I'll try and state why I think I have such an allergy to 'totality' as clearly as possible. First of all, what 'totality' denotes seems to change from one Marxist author to another, so that's part of my aversion (that it's so ill-defined). Because of that, it matters what type of 'totality' we're talking about. If it's the Levinasian idea of 'totality' (that which congeals the characteristics of the other and denies their infinity) then I'm against it for the same reasons that Levinas is, by and large. If it's the classical notion of 'totality', in which the whole is taken to be 'more' than the parts in some sense I'm against it because this seems to me to be a mistaken mereological relationship: the parts don't form a whole except for through a third party which imagines what that whole should be. The 'whole' isn't - it's ideological. And if it's totality in the sense of "the Absolute" or whatever other thing it's been called throughout history, then I'm against it because I just don't think it exists. It's a category mistake as far as I'm concerned, and ignores the original kernel of difference that makes such a self-same Absolute possible. Finally, if it's totality in the sense of that which grounds the subject-object relation in the Hegelian tradition, then I'm against it because it assumes that 'subject' and 'object' are still workable and separate categories (I've never seen a convincing case of this). It seems thoroughly correlationist to me, and places the whole realm of meaning and of activity into the 'human realm' - thus, it's thoroughly anthropocentric. And I think theory/philosophy/whatever, needs to move away from it's historical anthropocentrism, not just because of its ties to bourgeois Enlightenment thought but also because it's just a mistaken view of how we relate to various ecosystems and environments (it denies wholesale any agency outside of human agency, which I'm just not down for). But also, I just don't see what totality is supposed to do within Marxist criticism. We can still look at the way that literature and other forms of art 'symptomatically' repress history without grounding that history in some sort of social 'totality'. And we can talk about how the economy is determinate "in the last instance" without a notion of an economic totality (or any totality as far as I can see) - determination doesn't need to be grounding in some larger "whole" that allows the determination to take place. The same goes for mediation: my relationship to ideological products is mediated regardless of whether or not the production of such ideological objects is grounded in some larger totality, simply because I don't have any representation of a 'whole' in which it's produced in the first place. Totality seems to be a non-category: it not only can't be represented (it seems like everyone's pretty in agreement about that) but it doesn't seem to actually facilitate Marxist criticism in any way. So not only is it not represented, but it doesn't do anything - so I don't see any reason to keep the figure of thought.

Alexander R. Galloway, "The Poverty of Philosophy"

Here I lose Galloway, besides his bizarre equivocation of capitalist object oriented programming languages to object oriented philosophies and his mutual denunciation of both since they are slaves to capitalism or whatever, this philosophical nostalgia for the absolute isn't even amenable to the most intense idealism (e.g. Hegel, Schelling) who admit that the absolute is inaccessible unless it is mediated by some sort of material particular. The "joke" of idealism is that you are "already" in communion with the absolute through the "systematic"  dialectical contingencies of "Being in the World," the organic substance of your spiritual or communal "life-world" or through art or whatever.

How are realists supposed to respond to this? "Ok, I guess I'll spread my thoughts across the mind of history." What does this amount to besides the study and appreciation of history? Realists like Popper want a philosophy that can "inform" scientific practice or produce a worldly philosophy that makes accurate rational predictions. What a realist refuses, strictly speaking, is not the absolute or politics but meaning in general. They refuse the ecstatic significance of the "effect of meaning" preferring what Laruelle calls "the true without truthfulness," truth that adequates or models a "thing" without ontologically deciding its significance. A realist refuses or is at least suspicious of the transparency of being and thought and prefers the prosthetic of science to produce data, information, and models whose accuracy, applicability and predictability are at stake and guide their judgments--this rather than their "significance" which is a bit of a non-starter practically speaking.

A second divide might be between the "moral" and the "ethical": the materialist believes what they believe because they view it as "necessary" according to their given epistemological constructions whereas the realists are Nietzschean, morality is a arbitrary theoretical construction, ethics meanwhile are a set of normative assumptions or priors which can occasionally guide or regulate human actions. The materialist acquiesces to moral demands whereas the realist is perhaps more likely to practically acquiesce to ethical requirements as a sort of reality principle: they see nothing necessary about either morality or ethics. The realists I have known are usually "outcome oriented" or "utilitarian" expressing a "spontaneous ideology of the scientists" which is usually fairly humanist (maybe explaining their occasional infatuation with Buddhism or New Age spiritualism as practical philosophies or a scientifically inflected Christianity) but eerily solipsistic and instrumentalist (they should care for people because it is "probable" that they exist and they will benefit from it or they feel it is simply required of them and will be reciprocated), however, they are just as likely to be social justice advocates. Ultimately they do not even show a commitment to their realism.

It is fairly clear to me at least that these typologies collapse and that a more sociological or social psychological perspective on these "attitudes" is necessary and that one's philosophical outlook in-the-last-instance has little bearing on their political outlook.

Alexander R. Galloway, "The Poverty of Philosophy"

I am starting to see the necessity of shifting away from social constructivist methods that emphasize a historical-sociological perspective that emphasizes collective memory, collective trauma and so forth. I am immensely sympathetic to these discourses but they are fundamentally qualitative, literary, and testimonial. They also raise eyebrows from a policy, economic, and legal perspective because it seems like the crimes are so vast and horrible and irreconcilable that reparations, reconciliation and basic justice are impossible. Meanwhile, these discourses are as divisive among their originating groups (who has the right to speak for an entire identity group, the sub altern, etc.) as they are in mainstream political discourse. The drive to "accepting" these discourses and their difficult history and potentially obscurantist theoretical language as valid at least complicates the dimension of meaningful positive political institutional action which would necessarily require some sort of data driven or quantitative perspective. Even if the contentious history of violence and oppression is considered valid and agreed upon (already a difficult battle to undertake) translating it into a solvable problem becomes difficult because it must be translated from a highly conceptual and linguistic mishmash into a line of political action or policy, i.e., from the discursive and the conceptual to the measurable and the "actionable."

Ontology and philosophical "attitudes" like correlationism cannot really do this. Their basic purpose is to dominate and regulate the theoretically "sayable" by positing their objective validity. This necessarily runs aground upon the issues of the differend, philosophical-theoretical politics, and discursive agonism.

Giving up ontology as a battleground for politics might be a fruitful line of action for the academic Left. Their battles should be waged in the field of education (e.g. by changing hearts and minds, imparting the "objectivating" rather than "objectifying" power of science to the masses via a factually grounded discourse), within their institutions, and in "actually existing" politics. Symbolically divesting ontology of the political will "force" a worldly or more practical perspective. This would transform theory into work of policy proposal, quantitatively backed opining, the interpretation of data rather than texts, and persuasion. Philosophy and theoreticism would be abandoned for what I call "wiley" or "worldly theoreticism": a somewhat conniving, factual and data savvy academic discourse aimed at knotting political discourse to sociological and scientific discovery, disciplining the process of opinion making by suturing it to the provisional objectivity provided by econometric and sociological modeling whereby testimony and opining that isn't backed with data is considered invalid.