What is to be done under Real Subsumption #7

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and and I see see comment so yeah So I'm just telling everybody to come and come back. I guess I'll briefly present him, but by now you already might have an idea.

So, Ray Brassier from Beirut, he is teaching at the American University of Beirut a philosophy. He wrote this text, Monday in Abstraction, which as far as I know is maybe the most political text that I've seen of his. I was very glad to be surprised when he presented at the Acceleration Institute conference last year in Berlin. and maybe everybody who wants to be okay.

So without further comments, Ray, you can speak. Okay, thanks. Can everyone still hear? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm just going to try to respond to basically the literature's text, which is again critical response to the wandering abstraction piece by the book. This is not a Polish and a rhetorical response, it's basically picking up on some of the

right-tick to be the really crucial critical part. So, but first, before I get that, I just want to actually underline what I think of the point of agreement. I basically agree with the points that are made. One, I mean, simply put, one that's a criticism of a kind of, you know, an excessively metabiblical understanding of subsumption, where it's impossible to understand how anything or anyone would have the resources to struggle

or act against capital. So in other words, the rejection of the uncritical results are going to fully saturate its assumption. So I'm in agreement with that. I'm also in agreement with what is no longer tenable about programmaticism, the claim that we can simply identify positively determined or some kind of theoretically recognised subject struggle against capital.

which is not again the working class, the proletariat in the classical sense. And that we have to admit an indeterminacy about what will happen and the kinds of, you know, the consequences of the practical struggles in which people are engaged in. So there's a lot in Dimitri's text with which I agree. So let me just focus on points where I think there is a substantial disagreement.

So first, let's say there's three crucial points. One is the nature, there's a kind of disagreement over whether the primacy of struggle or conflict as against decision classification. That's I think the one central criticism of Dimitro's text. Secondly, whether transformation should be primarily anchored in struggle or some kind of theoretical cognition. And finally, the claim that requisition is simply kind of collapses into kind of really

conservative, if not necessarily a completely reactionary appeal, kind of, you know, classical kind of bourgeois legalism, bourgeois universalism, which is incapable of acknowledging the extent the extent to which capitalism is completely predetermined the way in which we understand what it is to be human, what rights are, what states it is of opera, etc. So first, well, first of all, first criticism seems to be that the way in which I articulate

cognitive and social abstraction presupposes some kind of cognitive discrimination, ultimately moral evaluation between alleging a good and bad abstraction or emancipatory reactionary distraction. And this is a quote, so Nietzsche writes, you know, this is a quote, the problem with this assumption is not that it is ethical, but that it implies a theoretical decision that predates a revolutionary moment and in doing so it preempts the motive to the discipline of conflicts that are unleashed in a struggle, reducing them into rational decision making to be carried out today, which is a cause of a particular background and social experience. And being reductive of social complicity, this is also a pre-emptive act of power."

So, well, first of all, I mean, I think this collapse of cognitive discrimination of the world about fishing is slightly hasty. Because I think, you know, all I'm saying is basically, and perhaps the term's written back obviously kind of undesirable because they invite this kind of interpretation. The key claim is simply that knowing what something is and how it works is necessary in order to help us to change it. And that the dangers dangers of delegating determinations to the vicissitudes of struggle and conflict without some form of preliminary cognitive arbitration is doomed to kind of

to latch into a kind of empiricist practices. So I mean I agree and so basically the thing is I guess it's certainly the case that theory is constitutively incapable of predicting, of telling us what to do, how to go about practical transformations. There's always going to be a shortfall discrepancy in what the theory said should be done and what actually has to be done. Okay, but then it seems that the claim that no kind of, you know, the claim that a positive account of what can be achieved by cognitive abstraction is the claim that a positive account of the

instruction based on understanding of the mechanisms through which power is perpetuated and reiterated is I think maybe it's kind of excessive or an overreaction. Because this ties into the question, what it means to abolish, the question of abolition. When I talk about the famous quote from Marx about communism is a real movement, abolish the president's data.

The question is about, is it possible to inflect or determine abolition? Or is it entirely something that can only be negotiated in a clear set of peace skills, discrete, spatiotemporary discontinued? Well, the translator, a German translator of the abstraction says, in Marx's German, it actually uses the word out of Hebrew. It uses the term, determine and negate. So the aim is that communism is the movement that permanently negates the present state of things.

So if it is a question of term and negation, the question is what determines the negation? Who or what determines the negation? And if the determination is simply kind of relegated to these objective mechanisms, then it's obviously kind of, there is no, it's not subject to control. This is important because I think one thing that makes me uneasy I think is the claim that you could have some kind of complete abolition of capitalism. I'm not sure I understand what that actually means.

I don't understand what it means to have an absolute transformation. In other words, an indeterminate negation. And I think that's, I find it difficult to make sense of, but it sounds ultimately metaphysical and in a proper context. more of a wholly indeterminate education is something that can be infected or prosecuted through a set of organized sex or practices.

So this is why I think also that the valorisation of struggle, independently, struggle is not a struggle where it's impossible to foresee in advance at one point in which struggle could be seen to either succeed or fail or to be worth persisting with, etc. becomes, well, becomes, I think, problematic, if not fetishistic. Struggle alone is not criticism. And I disagree with the claim that struggle is criticism. Because there's a kind of struggle, a struggle which is incapable of adjudicating the relationship

between means and aims, which simply, if only, can be seen to perpetuate struggles, I think, their interests and to preclude the possibility of a radical revolution of transformation. So, I think that, okay, so what I want to say is that the permanent negation need not presuppose I think I'd be the dialectic, that necessitization of history. And I think, again, this is I think a false alternative. The idea that if you're talking about the term that negation, you're talking about, you're seeing that history can

exist in illogical structure. And I think that's actually entirely on that. And it's based on a punitively reductive character behaviour, which has been challenged by lots of scholars. But the point is not about whether this is fair or not to Hagle, the point is that it becomes paralyzed. So I think it's necessary to insist on the possibility of determining so that it's possible to discriminate in advance and retreat progress and regress without subscribing to our metaphysical teleology. Because if we can't, on what basis then we distinguish between overcoming and perpetuation.

If the goal is the overcoming of the present state of things, of capital, then surely we have to be able to identify conditions under which this kind of overcoming would be or set towards the superman. I also think that this requires identifying material points as influence. And this is where I think theory is indispensable. You need to understand where the world works in order to understand where and when to enter. So this is why I can't accept the claim that there is no positive element of capitalism anywhere. And this is, you know, Venetra writes this to God, you know, she claims that what she rejects in this kind of a classic, in

program. It's a claim that it's simply about unleashing, if you simply kind of release, allow the forces of production to develop to a point where you overcome the social relations relations that prevented them from facilitating the transformation of society that would usher in communism. But it's not... Now, to say there are positive elements in capitalism, it's not positive here, it's not moral, it's not saying there's good or bad.

There must be a way of identifying what is indispensable or what could be cognitively and practically repurposed in capitalism without simply then saying that to do so is to perpetuate the social forms in which these elements are embedded. Because if there's no positive element of conservative family capitalism, I find it difficult to think of this is not just a moral evaluation. And doesn't it condemn us then to the phantasmatic annihilation of capitalism? Capitalism is holding is all bad, irid novel.

then you want to abolish it, you want to push it in the sense of this violation. And the point is, well, how will this annihilation happen? The problem with this account is that you end up with this kind of negative eschatology where since it's difficult to see how we can abolish capitalism, we hope that nature will do it false. The ecological catastrophe kind of bring about some crisis, some disastrous kind of injunction in which which will somehow, we know not how, lead to the advent of some example. So, this is why I'm not sure why you don't believe in the term negation.

And if you, once you, it's one thing to do is a certainty, a programmatic certainty of the opponent of capitalism. But on what basis will you hold on to the possibility of the overcoming? So it's a bit of each conflict circle, but a practice of them, dedicated on the absolute primacy of, let's say, agonism, or like just struggle. The idea is that struggle comes first, but then we kind of figure out how to articulate these struggles. If that shifat is to be an astute of practical possibility of transformation, it can only hope for its indeterminate advent. And of course this is the appeal to some note, the event, something, some extra systemic force or agency which precipitates the radical peak.

Moreover, if we cannot somehow measure the extent to which such an advent taken figures of horizon of possibility, then how can we act upon it? Possibilities are rooted in material structures. And it's important, you know, there are things that you can and can't do, you know, can't try to borrow the thick, you'll never build a set, never the back builds. And the reason why this is still seem to be a little too good capitalism. Now, okay, call this common sense. I think the habitual enunciation of common sense becomes another kind of theoretical common sense.

So I think it's the uncommon root of common sense in certain context. So while it's important, but not that ideological representations omit or occlude of our material structures, we have to have some positive approach to what occluded possibilities are. Otherwise, how can we even talk of possibilities? If theory is no longer the gallant or the overcoming of capitalism, when's the confidence in the possibility of its overcoming? Why would it not simply go on from there? Vacuous possibility is just the theological beneficion of incapacity. We don't know how to change it,

we don't even know how to repute it, we just continue to hope that it will. So, the alternative to theoretical prograbism can't just be, it can't be this kind of wholesale of the theoretical identification of the points of possibilities or potentials encoded in material points of input. And this is why these points need to be identified and this identification as a theoretic task which would then facilitate the transformation.

So the identity of these achievements of influence, which transformation might precipitate change, seems to me to presuppose some sort of theoretical description and explanation. Now, of course, I mean, I don't know what that, you know, constructing that is of course a huge challenge. And I'm not, you know, I don't know what that theory would be. So I think in other words, I think that while recognizing, you know, the, in a way, the kind of the anachronistic kind of classical program is entirely kind of, necessary and a good thing, in fact it's indispensable. I think that there's an overreaction and the overreaction seems to be the kind of the

valorisation of a kind of indeterminacy or a kind of what I've called empiricist practices. developers, we struggle and then we don't pretend to kind of, or we just then try and construct or elaborate some kind of theory on the basis of these struggles. So, all this to say that this is why I don't accept the idea, first of all, because I don't accept that struggle is criticism. I don't think it suffices as criticism. And secondly, I think that criticism is a normative term.

criticism is a non-insert firm and it's not there that the claim is that rationality is one of the things that needs to be subjected to the whole field critique. Well, two things, it depends what kind of concept of rationality you're in with. generally from what experts were taught does a critique of rationality proceed? The 20th century critiques of rationality, if you are philosophical, seem to me to be ideological through and through. Berkson, Spidegger's, even Adonino Horkheimer's, or those finding all structures. And they all involve a kind of well, a straightforward, again, a philosophical caricature of rationality, its reduction to calculation, you know, identification, instrumentalization, etc, etc.

So I think that that is... there are other ways of understanding rationality which don't involve its inflation into some kind of supernatural faculty that mysteriously distinguishes humans from other animals on the one hand and that don't involve this kind of... I think the necessarily metaphysical interpretation of Hegel where it's claimed that reality is self-correctional structure. Now I don't think that that's, I don't think it was committed to that to a way of notion which is ambitiously understood. And no one can, you know, no one can

So when you said that you have a face-off between instrument reason and objective reason, Horkheimer contrasts instrument rationality and what he calls objective reason. But the objective reason he invokes seems to be rooted in a classical, climatic, the rationality itself as a kind of, is encoded in objective reality. And it's striking that this is a claim, traditional claim of idealism, whether it's places like it, but also kind of, you know, Aristotelian idealism. I think there's no, you know, we don't have to settle for either instrumental rationality or so-called objective rationality. It's a choice between

called an aristotle. So why more revolutionary practices? So this, you know, due to the scandal between two equally unsatisfactory, you know, utilitarianism on one hand and aristotelian from the other hand. Okay, so when I talk about reason, okay, I mean, reason is is a socially embedded discursive practice, what some philosophers call the game of giving and asking for reasons. And this is simply something that human beings do. And philosophy produces or elaborates a kind of formalisation of it, a conceptual formalisation, not an

mathematical or logical formalization. It's important to emphasize this. And reason, on this time, is really understood as a discursive practice, actually explains logic itself, you know, the formal inferences that are studied by logic as already presupposing this stratum is discursive strategy. In other words, the power of this account is that conceptual rationality is embedded in social practice and that even the elementary operations which

are being codified in logic are themselves merely explicitation of relations of material influence that are already embodied in assertions. Assertions, you know, straightforward assertions. So, this is to say that I don't think that this conception of reason, of what reason is, is either metaphysical or objectively or objectively ideologies. That will be criticized but many philosophers have criticized and think it's wrong. But at least you can't simply think

but say well we know what reason is and we know that reason is just you know this kind of with this punitive, autor-lighting instrument that's swallowed everything up on different sheets. Okay, and this is why I think I might say something about the objection that the only of universalism that can be generated by this discursive, this ultimately, you know, this conception of rationality that is in depth with Kant and Hegel. In a way, Kant proposes

conception of rationality, non-sufficient rationality, primarily discursive, and then Hegel shows how So, dispersed rationality is socially embedded. So, in a way, the conception of rationality I cling to is ultimately Hegelian. Hegelian in a kind of a non-mesophobic science. But the claim that rests is that this, you know, again, conception of rationality is ultimately kind reactionary because it's simply, well, not a problem, no. It's simply the kind of the codification of bourgeois property relations, okay? that things like impersonality, compassionality, objectivity, obligation, responsibility, etc.

All the terms in which, for instance, I was also like Robert Brandon characterised the discussion of rationality are merely the abstract kind of interpretation of bourgeois kind of operative relations. Well, I have a couple of things to say here. One, first thing I'll say is that it's true that I think that there is actually a way in which the philosophical discourse of inspiration from the kind of anti-mediated pen is a kind of, has been a kind of, you know, an ideological apple for blimp.

I've also got a proper pattern, this line is clearly defining a kind of liberal kind of sort of democracy, actually. But there's a point here, here, about this particular attraction, which is to say that the fact that discursive self-consciousness, the kind of discursive self-consciousness, which a philosopher like Hegel, systematically elaborates, in what's Feyenoord logic, might be causally anchored in pre-discursive social structures, like trans relations,

does not suffice to this fault by its rationality as personal self-consciousness unless one is already committed to the claim that the irrationality of the cause vitiates the rationality of the reason. And this is a claim you subversive force, relies on what I think is a metaphysical identification of dispersive reasons with their non-rational causes. In other words, that particular argument I find unpersuasive. It collapses reasons into causes. It says that what Kant and Hegel are talking about is caused by class structures,

Therefore, the content is constituted by this kind of a kind of irrational form of content. I think that that is a dubious argument which I reject. So I think that that is, I just don't accept the kind of thing that the assertive rationality is always simply this ideological kind of excrescence of bourgeois-property religions. A second point to make about the appeal to recognition, I think Demetra appears to Richard Gunn's checks on recognition, Hedges, and all of your spirit.

I mean this is, obviously this is a minor point, but I was talking about Hedges. So the claim, you know, Gunn's claim is that, and I'm not a relevant quote, what Demetra said, is that, that a common world, or in other words a valid external world, which could pre-channel recognition into authorities of configurations and which could serve as a shared touchstone to which instructing individuals may refer, is just what the play of mutual recognition excludes. The revolutionary demolition of such a world, and of the role definitions inherently in this, was required to affect the track from a misrecognitive, but mutually

recognized, terrain. And rather, consequently, the sole statute under which mutual recognition can come into being, and through which it can sustain itself. Well, I kind of disagree with Mr. Karras. I think the claim that interpersonal recognition can proceed independently of a shared world that one's social and natural assumes that it's possible to reduce the socially instituted norms through which we negotiate both subjectively and objectively to interpersonal attitudes rooted in freestanding self-facilities. And in this regard, it disregards the constitutive independence between

objective statuses and subjective attitudes within some deterministic In other words, I simply don't think that this is a claim is viable. I don't think it's a credible reconstruction of Hegel. And moreover, also, I think the appeal to recognition is kind of curious because, obviously, people like Zizek have bailed against the claim that Pable is all about mutual recognition because this is one way of propagating this kind of liberal interpretation of Pable

it's all about sociality can be reduced to interpersonal particularity. And I think that this is tied to the claim that in a way sociality is rooted in community. And I think that this is a dubious claim and I I certainly think that it's supposed to be kind of wary of this. Okay, finally, I'll just say something about the paradox of self-abolition, okay, which I think there's... I'm not sure if... Well, I can agree with the claim that the paradox

only a paradox if you assume that there is no more to what constitutes us than our position in the whole network of relations within the capitalist society. And in fact, that's the point I was trying to make in the paper, is that if you distinguish between practices and labour, you can dissolve the paradox, the alleged paradox, because Because human practices always exceed whatever is allegedly subsumed or engulfed by machinations

of Kama Salk. So in a way, I agree with this claim, with this, you know, one interpretation is a kind of, basically, they appeal to a saturated assumption. And I want to make a clear that I don't believe that such a saturated subsumption obtains. I think in terms of counter practices, and I think it is, it's kind of the function, of the function, one of the things the theory should do is give an account of the vernic

practice, which include I think dispersal and cognitive practices, to understand how these practices actually have some tracking in transforming the two components of influence through which capitalism reproduces itself. I think that this insisting on the fact that human practices are not exhaustively saturated by capitalism,

It's important to understand how generally the transformative struggle might be prosecuted, but also to understand how cognitive practices can play an indispensable role. Because theory means, it's a cliche to say that theory is a kind of practice, but in a way all I want to say is that reason is a kind of cognitive practice, can be an indispensable book when you're trying to figure out how to precipitate, how to effect a real radical transformation. And what you have to do in order to engage in not local transformation,

but something that might involve a real determination of the capital social equation. Okay, there's one, I just have one final point, which... Yes, one fact about just a minor is that it seems to me that if one is willing to assume

that social practices are not, you know, are not kind of, you know, a saturated negation, they're not completely kind of enveloped by capital, then why should we assume that things like that science is a social practice and science tells us things about natural work and how the natural world works? Now of course, science is embedded in these social forms and capital social relations, and as Dmitry points out, most of all of the scientific research is tied into profit, exploitation, etc.

But it seems to me that this doesn't written a claim such as, you know, why should we assume like this is a quote, why should we assume today that in the future survival for a moment will have to involve medicine as it exists today? In other words, why would we assume that what contemporary medicine tells us about, you know, how to cure viruses would survive after the abolition of capital. Well, I think there's very good reason. I mean, it's a great question about do you believe that viruses are real or not? And if viruses are not real, then, you know, how do we explain the kind of, you

the effectiveness of antivirals. It seems, in other words, I don't see why we know that, you know, I believe that smallpox would eradicate it because I believe that we understood what smallpox was, small infrastructure, figured out the culture of anarchy. And I think that is a fact about the natural world that was discovered by scientists. I think that it seems to me implausible to believe that these accounts of the structure of the natural world that have been generated under the active existing

capitalists on them. Or therefore, we are more likely to jump them or should relinquish them altogether because of this. You know, I think that that's, I just find that peculiar claim and again, it's not clear, I mean it's also peculiar for the claims that there will be no possible continuity between our understanding of the way the world works now and the way in which we might understand after the abolishment of capitalism. And obviously, I guess there will be a radical discontinuity, but then absolutely discontinuity

metaphysical fiction. There's no such thing. There are degrees and it's clear that you may not be able to anticipate the radicality of rape or corruption from within the status quo, from within the present status quo, from within the present status quo. However, that doesn't mean that you won't retrospectively able to understand how the criminal established a continuity between what was the case before and how the transformation that overturned the previous state of affairs came about. In other words, our knowledge can undergo radical transformations. But those

radical transformations seem to be, you know, are based on or are dialectical. Simple as that. I think they're dialectical. And they have a structure, they have the term structure. That's what the term negation means. It means that even if your understanding undergoes a complete refigure, is it terrible? And I just wanted to, so if I were radical, the discontinuity, the discontinuity must be retrospectively intelligible. And it can't be wholly unimaginable from within the present because then it seems to be that it's wholly

unimaginable then it becomes something you have to appeal to things like you know events, an instance of radical transcendence and radical transcendence is not something that you can work with to change the world which is why I think it's something that should be kind of you know and chat at the end whenever possible. Okay, I think I've been talking for quite a while, so maybe I should stop. Okay, that was great. Thanks a lot, Ray. So maybe if people have questions, maybe they can come a bit closer

so the microphone can pick up the voice and can be heard. You hear very well, right? Yes, you hear very well. Okay, so that's... Maybe you want to respond? Yeah, I think particularly on the last point... Sit down here. Maybe it better come here just in case because the microphone is... Oh, okay. Yeah, I think it will be better.

Yeah, basically... Ah, well, yeah, I'll proceed. So, I'll just do the... It seems that the connection is good, so you can also see it in the intro. So it's less impersonal and more personal. Okay. All right. So, yeah, I think when you said the word retrospectively, I thought that was kind of the key to what I was trying to point at when I was talking about the concept of the term of negation that you look about. Because I don't think that retrospectively it is a problem.

I mean of course retrospectively it would be intelligible but there is a continuity between the different kind of phases even if there is a a well changing, completely well changing event that completely changes the way the instruction obviously there will be some forms of continuity and some forms in which you can see in the past kind of forms that seem to what's the word, refigure what is in the present. What I have a problem with is the certainty that it is possible that they're coherent or self, what's the word, not coherent, discrete.

There are discrete things and objects that you can identify in the present and discrete as they are, they can also exist as such after such a transformation. So there can be a continuity but there will be no discreteness of those elements and this can only be seen retrospectively. I mean, the way that things are to be transformed, I don't think it's possible to say or to tell precisely from the present. it is possible to make suggestions. For the role of struggle I certainly don't

advocate pure practice or some pure empiricism. I think that however that struggles are important as events as practices that take place in a particular context in order to produce different understandings of social relations and capitalism, and they have done so historically. So for example, if the communist revolution hadn't happened in Russia and all these things were not transformed, we wouldn't have been able to criticise those particular concepts of revolution. So that's where struggles come

and I'm trying to imagine of ways in which struggles mediate with every conceptions that may be before. So what I'm wary of is... What did I pronounce it? What I'm wary of is the idea that it is possible to have a complete notion of what it could be. I suppose on the notion of sociality, I think there is a disagreement only because I certainly

don't agree with notion of sociality just reduce the community. I think community is just as problematic, but I find I want to dramatize the notion of society as such. Society as such as a form of social organization just by the fact that this is a form of social organization contains within it very spiral relationships. So I want to pose that problem as well as a problem of communism, i.e. that communism is not just a question of a model production,

it's not just a question of having things, it's not just a question of being free from being free from hunger but it is a question of relations of power and it is there that this is this discussion of medicine from them because um yeah the the the i suppose the disagreement was with the particular fact that you that you talked about a discrete commodity of antivirals. So I wouldn't be against the idea that the knowledge itself could be in different ways, but I think that knowledge would be completely produced in

different ways and it might not produce antivirals, it might produce something else that would be, you know, I want that possibility open, that it would produce something else that wouldn't be based on this sort of production, it wouldn't be based on this kind of relationships, it wouldn't be based on a particular social conception of illness. That's kind of what I think. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can say, I mean, yeah, I'm not going to say anything else.

Someone else should ask a question. Ray, do you have the chance to bring some responses to the error, the end notes text? Well, I've read it and I really enjoyed it. And I find myself, you know, kind of agreeing with it. I mean, I think it's incredibly lucid,

a really lucid diagnosis of the problems. And I think, yeah, I think this idea of like, I think the way in which it can this kind of impasse, which on the one hand, you know, given that, well, you know, on the one hand we have a kind of an objectionable monism, where you find this kind of capitalism of this kind of absolute subject, everything is kind of puppets of capital, everything we do, everything we can do is already somewhere

kind of entirely enveloped by this omnivited monster. And a lot of times you have a kind of dualism, a dualism where you have like, you know, there's kind of a bug, there's always this kind of pure, this revolutionary potentiality which is just there, you know, somehow. And I take it that this is what's objectionable about people like, you know, like hard and angry and multitude and stuff. So I find that, you know, I think that's... it's kind of... and so the thing that whether we like it or not, even the way in which we relate to the environment,

you know, everything, all this stuff in our environment, even the stuff that is not kind of, you know, really subsumed in the kind of precise technical sense, sense, which I know Enroth insisted on, is still nevertheless kind of, you know, embedded in this horizon of possibility which is really kind of determined by capital. So that means that the way in which we orient ourselves, it's really the way in which we orient ourselves towards the future, in the sense of that the possibilities embedded in the world around still seem to be determined by capital. So the question, and that's why we're faced with this, either we,

on one hand we have this idea, well both the idea of some kind of managed transition to post-capitalism, as well as the idea of some kind of absolute rupture seemed practically inconceivable. It's just not... you seem to lack the resources to be able to kind of understand how that might come about. So I think, you know, I mean, I think the text is a fantastic kind of crystallization of a dilemma. But it ends on the curious, I mean, it ends rather kind of curiously.

I mean, the problem of the imminent transcendence. The problem of what would an imminent transcendence be, given the depths of our subsumption within the counter-statality. And it says, you know, it's a seductive problem that lends itself to no end before long and playful manipulation. The plague is boring. Eventually, boring is a more of critique. Yes, it's true because it seems that the problem is couched at a level of abstraction, philosophical abstraction where it seems intractable. And, okay, but I think it's not wholly attractive and I think some conceptual work, even at this level of abstraction, it's possible to actually render it tractable, to break it down.

And I think that that will have positive, practical consequences. In other words, it seems... Look, I have no idea... Or I'm going to convince this, the one that I do in the future, I have no idea how the transformations should or should be engaged in by revolutionaries. So that's why I agree completely that the theory seems to have, seem to be kind of incapable of cutting up a set of satisfactory prescriptions of here's a problem, here's

what to do enough to solve it. I also agree about how all these existing social problems are kind of problematically determined, if not wholly constituted by capitalism, and that whatever communism looks like, it would involve this radical reconfiguration, which is difficult for us to imagine. So it's not that I want to make it sound as if I think, you know, these kinds of bourgeois social structures and bourgeois institutions can simply be reformed and preserved or maintained.

So I completely kind of admit that they have to be radically reconfigurant, some of them chersened, some of them dissolved. But I'm saying that whatever kind of process of jettisoning them and storming them, in a way has to rely on internet resources. I just don't understand how you could do anything in the world, through the world, that wouldn't involve using what is at hand in the world. So, okay, and I also admit that the claim that act of functions are never wholly, you

know, can never be wholly abstracted from that claim of the law, or social, emotion, etc., etc., etc. But I think the stratification of functions is important. So in other words, it's not, this is why I don't agree that, like, for instance, everything that antivirals do is already circumscripted by their current function within capitalism. So, I want to make it clear that I admit this kind of constitutive indeterminacy in what

falls upon a radical transformation. But you have to determine the indeterminacy. My problem is with vacuous indeterminacy, where you have something that is just a kind of like, you know, something, something other, there's a radical alternative that's possible, but we don't know what makes it possible. That's what I mean by vacuous possibility, and that's what I have a problem with. I don't have a problem with indeterminacy or the impossibility of guarantees. I freely admit that. But I think you have to be very clear about when you say that something is indeterminate or indesciple.

You have to be more parsimonious about the points of indeterminacy that you allow in your analysis of a situation. Otherwise, it's like if you just lay down your hands and say, something must change, we know not what, we know not how, I think that's a recipe for scale. So that's why I think that yes, boredom is a mode of critique, you know, but people may say bored with boredom. It fits the reputation of every time, especially not when you realize that these abstractions, you know, nothing is wholly abstract, wrong. Things that seem wholly abstract

I can interpret it how concrete efficacy. In other words, you shouldn't prejudge when masturbation falls in the portion of the dentist. Masturbation, difference between masturbation and coitus. Because those two references to masturbation are making it totally honest. I don't think we disagree fundamentally at all. I mean, one issue is perhaps that part of the kind of character of that text is a very strange one. In a sense, it involves assuming a series of standpoints which I personally believe to be unsustainable,

and kind of seeing what you can do with them. it's some sort of dialectical attempt something sort of dialectical there and it's a fragment also so that ending on that silly thing about boredom is quite contingent really just because the text isn't finished you got bored right but in terms of stress on determinate negation I think I would be completely in agreement on that and not allowing, not just resting of a simple sense of vacuous possibility. And I think that's kind of implied by the other... I mean, you haven't seen the thing we've done today, but we were talking about thinking... Distinguishing between false totality and a determinate totality,

or indeterminate and determinate notions of totality. And it seems to me that if one has a determinate notion of the totality which is to be abolished, then one also must have a sense of determinate negation. The two logically follow, they logically go together. Whereas an indeterminate notion of totality does imply a vacuous sense of possibility. So in that sense, yeah, I agree. So, questions? Questions for anyone? Well, maybe directly there hasn't been any questions to Ray.

I don't think it's because he answered everything. But then maybe some questions for him and then we open it. But now because we are with him and he was not part of the other one... Sorry, for reference. For them, so wait maybe a bit and... It relates directly to what was said just now. Okay, so please. Yeah, go ahead and come closer just to the microphone so he can hear me. Yeah, is this possibility a necessary precondition for criticism of something that exists? Is the possibility of transforming something, is it a necessary

preconditions for criticizing? Well I guess no, it might be something to be objective or unacceptable even if you can't see up to a voucher or a So no, it's not that possibility is the precondition for criticism, but criticism must be more than saying you don't like it. Critique is not just saying you don't like it, it's explaining what's wrong with it. And if you say that something is wrong, then implicitly there's a people who want the right

state of thinking or what would not be. Now it may be that the... you can be a pessimist and say, we'll never know, we'll never be able to... Like if you're a Don or something, you can say, you know, the wrong state of things, everything's wrong. And any attempt to identify or to determine what would be the right state of things is, you know, temptation to be about all costs because that would simply be the kind of identification that would simply perpetuate what's wrong.

So, no, I admit that it's possible to critique, you know, critique need not into the obligation to practical transformation. But you know, the monotist tradition seems to be, you know, if you say that something is wrong, you say that capitalism is wrong, then you imply that something has been done in order to change it or to abolish it or whatever. And if you're committed to changing something, then you're not a right to identify a possibility. Now, of course, that is very,

very difficult and it's clear that you can't simply accept the representation of what is possible in the law, which will always be ideological. You can do this, it can be. And of course, that's very ideological. But one of the types of critique is to identify when ideological representation prevents you from shutting down, or preemptively shuts down the provides impossibility. So in a way you have to kind of operate, you know, part of the task of Christians to keep up is not to to kind of provoke the problem of possibility, the distinction between the possible and the

impossible, which is preemptively illimited. But you have to do it in a set way without relapsing into the other temptation, just to say that there's always something else possible, though that something else is inconceivable. That's the kind of negative theology of the state. Then you end up kind of because of utopia, like unimaginable, unrepresentable. And the point is that it's all too easy to lapse into a kind of, you ultimately that kind of complacent embrace of tragic impossibility. The world is terrible,

there's nothing to be done, and in fact the danger to be employed is trying, it's thinking you can do something. You know, this can be a very conservative position. So, yes, so I think part Part of the task of Chica is to be able to identify, to criticise, to create, to shut down the ideological foreclosure possibility, but also not to give into the opposite interpretation of the city and to, you know, and a lab-centred and a theological implication of completely transcend. Yeah, I just wanted to respond by saying one way in which to kind of rephrase what Ray

just said is maybe to think that to kind of flip the terms slightly and sort of say that a kind of adequately determinate criticism is a precondition for adequately determinate possibility and that maybe the kind of the mode of despair comes precisely from the kind of rightly perceived failings of an indeterminate possibility and its failure to kind of in any way adequately speak to reality. I have a question that might follow on that which is for you to, you know, kind of follow

on this notion of indeterminacy and determinacy to maybe expand or clarify what you previously have called unsaturated mediation and saturated mediation. Maybe the identifying of these unsaturated mediations can give us room to generate determinate possibilities. Yes, well in a way I think one of the things that I really liked the text, the end of the text, the first version of Deza, the error text, is because it's very clear about the

the mistake or what was this theological absolutization of capital. So capital saturated with that. So then, once one realizes that this is not of variable position, then it's asked as, okay, to identify unsaturated determination. So these are the points at which you can distinguish saturated saturated determination, is the point at which you can distinguish between those possibilities

that are tethered to the perpetuation of the safest quo and those which may not be, those which may allow you to actually transform, to look to change things in some kind of way, to affect a radical transformation. I take this to be a cognitive task. I think this involves describing and explaining. It involves describing and explaining reality, the world. And I think this is all deemed by insisting over the the indispensability of what I guess is a kind of cognitive abstraction.

What I just mean is the theorising that tries to understand what things are and how they work. I take this to be a cognitive task, in order to understand things about the world, and then it makes the difference between having an adequate and inadequate understanding will have immediate practical consequences. I would say political consequences. So, I think that's the challenge, once you admit that there's a difference between saturated and non-saturated mediation, then that's where you identify possibilities which are

not wholly determined by the status quo, the existing social world, etc. I don't have any such terms. I've got no idea if you ask me in detail about that. At least, you know, I think that this is where the work would have to be done. Any more questions? So, there doesn't seem to be any more questions, so...

We might just say thank you very much. It's been interesting and we will let you know how it goes. And if we find some unsaturated mediations... I think as wine, as wine kind of, you know, we started already with the wine, but I think as the party continues, we might get up somewhere. We might get saturated, but at the same time we might get unsaturated with life a year. It has to be a glass. Through the internet. Thanks so much, Ray. Great. Thank you, guys. Thanks a lot.

Thanks. Cheers. Cool. So we've been touched. Cheers. So would you like to dance? Do you have some music in your cinema? Do you want to try to find out? What does some saturated mediation right now? Here? For you? What? What? I guess the music is going to be on the internet. Yeah. Normal. So... One year after. We are more than in time. We are before time. Which might...

Maybe have to do with... No, we're tired. Yeah, for three years. Thank you. Thank you.