In this final chapter I want to begin to draw together the constellation of con­cepts and ideas that have been explored throughout the book.

The idea of a constellation of concepts as a model of thinking comes from Walter Benjamin, and developed through Adorno. Benjamin who argues that, ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.

survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step- by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover-concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation... By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being... They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking. (Adorno 2004a: 162)

To avoid classificatory thinking, and the automated classificatory processes of computational systems relevant to this book, requires the ‘priority of the object'. That is that ‘whilst it is impossible for us to even conceive of a subject which is not an object, we can very easily conceive of an object which is not a subject' (Jarvis 1998: 183). In other words, we cannot have access to any kind of immediate objectivity free of subjectivity and therefore subjective mediation. Indeed, any such approach would be delusive because cognitive ‘access' to immediacy is already a mediation of it and therefore the object cannot simply be promoted to the same kind of position of priority which Adorno sees as occupied by the subject in German idealism.

“On that throne the object would be nothing but an ideal”... because the decision that the object has priority would be the subject's decision: we would effectively be subjecting ourselves not to the object itself, but to a placeholder for it which we ourselves had installed in its place, deludedly believing it to be a transcendent and independent of our thinking. Nor does Adorno think it possible to guarantee objective knowledge simply by stripping away those elements of cognition considered to be subjective, as though they were an accidental extra. (Jarvis 1998: 183)

Indeed, in a situation whereby SR/OOO condemns the ‘correlationism' of much philosophical thought, these are important points. The internalization of computationality, such that its classificatory logic becomes a condition of possibility for everyday life today, needs to be reflexively and critically uncovered. Claims of object orientism or realism, whether in science, technology or philosophy, may be able to put down roots more easily in a culture that is strongly conditioned and shaped by computational categories and classifications. It also suggests the countervailing possibility of critical thought itself which is much harder to practice, teach and understand, when easy technocratic solutions, elegantly presented as a dance of assemblages in engineering models, more easily appear to catch the attention of thinkers and the public.

It is interesting to explore the extent to which computationality is itself also subject to an ideology. If it is indeed the case that computationality represents the incorporation of identity thinking par excellence. And where there is the slightest cognitive dissonance between reality and code, then anticipatory computing can co-opt cognition such that there is a reconciliation of disjuncture. This false unity, structured in part by the hollowing out of human reason and placing it within algorithms, requires only the acceptance of the superior cognitive abilities of the computational devices that mediate the algorithms.

Perhaps it is achievable through the sheer quantification that computation- ality makes possible, and which is intoxicating to the human narcissistic urge to collect, store and keep; combined with the other side of the computational coin, that is the ability to 'read' these huge data stores, archives, big data and databases through the mediation of computational visualization. The locked promise of personal histories and stories is held within the frame of the com­puter, combined with the key of enchanted interfaces, perfect memories and the paradigm of convenience that accompanies the digital. But this is a limited ideological screen, and critically identified through the instabilities, glitches, exceptions and crashes that plague our computational experience. Therefore, we have to keep in mind that individuals within computationality remain 'prod­ucts of history; they are also the spontaneous and variable points of nexus in processes of exchange and potentially new modes of socialization' (Schecter 2007: 166). Nonetheless, Horkheimer's prophetic words describing a world thrown upside down between 1926 and 1931 seem even more relevant today, when he argues,

The less stable necessary ideologies are, the more cruel the methods by which they are protected. The degree of zeal and terror with which tottering idols are defended show how far dusk has already advanced. With the development of large-scale industry, the intelligence of the European masses has grown so greatly that the sacred possessions must be protected from it.... There is not only the general, systematically engineered brainwashing but the threat of economic ruin, social ostracism, the penitentiary and death to deter reason from attacking the key conceptual techniques of domination. (Horkheimer 1978: 17)

Computational ideologies are protected in computationality by the more subtle apparatuses and more terrible armed guards of drones, algorithms, software and code.¹ Indeed, the pressure placed on persons or organizations involved in megaleaks, such as Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower and Wikileaks, demonstrates the dangers of revealing how global power oper­ates under the conditions made possible by computationality. This raises the question of resistance to the growing power of computation in our societies, and the commodity fetishism reinforced by computational devices, for exam­ple, through such tactical software/media interventions (see Raley 2009).