This chapter explores the question of ontology, particularly that presupposed by Cartesian ontology, which divides the world between res cogitans and res extensa, that is, spirit and matter.
This was part of the Kantian legacy that, through Husserl, Heidegger attempted to critique. In this chapter I think it is fruitful to use Heideggerian concepts to refresh critical thinking through an encounter with the, often opposing, camps of critical theory and Heideggerian phenomenology to tentatively develop a critical phenomenology.
Indeed, there are clear convergences with Heidegger's thought and Adorno, as each ‘wishes to insist on the temporal-historical character of truth without taking this as a excuse for relativism; each resists reducing philosophy either to a method or a doctrine.' Lastly, and perhaps crucially, ‘each is deeply concerned with a critique or questioning of modernity - and especially of the conversion of production into an absolute - without offering any simple return to tradition' (Jarvis 1998: 199). But, of course there are also clear political differences between the conservative Heidegger and Adorno, the critical theorist. In order to develop this notion of a critical phenomenology it is helpful to briefly review the corresponding positions of both Heidegger and Adorno. Thus the clarification of the relation to ontology of negative dialectics is needed in relation to the project outlined here, and to provide signposts for how this approach can be useful.First, I want to briefly outline a brief position on Heidegger's relation to ontology and his project of deconstruction (destruktion). I will then examine Adorno's reaction to this and his position on ontology through negative dialectics. I am doing this for a number of reasons, but specifically because I use both Heidegger and Adorno as important touchstones for the development of a critical theory of the digital. Their work contributes to understanding how computationality has a specific and limited ontology which is nevertheless totalizing, and that needs to be historicized and read in relation to the kinds of contemporary philosophy that is practised under computational capitalism.
By this I am gesturing towards certain kinds of Computationalism, but also the emergent philosophical work known as speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy or object-oriented ontology. Here, I shall group them under the term SR/OOO. While accepting that differences do exist between the various writers in this tradition, there are enough similarities in theorizing, not least due to their Heideggerian inheritance, that general contours of SR/OOO can be discerned. The aim is to explore how computationalism runs through the varieties of ontology that are deployed, and more specifically to connect them back to the critical theorists' treatment of philosophy as radically of its time.