« Alexander Galloway, you have just been cloooned »
Galloway is not the first to have been submitted to this treatment, there is the prestigious example of Heidegger, whom Harman managed to clooone by reducing « the impressive bulk of his projected 102-volume Collected Edition » (emphasis mine) to a « single repetitive dualism ». (TOOL-BEING, 3). But he is the first to be subjected to its upgraded form of collective digital counterfactuation followed by quarrelation. Galloway’s article has been replaced by its counterfactual clooone, and he probably now has no more idea of what the original article said than his critics do.
I think that Galloway went out on a limb unnecessarily with his putting so much emphasis on object-oriented programming as opposed to other sorts of programming languages. The general argument does not rely on this, which has the status only of an interesting or amusing instantion of the general idea that software is math and that capitalism is now, to a large extent, materialised math. So the term of “homology” is in fact too weak, we are talking about an identity of structure instantiating itself in different ways.
Badiou himself accepts this identity, or “homology”, and is very worried about it. He deserves a « free pass » and Meillassoux doesn’t, not because of his explicit pronouncements in favour of Marxism but because the whole architecture of his philosophy is based on assuming and overcoming that homology by adding to his ontology of pure multiples an ontology of the Event. The Event is what is non-homologous to capitalism and it is the keystone to his political ontology.
AGENT SWARM 
Except that Badiou is not a Marxist. He is a Maoist. Not the same thing. The Marxist path, having discovered a piece of the logic of late capitalism, would be a critique of it. The Maoist, or Jacobin-Leninist-Maoist path, is to try to leap out of it into something else.
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Yes, you’re right. Badiou seems most of the time much more worried about the State than about capitalism.
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Well this is exactly the problem. Galloway *doesn’t* demonstrate « an identity of structure instantiating itself in different ways » — he demonstrates a handful of genealogical similarities and just assumes these similarities to be meaningful, without any real argument. So, firstly, he demonstrated a relation, not an identity. But, more seriously than that, even if he did demonstrate an identity I don’t think that would tell us very much about anything. Galloway (as I understand him, forgive me if I’m ‘cloooning’!) basically presumes the following in his section on Badiou: If a philosophical system shares some genealogical or homological similarities with a branch of mathematics that, due to its utilisation in computer science, is important for the functioning and structuring of contemporary capitalism then this is an adequate basis to call into question that philosophical system’s epistemological validity and its conscious or subconscious political motivations. Indeed, it is enough to imply (if not to state outright) that such a philosophical system is epistemologically baseless and politically collusive with (or reproductive of) capital. To my mind, that’s just one giant leap of supposition after another, each as unjustified as the last. It’s a valid line of argument but it’s one that has to actually be argued.
Now, I’m aware that this argument isn’t made in a conceptual vacuum and that it’s occurring in dialogue with other bodies of knowledge and so on but even still I find this kind of ‘critique’ to be extremely weak. It leaves far, far too much unsaid. The problem with stating your points rather than arguing them is that if you’re already convinced that realism, OOO or whatever is just a philosophical outgrowth on the capitalist mode of production then Galloway is largely preaching to the choir. It won’t stop his points connecting with those who already agree with him. But those who are unconvinced are faced with a series of barely connected inferential leaps with conclusions that are little more than insinuated. They’re faced with a series of lucidly constructed observations but next to no substantive argument backing up the suggested consequences of these observations. What are the unconvinced meant to think, exactly?
That Badiou’s philosophy and capitalism have both made use of set theory proves nothing (this Galloway concedes) but nor does it even suggest very much (this Galloway does not concede, he uses words like ‘disturbing,’ ‘disconcerting’ to describe the confluence). Galloway doesn’t take this genealogical coincidence to be *proof* of Badiou’s unthinking reproduction of the structures of capitalism but he’s perfectly happy to *suggest* as much. Moreover, the tone and subtext of the article leave little doubt that he believes that Badiou et al. are indeed structure-reproducing cultural dopes. He’s hardly ‘on the fence,’ even if he refuses to go ‘all in’ (to mix my metaphors).
So, even if « capitalism is now, to a large extent, materialised math » (and this is a questionable idealisation) this doesn’t actually mean anything very much on its own. The implication of this critique seems to be that any other discourse that makes use of set theory (or maybe even maths in general) is in danger of simply reproducing the assumptions of capitalism, or post-Fordism more specifically. Well, that may be so but that is a completely speculative suggestion that, in my view, is simply not even suggested by the mere genealogical coincidence itself. I’d love to read someone actually making that argument rather than simply insinuating it or taking it to be self-evident. But this I have yet to see.
In short, Galloway demonstrates homological relation, not structural homotopy. But even if he did demonstrate structural homotopy this wouldn’t necessarily be a meaningful insight. His argument is, therefore, missing two components: (a) that the homological relation constitutes structural homotopy and (b) that this matters. That these two components can go unspoken as though they’re unimportant or self-evident – this is what concerns me! I just don’t understand what value any such ‘critique’ can have, besides perhaps being a prelude to something more comprehensive. Maybe that is my failing, but I suspect not.
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Hello Philip, I am glad to see that you are open to the possibility of an argument, and that your main critique is that the Big Argument is not really made. As you may be aware I am very critical of Galloway’s article, finding it confused and chaotic. I also find that it presupposes too much and that Galloway himself has not been willing to do the pedagogical work of filling in the background necessary to at least understand what the presuppositions are, even if one does not agree with them. I have taken up the thankless task of explicating some of these presuppositions, but only because some of the critiques seemed to me to be deliberately obfuscating them.
One cannot do everything in an article, and so one has to build on the shoulders of one’s predecessors. So I would say that the allusion to Badiou is the first track to take up. Without going in to the massive detail of BEING AND EVENT, I would recommend reading MANIFESTO FOR PHILOSOPHY which is quite short and very impressive (though in many ways quite infuriating for me). In particular, chapter 5 makes it clear that Badiou acknowledges the identity of structure between capitalism and set theory. It is not a question of capitalism making use of set theory or not, in both cases capitalism is or approaches as its limit, the abstract manipulation of interchangeable elements, that are treated as pure quantitative multiples whose qualitative aspects can be bracketed out as such, although they can be factored into the capitalist computation as giving rise to diverse forms of extraction of value.
Many people take this view of the progression from investment-oriented to speculative capitalism, and find it a horrifying prospect. So they wish to elaborate a philosophy with an emancipatory potential. Now as you can see we are dealing with philosophy at a very high level of abstraction and, I would add of self-reflexivity. Badiou thinks that his philosophy is in danger of reflecting the same structure as capitalism and he finds that very worrisome. The idea is that you will not be able to propose any real change if the very structure of your theory reproduces the structure of that which you want to change. Hence Badiou’s extreme care in including and accounting for the Event in his ontology. And also for the possibility of politics as event, and not just as the management of multiplicities. This necessity of including politics in the very fabric of his ontology is for Badiou itself a political necessity. And the disjunction of politics and ontology affirmed by OOO is in Badiousian eyes a political gesture in itself.
So as you can see nothing hangs on whether set theory or any specific programming language is actually used in any specific capitalist endeavour. Unfortunately Galloway muddied these waters by mixing in a very interesting comparison of OOO and object-oriented programming. This is at a much lower level of abstraction than the general argument and much more empirical in nature. It leaves open replies like Java is not used as much as some other language for example, and these replies miss the general argument altogether.
Maybe we agree that there is some conceptual confusion in the article and that there is a lack of pedagogy in its presentation and in Galloway’s follow-up. However I think that the main argument is untouched by his critics. As some of them claim to have read Badiou (but similar arguments can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, and in Bernard Stiegler) I think that some of these people are pandering in bad faith to the bewilderment of people who have not gone through the pedagogy of Continental Philosophy and wonder where some affirmations come from.
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