OOO and “Citizens United”

I’m too busy to read Alexander Galloway’s response to my recent interview at the moment. But someone just sent me this excerpt:

“This brings out a secondary problem with OOO in that it falls prey to a kind of ‘Citizens United fallacy’.. everything is an object, and thus Monsanto and Exxon Mobil are objects on equal footing just like the rest. Like other (human) objects, Monsanto is free to make unlimited campaign donations, contribute to the degradation of the environment, etc.”

Utter nonsense, and I believe Levi Bryant has refuted this point 15 or 20 times by now on his blog.

Monsanto and Exxon Mobil are certainly objects in an ontological sense (or at least they might be; we can never know for sure what is a real object and what isn’t). But that has nothing at all to do with which objects have political rights. Who ever said that all objects have equal political rights?

Here’s a different way of putting it. OOO also says that Popeye, unicorns, and square circles are objects in some sense. Does Galloway also think that we want to ascribe political rights to those objects?

Monkeys, dolphins, and butterflies are also objects. Does Galloway think that I want to defend the campaign contribution rights of monkeys, dolphins, and butterflies?

What about TV dinners, lava lamps, and the Easter Bunny? What about electrons?

The fact that something is established to be an object does not establish that it has campaign contribution rights. Completely separate question: a matter for law, not for ontology.

Galloway’s a lot smarter than that, so I’m not quite sure what he’s up to here.