done to justify writing about the medium. It is also partly because I feel that any broad statement about the form would be an overgeneralization at this point. There are too many games being made in too many places by too many different people for any all-encompassing statement about the state of videogame art to be all that coherent. (In this, I think Bogost’s sense of the need for a media microecology of videogames is still apropos.) But I will say that the state of videogame criticism—and, strangely enough, particularly the academic kind—is one of the few places where humanistic inquiry seems, at least to me, to be growing and expanding rather than contracting or ossifying. Such a generally positive and optimistic statement about a field of the humanities may not adhere to present conceptions about academic activity (indeed, it might even be unfashionable!), which seem to more generally despair about the humanities, and rightfully so. Admitting that some modes of criticism might be, at least in some ways, exhausted, would be an important caveat, especially given how the past few years have seen a considerable amount of reflection about contemporary modes of academic criticism—e.g., Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) or Eric Hayot’s “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do” (2014). But I think that, given how the anti-intellectual miasma that has long been present in US life has intensified in recent years, creeping into seemingly every discourse, one of the really useful functions of videogame criticism may very well be its potential ability to allow reflection on the function of criticism itself in the twenty-first century. If one of the most prominent videogame critics is calling his activity “preposterous” and his object “adolescent,” this should be a cause for alarm, for such claims cannot but help to perpetuate present views about the worthlessness of the humanities. So, I would like to modestly suggest that, rather than look to toasters and widgets to inform how we talk about videogames, let us look to critics and what they have written. Edward W. Said once wrote: “for in its essence the intellectual life—and I speak here mainly about the social sciences and the humanities—is about the freedom to be critical: criticism is intellectual life and, while the academic precinct contains a great deal in it, its spirit is intellectual and critical, and neither reverential nor patriotic” (1994, 11). If one can approach videogames—of all things!—in such a spirit, perhaps other spheres of human activity can rediscover their critical spirit as well.

    _____

    Bradley J. Fest will begin teaching writing this fall at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in boundary 2 (interviews here and here), Critical Quarterly, Critique, David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (Bloomsbury, 2014), First Person Scholar, The Silence of Fallout (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), Studies in the Novel, and Wide Screen. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), and a chapbook, “The Shape of Things,” was selected as finalist for the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize and is forthcoming in Verse. Recent poems have appeared in Empty Mirror, PELT, PLINTH, TXTOBJX, and Small Po(r)tions. He previously reviewed Alexander R. Galloway’s The Interface Effect for The b2 Review “Digital Studies.”

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    _____

    NOTES

    [1] On some of the first wave controversies, see Aarseth (2001).

    [2] For a representative sample of essays and books in the narratology versus ludology debate from the early days of academic videogame criticism, see Murray (1997 and 2004), Aarseth (1997, 2003, and 2004), Juul (2001), and Frasca (2003).

    [3] For representative texts, see Crogan (2011), Dyer-Witherford and Peuter (2009), Galloway (2006a and 2006b), Jagoda (2013 and 2016), Nakamura (2009), Shaw (2014), and Wark (2007). My claims about the vitality of the field of game studies are largely a result of having read these and other critics. There have also been a handful of interesting “videogame memoirs” published recently. See Bissell (2010) and Clune (2015).

    [4] Bogost defines procedurality as follows: “Procedural representation takes a different form than written or spoken representation. Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. . . . [It] is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language” (2007, 9). For my own discussion of proceduralism, particularly with regard to The Stanley Parable (2013) and postmodern metafiction, see Fest (forthcoming 2016).

    [5] For instance, in the concluding chapter of Unit Operations, Bogost writes powerfully and convincingly about the need for a comparative videogame criticism in conversation with other forms of cultural criticism, arguing that “a structural change in our thinking must take place for videogames to thrive, both commercially and culturally” (2006, 179). It appears that the lack of any structural change in the nonetheless wildly thriving—at least financially—videogame industry has given Bogost serious pause.

    [6] Indeed, at one point he even questions the justification for the book in the first place: “The truth is, a book like this one is doomed to relatively modest sales and an even more modest readership, despite the generous support of the university press that publishes it and despite the fact that I am fortunate enough to have a greater reach than the average game critic” (Bogost 2015, 185). It is unclear why the limited reach of his writing might be so worrisome to Bogost given that, historically, the audience for, say, poetry criticism has never been all that large.

    [7] In addition to those previously mentioned, Bogost has also published Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009) and, with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (2010). Also forthcoming is Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016).

    [8] This is, to be sure, a somewhat confusing point. Are not record stores, book stores, and video stores (if such things still exist), along with tea shops, shoe stores, and clothing stores “retail establishment[s] devoted to a singular practice” (Bogost 2015, 182–83)? Are all such establishments unseemly because of the same logic? What makes a game store any different?

    [9] For a brief overview of Gamergate, see Winfield (2014). For a more detailed discussion of both the cultural and technological underpinnings of Gamergate, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the algorithmic governance of sites such as Reddit or 4chan and online misogyny and harassment, see Massanari’s (2015) important essay. For links to a number of other articles and essays on gaming and feminism, see Ligman (2014) and The New Inquiry (2014). For essays about contemporary “gamer” culture, see Williams (2014) and Frase (2014). On gamers, Bogost writes in a chapter titled “The End of Gamers” from his previous book: “as videogames broaden in appeal, being a ‘gamer’ will actually become less common, if being a gamer means consuming games as one’s primary media diet or identifying with videogames as a primary part of one’s identity” (2011, 154).

    [10] See Bogost (2006, 73–89). Also, to be fair, Bogost devotes a paragraph of the introduction of How to Talk about Videogames to the considerable affective properties of videogames, but concludes the paragraph by saying that games are “Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-flavored chewing gum” (Bogost 2015, ix), which, I feel, considerably undercuts whatever aesthetic value he had just ascribed to them.

    [11] In Alien Phenomenology Bogost calls such lists “Latour litanies” (2012, 38) and discusses this stylistic aspect of object-oriented ontology at some length in the chapter, “Ontography” (35–59).

    [12] See Harman (2012). Bogost addresses such concerns in the conclusion of Alien Phenomenology, responding to criticism about his study of the Atari 2600: “The platform studies project is an example of alien phenomenology. Yet our efforts to draw attention to hardware and software objects have been met with myriad accusations of human erasure: technological determinism most frequently, but many other fears and outrages about ‘ignoring’ or ‘conflating’ or ‘reducing,’ or otherwise doing violence to ‘the cultural aspects’ of things. This is a myth” (2012, 132).

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    WORKS CITED

    • Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
    • ———. 2001. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html.
    • ———. 2003. “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis.” Game Approaches: Papers from spilforskning.dk Conference, August 28–29. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf.
    • ———. 2004. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Arac, Jonathan. 1989. Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Arnold, Matthew. 1993 (1864). “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini, 26–51. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    • Bissell, Tom. 2010. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon.
    • Bogost, Ian. 2006. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
    • ———. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2009. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT
    • Press.
    • ———. 2011. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. 2015. How to Talk about Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • ———. Forthcoming 2016. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books.
    • Bogost, Ian, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. 2010. Newsgames: Journalism at Play.
    • Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Clune, Michael W. 2015. Gamelife: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    • Crogan, Patrick. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Tehnoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Fest, Bradley J. Forthcoming 2016. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction.” “Videogame Adaptation,” edited by Kevin M. Flanagan, special issue, Wide Screen.
    • Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221–36. New York: Routledge.
    • Frase, Peter. 2014.  “Gamer’s Revanche.” Peter Frase (blog), September 3. http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/09/gamers-revanche/.
    • Galloway, Alexander R. 2006a. “Warcraft and Utopia.” Ctheory.net, February 16. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507.
    • ———. 2006b. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Harman, Graham. 2012. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43, no. 2: 183–203.
    • Hayot, Eric. 2014. “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1: 53–77.
    • Jagoda, Patrick. 2013. “Gamification and Other Forms of Play.” boundary 2 40, no. 2: 113–44.
    • ———. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Juul, Jesper. 2001. “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1, no. 1. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.
    • Ligman, Chris. 2014. “August 31st.” Critical Distance, August 31. http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/08/31/august-31st/.
    • Massanari, Adrienne . 2015. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society, OnlineFirst, October 9.
    • Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.
    • Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • ———. 2004. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 1–11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Nakamura, Lisa. 2009. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2: 128–44.
    • The New Inquiry. 2014. “TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.” New Inquiry, September 2. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
    • Said, Edward W. 1994. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler.” boundary 2 21, no. 3: 1–18.
    • Shaw, Adrienne. 2014. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Williams, Ian. “Death to the Gamer.” Jacobin, September 9. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/death-to-the-gamer/.
    • Winfield, Nick. 2014. “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” New York Times, October 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women-video-game-threats-anita-sarkeesian.html.

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  • Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)a review of William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)
    by Zachary Loeb
    ~

    Mountains and rivers, skyscrapers and dams – the world is filled with objects and structures that appear sturdy. Glancing upwards at a skyscraper, or mountain, a person may know that these obelisks will not remain eternally unchanged, but in the moment of the glance we maintain a certain casual confidence that they are not about to crumble suddenly. Yet skyscrapers collapse, mountains erode, rivers run dry or change course, and dams crack under the pressure of the waters they hold. Even equipped with this knowledge it is still tempting to view such structures as enduringly solid. Perhaps the residents of Lisbon, in November of 1755, had a similar faith in the sturdiness of the city they had built, a faith that was shattered in an earthquake – and aftershocks – that demonstrated all too terribly the fragility at the core of all physical things.

    The Lisbon earthquake, along with its cultural reverberations, provides the point of entry for William E. Connolly’s discussion of neoliberalism, ecology, activism, and the deceptive solidness of the world in his book The Fragility of Things. Beyond its relevance as an example of the natural tremors that can reduce the built world into rubble, the Lisbon earthquake provides Connolly (the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University), a vantage point from which to mark out and critique a Panglossian worldview he sees as prominent in contemporary society. No doubt, were Voltaire’s Pangloss alive today, he could find ready employment as an apologist for neoliberalism (perhaps as one of Silicon Valley’s evangelists). Like Panglossian philosophy, neoliberalism “acknowledges many evils and treats them as necessary effects” (6).

    Though the world has changed significantly since the mid-18th century during which Voltaire wrote, humanity remains assaulted by events that demonstrate the world’s fragility. Connolly councils against the withdrawal to which the protagonists of Candide finally consign themselves while taking up the famous trope Voltaire develops for that withdrawal; today we “cultivate our gardens” in a world in which the future of all gardens is uncertain. Under the specter of climate catastrophe, “to cultivate our gardens today means to engage the multiform relations late capitalism bears to the entire planet” (6). Connolly argues for an “ethic of cultivation” that can show “both how fragile the ethical life is and how important it is to cultivate it” (17). “Cultivation,” as developed in The Fragility of Things, stands in opposition to withdrawal. Instead it entails serious, ethically guided, activist engagement with the world – for us to recognize the fragility of natural, and human-made, systems (Connolly uses the term “force-fields”) and to act to protect this “fragility” instead of celebrating neoliberal risks that render the already precarious all the more tenuous.

    Connolly argues that when natural disasters strike, and often in their wake set off rippling cascades of additional catastrophes, they exemplify the “spontaneous order” so beloved by neoliberal economics. Under neoliberalism, the market is treated as though it embodies a uniquely omniscient, self-organizing and self-guiding principle. Yet the economic system is not the only one that can be described this way: “open systems periodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize one another” (25). Even in the so-called Anthropocene era the ecosystem, much to humanity’s chagrin, can still demonstrate creative and unpredictable potentialities. Nevertheless, the ideological core of neoliberalism relies upon celebrating the market’s self-organizing capabilities whilst ignoring the similar capabilities of governments, the public sphere, or the natural world. The ascendancy of neoliberalism runs parallel with an increase in fragility as economic inequality widens and as neoliberalism treats the ecosystem as just another profit source. Fragility is everywhere today, and though the cracks are becoming increasingly visible, it is still given – in Connolly’s estimation – less attention than is its due, even in “radical theory.” On this issue Connolly wonders if perhaps “radical theorists,” and conceivably radical activists, “fear that coming to terms with fragility would undercut the political militancy needed to respond to it?” (32). Yet Connolly sees no choice but to “respond,” envisioning a revitalized Left that can take action with a mixture of advocacy for immediate reforms while simultaneously building towards systemic solutions.

    Critically engaging with the thought of core neoliberal thinker and “spontaneous order” advocate Friedrich Hayek, Connolly demonstrates the way in which neoliberal ideology has been inculcated throughout society, even and especially amongst those whose lives have been made more fragile by neoliberalism: “a neoliberal economy cannot sustain itself unless it is supported by a self-conscious ideology internalized by most participants that celebrates the virtues of market individualism, market autonomy and a minimal state” (58). An army of Panglossian commentators must be deployed to remind the wary watchers that everything is for the best. That a high level of state intervention may be required to bolster and disseminate this ideology, and prop up neoliberalism, is wholly justified in a system that recognizes only neoliberalism as a source for creative self-organizing processes, indeed “sometimes you get the impression that ‘entrepreneurs’ are the sole paradigms of creativity in the Hayekian world” (66). Resisting neoliberalism, for Connolly, requires remembering the sources of creativity that occur outside of a market context and seeing how these other systems demonstrate self-organizing capacities.

    Within neoliberalism the market is treated as the ethical good, but Connolly works to counter this with “an ethic of cultivation” which works not only against neoliberalism but against certain elements of Kant’s philosophy. In Connolly’s estimation Kantian ethics provide some of the ideological shoring up for neoliberalism, as at times “Kant both prefigures some existential demands unconsciously folded into contemporary neoliberalism and reveals how precarious they in fact are. For he makes them postulates” (117). Connolly sees a certain similarity between the social conditioning that Kant saw as necessary for preparing the young to “obey moral law” and the ideological conditioning that trains people for life under neoliberalism – what is shared is a process by which a self-organizing system must counter people’s own self-organizing potential by organizing their reactions. Furthermore “the intensity of cultural desires to invest hopes in the images of self-regulating interest within markets and/or divine providence wards off acknowledgment of the fragility of things” (118). Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” appears as a corrective to this ethic of inculcation – it features “an element of tragic possibility within it” (133) which is the essential confrontation with the “fragility” that may act as a catalyst for a new radical activism.

    In the face of impending doom neoliberalism will once more have an opportunity to demonstrate its creativity even as this very creativity will have reverberations that will potentially unleash further disasters. Facing the possible catastrophe means that “we may need to recraft the long debate between secular, linear, and deterministic images of the world on the one hand and divinely touched, voluntarist, providential, and/or punitive images on the other” (149). Creativity, and the potential for creativity, is once more essential – as it is the creativity in multiple self-organizing systems that has created the world, for better or worse, around us today. Bringing his earlier discussions of Kant into conversation with the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, Connolly further considers the place of creative processes in shaping and reshaping the world. Nietzsche, in particular, provides Connolly with a way to emphasize the dispersion of creativity by removing the province of creativity from the control of God to treat it as something naturally recurring across various “force-fields.” A different demand thus takes shape wherein “we need to slow down and divert human intrusions into various planetary force fields, even as we speed up efforts to reconstitute the identities, spiritualities, consumption practices, market faiths, and state policies entangled with them” (172) though neoliberalism knows but one speed: faster.

    An odd dissonance occurs at present wherein people are confronted with the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism (one can hear the echoes of “there is no alternative”) and the warnings pointing to the fragility of things. In this context, for Connolly, withdrawal is irresponsible, it would be to “cultivate a garden” when what is needed is an “ethic of cultivation.” Neoliberal capitalism has trained people to accept the strictures of its ideology, but now is a time when different roles are needed; it is a time to become “role experimentalists” (187). Such experiments may take a variety of forms that run the gamut from “reformist” to “revolutionary” and back again, but the process of such experimentation can break the training of neoliberalism and demonstrate other ways of living, interacting, being and having. Connolly does not put forth a simple solution for the challenges facing humanity, instead he emphasizes how recognizing the “fragility of things” allows for people to come to terms with these challenges. After all, it may be that neoliberalism only appears so solid because we have forgotten that it is not actually a naturally occurring mountain but a human built pyramid – and our backs are its foundation.

    * * *

    In the “First Interlude,” on page 45, Connolly poses a question that haunts the remainder of The Fragility of Things, the question – asked in the midst of a brief discussion of the 2011 Lars von Trier film Melancholia – is, “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” It is the sort of disarming and discomforting question that in its cold honesty forces readers to face a conclusion they may not want to consider. It is a question that evokes the deceptively simple acronym FRED (Facing the Reality of Extinction and Doom). And yet there is something refreshing in the question – many have heard the recommendations about what must be done to halt climate catastrophe, but how many believe these steps will be taken? Indeed, even though Connolly claims “we need to slow down” there are also those who, to the contrary, insist that what is needed is even greater acceleration. Granted, Connolly does not pose this question on the first page of his book, and had he done so The Fragility of Things could have easily appeared as a dismissible dirge. Wisely, Connolly recognizes that “a therapist, a priest, or a philosopher might stutter over such questions. Even Pangloss might hesitate” (45); one of the core strengths of The Fragility of Things is that it does not “stutter over such questions” but realizes that such questions require an honest reckoning. Which includes being willing to ask “How do you prepare for the end of the world?”

    William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things is both ethically and intellectually rigorous, demanding readers perceive the “fragility” of the world around them even as it lays out the ways in which the world around them derives its stability from making that very fragility invisible. Though it may seem that there are relatively simple concerns at the core of The Fragility of Things Connolly never succumbs to simplistic argumentation – preferring the fine-toothed complexity that allows moments of fragility to be fully understood. The tone and style of The Fragility of Things feels as though it assumes its readership will consist primarily of academics, activists, and those who see themselves as both. It is a book that wastes no time trying to convince its reader that “climate change is real” or “neoliberalism is making things worse,” and the book is more easily understood if a reader begins with at least a basic acquaintance with the thought of Hayek, Kant, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. Even if not every reader of The Fragility of Things has dwelled for hours upon the question of “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” the book seems to expect that this question lurks somewhere in the subconscious of the reader.

    Amidst Connolly’s discussions of ethics, fragility and neoliberalism, he devotes much of the book to arguing for the need for a revitalized, active, and committed Left – one that would conceivably do more than hold large marches and then disappear. While Connolly cautions against “giving up” on electoral politics he does evince a distrust for US party politics; to the extent that Connolly appears to be a democrat it is a democrat with a lowercase d. Drawing inspiration from the wave of protests in and around 2011 Connolly expresses the need for a multi-issue, broadly supported, international (and internationalist) Left that can organize effectively to win small-scale local reforms while building the power to truly challenge the grip of neoliberalism. The goal, as Connolly envisions it, is to eventually “mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future” even as Connolly remains cognizant of threats that “the emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism” can pose (39). Connolly’s focus on the, often slow, “traditional” activist strategies of organizing should not be overlooked, as his focus on mobilizing large numbers of people acts as a retort to a utopian belief that “technology will fix everything.” The “general strike” as the democratic response once electoral democracy has gone awry is a theme that Connolly concludes with as he calls for his readership to take part in helping to bring together “a set of interacting minorities in several countries for the time when we coalesce around a general strike launched in several states simultaneously” (195). Connolly emphasizes the types of localized activism and action that are also necessary, but “the general strike” is iconic as the way to challenge neoliberalism. In emphasizing the “the general strike” Connolly stakes out a position in which people have an obligation to actively challenge existing neoliberalism, waiting for capitalism to collapse due to its own contradictions (and trying to accelerate these contradictions) does not appear as a viable tactic.

    All of which raises something of prickly question for The Fragility of Things: which element of the book strikes the reader as more outlandish, the question of how to prepare for the end of the world, or the prospect of a renewed Left launching “a general strike…in the near future”? This question is not asked idly or as provocation; and the goal here is in no way to traffic in Leftist apocalyptic romanticism. Yet experience in current activism and organizing does not necessarily imbue one with great confidence in the prospect of a city-wide general strike (in the US) to say nothing of an international one. Activists may be acutely aware of the creative potentials and challenges faced by repressed communities, precarious labor, the ecosystem, and so forth – but these same activists are aware of the solidity of militarized police forces, a reactionary culture industry, and neoliberal dominance. Current, committed, activists’ awareness of the challenges they face makes it seem rather odd that Connolly suggests that radical theorists have ignored “fragility.” Indeed many radical thinkers, or at least some (Grace Lee Boggs and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to name just two) seem to have warned consistently of “fragility” – even if they do not always use that exact term. Nevertheless, here the challenge may not be the Sisyphean work of activism but the rather cynical answer many, non-activists, give to the question of “How does one prepare for the end of the world?” That answer? Download some new apps, binge watch a few shows, enjoy the sci-fi cool of the latest gadget, and otherwise eat, drink and be merry because we’ll invent something to solve tomorrow’s problems next week. Neoliberalism has trained people well.

    That answer, however, is the type that Connolly seems to find untenable, and his apparent hope in The Fragility of Things is that most readers will also find this answer unacceptable. Thus Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” returns and shows its value again. “Our lives are messages” (185) Connolly writes and thus the actions that an individual takes to defend “fragility” and oppose neoliberalism act as a demonstration to others that different ways of being are possible.

    What The Fragility of Things makes clear is that an “ethic of cultivation” is not a one-off event but an ongoing process – cultivating a garden, after all, is something that takes time. Some gardens require years of cultivation before they start to bear fruit.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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  • From the Decision to the Digital

    From the Decision to the Digital

    Laruelle: Against the Digital

    a review of Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

    by Andrew Culp

    ~
    Alexander R. Galloway’s forthcoming Laruelle: Against the Digital is a welcome and original entry in the discussion of French theorist François Laruelle’s thought. The book is at once both pedagogical and creative: it succinctly summarizes important aspects of Laruelle’s substantial oeuvre by placing his thought within the more familiar terrain of popular philosophies of difference (most notably the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou) and creatively extends Laruelle’s work through a series of fourteen axioms.

    The book is a bridge between current Anglophone scholarship on Laruelle, which largely treats Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy through an extension of problematics common to contemporary continental philosophy (Mullarkey 2006, Mullarkey and Smith 2012, Smith 2013, Gangle 2013, Kolozova 2014), and such scholarship’s maturation, which blazes new territory because it takes thought to be “an exercise in perpetual innovation” (Brassier 2003, 25). As such, Laruelle: Against the Digital stands out from other scholarship in that it is not primarily a work of exposition or application of the axioms laid out by Laruelle. This approach is apparent from the beginning, where Galloway declares that he is not a foot soldier in Laruelle’s army and he does not proceed by way of Laurelle’s “non-philosophical” method (a method so thoroughly abstract that Laruelle appears to be the inheritor of French rationalism, though in his terminology, philosophy should remain only as “raw material” to carry thinking beyond philosophy’s image of thought). The significance of Galloway’s Laruelle is that he instead produces his own axioms, which follow from non-philosophy but are of his own design, and takes aim at a different target: the digital.

    The Laruellian Kernel

    Are philosophers no better than creationists? Philosophers may claim to hate irrationalist leaps of faith, but Laruelle locates such leaps precisely in philosophers’ own narcissistic origin stories. This argument follows from Chapter One of Galloway’s Laruelle, which outlines how all philosophy begins with the world as ‘fact.’ For example: the atomists begin with change, Kant with empirical judgment, and Fichte with the principle of identity. And because facts do not speak for themselves, philosophy elects for itself a second task — after establishing what ‘is’ — inventing a form of thought to reflect on the world. Philosophy thus arises out of a brash entitlement: the world exists to be thought. Galloway reminds us of this through Gottfried Leibniz, who tells us that “everything in the world happens for a specific reason” (and it is the job of philosophers to identify it), and Alfred North Whitehead, who alternatively says, “no actual entity, then no reason” (so it is up to philosophers to find one).

    For Laruelle, various philosophies are but variations on a single approach that first begins by positing how the world presents itself, and second determines the mode of thought that is the appropriate response. Between the two halves, Laruelle finds a grand division: appearance/presence, essence/instance, Being/beings. Laruelle’s key claim is that philosophy cannot think the division itself. The consequence is that such a division is tantamount to cheating, as it wills thought into being through an original thoughtless act. This act of thoughtlessly splitting of the world in half is what Laruelle calls “the philosophical decision.”

    Philosophy need not wait for Laruelle to be demoted, as it has already done this for itself; no longer the queen of the sciences, philosophy seems superfluous to the most harrowing realities of contemporary life. The recent focus on Laruelle did indeed come from a reinvigoration of philosophy that goes under the name ‘speculative realism.’ Certainly there are affinities between Laruelle and these philosophers — the early case was built by Ray Brassier, who emphasizes that Laruelle earnestly adopts an anti-correlationalist position similar to the one suggested by Quentin Meillassoux and distances himself from postmodern constructivism as much as other realists, all by positing the One as the Real. It is on the issue of philosophy, however, that Laruelle is most at odds with the irascible thinkers of speculative realism, for non-philosophy is not a revolt against philosophy nor is it a patronizing correction of how others see reality. 1 Galloway argues that non-philosophy should be considered materialist. He attributes to Laruelle a mix of empiricism, realism, and materialism but qualifies non-philosophy’s approach to the real as not a matter of the givenness of empirical reality but of lived experience (vécu) (Galloway, Laruelle, 24-25). The point of non-philosophy is to withdraw from philosophy by short-circuiting the attempt to reflect on what supposedly exists. To be clear: such withdrawal is not an anti-philosophy. Non-philosophy suspends philosophy, but also raids it for its own rigorous pursuit: an axiomatic investigation of the generic. 2

    From Decision to Digital

    A sharp focus on the concept of “the digital” is Galloway’s main contribution — a concept not in the forefront of Laruelle’s work, but of great interest to all of us today. Drawing from non-philosophy’s basic insight, Galloway’s goal in Laruelle is to demonstrate the “special connection” shared by philosophy and digital (15). Galloway asks his readers to consider a withdrawal from digitality that is parallel to the non-philosophical withdrawal from philosophy.

    Just as Laruelle discovered the original division to which philosophy must remain silent, Galloway finds that the digital is the “basic distinction that makes it a possible to make any distinction at all” (Laruelle, 26). Certainly the digital-analog opposition survives this reworking, but not as one might assume. Gone are the usual notions of online-offline, new-old, stepwise-continuous variation, etc. To maintain these definitions presupposes the digital, or as Galloway defines it, “the capacity to divide things and make distinctions between them” (26). Non-philosophy’s analogy for the digital thus becomes the processes of distinction and decision themselves.

    The dialectic is where Galloway provocatively traces the history of digitality. This is because he argues that digitality is “not so much 0 and 1” but “1 and 2” (Galloway, Laruelle, 26). Drawing on Marxist definitions of the dialectical process, he defines the movement from one to two as analysis, while the movement from two to one is synthesis (26-27). In this way, Laruelle can say that, “Hegel is dead, but he lives on inside the electric calculator” (Introduction aux sciences génériques, 28, qtd in Galloway, Laruelle, 32). Playing Badiou and Deleuze off of each other, as he does throughout the book, Galloway subsequently outlines the political stakes between them — with Badiou establishing clear reference points through the argument that analysis is for leftists and synthesis for reactionaries, and Deleuze as a progenitor of non-philosophy still too tied to the world of difference but shrewd enough to have a Spinozist distaste for both movements of the dialectic (Laruelle, 27-30). Galloway looks to Laruelle to get beyond Badiou’s analytic leftism and Deleuze’s “Spinozist grand compromise” (30). His proposal is a withdrawal in the name of indecision that demands abstention from digitality’s attempt to “encode and simulate anything whatsoever in the universe” (31).

    Insufficiency

    Insufficiency is the idea into which Galloway sharpens the stakes of non-philosophy. In doing so, he does to Laruelle what Deleuze does to Spinoza. While Deleuze refashions philosophy into the pursuit of adequate knowledge, the eminently practical task of understanding the conditions of chance encounters enough to gain the capacity to influence them, Galloway makes non-philosophy into the labor of inadequacy, a mode of thought that embraces the event of creation through a withdrawal from decision. If Deleuze turns Spinoza into a pragmatist, then Galloway turns Laruelle into a nihilist.

    There are echoes of Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben, and Afro-pessimism in Galloway’s Laruelle. This is because he uses nihilism’s marriage of withdrawal, opacity, and darkness as his orientation to politics, ethics, and aesthetics. From Cacciari, Galloway borrows a politics of non-compromise. But while the Italian Autonomist Marxist milieu of which Cacciari’s negative thought is characteristic emphasizes subjectivity, non-philosophy takes the subject to be one of philosophy’s dirty sins and makes no place for it. Yet Galloway is not shy about bringing up examples, such as Bartleby, Occupy, and other figures of non-action. Though as in Agamben, Galloway’s figures only gain significance in their insufficiency. “The more I am anonymous, the more I am present” Galloway repeats from Tiqqun to axiomatically argue the centrality of opacity (233-236). There is also a strange affinity between Galloway and Afro-pessimists, who both oppose the integrationist tendencies of representational systems ultimately premised on the exclusion, exploitation, and elimination of blackness. In spite of potential differences, they both define blackness as absolute foreclosure to being; from which, Galloway is determined to “channel that great saint of radical blackness, Toussaint Louveture,” in order to bring about a “cataclysm of human color” through the “blanket totality of black” that “renders color invalid” and brings about “a new uchromia, a new color utopia rooted in the generic black universe” (188-189). What remains an open question is: how does such a formulation of the generic depart from the philosophy of difference’s becoming-minor, whereby the liberation must first pass through the figures of the woman, the fugitive, and the foreigner?

    Actually Existing Digitality

    One could read Laruelle not as urging thought to become more practical, but to become less so. Evidence for such a claim comes in his retreat to dense abstract writing and a strong insistence against providing examples. Each is an effect of non-philosophy’s approach, which is both rigorous and generic. Although possibly justified, there are those who stylistically object to Laruelle for taking too many liberties with his prose; most considerations tend make up for such flights of fancy by putting non-philosophy in communication with more familiar philosophies of difference (Mullarkey 2006; Kolozova 2014). Yet the strangeness of the non-philosophical method is not a stylistic choice intended to encourage reflection. Non-philosophy is quite explicitly not a philosophy of difference — Laruelle’s landmark Philosophies of Difference is an indictment of Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Deleuze. To this end, non-philosophy does not seek to promote thought through marginality, Otherness, or any other form of alterity.

    Readers who have henceforth been frustrated with non-philosophy’s impenetrability may be more attracted to the second part of Galloway’s Laruelle. In part two, Galloway addresses actually existing digitality, such as computers and capitalism. This part also includes a contribution to the ethical turn, which is premised on a geometrically neat set of axioms whereby ethics is the One and politics is the division of the One into two. He develops each chapter through numerous examples, many of them concrete, that helps fold non-philosophical terms into discussions with long-established significance. For instance, Galloway makes his way through a chapter on art and utopia with the help of James Turrell’s light art, Laruelle’s Concept of Non-Photography, and August von Briesen’s automatic drawing (194-218). The book is over three hundred-pages long, so most readers will probably appreciate the brevity of many of the chapters in part two. The chapters are short enough to be impressionistic while implying that treatments as fully rigorous as what non-philosophy often demands may be much longer.

    Questions

    While his diagrammatical thinking is very clear, I find it more difficult to determine during Galloway’s philosophical expositions whether he is embracing or criticizing a concept. The difficulty of such determinations is compounded by the ambivalence of the non-philosophical method, which adopts philosophy as its raw material while simultaneously declaring that philosophical concepts are insufficient. My second fear is that while Galloway is quite adept at wielding his reworked concept of ‘the digital,’ his own trademark rigor may be lost when taken up by less judicious scholars. In particular, his attack on digitality could form the footnote for a disingenuous defense of everything analog.

    There is also something deeper at stake: What if we are in the age of non-representation? From the modernists to Rancière and Occupy, we have copious examples of non-representational aesthetics and politics. But perhaps all previous philosophy has only gestured at non-representational thought, and non-philosophy is the first to realize this goal. If so, then a fundamental objection could be raised about both Galloway’s Laruelle and non-philosophy in general: is non-philosophy properly non-thinking or is it just plain not thinking? Galloway’s axiomatic approach is a refreshing counterpoint to Laruelle’s routine circumlocution. Yet a number of the key concepts that non-philosophy provides are still frustratingly elusive. Unlike the targets of Laruelle’s criticism, Derrida and Deleuze, non-philosophy strives to avoid the obscuring effects of aporia and paradox — so is its own use of opacity simply playing coy, or to be understood purely as a statement that the emperor has no clothes? While I am intrigued by anexact concepts such as ‘the prevent,’ and I understand the basic critique of the standard model of philosophy, I am still not sure what non-philosophy does. Perhaps that is an unfair question given the sterility of the One. But as Hardt and Negri remind us in the epigraph to Empire, “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” We now know that non-philosophy cuts — what remains to be seen, is where and how deeply.
    _____

    Andrew Culp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. He specializes in cultural-communicative theories of power, the politics of emerging media, and gendered responses to urbanization. In his current project, Escape, he explores the apathy, distraction, and cultural exhaustion born from the 24/7 demands of an ‘always-on’ media-driven society. His work has appeared Radical Philosophy, Angelaki, Affinities, and other venues.

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    Notes

    1. There are two qualifications worth mentioning: first, Laruelle presents non-philosophy as a scientific enterprise. There is little proximity between non-philosophy’s scientific approach and other sciences, such as techno-science, big science, scientific modernity, modern rationality, or the scientific method. Perhaps it is closest to Althusser’s science, but some more detailed specification of this point would be welcome.
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    2. Galloway lays out the non-philosophy of generic immanence, The One, in Chapter Two of Laruelle. Though important, Galloway’s main contribution is not a summation of Laruelle’s version of immanence and thus not the focus of this review. Substantial summaries of this sort are already available, including Mullarkey 2006, and Smith 2013.
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    Bibliography

    Brassier, Ray (2003) “Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle,” Radical Philosophy 121.
    Gangle, Rocco (2013) François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press).
    Kolozova, Katerina (2014) Cut of the Real (New York, USA: Columbia University Press).
    Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
    Laruelle, François (2010/1986) Philosophies of Difference (London, UK and New York, USA: Continuum).
    Laruelle, François (2011) Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic).
    Mullarkey, John (2006) Post-Continental Philosophy (London, UK: Continuum).
    Mullarkey, John and Anthony Paul Smith (eds) (2012) Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press).
    Smith, Anthony Paul (2013) A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature (New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan).