Interview

A Network is a
Network is a Network:
Reflections on the
Computational and the
Societies of Control

Theory, Culture & Society

0(0) 122
! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415590237
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David M. Berry
University of Sussex

Alexander R. Galloway
New York University

Abstract
In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the implications of
undertaking media theoretical work for critiquing the digital in a time when networks
proliferate and, as Galloway claims, we need to forget Deleuze. Through the lens of
Galloways new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, the potential of a non-philosophy
for media is probed. From the import of the allegorical method from excommunication to the question of networks, they discuss Galloways recent work and reflect
on the implications of computation for media theory, thinking about media objects,
and critical theory.
Keywords
computation, control society, critical theory, Laruelle, media theory, networks, nonphilosophy

The network has become a key concept for understanding an increasingly postdigital age, sedimented in contemporary understandings of the
specicity of digital technologies within social life. In a number of elds,
attempts to study and interpret the digital have been refracted through a
network lens, an optic that has increasingly been subject to important
critiques but which has remained remarkably consistent as an explanatory framework. Galloways recent approach to media, which incorporates Laruelles non-philosophy (Galloway, 2014), problematizes this
taken-for-grantedness of the network and seeks to explore the
Corresponding author: David M. Berry. Email: d.m.berry@sussex.ac.uk
Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
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specicities and vicissitudes of computers and other digital machines, using

what we might call a method of exploring non-media towards a critical rereading of the digital. This is a rigorous non-philosophical knowledge of the
kernel of (digital) media, to investigate the deterministic causality found in
an ontology of media that stresses its unidirectional causality and ultimate
status as the ground of possibility. That is, to contest and explore a set of
realist claims using Laruelles rigorously non-philosophical tradition, especially those that seek to get at the core of media, at the thing in itself. But
Galloway also deploys Laruelle to rethink philosophy and media in a computational milieu, arguing that it is impossible to think philosophy without
thinking digitality. It is impossible to think philosophy without interrogating
the zero, the one, the two, the multiple, and the distinctions made among
these terms (Galloway, 2014: 219).
If we take seriously the claims of Francois Laruelle that it is possible to
undertake what he calls a non-philosophy a project that seeks out a
non-philosophical kernel within a philosophical system then what
would be the implications of what we are here calling a method of
non-media? Laruelle himself undertook a similar project in relation to
Marxism in Introduction au non-marxisme (2000), where he seeks to
philosophically impoverish Marxism, with the goal of universalizing
it through a scientic mode of universalization. Laruelle, in Galloways
interpretation, sought to develop an ontological platform that, while
leaving room for certain kinds of causality and relation, radically denies
exchange in any form whatsoever (Galloway, 2012: 194). For example, in
seeking a non-Euclidean Marxism, Laruelle argues that we could
uncover, in some sense, the non-philosophical ingredient, as Galloway
has called it. Finding the non-Marxist kernel serves as the starting point,
both as symptom and model, for undertaking systematic enquiry.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the
implications of the symptom and model that Galloway draws from
Laruelle in his new book, Against the Digital (Galloway, 2014), and the
allegorical methods introduced in the co-written book, Excommunication
(Galloway et al., 2013). The aim is to uncover the implications of undertaking media theoretical writing and (non)thinking of the digital at a time
when digital networks proliferate and, as Galloway claims, it is urgent
that we forget Deleuze. Berry and Galloway reect on the implications
for media theory, thinking about media objects and the implications of
Galloways turn against the digital.1
David M. Berry: In my own work I am interested in the ways in which we
can further develop a post-foundational and decentred critical theory in
relation to our contemporary computational society (Berry, 2014). Do
you see the argument developed in your work as intersecting with such a
project, or do you see it as dierent to it?
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Alexander R. Galloway: I view things like decentralization and anti-foundationalism as perhaps having a tactical utility, but lacking a more durable use. Lets not forget that bourgeois capitalism is the greatest
proponent of anti-foundationalism and decentralization. All that is
solid melts into air. Nothing wants to destroy essences and sovereign
bodies more than big business. There is no better example of decentralized sovereignty than global empire. Im much too paranoid to subscribe
to any of that. This is why Im a materialist.
Im what you might call a weak foundationalist. As I see it, weak
foundationalism means: I have no dogma, except. . .. Or to put it more
verbosely: I am anti-dogmatic and have no dogma (except for this one
small scrap of dogma-x). Dogma-x refers to any kind of coherent image
of things. It may be observational or methodological, provisional or
total, small or large. To claim all is water is to articulate some
dogma-x. To say everything is material is a dogma-x. So too are the
great mantras of modern criticality: think freely, always historicize, or
the conditions of possibility of thought.
Even sceptics, pragmatists, and empiricists those anti-dogmatic
heroes have their own kinds of dogma-x: for the sceptic, the notion
that knowledge is fallible; for the pragmatist, the commitment to practical application; for the empiricist, the religion of sense experience. And
even the most intrepid anti-essentialist positions, such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, have their own versions of dogma-x: there is
nothing outside of the text or all rationality contains a play of supplementarity. Dogma-x is a claim, a claim formulated as a picture of the
world. Weak foundationalism means that, irrespective of the antidogmatic or critical nature of any particular knowledge claims, all such
knowledge claims are claims, and thus as claims embody some kind of
dogma-x, no matter how minimal. It would take longer to demonstrate,
but in essence I believe that all philosophical positions, when fully articulated, are weak foundationalist (at the very least; they may be strong
foundationalist too).
DMB: How do you deploy such a materialist weak-foundational
approach?
ARG: The most sensible use of dogma-x, and the best way to mitigate its
dangers, is always to side with the generic or the common. If we are fated
to have one small scrap of dogma-x, the best use of dogma call it a
fundamentalism if you like is in the form of an insucient materialism.
And note that such a weak foundationalism is weak two times over. The
dogma-x itself is the most minimal scrap. It does not occupy the role of a
Prime Mover or absolute cause, but rather determines in the last
instance, as Althusser and Laruelle liked to say. And likewise, an insufcient generic materialism is, if you like, a philosophy of

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impoverishment. I view such a move as absolutely essential to any kind

of political or ethical project today.
The key, therefore, is to select this dogma-x with the utmost care.
Huge swaths of contemporary thought are either oblivious to their
own dogma-x or, when conscious of it, have constructed their dogma-x
in dubious ways. Consider what I call reticular pessimists. Their dogmax? Everything is a network. That strikes me as a rather questionable
form of foundationalism for a number of reasons. First, its way too
presentist to pass the straight face test. (I suppose in 1860 they would
have said everything is a steam engine? Pu pu!) Blinded by such
presentism, the claim is simply incorrect in a lot of ways; think of all
the things that arent networks. And third, their claim crashes directly
into contemporary forms of network power, and in doing so misses a
wonderful opportunity to contest them.
DMB: By weak foundationalism are you referring to a minimal ontology guiding your work?
ARG: Yes, and we urgently need more cogent theories of this minimal
condition itself, the condition of the weak. You might say Im something of a reverse Nietzschean. A muscular subject who wilfully overcomes the bankruptcy of the world might have been a radical subject
position at some point in the past. But today the most radical gesture is
to withhold the suciency of power. To withhold suciency itself.
(Such is Laruelles project in a nutshell.) We need this strategy to
combat empire, to combat patriarchy, to combat fascism, both micro
and macro.
DMB: How do you understand this notion of minimal ontology?
ARG: Consider the age-old dierence between philosophy and science.
Philosophy is the thing that is transcendental vis-a`-vis the real. Generic
science, by contrast, is the thing that is immanent vis-a`-vis the real.
Philosophy uses the as-structure, science the in-structure. From an existential point of view, philosophy asks the same question over and over,
what is x?, or what is the identity of anything whatsoever? And from an
ontological point of view the inquiry is similar, all is x, or All as the
principle of unity that subtends anything whatsoever.
Generic science does it dierently. Contra philosophys approach
(what is x?), the existential question of generic science is x is what?,
or how is anything whatsoever an instance of identity? Likewise the
generics ontological inquiry is x is all, or the anything whatsoever as
the principle of unity.
On this score the pre-Socratics are much more interesting than everything that came after. Still, the goal is not so much to proer explanatory rubrics like water is all or re is all. Instead, we ought to begin
with all is water or all is re and continue from there. Ultimately the
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generic question is not what is x? but what is all?. What is the All?
What is the one? What is the unary tendency of all being? And how can
we withdraw from being in order to discover the one within the unary
tendency?
The aforementioned dogma-x now comes full circle. The dogma-x
should be subjected to a principle of insuciency. This forces the
dogma in the direction of the generic, and away from traps like essentialism or liberal universalism. (Despite their overall incompatibility,
Badiou and Laruelle synchronize somewhat on this point: Badiou
(2007, 185) says void, but Laruelles generic is as impoverished and unencumbered as something can get without vanishing into nothing. The
generic is on the edge of the void as Badiou likes to say.) Forcing the
dogma-x in the direction of the generic results in an insucient and
generic weak foundation upon which the normal forms of anti-dogmatic
critique can best arise.
What Laruelle calls generic science also comes under another name:
no longer philosophy, but theory. Philosophy is always inationary and
maximalist. Even the most hard-nosed sceptics are philosophical because
they remain sucient unto themselves scepticism as adequate for
thinking. By contrast, theory creates a minimalism in thought. Theory
is a rigorous science of the inadequacy of material life.
DMB: In my own work I am interested in exploring how theoretical work
is aesthetically theoretical, and here I mean in terms of a method informed
by aesthetic or mimetic reason, and theoretically aesthetic, such that it
remains concerned with the object mediating structures constitutive of
socio-historical reality. Does your work explore similar themes?
ARG: What a fascinating question. Certainly rst philosophy has
always been closely linked with things like representation or mimesis.
From the Book of Genesis to Pygmalion and Plato, the existence of
things in the world has often been bound up with notions of creativity,
art, and expression. Its no exaggeration to say that Platos theory of art
is a theory of being, and vice versa. I love when these connections are
made explicit: Deleuze labelling Leibniz a Baroque philosopher, and so
on. Perhaps we ought to learn from this and more clearly describe thinkers according to the aesthetic yearnings they exhibit. Or the reverse, do
more to characterize art as pure rationality.
As regards the object mediating structures in your question, I read
recently that the architect Frank Gehry was enlisted to design an expansion to the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Facebooks existing site is the spot of the old Sun Microsystems building,
and they have already renovated Suns old hierarchical oor plan to a
more open and emergent ethos. Its the great fable of the information
age: structured hierarchy surpassed by emergent horizontality. Even Sun
is over the hill, vulnerable to the new upstarts.
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But why Gehry for Facebook East, the new expansion building? Isnt
this a bit incongruous? Now, at 83 years old, Gehry is the quintessential
Los Angeles deconstructivist, the indisputable king of the old guard. A
baby boomer if not by birth then by spirit, Gehry designed a building in
Seattle that looks like how a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo is supposed to
sound, and on the MIT campus he designed a building that looks like a
party of drunken robots got together to celebrate. On the other hand
theres Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, the most emblematic of the new
dot-com executives, young, ery, and lthy rich. A 28-year-old multibillionaire, he forged his riches online. Unlike the great moguls of the
past, he doesnt exploit steel or shipping or oil or banking, he exploits
interpersonal relationships. Facebook operates not in the sphere of work
but in the sphere of leisure, not in commodities or manufacturing but in
friends (and friends of friends).
In fact Gehry and Zuckerberg are an excellent pairing because they
synchronize almost identically on the question of object mediating structures. Consider the old mantra of modernist design: form follows function. Modernism embodies the virtues of industrial standardization, and
geometric regularity, taking advantage of new materials like steel and
glass. Or consider the principle of minimalism: how objects elicit theatricality. Minimalism embodies a dierent set of virtues: the necessary
involvement of the viewer who must complete the work; the shift from
painting to sculpture; or a dematerialization further into performance,
installation, happenings, and experiences. But today we have a new dominant, the realists, the vitalists, the environmentalists, those whose chief
concern is the expressivity of matter. Todays new virtues include atness
over hierarchy, liberation over discipline, openness over structure, improvisation over repetition, play over work all of which are designed to
liberate aect as much as possible, to make ourish a vast plane of
machinic expression. Form follows function is more true today than
it ever has been, only today function has been understood in strictly
mathematical or algorithmic terms (function as subroutine, method,
black box, etc.), not mechanical function as it was for modernist
design 50 or 100 years ago.
From one perspective Gehry and Zuckerberg are slightly mismatched,
but from another perspective they are nearly identical. They are both
environmental activists, that is, they both assume that the most important things in the universe are systems, ecologies, networks, assemblages,
environments; and likewise they both assume that such environments
have a single responsibility, to express themselves, to produce aective
responses, to create value, to be active. Sure, they are environmental
activists in a rather silly, mundane way, green rooftops and all that,
but they are also environmental activists because they believe quite militantly that the world consists of vital systems. This is the problem of
reticular pessimism.
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DMB: How can we understand this notion of reticular pessimism?

ARG: Today we are trapped in a sort of networked or reticular pessimism. And here Im taking a cue from the notion of Afro-pessimism in
critical race theory. Just as Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which
Afro-American identity is only ever dened via the fetters of its own
historical evolution, reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is
no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in,
through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves.
According to reticular pessimism, responses to networked power are only
able to be conceived in terms of other network forms. (And thus to ght
Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages, or multiplicities.)
DMB: Are there identiable trends in thinking or commentators that you
think are emblematic of this form of thinking?
ARG: Yes, a new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme
today, ready to proclaim at every turn that everything is a network.
Mark Zuckerberg: people are networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battleeld
is a network. Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. Franco Moretti:
Hamlet is a network. David Joselit: art is a network. Guy Debord: the
post-capitalist city is a network. John Von Neumann: computation is a
network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a network.
DMB: Are there political implications that stem from this position?
ARG: Postmodernism is denitively over; we have a new meta-narrative
to guide us reticular empiricism. Welcome to the new dark age! By
oering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply
cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might
entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.
And all of this is often under the aegis of Deleuze our once dear
Deleuze!
DMB: It seems to me that tackling the importance of a non-oppressive
mediation between critical theory and contemporary society is needed
in our theoretical work, and here I am thinking of the way in which
one might harmonize the method of study and the object of study
without doing violence to the complexity of historical and social relations. In your approach, what do you think are the ways forward for
doing this?
ARG: We must forget Deleuze. Its troubling to admit, given how inuential Deleuze has been on my own thinking. But its imperative today
that we forget Deleuzianism in all its many guises.
First, we must forget the Google Deleuzians, those who see the world
as a vital assemblage, proering untold bounties of knowledge and
riches. From clouds, to humans, to molluscs, to molecules, the world is
nothing but systems. Lines of ight slice through assemblages, creating
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new living landscapes. Systems are open, dynamic, and robust. Networks
produce value. These are some of the many mantras of the Google
Deleuzians.
We must also forget the Carl Sagan Deleuzians. Remember Carl
Sagan and his awestruck odes to the billions and billions of stars?
Carl Sagan Deleuzians are those who think that ontology is about producing a sense of sublime grandeur in the mind of the thinker. These
kinds of Deleuzians assume that nature and human nature coincide,
and that the world is there for us or, more specically, to impress us.
For the Carl Sagan Deleuzians ontology means awesome-ology.
Finally, we must forget the Wet Diaper Deleuzians, or those who,
in an endless restaging of the 1960s, think that being political means
liberating ones desires. (Lets not forget that Facebooks entire business plan is based on the liberation of desire.) For the Wet Diaper
Deleuzians, everything is a desiring machine driven by an endless
reserve of polymorphous perversity. They giggle and cry, suckle and
shit, fall down and get back up. The world is a giant sandbox, lled
with toys. Everyone they meet is a potential Father or Master that
might threaten their desire, someone to be dethroned, debased, even
killed. Each act becomes a doll house revolution o with their
heads!
DMB: If we are to cut o Deleuzes head, in a paradoxical attempt to
stop the dethroned Deleuzian avours of theory and practice, with what
would we replace this theoretical work? Or do you have in mind some
other register for thinking about a post-Deleuzian world?
ARG: Im poking fun of course. The problem is less with Deleuze himself
than with a certain kind of Deleuzian School that has arisen since his
death. We must forget Deleuze, but only a limited and somewhat perverted interpretation of Deleuze. In fact there are two Deleuzes, the
Deleuze of 1972 and the Deleuze of 1990. The 72 Deleuze is the thinker
of machinic subjectivity and dierential systematicity. The 90 Deleuze is
the thinker of control and historical transformation. Unfortunately, the
rst Deleuze is so commonplace today that it has essentially become a
TED talk. I see the 90 Deleuze as the more radical voice. For example,
the reticular pessimists champion the Deleuze of 1972 while ignoring the
Deleuze of 1990. The legacy of May 1968, and all that it represents, plays
a large role. Im thinking of the Maude character in the lm Harold and
Maude, and the weary notion that liberation means running stoplights in
a fast car.
But while we forget Deleuze we should also remember him. We should
remember Deleuze the anti-fascist. We should remember Deleuze the
thinker of materialism and immanence. We should remember Deleuze
the communist.

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DMB: In thinking about the reticular, I am also interested in your

critique of what you have called the reticular empiricists. How does
(non-)philosophical critique assist us in thinking about the infrastructural base and deploying a material and ideological critique?
ARG: Ten years ago in Protocol I wrote that protocols and networks are
against interpretation. At that time I was trying to describe the qualities
of this new reticular infrastructure. One of the key issues was the way in
which computers are very weak interpreters they are in very literal
terms anti-hermeneutic. So it comes as no surprise that, with a change
in the mode of production since the early 1970s, we have a change in the
ideology of how knowledge is produced. The reticular empiricists are
more or less dominant today. From Nate Silver to Franco Moretti, the
hard-nosed empiricism of big data is triumphing over more interpretive
or normative approaches. To be a knowledge worker today, one must
aect a kind of sober pragmatism and deal with the world empirically. In
a certain sense weve all become gloried journalists, or at best social
scientists, expected simply to observe and describe the world. Bruno
Latour conrms this recently in his An Inquiry into Modes of
Existence: we all ought to be, like William James, radical empiricists;
we all ought to move beyond common sense to good sense. In fact
Deleuze, bless his heart, is the consummate reticular empiricist. Deleuze
is armative, non-dialectical, network-centric, and might be said to be
one of the great proponents of a radical empiricism.
Shall we resist such empiricism? What a silly notion, of course not.
Empiricism is essential. But its also totally banal. Empiricism is something akin to respiration. We all must breathe air in order to remain
alive. But the spirit of humanity does not oat on the breath.
Badious work in Logics of Worlds is an important critique of such
reticular empiricism. Im thinking of his phrase only bodies and languages from the opening passages of the book. Asserting that there
exist only bodies and languages is the key danger of contemporary
life, because it suggests that nothing exists except for entities and the
symbolic structures that organize them. Later in the book he uses the
concept of an atonal world to evoke something similar. Atonal worlds
are lifeless worlds, at worlds, worlds that have no topography. Atonal
worlds claim that there are only bodies and languages in other words,
that there are only objects in the world and the various relations that
combine and organize objects. For Badiou this is the utmost in cynicism,
for it denies the event. Atonal worlds have being, but nothing else. They
have being without event.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, the reticular empiricists make
the same claim: being without event. For example, in Latour nothing can
ever really change because there is nothing in his work that goes beyond a
series of descriptive frameworks for bodies and languages. Latour is very
Deleuzian in this sense because he embeds dierence (along with change,
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process, transformation, etc.) inside the reticular infrastructure. For

example, events are relatively banal in Deleuze, whereas they are extraordinary in Badiou. Cells dividing. . . versus the storming of the Winter
Palace. (Badiou is the DeMille of philosophy: its all about the Big
Event.) Because of this, many have accused Latour of promoting a
more or less neoliberal, market-driven ontology in which all things are
actors who meet on equal footing in order to exchange, translate, arbitrate, and indeed esh out their very existence. To these accusers Latours
chief aw is a political one, for at best he abstains from the political
question by naturalizing it, and at worst he unwittingly assists the dominant ideology by endorsing and recapitulating it. Ill admit Im persuaded by such accusations, and nd Latours work shallow because of
them.
Latour still believes the old myth that networks are enough. He still
believes that bazaars are better than cathedrals, that systems are enough
to disrupt hierarchies, that networks corrode the power of the sovereign, that markets are the most natural, most democratic, and most
scientically accurate heuristic for redistributing and indeed dening
knowledge. Such claims are often necessary to make, and are often
true within a certain limited arena. Yet Latour is unable or unwilling
to move beyond them, to take the ultimate step and acknowledge the
historicity of networks. Such a step requires a number of things, but
most importantly it requires that we acknowledge the special relationship between networks and the industrial infrastructure, a relationship
that began in the middle of the 20th century and has become dominant
now at the turn of the millennium. Latour has little interest in the
contingency of systematicity. He would not agree with me that there
is an historical phase after decentralization has taken place. And even
if we might convince him of such an historical periodization, he would
not likely agree that this new infrastructure should itself be the target of
criticism.
DMB: Latour asserted that critique is running out of steam, arguing,
somewhat unconvincingly, that critical theory died away long ago
(Latour, 2004: 248). Are you gesturing to another kind of post-ideological approach, perhaps as a (recongured) Laruellean real?
ARG: Critique only runs out of steam if thinking becomes the handmaiden of its natural surroundings, only if the world of networks is
taken to be the one and only network-world. Latour ultimately eschews
both the Kantian and Marxian modes of critique: denying Kant, he
shuns the kind of inquiry that would plumb the conditions of possibility
undergirding the present state of aairs, in the hopes of auto-position via
better self-clarication; denying Marx, he shuns the kind of inquiry that
superimposes a two-structure of antagonism onto the state of aairs, in
the hopes of destroying and preserving the world in a higher form. In
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other words, Latour enacts a kind of reticular decision in which markets, networks, and other kinds of economic exchange are deemed sucient to describe any situation whatsoever. To avoid the Latourian trap
one must withdraw from the reticular decision, refusing to decide in
favour of the network, and ultimately discovering the networks generic
insuciency. (This is how to arrive at the Laruellean real evoked in
your question.)
DMB: If we withdraw from the reticular decision, what approach comes
after?
ARG: After is a useful way to think about historical periodization and
other kinds of diachronic phenomena. For example, Ive been tremendously inuenced by Deleuzes short essay Postscript on Control
Societies in which he describes a historical period, dubbed control society, that comes after what Foucault called the disciplinary and sovereign
societies.
DMB: Deluezes (1992) article remains a key, albeit provocatively
ambiguous, description of an emergent control society that relies heavily on computation and digital networks. Could you explain what you
think lies after networks and how Laruelle is helpful for thinking
through the control society?
ARG: In the case of networks, prepositions like after are perhaps less
useful. I realize that sounds pedantic, but we should be aware how such
prepositions indicate even sculpt our thinking. Much of critical
thought still clings to a canonical set of relational structures: meta,
post, or after. But these all imply some kind of development, exchange,
reversibility, representation, combination, negation, or synthesis. Such
structures remain thoroughly metaphysical.
Laruelles question is not so much what lies after networks, but what is
in networks. Or to put it another way: What is the immanent identity of
networks? As I previously mentioned, transcendental philosophy tends
toward the as-structure. Something appears as something else. By contrast, materialist science tends toward the in-structure. Something
remains in whatsoever it is. The former is what Marx called the
form-of-appearance. The latter comes under many names: Deleuze
was partial to univocity or speaking in one; Laruelle uses terms like
in-One or in-person.
I nd the in-structure to be much more useful for theoretical investigation, for it withdraws rather denitively from the legacy of transcendental philosophy. I see this as the chief task of any materialism. Or at
the very least it shows a way to augment the classic historical form of
materialism (Marx qua Marx) with a rigorously synchronic form of
materialism (Laruelles generic one).

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The stakes for me are thoroughly utopian, and unabashedly so. We

urgently need to think utopia in the here and now! The dicult thing is
determining how utopian thinking actually works. Along with
Meillassoux, Laruelle is perhaps the most utopian of the so-called speculative realist thinkers, for he is the one who sidelines the correlationist
scenario most denitively. The case of Graham Harman is more dicult
as regards utopia, because he does not surpass correlationism. On the
contrary, Harman is the Johnny Appleseed of correlation; he strides
through the world assigning the as-structure to all entities in sight.
Harman borrows the basic world structure from Heidegger and then
asserts that every object constructs its own world or place. In this
sense Harman is something like a pan-correlationist. His ontology is a
vast democratization of correlation that extends above and beyond the
bounds of the human. Consider how Harman and Laruelle contrast on
the theme of withdrawal: for Harman reality is rooted in the withdrawal
of the object, but for Laruelle reality is discovered via the withdrawal
from the philosophical decision. The withdrawal of the object creates a
world, but the withdrawal from philosophy creates a non-world. Thus
while Harman is a disseminator of worlds, Laruelle is the consummate
thinker of the non-world, a non-place (a utopia) in parallel with this one.
I see Laruelle as the chief utopian thinker of our times.
DMB: It is certainly the case that we need to historicize networks and
place them within a specic historical constellation of ideas and practices.
How do you think the question of networks relates to collaboration in
the humanities, and here I am thinking of digital humanities, etc.?
ARG: What librarians used to call humanities computing has reinvented
itself under the meme digital humanities. I see this as a web 2.0 phenomenon; in other words, its part of the real subsumption of networks.
The vanguard of the late 90 s people like Knowbotic Research or Etoy
were participating in the formal subsumption phase, during which real
exploration and transformation was possible. But now its the real subsumption phase: send out the bots to gather and valorize data.
Digital humanities faces a number of challenges. First and foremost it
has dened itself as a community of tool users favouring empirical and
positivistic methods. This has the dual advantage of both bringing more
scholars into the fold and endowing them with powerful new technologies. But at the same time it exacerbates what we might call the
Zuhandenheit problem: tools get used unconsciously and without critical
reection. With this waning in critical reection, and as the digital humanities expands, the ideological infrastructure will become more
emboldened.
As a colleague of mine likes to joke: digital humanities is for old professors who dont understand computers, and for young ones who dont
understand hermeneutics. Of course we need computation and
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hermeneutics at the same time. But thats nothing new. A much more
challenging question has to do with the precise relationship between
computation and hermeneutics. Why do we see these two terms as different in the rst place? What do they have to say to each another? Can
we have a hermeneutics of computation? Or a computation of
hermeneutics?
DMB: My own work has called for a specic attention to the materiality
and specicity of computation in relation to the humanities as a task for
the digital humanities (Berry, 2012). How should we understand the
digital humanities in relation to your recent work?
ARG: Excommunication doesnt directly answer such questions, but it
does provide a broader frame of reference for both critics and poets,
as well as engineers or in my language, Hermes, Iris, and the Furies.
In other books, Ive used allegory as the chief method for connecting
computers and hermeneutics. The problem with digital methods, such as
n-grams, is that they often dont tell you much. I argue that allegory is a
much more powerful investigative method for thinking about the nonhuman, objects or networks.
DMB: You have suggested that Excommunication is about taking a heretical position on mass communication-style communication theory.
Indeed, the use of guration and allegory as a means of talking about
media objects seems to move away from critique. Could you explain your
approach?
ARG: I wouldnt want to overstate our stance, or construe it as some sort
of quixotic opposition to the discipline. Its not that. And in many ways
my chapter on the middle is very traditional, even slightly old fashioned.
Media studies is still a very young eld. A number of the most basic
questions are still available for further exploration.
My contribution to the book serves to map out a series of alternatives
to the hermeneutic tradition, which I view as the dominant tradition in
humanities scholarship, even as it might be losing its foothold today.
I start from a very simple conceit: why does the term hermeneutics
come from Hermes? Is Hermes the god of interpretation, or perhaps
even the god of media? (I love when Derrida called Hermes the signier
god.) And if Hermes is a god of media, are there other gods of media
that weve overlooked? I use this exploration as a way to map out how
intellectual work has shifted in the modern period. So we quickly discover the other god of media, Iris, and the tradition of mediation she
represents that is diametrically opposed to the Hermes model. Susan
Sontag evoked this alternative in her famous essay Against
Interpretation, a title more or less equivalent to Against Hermes. But
I show how its not sucient simply to amend hermeneutics with this
alternative tradition of iridescent immediacy. This brings us to the
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network form of mediation, a form that is as old as time. Indeed the

Greeks had a robust sense of assemblages and multiplicity in the form of
the Erinyes.
Some have a problem with going back to Greece. Indeed, after postmodernism ancient Greece presents a double bind: on the one hand postmodernism destroyed the notion that canonical literature still holds any
authority over what we call culture today, and on the other hand postmodernism reframed the desire to return to Greece as a suspicious if not
pernicious form of nostalgia. There is a tendency particularly in
German thought from Kittler to Heidegger and beyond to use ancient
Greece as a way to explore essences and origins. Ill admit I dont share
the anxiety that often surrounds such a move. My tastes are more
catholic. We need to have a grasp on both the ancient and modern
worlds. We should be writing computer code and reading Homer at
the same time.
In a very practical sense, going back to Greece is an attempt to expand
the repertoire of what counts for media studies. John Durham Peters, for
example, does this quite nicely in the opening chapters of his Speaking
into the Air. The goal for me is to show that networks and network
thinking are always already embedded in the very heart of western philosophy. Networks are ancient, not just postmodern. Networks are a
mode of mediation, just like any other. They arent more natural or
more real, despite what many pundits and intellectuals try to claim.
DMB: Could you explain what you mean when you say you dont view
Greek thought as literary; [you] view it as real?
ARG: We have this trumped-up notion of Greek gods sitting astride
thrones up on Mount Olympus, an image no doubt ltered through
the cloud-city conception of a Christian heaven. But the Greeks viewed
their spirits very dierently. They viewed them as simply various aspects
of the world. (Husserlian phenomenology, in fact, adopts this notion of
aspect in very useful ways.) Recall how Hermes is the god of the threshold. When you open the door to step over a threshold, and you hear the
squeak of the hinge on the door, that very squeak is Hermes. The squeak
doesnt merely refer to Hermes, nor is it caused by Hermes; it actually is
Hermes. Gods dont reside in a land beyond, but right here in these many
aspects of the world. The Greeks even had a special name for squeaky
Hermes: Hermes Strophaios or Hermes of the Turning Hinge.
DMB: You said that you think media studies is a young eld, but in
many ways (depending where one stands) it seems to me that the eld is
going through something of a mid-life crisis as the certainties of the
broadcast era give way to digital streams and networks. We cannot but
notice the diculties that media studies has in the encounter with the
digital, which undermines not only its taken-for-granted disciplinary
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divisions (TV, radio, print, lm) but also its emphasis on representation
and culture. What do you think is the way forward for media studies?
ARG: Young only in the scholastic sense! Media studies has taken an
interesting turn over the last 10 or 20 years. During the 1980s and 90 s
inuenced greatly by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and cultural
Marxism media studies tended to focus on the realm of the superstructure: subjects, texts, ideology, spectacle, language, and so on, whereas
today the focus has shifted from the superstructure to the base. Im
thinking of the renaissance in more archival and historical approaches
to media studies (dubbed media archaeology), or the trend in digital
media toward more hard-nosed, machine-oriented methods (platform
studies, software studies). Kittler said that in order to be literate today
one must know at least one natural language and one computer language. And he was right.
DMB: But if not networks to analyse networks, what do you think will
be the new theoretical and methodological innovations in the eld?
ARG: To be clear, methodological innovation might not be the goal
today. Im afraid that the term innovation has been forever corrupted
by the entrepreneurial ideology of the start-ups. Innovation is an ideological problem in contemporary life; it doesnt oer a solution. And here
I might deviate from the view oered by Wark in his book A Hacker
Manifesto. He denes the hacker in terms of novelty and innovation;
hackers are those who produce new concepts, new perceptions, new
sensations, hacked out of raw data. By contrast Im quite pessimistic
about the new as a category, and instead am much more interested in
concepts like repetition, withdrawal, collapse, extinction. Consider something like social justice. We dont need innovation when it comes to
social justice. We need enactment of social justice. Every child knows
how to make a just society. We simply need the will to carry it out.
Gramsci was right: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Badiou is inspiring here when he describes truth. For Badiou, truth is
not a grand overarching absolute and its not a kind of perpetually
cresting wave of intensication and machinic process as per the
Deleuzian tradition. Rather, Badiou speaks in terms of the generic delity to truth furnished to all. What we know about inventive politics at
least since 1793, Badiou wrote, is that it can only be egalitarian and
non-Statist, tracing, in the historic and social thick, humanitys genericity, the deconstruction of strata, the ruin of dierential or hierarchical
representations and the assumption of a communism of singularities. [. . .]
Philosophy today is the thinking of the generic as such.
DMB: You have talked about your project as having a love of the
middle. What do you mean by this?

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ARG: The most sophisticated work in media studies tends to follow a

particular trend: looking at media objects is interesting but it only goes so
far; whats really interesting are modes of mediation. Hence a gradual
shift from objects to processes. Not just the telegraph but telepresence.
Not just HTML but protocol. Not just the body but gesture. Not just
the people but a process of political realization. The term middle is an
attempt to identify these kinds of processes or modes of mediation. I see
middle as a synonym for milieu or mode of mediation.
DMB: What are the conditions of possibility for this middle, and in
what way is love helpful as a concept for thinking through a standpoint
in relation to it?
ARG: Why love? Love means many things: a commitment to the generic
(agape), a relation of intimacy (Eros), a romantic sublime, a mystical
unknown, an aective sense of joy, and of course love may appear in
any manner of compulsions, desires, or drives. In Excommunication,
Aphrodite forms the connection between media and love, for she is
named the one who is fond of the middle. So love is a media concept,
but lets not forget that its also a political concept. Here Im inuenced
greatly by my teacher Michael Hardt and his work on the relation
between love and the political. Drawing on Spinoza, Hardt talks about
love in terms of joy, or the mutual increase in power contained in collective interaction. In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri dene love as the
production of the common and the production of social life. All of these
concepts swirl together in my mind: an intimacy with the common; a
commitment to the generic; media as middle; love as middle they all go
together.
DMB: How do you see the production of the common deployed in a
political sense? Are there connections to civil society, and what are the
implications for notions of solidarity?
ARG: Since Hegel, if not earlier, civil society has been understood as
essentially synonymous with bourgeois society [burgerliche
Gesellschaft]. This is the realm of the market economy, of the citizen.
Civil society forms a bulwark against the state of nature (and itself is
subsumed by the state form).
Hardt wrote an important essay in 1995 called The Withering of Civil
Society in which he described how the various institutions of civil society
have been displaced . . . by a new conguration of apparatuses, deployments, and structures. In other words, the old dichotomy between the
social and the natural civil society as refuge from the state of nature
has given way to a new scenario in which political technologies assume
more inuence than social structures.
Here Marx was correct: civil society is a barren wasteland lled with
compromises, contradictions, and half-truths. We would be wise to do
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away with this category along with Hegel as well! because the
common cannot be found there. But as Hardt instructs, todays
techno-centric infrastructure is no better. I think the problem is not so
much with any of these categories as such but simply the ideological
move that insinuates an elemental dierence between the natural and
the social, with technophilic control dialectically synthesizing the rst
two and thus solving the problems they seem to invent. These three discursive moments are not an indication of a problem, they are the problem. The common is thus not found in some supposed resolution of the
problem of the social but by undoing the representational structure that
sustains it.
DMB: Collaboration, particularly collaborative writing, is dicult, hence
my own interest in new forms of writing practice such as book sprints
and hackathons. What was the writing process you developed with
McKenzie Wark and Eugene Thacker for Excommunication?
ARG: Collaboration can be tricky indeed. Collaboration is one of the
great demons haunting the humanities, although the sciences, by contrast, are much less skittish about it. Most humanities scholars do very
little collaboration. Or when they do, collaboration is masked by certain
obfuscatory infrastructures, such as graduate student labour, or the
silent partnership of the wife/girlfriend/secretary. Ive done a few different kinds of collaboration in the past: a book translation, various
kinds of co-authoring, a number of software projects that require
teams of dierent sizes. Writing Excommunication was uncomplicated,
though, since each chapter was a solo eort. There was much cross talk
among the three of us, but ultimately each chapter was the expression of
a single voice.
DMB: How did you conceive of this project and nish the writing
process?
ARG: The idea grew out of a conversation Thacker had been having with
his editor, and it quickly gelled after that. We wanted to explore the more
theological wing of philosophical thought. Hence the crude chronology
of the book. I focus on a series of archaic divinities, Thacker is inspired
by the heretical monotheism of medieval mysticism, and Wark is working
on a more modern and postsecular form of heresy. The concept of
excommunication, with both its theological and media-theoretical connotations, seemed like a tting framework. Since rst starting to write
The Exploit together, already several years ago now, Thacker and I have
both been interested in the non-human. The coda to that book opens a
door that were only now fully exploring. All three of us quickly gravitated to the theme of excommunication, particularly the way in which it
implies some sort of mediation with the radically non-human, what
Thacker calls the world without us.
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DMB: In relation to the challenges raised with collaboration, I wondered

if you felt that working with Thacker and Wark pushed your thinking in
new or dierent directions.
ARG: Eugene Thacker has an impressive knowledge of mystical and
esoteric philosophical texts, and McKenzie Warks familiarity with the
history of radical thinking is peerless. Im always learning new things
from both of them. They constantly reinvent themselves too, which I
admire. Never the same thing twice.
Thackers book After Life altered the course of my own thinking in
measurable ways, particularly his treatment of concepts like the uncreature, equivocal inexistence, uncreated univocity, and dark pantheism. His
use of apophatic reason has also been tremendously useful in my own
understanding of Laruelle, not to reinforce some sort of transcendental,
religious or otherwise, but to highlight how important denial is for contemporary methodology. In other words, while much contemporary
thought operates through a logic of augmentation more this, more
that Im much more excited by a logic of subtraction. One example
would be Badious theory of the event. We need a kind of anorexic
philosophy, not an inated one. Thinking is hamstrung by claims to
transcendental suciency; thought is only liberated via the generic
common. I see this as the key to unlocking the non-human.
DMB: McKenzie Wark recently stated on the Empyre mailing list that
Excommunication is a *structural condition*, not something one
chooses. Communication needs to excommunicate in order to communicate. To what extent do you agree with him and what are the implications for thought and practice?
ARG: The question of a structural condition leads to a number of interesting places. One way to approach it is through the lens of post-structuralism, whereby the outside is a structuring ingredient in the inside.
Here the notion of communicative immediacy is co-constituted with
threats of disconnection, alienation or exile. We talk about this aspect
a great deal in Excommunication, particularly in regard to critical
thought in the last half of the 20th century.
But we also pursue another direction. Im thinking again of what
Thacker calls the world without us. Post-structuralism is an incredibly
powerful discourse, but it also diminishes certain approaches. Consider
the return to truth in a contemporary thinker like Badiou, or the return
to the absolute in Meillassoux. Thats not exactly our approach, but we
do try to look beyond a number of the post-structuralist prohibitions
that conditioned so much of critical thinking for so long.
Excommunication, therefore, is a way to think about things like antiand post-humanism, the notion of an absolute outside, and the possibility for strictly unidirectional mediation.
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DMB: Your new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, appears provocatively located in relation to the contemporary mode of informational
capitalism. Laruelle is explicitly cited as a key resource for thinking the
provocation in this work. Could you outline your argument in the new
book and how it connects with your previous work?
ARG: Rather than oering a synopsis or critical annotation of
Laruelles work, the book aims to collide Laruelles non-standard
method with the concept of digitality. I say concept of digitality because
the topic at hand is not exactly the web, computers, video games, or
even binary numbers, but a principle that subtends and facilitates all of
them. I dene digitality as a process of distinction. Thus I see an immediate resemblance with Laruelles notion of the philosophical decision.
Philosophy and digitality both require a fundamental act in which
something is divided into two. For example, metaphysics requires the
notion of a division between essences and instances. Or on a computer
chip data is modelled and processed by means of voltage dierentials.
This fundamental action is important: distinction, division, decision, or
discretization. Not so much the proverbial zero and one of computer
culture, Im focused here on one and two, or what it means to move
from one to two.
We know that thought can be understood digitally, thats the easy
part. Philosophical rationality has worked that way since Plato, and so
does a computer. (So-called digital philosophers like Stephen Wolfram
merely state the obvious through a redundancy in terminology: there is
no other philosophy than digital philosophy!) The hard part is to speculate about a withdrawal from the digital decision. In this sense the book
is nothing but a massive thought experiment: is it possible to think nondigitally? My answer is the same answer given since time immemorial:
Yes. We need immanence and materialism to accomplish it.
DMB: Critical theory argues that philosophy is a specic historical tradition bound up with the history of class thought. How is Laruelle useful
in contributing to a general process of reection on basic assumptions of
which philosophy would be an example?
ARG: Laruelle gives a basic instruction, one that reveals the distinction
between philosophy and theory or science, as Laruelle, Althusser and
others often prefer to call it. His instruction is that the best response to
philosophy is not more philosophy. The best response to philosophy is to
cease doing it.
Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach conveys a similar instruction. In
that famous maxim, Marx suggests that philosophers ought to change
the world, not simply interpret it. And elsewhere in the early writings,
Marx delineates cleanly between speculative philosophy and the kind of
theoretical intervention necessary for political action. Laruelle may be
eectively read through a similar lens. The correct response to
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interpretation (philosophy) is not more interpretation (not more philosophy). Marxs philosophers only interpret the world is identical to what
Laruelle calls the philosophical decision. The point is not to continue
enacting the decision but to articulate a rigorous and immanent theoretical science of it.
This is precisely what critical theory has always done. Whether it be
through ideological demystication or experiments in radical practice,
critical theory has always posed itself against the naturalizing powers
of representational structures. For Laruelle, the goal is not so much to
reect on those structures, but to show how there is really only one
structure, the generic commonality of the material base.
DMB: Do you feel that Snowdens NSA revelations have strengthened
the conditions for a critique for the societies of control and their material base?
ARG: I rst started working on the problem of mass data surveillance with
the Carnivore project in early 2001. Launched during an earlier phase of
mass government monitoring, Carnivore was essentially a packet snier
wrapped up in an easy API so that artists and designers could visualize
real-time network data with a minimum amount of coding knowledge. The
project was partially pedagogical (get to know your data!) and partially
tactical (start using encryption!). The recent Snowden revelations merely
conrmed what everyone already knew. In my rst book, Protocol, I wrote
that, contra conventional wisdom around the seemingly chaotic or unorganizable nature of digital systems, the internet is in fact the mostly highly
controlled mass media hitherto known.
Today were witnessing the true potential of these kinds of systems,
not only by the state but also in the commercial sector as well. A true
ideological coup: cybernetics, which since its inception was dened as a
technology of systemic control and management, was rolled out under
the banner of individual freedom. The goal of critical thinking today,
indeed the very denition of thought in the broadest sense, is to establish
a relationship of the two vis-a`-vis its object, a relation of dierence,
distinction, decision, or opposition.
DMB: More recently you have been using the notion of compression as
a concept for thinking philosophically. What are the implications of
compression for activist tactics and strategies?
ARG: The work on compression for which Im greatly inspired by
scholars like Jonathan Sterne and Jason R. LaRivie`re is motivated
by what you might call an anti-Baroque instinct. The Baroque has a
tendency toward over-saturation, toward the accentuation of a
manner. Deleuzes book on the Baroque shows how such an accentuation or a fold, as he calls it is in fact the genesis of the modern
subject. This fold is a kind of compression, or at least a kind of sculpting
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and inecting of forces and energies. Much of modern life, thus, hinges
on the relative compression or expansion of this vital milieu. Deleuzes
work in particular hinges on this dynamic. No longer beholden to the
highly compressed model of the Freudian subject, Deleuze opened up an
uncompressed vital milieu, prizing expressive logics over compressive
ones. Or think about the new social movements of the 1960s and the
way in which political action revolved around the expansion or liberation
of quotidian experience. Express yourself. Liberate your desire. Take
back the streets.
All of these tactics are tremendously useful. Yet the world is dierent
today, and thus we need to invent dierent tactics. We shouldnt expect
that the tools from the 1960s will still work. This is part of why Im
drawn to generic compression as a tactic. It breaks the orthodox assumptions of Marxist critique, that one should avoid mystication and
denaturalization. Yet in an age of mandated visibility, of high resolution,
and high bandwidth, I wonder if a little bit of compression isnt tactically
useful. I wonder if a cryptographic world isnt more attractive today than
a world decompressed and fully legible to all (legible not just by the Big
Other or the Father, but the NSA and Gmail). I wonder if a degraded
image isnt better than a photorealistic one. Heidegger used phenomenology as an avenue for truth, phenomenology as the pursuit of that
which shows itself. But obfuscation might be the better paradigm today.

Note
1. This text is a re-presentation of an email discussion between David M. Berry
and Alexander R. Galloway, carried out between April and June 2014, which
has been edited to clarify the argument and the dialogue. Questions and
answers may have been merged or re-ordered from the original email
exchange.

References
Badiou A (2007) Being and Event. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Berry DM (2012) Understanding Digital Humanities. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Berry DM (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital. New York, Continuum.
Deleuze G (1992) Postscript on the societies of control. October 59: 37.
Galloway AR (2006) Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Galloway AR (2012) Laruelle, anti-capitalist. In: Mullarkey J and Smith AP
(eds) Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Galloway AR (2014) Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Galloway AR, Thacker E and Wark M (2013) Excommunication: Three Inquiries
in Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hardt M (1995) The withering of civil society. Social Text 45: 2744.
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Laruelle F (2000) Introduction au non-marxisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de

France.
Latour B (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to
matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30(2): 225248.

David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the
University of Sussex.
Alexander R. Galloway is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture,
and Communication at New York University.

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