Glitch ontology

In this section, I want to look more closely at the computal and computational ontologies through what Adorno called ‘cover concepts' and their distinction from ‘emphatic concepts' (see Adorno 2004a: 148-51).

A cover-concept is one which can be used to limit the members of a set. It is descriptive. But an emphatic concept is one which has inside it a promise. It is a promise which cannot be cut out of the concept without changing it. So that the concept of "art”' it could be suggested, is not merely a cover-concept. It does not signify a certain set of properties, any object possessing which could count as an instance of the concept. To call something art is always not only to describe something but also to evaluate it. (Jarvis 2009: 88)

Adorno argues that emphatically conceived, a concept is ‘one that is not simply the characteristic unit of the individual object from which it was abstracted' (Adorno 2004a: 150). That is, like the concept of freedom, these emphatic concepts are not merely descriptive, and therefore ‘arbitrarily diminished', instead there is a ‘more' of the concept, as it were, which offers the possibility of generating a contradiction between the concept of freedom and its realization, and therefore the possibility of critical thought itself. Concepts such as freedom, humanity, and justice are what Adorno calls ‘emphatic' concepts in the sense that they are ineliminably both prescriptive and descriptive (Jarvis 1998: 66).

In the case of computational ontologies, and the use of computational concepts more widely within our ontological and everyday understanding of life, the question is: to what extent do these computational categories perform not merely as 'wretched' cover concepts? Indeed, do they have the possibility of generatively making possible contradictions that facilitate critical thought, within what we are calling here computationality, as emphatic conceptual resources?

Previously, in The Philosophy of Software, I outlined the emergence of computationality as an ontotheology drawing on the work of Heidegger (Berry 2011a, b).

Thus, as an ontotheology, computationalityis a central, effective, increasingly dominant system of meanings and values that become operative and which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. Thus computationality cannot be understood at the level of mere opinion or manipulation. It is related to a whole body of computational practices and expectations, for example, the assignment of energy towards particular projects, the ordinary understanding of the 'nature' of humans, and of the world. This set of meanings and values is experienced as practices which appear as reciprocally confirming, repeated and predictable and also used to describe and understand the world - in some cases, software even becomes an explanatory form of explanation itself (see Chun 2011).

Today there are rapid changes in social contexts that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks, what Mitcham (1998: 43) calls a ‘new ecology of artifice'. The proliferation of computal contrivances that are computationally based is truly breathtaking, and each year there is a large growth in the use of these computational devices and the data they collect. These devices, of course, are not static, nor are they mute, and their interconnections, communications, operation, effects and usage are increasingly prescriptive on the everyday life world. But as opaque devices they are difficult to understand and analyse due to their staggering rate of change, thanks to the underlying hardware technologies, which are becoming ever smaller, more compact, more powerful and less power-hungry, and also due to the increase in complexity, power, range and intelligence of the software that powers these devices. Within the algorithms that power these devices are embedded classificatory schemes and ontologies that pre-structure the world that is presented. Indeed, this formatting and mediating capacity directly encodes cover concepts into the device.

It should hardly come as a surprise that code/software lies as a mediator between ourselves and our corporeal experiences, disconnecting the physical world from a direct coupling with our physicality, while managing a looser softwarized transmission system. Called 'fly-by-wire' in aircraft design, in reality fly-by-wire is the condition of the computational environment we increasingly experience, hence the term computationality (Berry 2011a).

These devices also enable the assemblage of new social ontologies and the corresponding social epistemologies that we increasingly take for granted in computational society, including Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter. The extent to which computational devices, and the computational principles on which they are based and from which they draw their power, have permeated the way we use and develop knowledges in everyday life is simply breathtaking, had we not already discounted and backgrounded their importance. For example, computational methods like n-gramming are being utilized to decode everyday life by counting how word usage has changed over time, particularly over a large period of time (Zax 2011).¹ The ability to call up information instantly from a mobile device, combine it with others, subject it to debate and critique through real-time social networks, and then edit, post and distribute it worldwide would be incredible if it hadn't already started to become so mundane.

Drawing from and extending Heidegger's concepts we might reconstruct his notions of the mode of technicity and its 'challenging-forth' to one where computationality is central and has a classificatory structure we might call 'streaming-forth'. For Heidegger, 'challenging-forth' is understood as a relationship to the world whereby one treats the world, nature, culture, etc. as available for extraction, processing and storing as standing reserve. In doing so, the original entities are destroyed, transformed and reconstructed as a form of 'fuel'. A good example of this is a hill that produces coal, which in the process of being mined is destroyed, leaving behind only the coal as standing reserve (resources) and waste products. In computationality, however, it is data that is being 'mined', leaving the original entities in their original state, but with secondary information collected about them, a kind of second-order data or metadata, as a form of standing reserve. Thus, this data is 'extracted' without the destruction of the other. This data 'exhaustion' process, which here I call 'streaming-forth' is the creation of information from characteristics, properties and social epistemologies regarding the object under computational analysis.

Streaming forth generates second-order information and data to maintain a world which is itself seen and computationally processed as flow, but re-articulated within a screenic form which produces a universe which is increasingly understood as object-oriented and discrete. Collected information is processed together with feedback which creates part of the ecology of computationality. Adorno calls this an ontological moment, that is the emergence of a horizon or constellation of key concepts around a particular historical social formation linked to, in this case, computational capitalism. We can analyse the history of the changing forms of human alienation from nature by theorizing epistemological questions in relation to socio-economic, ethical and political issues.

is a theorist of aesthetics and society interested in the (possibly utopian) conditions under which non-antagonistic knowledge and non-instrumental reason might be operative in practice rather than merely discernable in absence... a hermeneutics of absent mediations, and can be compared with Heidegger's affirmation of Nichts (nothingness) as a hermeneutic of absolute origins. (Schecter 2007: 112, fn 34, original emphasis)

This is a suggestive approach and helps thinking through the question of the absent mediations of the computational. Indeed, we might note again using historicized Heideggerian categories the way in which computation creates not only the conditions of possibility for this way of being in the world, but also points to computational experience within capitalism as constitutive of this ontology. Additionally, computational devices demonstrate a phenomenological experience of computation, that of the rapid oscillation between the categories Heidegger identified as VorhandenheitfZuhandenheit (present-at-hand/ready-to-hand) - and this I call a 'glitch' ontology. Thus the computational device constantly changes from being part of the everyday flow of reality, ready-to-hand and the objective 'paused' experience familiar from science, which he calls unready-to-hand, in quick alternation. As Weiser argued,

Such a disappearance [in readiness-to-hand] is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon “compiling”; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the “tacit dimension”; psychologist TK Gibson calls it “visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it “the horizon” and the “ready-to-hand" John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the “periphery" All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals. (Weiser 1991: 78)

Computers do not, nor have ever been able to, run themselves entirely without human assistance and therefore this computal disappearance is only ever partial. Computational devices are constantly suffering from breakdowns, bugs, errors and crashes. Well-engineered industrial machines do not tend to suffer these constant breakdowns.You could think of this then as an oscillation, perhaps due to the underlying fragility of the nature of code, that means it is always on the constant verge of breakdown (again car engines do not act like this, once they are working they are working, generally speaking). Software and code is thus always calling to us from a position of unreadiness-to-hand. Software programmers have a lovely term for what I am getting at when they say that code throws an exception, which causes the machine to pause and wait for further instruction or execute an alternative method, and if no such instruction is available or forthcoming, it is said that code is unable to catch the exception and it crashes in some way (sometimes gracefully and at other times catastrophically). When this happens we are left nursing a device that no longer contains the agency that animates the device - on Windows devices known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death'. And by quick, this breakdown can be happening in microseconds, milliseconds or seconds, repeatedly, in quick succession. This aspect of breakdown has been acknowledged as an issue within human-computer design and is seen as one of the pressing concerns to be 'fixed' or made invisible to the computational device user (Winograd and Flores 1987).

However, it is not necessarily the case that computation is different from 'other' equipment by being a 'third mode' or middle between presence and absence. For example, there is much to learn by exploring how computational devices engender an experience generated by this rather novel feature/bug of oscillating rapidly between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit; indeed it highlights the phenomenological specificity of the computal.Thus, how absence and presence are experienced in this very specific and curious way, enabled by computational devices (and by extension code and software), can give a great deal of insight into the experience of the user of computational devices. This quantitative micro/millisecond oscillations between Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit might therefore be said to translate into an odd mediated 'pseudo-mode' which is, perhaps, qualitatively experienced as 'uncanny' and which might analytically be referred to as ‘radically unready-to-hand' or as fractured objects. This is generated by the so-called ‘closed world' of computation. Certainly, this is part of the specificity of the phenomenological experience that I am gesturing towards with the concept of glitch ontology.

The oscillation creates the ‘glitch' that is a specific feature of computation as opposed to other technical forms (Berry 2011a). This is the glitch that creates the conspicuousness that breaks the everyday experience of things, and more importantly breaks the flow of things being readily at hand. This is a form that Heidegger usefully outlined using the term unreadyness-to- hand (Unzuhandenheit). Heidegger defines three forms of unreadyness- to-hand: Obtrusiveness (Aufdringlichkeit), Obstinacy (Aufsassigkeit) and Conspicuousness (Auffalligkeit), where the first two are non-functioning equipment and the latter is equipment that is not functioning at its best (see Heidegger 1978, particularly fn 1). In other words, if equipment breaks, you have to think about it and consider it as a ‘present-at-hand' object. Nonetheless, it is crucial to historicize this notion, in relation to a specific historically located understanding of the subject-object relationship and particular conceptions of how an object appears or changes within a historical epoch. Within the computational constellation of historical intelligibility outlined here, objects are both constituted through a computational register, and, crucially, are increasingly mediated through computer software, code and algorithms.

In this ontology, it is important to note that conspicuousness is not partially or temporarily broken-down equipment. As Heidegger puts it, it requires ‘a more precise kind of circumspection, such as "inspecting',' checking up on what has been attained, [etc.]' (Dreyfus 2001: 70). Conspicuousness, then, ‘presents the available equipment as in a certain unavailableness' (Heidegger 1978: 102-3), so that, as Dreyfus (2001: 71) explains, we are momentarily startled, and then shift to a new way of coping. However, if help is given quickly or the situation is resolved, then ‘transparent circumspective behaviour can be so quickly and easily restored that no new stance on the part of Dasein is required' (Dreyfus 2001: 72).

In other words, computation due to its glitch ontology continually forces a contextual slowing down at the level of the experience of the user. This is suggestive of the possibility for a micro-phenomenology that could fully explore the breaks in perception that the computer generates. The continuity of flow or practice is interrupted by minute pauses and breaks (these may be beyond conscious perception, as such). This is not to say that analogue technologies do not break down. The difference in the conspicuousness of digital technologies is at a resolution of breakdown beyond conscious perception whereas our everyday experience of the obstinacy or obtrusiveness of analogue technologies is that they tend to work or not at a ‘macro' scale.

The discrete granularity of the conspicuousness of digital technologies raises interesting questions in relation to basic questions about our experiences of computational systems and the way in which micro-phenomenological interrupts can structure consciousness in a number of ways. It also suggests a research programme related to the new high-speed adaptive algorithmic interfaces (algorithmic GUIs) that can offer contextual information, and even reshape the entire interface itself, through the monitoring of our reactions to computational interfaces and feedback and sensor information from the computational device itself. This method of producing computational devices has been christened ‘context aware programming' which ‘just as the switch from the command line to the GUI required new UI skills and sensibilities, mobile and sensor-based programming creates new opportunities to innovate, to surprise and delight the user, or, in failing to use the new capabilities, the opportunity to create frustration and anger' (O'Reilly 2013).

The use of Heideggerian concepts is also helpful in contesting the meth­odological distinction of concept from intuition in Kant's thought where Neo-Kantian readings of Kant's first critique, Critique of Pure Reason have read it as an epistemology (Jarvis 1998: 203). Heidegger argues,

What is philosophically primary is neither a theory of the concept-formation of historiology nor the theory of historiological knowledge, nor yet the theory of history as the Object of historiology; what is primary is rather the Interpretation of authentically historical entities as regards their historicality. Similarly the positive outcome of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason lies in what is has contributed towards the working out of what belongs to any Nature whatsoever, not in a “theory” of knowledge. (Heidegger 1978: 31)

For both Heidegger and Adorno, Kant's schematism chapter (Kant 1998: 271-7) is an important contribution to philosophy and to thinking. For Heidegger ‘the idea that the transcendental imagination itself makes possible both understanding and sensibility - and that it does so through “transcendental determinations of time"' - is a radically new insight which... opens up the possibility of a fundamental ontology whose “horizon" is time' (Jarvis 1998: 203). Heidegger and Adorno both,

Suggest that critical thinking may itself already contain the resources for an ontology (or ontological moment, in Adorno's case) in which Being need not be transfigured into an invariant. Secondly, they take it to indicate an awareness of the metaphysical presuppositions of epistemology. It is to these presuppositions that Heidegger refers when he remarks that “possibility of experience is therefore synonymous with transcendence" (Jarvis 1998: 204)

For Heidegger, the reciprocal relationship between concepts and intuition is expressed in terms of the ‘priority of (categorical) intuition over concepts' (Jarvis 1998: 204). This is problematic for Adorno, as it suggests that ‘mediation through concepts which is necessary for our knowledge of objects to be knowledge of objects is in some way a dependent or inferior element, “in the service” of what is given in intuition' (Jarvis 1998: 204). Indeed, for Adorno, ‘the mediated non-identity of subject and object is not even potentially knowable without thinking the priority of the object against the background of anticipated reconciliation in epistemology and politics' (Schecter 2007: 119). Thus,

Heidegger distinguishes between epistemological subjects knowing objects without thinking the being of their beingness, and Dasein thinking that difference ontologically. Adorno insists that there is a difference between thinking and more or less successful modes of adaptation to social norms and structures. That difference is also a historical and libertarian difference for Adorno that is not thinkable in isolation from the repressive socio­economic, political and juridical institutions which make the difference between thought and mere adaptation apparent. (Schecter 2007: 120, original emphasis)

In contrast to Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Adorno offers negative dialectics. Adorno argues that critical theory must be grounded in philosophy, and as such the distinction between appearance and reality is crucial to understand that ‘society determines social phenomena (the appearances of society)' (O'Connor 2013: 51). By doing so Adorno stands against positivistic and empirical approaches that argue that research into appearance is sufficient to describe society (O'Connor 2013: 51). Indeed Adorno,

Conceives society as a totality. Society is not a collection of disconnected facts. Rather facts (what things supposedly are) are interconnected - mediated - by the social totality, the character of which impresses itself on each fact... society has become a totality: it is now a coercive system. (O'Connor 2013: 52)

Thus, Adorno seeks to criticize society and part of this criticism is to explore how the ‘conditions of society that can be shown to distort or deform the possibilities for human flourishing' can be examined through the notion of immanent critique. Here, immanent critique is understood as a critique which “remains within” what it criticizes in contrast to a transcendental critique, a critique from outside, which first establishes its own principles, and then uses them as a yardstick by which to criticize other theories (Jarvis 1998: 6). Immanent critique seeks not just to provide a criticism of individual argu­ments, ‘but also the way those arguments fit together... so as to understand the significance of the particular kinds of contradiction present... to under­stand what these contradictions tell us about the social experience' (Jarvis 1998: 6). Thus, Adorno is interested in analysing the changing forms of human alienation in contrast to Marx's political economy of reification based on alien­ated labour (Schecter 2007: 99) and in contrast to Heidegger's fundamental ontology. So, for example, Horkheimer and Adorno examine the ‘simultaneous homogenization and isolation of individuals in the industrial-democratic era', such that ‘enlightenment, which presents itself as the secular modern movement par excellence, becomes secular mythology in the course of its unfolding' (Schecter 2007: 94).

While Marx orients his project towards the re-appropriation of alienated labour, Adorno and Horkheimer, in contrast, develop a genealogy of reification based on alienated nature. Indeed, this move towards the industrial subjective objectification is, within late capitalism, the measure of reality itself. While,

Marx clearly regards the re-appropriation of alienated labour as the condition of a humanized world oriented towards emancipation, Horkheimer and Adorno regard such re-appropriation as the condition of a subjectivized world oriented towards manipulation and distortion. On this reading the commodified version of objectification prevalent in capitalism simply takes over from the successive forms of religious objectification which dominated consciousness and society prior to the advent of industrial production. (Schecter 2007: 94)

Thus, the question they pose is: how does the project of enlightened autonomy and freedom become instead a reality of radical heteronomy and domination? This takes place, they argue, when increasingly advanced forms of rationalization as ratio become institutionalized, and the project of autonomy is sacrificed in relation to homogenization, standardized thinking and social control. This means that human beings become fungible and useful only in as much as they are trained towards the requirements of a corporate, industrial world of commodity production. For the Enlightenment thinkers, human power triumphs over nature, enabling freedom from physical necessity and hardship. For Kant, ‘humanity creates the conditions of its autonomy in consciousness by ordering the chaos of nature in concepts and categories, for Marx it creates the political conditions of its autonomy by ordering the chaos of nature through labour and collective social action' (Schecter 2007: 96). In contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that these processes are instead taken over by money and capital, creating the possibilities for oppressive social structures.

I now want to examine in detail what I see as one possible manifestation of the reification associated with computationality and which is sedimented in a philosophy that has come to be known as speculative realism/object-oriented ontology (SR/OOO). This we might call a contemporary configuration. While accepting that there are differences in the way in which different participants within SR/OOO present their work and articulate their ontology, here I present a general overview of SR/OOO. The aim is not to engage substantively with SR/OOO's chosen fields of debate and investigation, indeed, the wide range of publications are outside the scope of this book. Rather, I want to tentatively explore the links between my own notion of computationality as ontotheology and how SR/OOO unconsciously reproduces some of these structural features that I think are apparent in its ontological and theological moments. In order to do this, I want to begin outlining some of the ways one might expect the ‘ontological moment', as it were, to be dominated by computational categories and ideas which seem to hold explanatory power. SR/OOO is marked by its focus on the priority of the ‘object' for thought and the insistence on a heterogeneous multiplicity of entities as objects. The priority of objects as a fundamental notion in their work together with the inability within the philosophical systems grouped together as SR/OOO to critically distinguish between the products of alienated labour congealed into objects and subjects gives SR/OOO a problematic form. Indeed, SR/OOO has a limited notion of reification as the insistence of objects stymie attempts to think about the objectification practices of capitalism, if as SR/OOO proponents claim, the object is pre-defined as an ontological category.

It is interesting to note that these philosophers do not tend to take into account the possibility that the computational medium itself may have transformed the way in which they understand the ontological dimension of their projects - even as they invoke McLuhan in their work. Indeed, the taken-for-granted materiality of digital media is clearly being referred to in relation to a form of communication theory - as if the internet were merely a transparent transmission channel - rather than understanding the affordances of the medium encouraging, shaping or creating certain ways of thinking about things, as such. It is revealing that discussions about computation by members of SR/OOO have been limited to the importance of a computational medium for facilitating SR/OOO's dissemination (see Bryant 2012; Harman 2012). Nonetheless, SR/OOO might be termed the first computational medium-based philosophy, even if it is not fully reflexive of its own historical context in its self-understanding of the computation milieu in which it resides.

For SR/OOO, the speed and publishing affordances of digital media allow them to get their philosophical reflections out more quickly, correct them and create faster feedback and feedforward loops. However, I would argue that the computational layers (software, applications, blogs, tweets, etc.) also discipline the user/writer/philosopher to think within and through particular computational categories. I think it is not a coincidence that what is perhaps the first internet or born-digital philosophy has certain overdetermined characteristics that reflect the medium within which they have emerged. Indeed as Galloway (2012) asks,

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 postfordist capitalism? I am speaking, on the one hand, of computer networks in general, and object-oriented computer languages (such as Java or C+ + ) in particular, and on the other hand, of certain realist philosophers such as Bruno Latour, but also more pointedly Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and their associated school known as “speculative realism.” Why do these philosophers, when holding up a mirror to nature, see the mode of production reflected back at them? Why, in short, a coincidence between today's ontologies and the software of big business? (Galloway 2013: 347, original emphasis)

Indeed, I would argue that it is no surprise that reification is central to both SR/OOO and object-oriented programming. Indeed, both have deep similari­ties and, I argue, draw from a computational imaginary that conceptualizes what things are, or how they should be categorized. In other words, it is an ideology of reification informed through a computational ontotheology. For example, Harman argues that ‘the movement of philosophy is less an unveiling... than a kind of reverse engineering. Teams of industrial pirates often lock themselves in motel rooms, working backward from a competitor's finished product in an effort to unlock and replicate the code that generates it. In the case of the philosopher, the finished product that must be reverse- engineered is the world as we know it... one should reverse engineer, so as to unlock the infrastructure of objects' (Harman 2002: 196, original empha­sis). It is striking to note the extent to which human productive activities are re-presented as reified and object-like, that is, as something strange and alien within the contours of SR/OOO. Ian Bogost's (2012) Alien Phenomenol­ogy is perhaps the most recent case where the links between his compu­tational approach, reification and SR/OOO philosophical system are deeply entwined as objects, units, collections, lists, software philosophy, carpentry

(as programming), etc. Indeed, the subtitle, what its like to be a thing, gestures towards their strangeness and the autonomy of things that are given agency, even as humans are in contrast sharply restricted in their autonomy. As Galloway argues,

Philosophy and computer science are not unconnected. In fact they share an intimate connection, and have for some time. For example, set theory, topology, graph theory, cybernetics and general system theory are part of the intellectual lineage of both object-oriented computer languages, which inherit the principles of these scientific fields with great fidelity, and for recent continental philosophy including figures like Deleuze, Badiou, Luhmann, or Latour. Where does Deleuze's “control society” come from if not from Norbert Wiener's definition of cybernetics? Where do Latour's “actants” come from if not from systems theory? Where does Levi Bryant's “difference that makes a difference” come from if not from Gregory Bateson's theory of information? (Galloway 2013)

The recent work within SR/OOO reflects the society and historical conditions under which they were written, particularly in their fetishization of the object as both ontological and epistemological sources of truth and reality. Galloway further argues,

(1) If recent realist philosophy mimics the infrastructure of contemporary capitalism, should we not show it the door based on this fact alone, the assumption being that any mere repackaging of contemporary ideology is, by definition, anti-scientific and therefore suspect on epistemological grounds? And (2) even if one overlooks the epistemological shortcomings, should we not critique it on purely political grounds, the argument being that any philosophical project that seeks to ventriloquize the current industrial arrangement is, for this very reason, politically retrograde? (Galloway 2013)

Computational metaphors share a lot of similarity in object-oriented software to the principles expressed by SR/OOO speculations about objects as objects. Indeed the appeal of SR/OOO becomes tautological when it discusses computation itself, as the philosophical principles sometimes too neatly intersect with the reality of software systems. This is where Bogost's work on alien phenomenology becomes interesting to focus on, in relation to its attempt to apply SR/OOO to understanding computational systems even as it claims to cast a new light on wider questions about other kinds of objects. After all, every entity is an 'object', in the ontology of object-oriented ontology. Galloway explains,

Granted, merely identifying a formal congruity is not damning in itself. There are any number of structures that “look like” other structures.... Nevertheless are we not obligated to interrogate such a congruity? Is such a mimetic relationship cause for concern?.... What should we do so that our understanding of the world does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism? (Galloway 2013)

In response SR/OOO argues that we must no longer make the 'correlationist' error of privileging the being of humans within ontology, instead we should be moving towards a ‘democracy of objects' (see Bryant 2011). By correlationist they mean any subjectivist position, or attempt to place humanity or human cognition or understanding central in relation to a philosophy of reality. This is to follow from the work of Quentin Meillassoux (2009) who argued in After Finitude:

Such considerations reveal the extent to which the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of the correlation. By “correlation” we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call Correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of correlation so defined. Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant of correlationism. (Meillassoux 2009: 5, original emphasis)

Meillassoux, in particular, is interested in the production of claims about reality that are extra-human, either ancestral, that is, any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species, or shown as arche-fossil, particularly through materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality, the material support such as an isotope whose rate of radioactive decay enables the dating of things (Meillassoux 2009: 10). How then can we make claims about things that are not only non-human, but that also temporally predate the very existence of humans at all. While Meillassoux was careful to delimit his philosophical investigations to those that pre-date humans, and thus the problematic of a correlationist claim in relation to it, here there isn't space to explore the problematic nature of the formulation of a realist science which underpins his claims, it does open the door for philosophically speculative work on the nature of the universe per se. Indeed, this is where object- oriented ontology comes into play, particularly with the work of Bryant et al. (2011) - although here we should note that Meillassoux rejects the labels of both object-oriented ontology and speculative realism. Bryant et al. claim,

[In] “The Speculative Turn',' one can detect the hints of something new. By contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, discourses, social practices, and human finitude, the new breed of thinkers is turning once more towards reality itself. While it is difficult to find explicit positions common to all the thinkers... all have certainly rejected the traditional focus on textual critique... all of them, in one way or another, have begun speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humans more generally. (Bryant et al. 2011: 3)

Indeed, Meillassoux argues,

For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory - of being entirely elsewhere. (Meillassoux 2009: 7, original emphasis)

While there are significant differences between the various ‘speculative realism' positions, this attempt to develop a strong anti-correlationist approach seems both significant and interesting philosophically, and something, I should add, that I am broadly sympathetic to. To my mind, however, there remains a significant problem of theorizing non-human relations while simultaneously being constrained within the categories and limitations of human thought, what we might call the anti-correlationist paradox, even when mediated through mathematics, physics or technical apparatus that gives the appearance of objectivity or non-human thought.

In this, they develop a notion of a form of 'fiat ontology' or a variant described by Bogost (2012: 11) as, 'all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally'. This ontology insists on equal ontological status but difference in ontic status, and bears a striking resemblance to a reductionist universe described by science, albeit perhaps differing in not seeking reductionist explanations in terms of causation, etc. Bogost and others have argued that because they recognize difference at the level of the ontic this demonstrates that they do not have a fiat ontology as such - however, it seems to me that the category of object as the de facto ontological entity is demonstrative of a fiattened ontology.

My critique echos the critical theorists position on Kant, and particularly Lukac's critique of Kant' introduction of a dialectical moment into epistemol­ogy which superseded the inadequacies of 'the rationalist dualism between humanity and nature and the empiricist identity between humanity and nature' (Schecter 2007: 52). Indeed, Kant's epistemology posits the limit to human knowledge which reflects the political reality that ‘freedom can only be rational if it is formal and juridical'. Thus, Kant's epistemology and political thought more generally are trapped in a series of dualisms such as theory/practice, phenomenon/thing-in-itself, subject/object, ethics/politics, etc., which 'reveal themselves to be dependent on the mode of production and the forms of consciousness that correspond to it' (Schecter 2007: 53). Indeed it is striking that the ontology of objects that SR/OOO describe is sharply reminiscent of the flatness represented by objects within object- oriented programming, and the post-Fordist capitalism that is proper to it.

Additionally, there is a dismissal of the notion of World, in the Heideg- gerian sense, for SR/OOO, which, observing the relative position of philosophy vis a vis science within human culture, endeavours to repli­cate or supplement scientific inquiry without human culture, by providing a speculative and philosophical description of the universe through the notion of withdrawn or partially visible objects - Morton calls this ekphrasis or 'ultra-vivid description' (Morton 2011: 170).That is, to refute the presumed correlationism of scientific practice. In most varieties of SR/OOO, there­fore, I think that they are actually undertaking object-oriented onticology. That is, a position more interested in beings, rather than Being, something I discuss further below. For example, Bogost (2012a) outlines a system of thought in which no object has precedence or hierarchy over another, and yet all share a commonality which, following Heidegger, Bogost calls being and we might understand as 'objectness' or 'being an object'. This sug­gests a revealing paradox raised by trying to place a general case (being) as equivalent to the particular (beings) within this flat ontology, and which is justified by virtue of the singularity of what he calls a 'tiny ontology' (Bogost 2012a: 22).

So, what is at stake in the project of SR/OOO - a philosophy whose readers consist of humans who are actively solicited? Indeed, as part of this project, object-oriented ontology seeks to convince the reader of her own experiential equality in relation to the quantitative variety of experiences of different beings within the universe, human and non-human (see Charlesworth 2012). This, of course, has political implications. Here, I want to explore how and why this group of self-defined 'anti-correlationists' work so hard at a rhetorical attempt to convince its readers as to the importance of the SR/OOO project. We might also note that the term object-oriented philosophy has knowingly borrowed its label from object- oriented programming, a method of structured computer software design and programming. I argue that there appears to be an ontotheology of computationality underlying object-oriented ontology (see Bogost 2009b for a related discussion of this; also Berry 2011; Galloway 2013).

But even while expressing a disavowal of the human (as correlationist) there is a practice undertaken of philosophy, an extremely human activity, in relation to humans and objects but directed to the human readers. It is useful again to again turn to Bogost (2012) where he indicates a readership that is unmistakably human. He writes,

We ought to think in public. We ought to be expanding our spheres of influence and inspiration with every page we write. We ought to be trying to influence the world, not just the blinkered group that goes to our favorite conference. And that principle ought to hold no matter your topic of interest, be it Proust or videogames or human factors engineering or the medieval chanson de geste. No matter your field, it can be done, and people do it all the time. They're called “good books”... And I've tried very hard as an author to learn how to write better and better books, books that speak to a broader audience without compromising my scholarly connections, books that really ought to exist as books. (Bogost 2011; see also Bogost 2012: 88-91)

Bogost here acknowledges that the practices of reading and writing, and by extension, that of a reading public - the 'we', is an activity that lies within the purview of humanity. By implication then, humans are a special kind of entity that is able to understand, and by understand I am gesturing towards the notion of Verstehen, or interpretative understanding (Outhwaite 1975). So, rather than asking what it is like to be a thing, I want to explore what is the use of knowing what it is to be a thing. In other words, we might ask what are the uses of SR/OOO? What are the practices of SR/OOO, and how do they reflect upon their own, mostly discursive practices, and their relationships with 'objects'? Although I cannot hope to provide a complete answer to this question here, it is helpful to examine the contours of SR/OOO in relation to these key questions.

Indeed, I would argue that SR/OOO can be understood as a descriptive project for philosophy, which Bogost, following Harman, christens ontography (Bogost 2012a: 36), a 'name for a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units [Bogost's term for objects] and their interoperability' (Bogost 2012a: 38). For Bogost, this project involves the creation of lists, a 'group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma', he explains, 'ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence' (Bogost 2012a: 38). Here, we see why Bogost is keen to draw out the similarities to the creation of aesthetic collections, such as with the new aesthetic discussed below (see Berry 2012; Bogost 2012b). Drawing on Harman, Bogost describes why the ‘rhetoric of lists' is useful to a philosophical project:

Some readers may tire (or pretend to tire) of these frequent lists, dismissing them as an “incantation” or “poetics” of objects. But most readers will not soon grow tired, since the rhetorical power of these rosters of beings stems from their direct opposition to the flaws of current mainstream philosophy. We cannot imagine Kant or Hegel invoking such a roll-call.... The best stylistic antidote to this grim deadlock is a repeated sorcerer's chant of the multitude of things that resist any unified empire. (Harman 2009a: 102)

Thus, Bogost argues that making lists ‘hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail' (Bogost 2012a: 42). An attempt, we might say, to get closer to the buzzing variety of the ‘real'. Harman further argues that ‘human-centred philosophy is a Hiroshima of metaphysics, one that annihilates... objects'. Instead, Bogost explains, ‘lists of objects without explication can do the philosophical work of drawing our attention towards them with greater attentiveness' (Bogost 2012a: 45).This Bogost calls an ontograph, which is, he says, a ‘crowd' (Bogost 2012a: 59). They are also, we might note in passing, extremely partial lists, reflecting the rhetorical intentions of the litany reciter and only a ‘description' in the weakest sense. For example, in the following three litanies taken from Bogost (2012a), objects are invoked with no particularity, rather they remain abstract - the signified rather than the referent,²

“molded plastic keys and controllers, motor-driven disc drives, silicon wafers, plastic ribbons, and bits of data” “Subroutines and middleware libraries compiled into byte code or etched onto silicon, cathode ray tubes or LCD displays mated to be insulated, conductive cabling, and microprocessors executing machine instructions that enter and exit address buses”, “African elephant or the Acropora coral” “computer or a microprocessor, or a ribbon cable” (Bogost 2012a: 10)

The unicorn and the combine harvester, the color red and methyl alcohol, quarks and corrugated iron, Amelia Earhart and dyspepsia. (Bogost 2012a: 11)

quarks, Harry Potter, keynote speeches, single-malt scotch, Land Rovers, lychee fruit, love affairs, dereferenced pointers, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, bozons, horticulturalists, Mozambique, Super Mario Bros. (Bogost 2012a: 12)

One striking aspect to the project outlined within Alien Phenomenology is the aim towards what Bogost calls a phenomenological practice. Bogost writes, ‘as philosophers, our job is to amplify... the noise of objects.... Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, of their... operations.... Our job is to get our hands dirty...' (Bogost 2012a: 34). In contrast to Marx's dictum that philosophers have hitherto tried to understand the world, and that philosophers should therefore aim to change it, Bogost proposes that we should describe it or create other actors to describe it for us, by making philosophical software (see Bogost 2012a: 110). A form of second- order epistemology, quite in keeping with the computational approaches of distantiation and second-order data collection and the importance of control via a computational system, even if only used as a 'method' to ‘access' the objects themselves. As Bogost himself notes,

Why do we give the Civil War soldier, the guilty Manhattan project physicist, the oval-headed alien anthropomorph, and the intelligent celestial race so much more credence than the scoria cone, the obsidian fragment, the gypsum crystal, the capsicum pepper, and the propane flame? When we welcome these things into scholarship, poetry, science, and business, it is only to ask how they relate to human productivity, culture, and politics. We've been living in a tiny prison of our own devising, one in which all the stuff that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuffs with which we stuff ourselves. (Bogost 2012a: 3, emphasis added)

Putting to one side the somewhat doubtful claim that the former litany is given more credence by anyone except, perhaps, humanities scholars, here we see a claim to a collective 'we' that Bogost wishes to speak for and to. Further, he adds, 'let me be clear: we need not discount human beings to adopt an object-oriented position - after all, we ourselves are of the world as much as musket buckshot and gypsum and space shuttles. But we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence' (Bogost 2012a: 8). Thus the flatness denied in relation to the ontological 'specialness' or uniqueness of humans is reinforced. Entities and humans have equal place in the metaphysics presented by Bogost, in other words humans have no specific existence, contra Heidegger, that would enable them to have any claim over or in distinction to other kinds of objects.

However, there is a performative contradiction presented here in as much as 'musket buckshot and gypsum and space shuttles' cannot be the addressees of this text as patently they do not read. It seems that SR/OOO is trying to do two things here: on the one hand SR/OOO denies the specialness of humans' existence in relation to other objects, while simultaneously having to write a special kind of writing - philosophy - to make arguments supporting their claims - thereby acknowledging the very special existence that humans possess, namely qualities of understanding, taking a stand on their own being, etc. This is a classic performative contradiction. While it would be perfectly legitimate to outline a formalist theory or methodological position that, for the sake of the approach, limits the requirement to treat human actors as particular or special in relation to others (this is the methodological innovation within actor-network theory), it is quite another to then extend this claim into a philosophical ontology, which is part of a special order of discourse particular to human beings, that is, philosophy. The implications of a so-called philosophical non-human turn are interesting for its nihilistic and conservative implications but for his part, Bogost (2012a) rejects that nihilism is present in his work, remarking,

[object-oriented ontology] “allows for the possibility of a new sort of humanism,” in which, as Harman adds, “humans will be liberated from the crushing correlational system” For his part, Nick Srnicek offers opprobrium in place of optimism.... “Do we need another analysis of how a cultural representation does symbolic violence to a marginal group? This is not to say that this work has been useless, just that it's become repetitive” (Bogost 2012a: 132)

In this 'liberation' therefore, we are saved from the 'crushing' problem of repetitive accounts of marginal inequality and suffering. This is achieved by a new 'humanism' that seems to reject the human as having any special case, such that the marginal problems of women, LGBT immigrants, asylum seekers and the poor are seemingly replaced with the problem of a litany of objects such as 'quarks, Elizabeth Bennet, single-malt scotch, Ford Mustang fastbacks, lychee fruit, love affairs, dereferenced pointers, Care Bears, sirocco winds, the Tri-City Mall, tort law, the Airbus A330, the five-hundred drachma note' (Bogost 2012a: 133).

Bogost notes, 'if we take seriously the idea that all objects recede inter­minably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the centre of a new meta­physics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us' (Bogost 2012a: 9). Leaving aside the question as to why we would want to apply that hypothesis, the question arises as to how one is to judge between the differ­ent forms of perception in order to (re)present the litanies, let alone recognize them. In other words, if human perception is 'correlationist' is itself suspect and to be rejected, then why should we accept litanies and sets, which themselves are creations of the human mind? Indeed, it seems that litanies as a method for forming a collection of objects are extremely partial and are a result of a particular and limited capacity of the human mind. The question of how SR/ OOO theorists are able to make a claim to the litany as a device free of the contagion of correlationism is never firmly established. Nor indeed is Bogost's attempt to sidestep this problem by the composition of litanies using algo­rithms, which merely moves the human intervention to that of a second-order function by writing the very algorithm that generates the lists. This issue of litanies as a rhetorical structure and claim to a certain kind of 'objectivity', as if a list of things were more concrete, is a problem within the domain of SR/OOO and is hardly dealt with by Harman's notion of 'metaphor' or 'allud­ing' to things (Harman 2009b).

However, Bogost wants to move away from the tricky epistemological problem of access, and instead also argues for 'metaphor' as a means of understanding the way in which objects, within this system, interact. This, oddly, avoids the very real problem of mediation in SR/OOO and moves the focus onto a form of information transfer between objects, rather than the practice of mediating those objects and SR/OOO's claims about them. In effect, 'metaphor' describes an operation whereby the properties of an object are 'represented' within another object in order to facilitate some form of interaction (which might be vicarious). Bogost writes,

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves. (Bogost 2009; see also Bogost 2012: 6)

This definition is helpful in a number of ways, first it demonstrates that in the move towards a flat ontology the attention has shifted from ontology (being) to things/objects (beings). Indeed, the definition of everything as a single thing, in this case an object/unit - is precisely the danger that Heidegger identified for philosophy - the 'Being' that explains everything, the 'Good' for Plato, 'Substance' for Spinoza and 'Object' for SR/OOO. As Bryant remarks, 'there is only one type of being: objects. As a consequence, humans are not excluded, but are rather objects among the various types of objects that exist or populate the world, each with their own specific powers and capacities' (Bryant 2011: 20, original emphasis). This raises a further problem of 'correctness', in other words in correctly identifying objects as beings, as Heidegger argues the focus on entities is a mistake for philosophy and that,

what is essential is not what we presumably establish with exactness by means of instruments and gadgets; what is essential is the view in advance which opens up the field for anything to be established. (Heidegger 1995: 60)

Bogost's work is exemplary and highly suggestive for the work of studying software and code, however, I feel that this work is an example of what we might call object-oriented onticology, rather than ontology as such. This is important work, we do need to map certain kinds of objects and their inter­relations, however, we also need to be aware of the consequences of certain ways of seeing and categorizing the world else we fall prey to identity think­ing. The problem seems to be that object-oriented ontology has no notion of an exemplar, no special case, no shining examples. Indeed, the cover concept, 'object' has been generalized to a remarkable degree in this work. As such, it quickly descends into endless lists and litanies. As Heidegger observes,

So it happens that we, lost as we usually are in the activities of observing and establishing, believe we “see” many things and yet do not see what really is. (Heidegger 1995: 60)

Bogost attempts to circumvent this problem by the application of a method he calls carpentry, after Harman and Lingis who use the term to refer to the way in which 'things fashion one another and the world at large' (Bogost 2012a: 93). Bogost introduces philosophical software carpentry to implement the creation of what he calls 'ontographic tools to characterize the diversity of being' (Bogost 2012a: 94). A move he characterizes as pragmatic speculative realism. One of these tools he calls the Latour Litanizer, which generates 'random' litanies based on randomized selections of Wikipedia pages (although it doesn't appear to have been used within Alien Phenomenology itself, which has a constant refrain in the choice of items in the litanies, see above). While an interesting example of software litany creation, it is hardly divorced from its programmer (see Berry 2011a). This is further demonstrated in the example of the 'image toy' programmed by Bogost that selected random photographs of 'objects' from the Flickr website, and occasionally therefore showed images of women, one of which happened to be wearing a playboy bunny suit. In response to criticism, Bogost was required to hand-code a specific query that prevented the operation of certain aspects of philosophical software carpentry, namely no women in bunny suits, defined in the code as:

Options.Tags = ‘(object OR thing OR stuff) AND NOT (sexy OR woman OR girl)'. (Bogost 2012: 99)

So there is certainly agency at work here, but it is a delegated agency, and one that is circumscribed both by the programmer, in this case Bogost, and by norms and values of society. For example, human notions of what an acceptable image is. But also there is an interesting question of how images of woman become ‘objects' when mediated through code, in this case ‘sexy or woman or girl' are not the kinds of ‘objects' that the ‘image toy' is allowed to find and display. And just to reiterate, these requirements are delegated to the code in the image toy by Bogost, they require the very correlationism that SR/OOO tries so hard to avoid. Indeed the agency of these objects, and how this agency plays out in relation to the selectivity that goes into making the litanies of SR/OOO are mediated by human programmers. Indeed, when software code objects are unmonitored and given the opportunity to exercise their (limited) agency very strange results can occur, such as with the financial Flash Crash of 2010 discussed earlier, or for example, the case of offensive computer-generated t-shirts, where

The American clothing company Solid Gold Bomb blamed an automated computer dictionary for its series of the items emblazoned with offensive phrases such as “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot” and “Keep Calm and Hit Her” based on the much reproduced “Keep Calm and Carry On” second world war poster... [they claimed it was] the result of “a scripted computer process”, which used an algorithm to generate hundreds of slogans. (Guardian 2013)

The founder of Solid Gold Bomb explained,

I then generated word lists that were called using simple scripting methods to generate image based art of the modified slogans. These were subsequently scripted to position themselves on t-shirts and the associated product data was derived simply from the product name and the 16 word combinations like “On” and “Off” and “Him” or “Her” and so forth... it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff. (Fowler 2013)

It is interesting to consider within the flat ontology of objects, and to which SR/OOO generally subscribes, how SR/OOO is able to square the ontological claims of its philosophical position with unintended ethical and political outcomes. For example, Bogost argued ‘the change [to excluding problematic images of women etc.] risks excluding a whole category of units from the realm of being! Are women or girls or sexiness to have no ontological place alongside chipmunks, lighthouses, and galoshes?' (Bogost 2012: 99). But the act of referring to women and girls as ‘units' or ‘objects' even if, as he is keen to emphasize, they are objects among a plenitude of other objects remains problematic. Indeed, it raises the question of whether it is possible within SR/OOO to condemn an object or its outcomes, and from what normative position would one critique it? In the case where the computer code is clearly at fault, for example, by producing offensive output, where is the standpoint whereby one object (humans) can critique another object (computer code)? Is there such a thing as a bad object in SR/OOO, or are all objects equal to the extent that no such distinctions can be made? Certainly the critique of correlationism seems to imply that humans are not in such a position to make such judgements, and certainly not able to exercise a moral or ethical superiority in relation to the objects that surround them, code objects included. Bogost states ‘being is unconcerned with issues of gender, performance, and its associated politics' (Bogost 2012: 99). Harman explains,

Often when this question is asked, people want to know what the political ramifications of object-oriented philosophy would be, and I think this is the wrong place to start. Intellectuals have become far too aggressively political, in almost puritanical fashion, as if there were something immoral about looking for beauty or fascination in the world as long as there is still exploitation somewhere. Philosophers have tried to save the world; the point, however, is to explore it. (Kimbell 2013: 7)

It seems then that SR/OOO reflects a worrying spirit of conservatism. They discount the work of human activity and place it alongside a litany of naturalized objects - a method that points less at the interconnected nature of things, and gestures more towards the infinity of sameness, the gigantic of objects, the relentless distanceless of a total confusion of beings. In short, experience is conceived of as disoriented and overwhelming, what Heidegger described as the ‘terror' of pure unmitigated flatness. And with that, philosophy becomes ‘cold' philosophy, instead of understanding, we have lists and litanies of objects. Not so much philosophy as philosography, where rather than understanding the world, there is an attempt to describe it. A description that is taken to be objective, in as much SR/OOO claims a special kind of access to the ontology that it uncovers, a position that is strangely unreflexive about its own historical grounding. SR/OOO is, then, a descriptive philosophy

that attempts to conceptualize a universe of objects while simultaneously disavowing conceptualization as correlationist. It attempts to provide a speculative, but nonetheless realist and ahistorical ontology which claims to be philosophically untimely, but in fact is extremely timely, mirroring, as it does, the objectification of both computation and capitalism.

This lack of historical awareness is common in the SR/OOO approach, and one that is rejected by claiming to be writing ‘metaphysics' disconnected from the social and political. I want to challenge this claim on three grounds: first, a performative contradiction in relation to the selection of intended readers capable of being influenced by the persuasive discourse of object-oriented ontology. Secondly, on the basis of what I perceive to be an unexamined formalism which is implicit in the construction of the SR/OOO philosophical system, this is, indeed an example of identity thinking. Lastly, it seems to me that as Golumbia (2012) convincingly argues, there are ‘profound philosophical contradictions posed by the refusal to distinguish between epistemology and metaphysics and simultaneous use of arguments from both philosophical discourses' (Golumbia 2012). These objections I believe are highly damaging to the claims of SR/OOO, but the second criticism points towards a potential political conservatism at work within the project of speculative realism more generally. These are not the only weaknesses in the object-oriented ontology position, but I think they are significant enough to warrant discussion. Indeed, Blake (2012) argues these strands have a common root of the ‘necessary but repressed "anthropologism" required to make sense of our singularity as bearers of and contributors to the practice of science......................................................................................... Thus [SR/OOO]

philosophy addresses itself to the anthropological Subject of science... a structural subject instantiated, as far as we know, only by human beings' (Blake 2012). Even if, as Harman claims,

Speculative Realism is not post-human in the sense of privileging entities other than humans. Humans are still in the picture as entities, even very interesting entities, they simply aren't a full half ontology anymore. (Harman 2013)

The litanies by which SR/OOO practitioners proclaim their commitment to heterogeneity of entities - cascades and tumbling threads of polythetic classification - are linked merely by sequence, in which each item has no need to bear any resemblance to the ones before or after. They posit few relationships, and offer few narrative connections, and are therefore ‘essentially uncontrollable: at the limit so indeterminable that anything can be connected with anything' (Anderson 2012). But of course there is a connection, a link, a thread, performed by the philosographer as the human who chooses, consciously or unconsciously, the elements that make up the chain, and which are inscribed in countless books and articles. And more so, undertakes the work of constructing the litany or the collection as a means of discussing the very notion of the 'object'. The use of object-oriented ontology, then, is bound up in an apparent conservatism that rallies at the temerity of human beings to believe in themselves, their politics and their specialness. Instead of World, SR/OOO posits universe, and collapses object and concept into ontology.

To see what 'shows up' to the philosographer, a critical examination of the lists shows that they are often contaminated by the products of neo­liberal capitalism, objects which could not just appear of themselves, but required the actual concrete social labour of human beings to mediate their existence. This is the lack of historical and social context in both the types of objects found and the choices that SR/OOO makes in its selection of exemplar objects, not that it accepts that these are 'exemplars', they just 'happen' to be the objects chosen in this particular litany. There is also the tendency to attempt to shock the reader by the juxtaposition of objects that would normally be thought to be categorically different - see Bogost (2009) for a discussion of whether including Harry Potter, blinis and humans in a list was a striking enough example. These rhetorical strategies are interesting in themselves, but I do not see them as replacements for critical philosophy. This demonstrates that SR/OOO has not escaped the so-called 'correlationist circle' (Harman 2009b), nor provided a model for thinking about the anti- correlationist paradox which remains present in their own work. Indeed, it reinforces the extent to which SR/OOO practices identity thinking.

We should therefore ask SR/OOO to move beyond merely 'exploring' the objects they see around them and catch sight of what is being listed in their descriptive litanies. That is, examining the lists they produce, we can see what kind of objects they see as near, and which they see as far, and therefore question their claims to see objects all the way down (see Bogost 2012: 83-4). Yet, as we examine these lists there appears to be a profound forgetting of Being, as it were, as they write both for and as subjects of computational capitalism - a fact which remains hidden from them - and a seemingly major aporia in their work - that is, the wider capitalist order, post- Fordist or informational capitalism. For some reason, SR/OOO is attracted to the ephemerality of certain objects, as if by listing them they doubly affirm their commitment to realism, or that the longer the list, the more 'real' it is. And this ephemerality is often represented by objects that are the creation of computational capitalism, such as,

molded plastic keys and controllers, motor-driven disc drives, silicon wafers, plastic ribbons, and bits of data.... Subroutines and middleware libraries compiled into byte code or etched onto silicon, cathode ray tubes or LCD displays mated to be insulated, conductive cabling, and microprocessors executing machine instructions that enter and exit address buses. (Bogost 2012: 10)

Indeed, this highlights the important distinction between materialism and realism, that materialism must be historical and critical, whereas realism tends towards an ahistoricism. By historicizing SR/OOO, we are able to discern the links between the underlying computational capitalism and its theoretical and philosophical manifestations. Indeed, in the spirit of the critique made by the Frankfurt School of Kant's work, it is apparent that SR/OOO is a timely philosophy that uncritically re-presents claims that mirror capitalism, for example, that SR/OOO is in some sense outside the realm of humans, eternal, unchanging, apolitical or naturalized, even as concepts and litanies are hypostatized in metaphysical claims.

More work needs to be done to trace the trajectories that are hinted at, particularly the computationality I see implicit in SR/OOO more generally. But I also want to tentatively gesture towards SR/OOO as one discourse contributing to a new bifurcation (as Whitehead referred to the nature/ culture split), in this case, not between nature and culture, which today have begun to reconnect as dual hybridized sites of political contestation - for example, climate change - but rather as computation versus nature-culture. Here, nature-culture becomes a site of difference, disagreement, political relativism and a kind of 'secondary' quality, in other words ‘values' and 'felicity conditions'. Computationality, or some related ontological form, becomes the site of primary qualities or 'facts', the site of objectivity, and is foundational, ahistorical, unchanging and a replacement for nature in modernity as the site of agreement upon which a polity is made possible - a computational society.

The abstract nature of objects within computer programming, formal code objects which interrelate to each other and interact (or not), and yet remain deeply computational, mathematical and discrete, is more than suggestive of the ontology that SR/OOO outlines. The purification process of object-oriented design/programming is also similar to the gradual emptying of the universe of 'non-objects' by SR/OOO, in other words subjects become objects too, but this serves to create the possibility of shared consensus by SR/OOO practitioners about this new bifurcated world. This creates a united foundation, understood as ontological, a site of 'objectivity', 'facts', and with a strict border control to prevent this pure realm being affected by the newly excised nature-culture. Within this new bifurcation, we see pure objects placed in the bifurcated object-space and subjects are located in the nature-culture space. Such as demonstrated by the litanies that SR/OOO practitioners share and which describe abstract names of objects, not concrete entities. This is clearly ironic in a philosophical movement that claims to be realist.

This ontological claim also points thought towards a cartography of what are claimed to be 'purer' objects, often provocatively listed in the litanies, such as 'angels', 'Popeye' and 'unicorns'. These textual attempts to capture and describe the real - without ever venturing into the 'great outdoors' that SR/OOO claims to respect. Galloway rightly shows us how to break this spell, reflected also in the SR/OOO refusal to historicize, through a concrete analysis of the historical and material conditions of production. He writes,

One might therefore label this the postfordist response to philosophical realism in general and Meillassoux in particular: after software has entered history, math cannot and should not be understood ahistorically... math itself, as algorithm, has become a historical actor. (Galloway 2013)

A critical approach to SR/OOO raises the suspicion that the claims are a metaphysical reflection of computational capitalism. Indeed, it raises important questions of how the SR/OOO position on ontological questions, and here I am thinking in terms of the ontological notion of the political, creates certain conditions of possibility for an SR/OOO politics at the level of the ontic. In other words, ontological claims imply choices which serve to delimit certain kinds of action in the specific realm of politics. Which is not to say, of course, that the construction or categories used to define the ontological, as such, are not political in themselves. This points the way to understanding the way in which SR/OOO manifests identity thinking in its claims to 'explore' the 'real' object, and simultaneously disavow the human subject as correlationist error. Indeed, this tendency towards reification within SR/OOO mirrors in many ways the reification of computational processes, which excels in creating discrete objects within its systems. A discussion we now turn to in relation to the reification of everyday life in the next chapter.