Reason Is Inconsolable
and Non-Conciliatory
Ray Brassier in Conversation with Suhail Malilc
Suhail Malik: By way of general introduction, let's start with the develop
ment of your thinking and ideas through nihilism. In Nihil Unbound, you
advocated a (perhaps modernist) project, maybe best exemplified by science,
in which the rational understanding of the world undoes all conventional
accounts for it (from the mythic to structured or individualized beliefs to
most philosophical structures insofar as they do not take seriously enough
the discoveries and horizons opened up by the sciences).' As I see it, you
argue that the rational revisions of understanding, the cosmos (philosophi
cally and scientifically apprehended), the seif, and the conditions of thought
do not depend on or lead to anything predetermined. Or, to put it otherwise,
they depend on and assume nothing as their condition other than the itera
tion of rational thought in a material world. The absence of any positive term
as a condition or result of this process-the absenting of a transcendental
condition or determination of rational enquiry, its nothing-marks rational
thought as a productive nihilism: nihil unbound, as the title of your book
has it. One way to capture this nihilistic condition for thought, its termless
ness, is your image of the death of the sun, which, thanks to scientific pre
diction, we know will happen in about five billion years. You ask the ques
tion Lyotard does of how thinking addresses its own extra-terrestriality as a
rational injunction-and perhaps organizes its own departure from the solar
system in a politics of survival2-but, beyond that, solar burnout captures
a kind of ultimate nothing for thinking as we have understood it so far, and
of its (terrestrial) conditions. So-and here is an audacious move-solar
burnout becomes a positive figure for how rational thought in a way assumes
nothing as its condition. If this is right, clearly thought cannot be predicated
on human interests or have the human as its term, even if it is the human
who thinks rationally (perhaps not exclusively, but as at least one such spe
cies-actor). This is the antihumanism and non-correlationism of your work.
My initial questions are twofold. The first concerns the drama
of nihilism: solar burnout if not universal termination is a grand and
Conversation conducted by e-mail in September and October 2013.
1
2
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, "Can Thought Go Without a Body," in The Inhuman: Rejlection on
Time, trans. Geolfrey Bennington and Rache! Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
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REASONISINCONSOLABLE
catastrophic vista from which to think the base conditions for rational
thought and its development. Your more recent work revolving around
the work of the mid-twentieth century American analytic philosopher Wilfrid Seilars seems by comparison relatively modest. The aspects
of Sellars's work you are interested in are his theorizations of how
ideas are revised by a rational agent by the relation between what he
calls the "manifest image"-approximately how the world appears and
makes sense to a general rational consciousness-and the "scientific
image"-the world as it is known in the terms of theoretical science.
Other than explaining your turn to Seilars, the question-which I think
is not just about rhetorical strategies but is close to core shifts in your
approach-is: Why this "modesty" of returning to an encultured human
actor as the basis of your inquiries now? At first blush, it seems a regression
or stepping down from the scales and ambition of your earlier work in two
regards: first, it concerns only intricacies of processes of rational thinking
and concept generation rather than literally stellar conditions for thinking
the future of thought; the scope seems much reduced. Second, given your
earlier advocacy of a trenchantly antihumanist or non-correlational condi
tion and term for rational thought, the "concept-monger" (to take up your
citation of Robert Brandom) involved here seems indelibly human. And
this is very far from a now established perception of your interests. In either
instance, the emphasis now seems more constructive than nihilistic, more
anthropological than cosmological. (1 think they are no less nihilistic
but it may need some explanation to make it clear why so.)
Brassier: At the heart of Nihil Unbound (NU) is an argument defending the necessary
link between rationality and nihilism, such that, as you put it, rational thought must
assume nothing (what the book calls "being-nothing") as its productive condition.
But the subsequent move toward Seilars, who was all too summarily dealt with in NU,
is a direct continuation rather than a detour or a regression from this agenda. I realize
it may look Iike a step backward-a retreat from the impasse of extinction-but in
fact it's a case of what the French call reculer pour mieux sautez, that is, stepping back
in order to leap farther. In this particular context, it means reconsidering my overly
hasty dismissal of Sellars's defense of the manifest image in order to think through
what it might mean to unbind thinking from its terrestrial condition.
l've come to understand why Seilars insisted on the indispensability of the
manifest image and its role in the process of conceptual revision that fuels cogni
tive discovery. There's nothing sacrosanct about the contents of the manifest image
(except perhaps for the category of "personhood," which is not species-specific for
Seilars: persons need not be human). What is crucial is its normative infrastructure,
by virtue of which it constitutes what Seilars called "the space of reasons." This
normative infrastructure is spelled out in Sellars's inferentialist theory of meaning,
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which has been vastly amplified by Brandom. The basic idea is simple: if you believe
or mean something, you also ought to believe or mean everything that follows from
it. Inferentialism ties together semantic and epistemic holism. Semantic holism is
the idea that the meaning of any individual claim is defined by its relations to other
claims: not just the claims it implies, but those that imply it in turn. These relations
are inferential: what something means is a function of what you can infer from it, and
what implies it in turn. But this means that to be committed to the meaning of any
single claim is also to be committed to the meaning of all those other claims with
which it is inferentially bound. This has an epistemic consequence: any individual
belief is defined by its inferential relations to all the other beliefs presupposed by or
implied by it. So if you believe one thing, you also ought to believe everything that
follows from that one thing-regardless of whether or not you are explicitly aware
of it (which, clearly, most of the time we are not).
This notion of "discursive commitment" is central to inferentialism: the
meanings of our claims regularly outstrip what we currently intend or are aware
of. This is because the implications of our claims regularly outstrip what we are cur
rently aware of. To be rational is to keep track of those entailments and thereby to
track what we become committed to when we commit ourselves to a belief or claim.
"Deontic scorekeeping" is the name Brandom gives to the practice whereby we keep
track of these discursive commitments. We as rational beings strive to keep track of
what we ought to say, think, or do, just as a good chess player strives to keep track
of what will follow from all the possible moves that might be made given a specific
configuration of pieces on the board. In other words, what we mean when we think
or speak is determined by all the things we also ought to think or say in its wake.
This inferentialist account of meaning and belief turns out to be a valuable
resource for me because it defends the autonomy of rationality without violating
the constraints of naturalism (or, if one prefers, "materialism"). The "normativity"
invoked in this inferentialist theory of meaning and thought must be distinguished
from the sense in which we refer to as "socio-cultural norms." Rational normativity
is distinct from social normativity even if it is invariably socially instituted. This
is something Hegel understood and it's the reason why Hegel can be a rationalist
(indeed, an absolute rationalist) while insisting that rationality is always socially
and historically embodied. Sellars is Hegelian to the extent that, for him too, the
practice of giving and asking for reasons is socially instituted. But institution is not
constitution: to say that reason is socially instituted is not to say that it is socially
constituted; that is the kind of historicist relativism that both Hegel and Sellars
were attempting to avoid, not least because it founders in incoherence. Reason is a
practice, but not all practices are equivalent. To claim that they are is to Japse into
the kind of vulgar pragmatism which subordinates all practices to a single standard
of utility, whether social or biological. Inferentialism insists that the ends governing
the practice of giving and asking for reasons cannot be reduced to those of other
social practices, even if they are bound up with them in complicated ways.
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This is one way in which inferentialism has allowed me to substantiate the
distinction I made in NU between the ends of thought and the ends of life. This is
also why it would be a mistake to view my current focus on the inferentialist link
between conceptual function and linguistic practice as symptomatic of a drop
from the cosmological register to the anthropological register. The "modesty" of
my apparent stepping back from thought's cosmic condition and returning to an
account that roots thinking in the activities of encultured human agents is strategic.
lt's necessary in order both to ground the normative valence I accord to thinking,
and to explain what thinking is and why it ought to be deterritorialized. Unless I
can give an account of the "ought" in a statement like "thinking ought to be freed
from its terrestrial condition," its status as an imperative is null. More generally,
one has to give an account of the normativity of tmth in order to break out of the
paradox of nihilism: if nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters
doesn't matter. Therefore mattering can't be adjudicated by thinking; it can only be
determined by living. Having destituted reason and tmth, nihilism crowns feeling
and instinct in their stead. Living holds sway over thinking.
Equally, the Lamellean account of thought which I sought to repurpose
in NU proved unsuited to the task of liberating thinking from living because it
relegated the need for justification to the transcendent realm of philosophy that
it claims to suspend. From the standpoint of what Lamelle calls "radical imma
nence," rational normativity is just another philosopheme among others. The
move from Lamelle to Sellars is the move from the absolute suspension of justi
fication to the justified suspension of the absolute. For my purposes, Lamelle's
"non-standard philosophy" remains too static, too formalist a procedure; its
"realism of the last instance" reifies conceptual stmctures and reduces inferential
necessity to authoritarian whim-that of "the philosophical decision." But unless
one can give an immanent, materialist account of the status of rational normativity,
one cannot but regress from the cosmological to the anthropological. lnferentialism
provides an account wherein thinking that thinking makes no difference does make
a difference in and for thinking itself. lt matters whether or not anything matters;
determining whether or not nihilism is tme makes a difference for thinking and
this makes a difference in reality: not because thinking is magically keyed in to the
fabric of reality, but because thinking is an activity performed by language-using
animals, an activity that makes a difference because it is embedded in material
reality. Because concepts are functions, they are relayed by the activities of lan
guage-using animals, but this does not mean that the properties of conceptual
function are to be identified with properties or capacities exclusive to the human
animal. Humans may be the only concept-mongers on Earth, but this is not to say
they are the only possible concept-mongers. Ultimately, the inferentialist account
of conceptual practice ties into a metaphysics of processes wherein conceptual
function may be realized by very different kinds of physical processes. Sellars's
vision entails a transcendental functionalism wherein thinking is a process among
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other processes, but one whose peculiar involution generates a cognitive gateway
onto those other processes.
Let's clarify and situate your broad ambition a little more. Two interrelated
aspects are worth highlighting here, even at risk of repetition. The first
is forward-looking, the second is backward-looking. Prospectively, what
is the "farther" horizon you want to "leap" toward, that the turn to infer
entialism will help you secure? Retrospectively, accepting the divergence
between the interests and claims of reason and those of life-reason trans
forms life because it is other to it-it seems that rational thought is for you
more fundamentally yet the "engine" for its own extension beyond human
determination, in two senses: first, you avow the extension of reason qua
inferentialism outside of the human into material and practical processes
in general; second, it is rational thought qua philosophy that generates
an adequate account of this extension and its possibility. Philosophy is then
not just a belated self-reflection on the conditions of thought and reality
but at once a practice effected through language. This nuanced global distinc
tion leads to the question of what other recursive inferentialist pattern for
mations there can be.
Certainly, making inferences through a recursive pattern formation
is a central conceit of capitalist markets as pricing mechanisms constituted
through the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Here, all prices in a market are
"true" reflections of the market as a whole insofar as it is transparent to itself;
price changes arise only as a consequence of nonsymmetrical information
before returning to "rationally determined" equilibrium precisely through
recursive operations of trading for maximal gains. This may not quite be
an inferentialism as per the philosophical lineage you are drawing on, but
it seems to observe the same functionalist account. lf so, today's capitalist
markets, drawing on these basic premises and also the automation of their
practical implementation, would seem to constitute-you may prefer "insti
tute" -a kind of rational agency, and at speeds and capacities that far exceed
human limits. At least, that's what's declared by those who advocate for cap
ital markets as generating "accurate" prices. Equally, writers, artists, and
filmmakers have "embodied" capitalist markets or recursive information
network systems as fantastical, spectral figures, proposing a personifica
tion of a kind of nonhuman inferentialist functioning: William Gibson's
Neuromancer trilogy is one influential example here.
1f these or other extensions or generalizations of inferentialism qua
recursive patterning process have validity qua reasoning for you, how do
you locate inferentialism qua philosophy as a practice in relation to other
inferentialist/patterning operations? Sub-question: What is its privilege,
if any, and what can you say about this privilege compared with the one
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philosophy had in the high Enlightenment as the rational discipline (given
that philosophy then also covered what are now distinguished as sciences
and now does not)?
First of all, l'd like to obviate a misunderstanding: I wouldn't say that I "avow the
extension ofreason qua inferentialism outside ofthe human into material and prac
tical processes in general." While it's true to say that reason is incarnated in mate
rial and practical processes, this is not to say that these processes are themselves
"rational" or that inferential patterns are realized by all sorts ofmaterial and practical
processes in general. On the contrary: I want to uphold the crucial (Kantian) dis
tinction between rule-governed conceptual practices, which I take to be constitutive
of rationality, and which are exceedingly rare and metaphysically exceptional, and
pattern-governed processes, which are ubiquitous and metaphysically unremarkable.
In other words, I want to maintain the exceptional status of reason and insist on
the "unnatural" nature ofour rational capacity without lapsing into a metaphysical
dualism of the mental and physical (of the sort recently rehabilitated by philoso
phers like David Chalmers)3 but also without attributing to it a supernatural origin.
The distinction between rule-obeying activity and pattern-governed behavior dis
qualifies the claim that markets think or dynamic systems reason. Rule-following is
pattern-governed but not every pattern incarnates a rule.
So, not everything thinks: rationality is a metaphysical exception. But it's the
exception constituted by the rule that discriminates the exception from the rule. So
the "farther horizon" toward which rationality propels itselfis one that reason must
construct: it is not pre-given and it is fundamentally incompatible with the brand
ofmetaphysical eschatology for which the ultimate horizon is the reconciliation of
mind and matter or reason and nature. Reason is inconsolable and non-concilia
tory. Rational inquiry is propelled by cognitive interests that are generated anew by
breaking with past modes of understanding. In this regard, reason is the "restless
ness of the negative." lt progresses by refusing the Jure ofreconciliation-even and
especially the Jure of being reconciled to the irreconcilable. The farther horizon
toward which it progresses is the universal understood as determinate negation of
parochial, context-specific modes of understanding.
What this progression ultimately implies is a transformation ofreason's rela
tion to time. Why? Because the critique ofintellectual intuition, which is the ratio
nalist variant ofthe myth ofthe given, requires that we acknowledge the discursive
structure ofrationality: concepts are linguistically instantiated functions. But to say
that reason is discursive is also to say that reasoning takes time: just as there is no
nondiscursive rationality, there is no timeless reason. lt is because reason takes time
that it constitutes a "self-correcting enterprise" in which even our most cherished
categories may have to be revised or abandoned. Among these are the temporal
3
David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
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categories of past, present, and future. My wager is that our understanding of the
articulation of past, present, and future-and hence of the structure of time-will
eventually be transformed in the light of cognitive discovery. This is where I think
reason harbors the possibility of a cognitive solution to the problem of nihilism,
which, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is simply the problem of what to do with time. W hy
keep investing in the future when there is no longer a transcendental guarantor, a
positive end of time as ultimate horizon of reconciliation or redemption ensuring a
payoff for this investment? Reason promises to transform our relation to time such
that the purposelessness of becoming would become intelligible as the enabling
condition of action. In Platonic terms, this would be to grasp the intelligible form
of formlessness, which is time as such. This would be the rationalist alternative to
Nietzsche's irrationalist solution, which is simply to affirm, rather than understand,
the senselessness of becoming ("eternal recurrence" as amorfati).
It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To opt for
the latter is to extend the Prometheanism of reason to becoming itself. Prometheanism,
in the words of Alberto Toscano, is the articulation of action and knowledge in the
perspective of totality.4 lt is the attempt to eradicate the discrepancy between what is
humanly made and what is nonhumanly given-not by rendering the world amenable
to human whim or by merely satisfying our pathological needs, but by remaking our
selves and our world in conformity with the demands of reason. In metaphysical terms,
this requires reinscribing the transcendence of time into the immanence of space. To
grasp the form of formlessness would be to transform the structure of fate understood
as the way in which things happen to us. T he gain in intelligibility is practically trans
formative once one realizes, with Sellars, that thinking is a kind of doing, or as he puts
it, that "inferring is an act." Thinking is not a preliminary to doing, but a kind of doing
whose potencies we have yet to understand. The point at which thinking and doing
coincide is the point at which idealism and materialism fuse.
Pete Wolfendale has suggested that it's time to rehabilitate logocentrism,
a sentiment with which I heartily concur. Everything is ultimately accessible to
reason, but reason is not accessible to everything. The Kantian resonances of infer
entialism may chafe against contemporary neo-materialism, but among its clear
advantages over the latter is ruling out the suggestion that corporations are per
sons. The personification of complex systems, whether corporations or markets,
is among the most unfortunate consequences of the pseudo-materialist tendency
to elide the distinction between rational agency and complex behavior. The result
is neo-animism: the indiscriminate attribution of agency to anything and everything
(speed bumps, traffic cones, pencil sharpeners, and so forth). This is theoretically
and politically disastrous. Among the duties of philosophy is reminding theorists
that hard-won distinctions like the one between action and behavior cannot be
4
Alberto Toscano, "The Prejudice Against Prometheus," Stir (Summer 2011). Available at
www.stirtoaction.com/the-prejudice-against-prometheus.
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dissolved by fiat. But this is not to say that philosophy can reclaim its former priv
ileges, such as claiming to be the rational discipline. The secession of the special
sciences cannot be overturned. Philosophers-and metaphysicians in particular
should be more humble before the astonishing achievements of the empirical sci
ences. But philosophers need not abase themselves before natural scientists or social
scientists. Philosophy retains two indispensable tasks: scrutinizing the conceptual
logic underpinning theoretical discourses and identifying the most fundamental cat
egories presupposed by those discourses. This is a modest remit with far-reaching
consequences. lt's preferable to a grandiose trumpeting of the return of metaphysics,
which often means the regression to precritical dogmatism.
Accepting that rational thought deprioritizes human life as its privileged
agent (a historical privilege attributable, in fact, to various evolutionary
contingencies and, in myth, to human self-regard) seems to subscribe to
an antihumanism. Yet, that the human is one rational agent in the uni
verse among others (a condition familiar from science fiction) would be a
trans-humanism. And if rational thought extends the human as its historical
agent in terms other than those (primarily biological-symbolic terms) estab
lished to date, this corresponds to a post-humanism. Would you identify
any one of these as of greater importance to you than the others? Or do you
advocate these multiple yet cogent de-anthropologizing effects and conse
quences of rational thought (among others) equally and simultaneously?
Where and how do you situate your work and ambitions in relation to the
spectrum of antihumanism, post-humanism, and trans-humanism?
My primary commitment is to a rationalistic naturalism, so there are elements in your
characterization of each that I would endorse, viz., that humans are not necessarily the
privileged bearers of rationality (antihumanism); that humans may not be the only
rational agents (trans-humanism); that rationality may extend itself through post-bi
otic systems (post-humanism). Others may quibble with these definitions, but what
I endorse in your version of these positions is the emphasis on rationality, which is
precisely what some advocates of these stances are concerned to minimize or deny.
The matter is complicated because there is a disavowed humanism in anti-, post-,
and trans-humanism, and there is a necessary inhumanism implicit in humanism. It's
the latter that I'm particularly interested in. So I don't think one can simply pit the
nonhuman against the human, or plump for one over against the other.
In order to clarify my own position on these issues, I need to explain what I
think rationalistic naturalism entails. I think it has four basic consequences. First,
there can be no such thing as an extraterritorial or arational critique of reason,
since critique is a normative term whose ultimate warrant derives from reason
itself. This remains the case even if one accepts, with Hegel, that the structure of
human reason is always historically bounded. Second, reason is our sole means of
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cognitive access to nature. There is no other way of knowing what nature is (cer
tainly not intuition, pace Bergson and others). Third, Kant's critique of dogmatic
rationalism, which I accept, rules out the possibility of an a priori or metaphys
ical science of nature. This means that empirical science is the privileged source
for our understanding of nature, as weil as for demarcating the natural from the
supernatural. But after Darwin, it becomes increasingly implausible to maintain
the Aristotelian thesis that a kind of proto-rationality is already encoded in nature.
From a Darwinian perspective, rational purposefulness is an artifact of purposeless
processes. Yet reason is purposeful and is honed to track purposes. This engenders
the following dichotomy: on the one hand, there are naturalists who think reason
is natural because nature is reasonable-a repository of essences and final causes,
as Aristotle maintained; on the other hand, there are rationalists who think reason
must be unnatural because nature is unreasonable. They see an absolute disjunction
between reason and nature. I reject both forks of this dilemma, which leads me to
my fourth consequence: reason is unnatural but not supernatural. lt is unnatural
because rational purposiveness cannot be reduced to natural process: every rule is
incarnated in a pattern, but not every pattern incarnates a rule. Yet reason is not
supernatural because rules (i.e., concepts) must be realized in patterns: they can do
nothing independently of their material realization. In other words, concepts are
functions, but functions must be materially realized in order to do anything-and
I use "material" in the broadest possible sense here, to encompass the microphys
ical, neurobiological, and sociohistorical domains.
Part of philosophy's remit is then to excavate the infrastructure of rationality
as contingently instantiated in the cognitive capacities of the human organism. Since
Homo sapiens is the only concept-monger we know of on this planet, it is the bearer
of rational capacity and deserves to be privileged, albeit only insofar as it exercises
this capacity. From this point of view, rationalist anthropocentrism is indissociable
from logocentrism understood as reason's self-interestedness. In other words, reason
is self-interested because it is the source and legislator of every interest. Without it,
nothing is of any interest whatsoever. Reason is nonanthropological precisely insofar
as sapience is the defining attribute of humanity.
Does nonanthropological reason then necessarily require its cosmological determination as you have it in NU? If rational thought is a non
anthropological functionalist pattern formation by inference, there are in
principle many determinations of the nonanthropological in addition to the
cosmological one. Why then privilege the cosmic dimension of reason as the
direct consequence or horizon of its ex-human generalization? In doing
so, don't you flatten or obviate the proliferation of inferentialist processes
exposed in principal by the "step back" from the cosmic as condition of
rational thought to Sellarsian persons? Doesn't Sellars's functionalist
account of reason instead offer a complexification of generalized reason?
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Nonanthropological reason requires its cosmological determination if the "cosmo
logical" is understood as the piercing of the terrestrial horizon by the universal
construed as intelligible-but inhuman-exteriority, rather than some spurious
absolute alterity. This is what physics, biology, and cosmology jointly encourage
philosophy to elucidate. But it doesn't if "cosmological" is understood in its limited
regional sense as a specific empirical discourse about the physical universe-a dis
course that deserves no special epistemic privileging by philosophy. To follow up on
my previous response, it is a cosmological rationalism that affirms the inhuman core
of human cognitive capacity, i.e., sapience as the gateway onto nonhuman reality,
while those varieties of post-humanism whose leveling of the difference between
the human and the nonhuman is predicated on dissolving the distinction between
sapience and sentience end up promoting an unbridled anthropomorphism. They
generalize certain properties of human subjective experience and attribute them to
everything. The result is what Wolfendale has called "introspective metaphysics":
a metaphysics that believes it can feel its way into the ultimate nature of reality
because it claims that what is going on in us is also going on everywhere outside us.5
This may well be realism, but it's a wildly indiscriminate realism that is incapable
of explaining the difference between appearance and reality because it has abolished
the distinction between knowing and feeling.
Rationalist anthropocentrism, through which reason reveals a radically unfa
miliar universe, strikes me as far less parochial than arational anthropomorphism,
whose absolutization of human subjectivity encourages us to believe everything is
really just lilce us. And since I'm a rationalist-although of the Kantian rather than
metaphysical variety-1 believe enlightened anthropocentrism marks a decisive
cognitive advance over anthropomorphism, whose rehabilitation leads to a kind
of post-modern animism. lt is somewhat disconcerting to see animism proclaimed
as a theoretical advance: I'm afraid I can only see in it a lamentable regression to
pre-modern superstition. lt's the result of privileging feeling as a source of insight
into nonhuman reality. But if using feeling to move beyond anthropocentrism yields
only untrammeled anthropomorphism, then it's hardly preferable to correlationism.
You are associated for better or worse with Speculative Realism, the one
tenuously common point of the various thinkers and projects gathered
under that umbrella term being precisely an interest in overcoming the
limitations of what Quentin Meillassoux has called correlationism: that
thinking always assumes and reinstantiates the thinking subject, so the real
outside of thought cannot be thought as such. Can you clarify whether
for you the affirmation of rational thought is necessarily non-correlational?
To explain this question a little more: the problem captured with a
striking reductive power by the term correlationism is not only how thought
5
Pete Wolfendale, "The Noumenon's New Clothes," Speculations: a Journal of Speculative Realism 3
(2012): 365.
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thinks the non-human in its exteriority to human apprehension but, more
precisely, how thinking as such-by any subject or person of thought such
as a postbiotic or alien rational agent-can think outside of itself (the real)
without supposing that the exterior to thinking is thought. You are clear
that inferentialism as the functionalist account of rational thought permits
the first-mentioned extraction of rational thought from the human as its
historically privileged subject, and it also seems that Sellars's secular account
of transcendental reason is itself a "realist" account of rational thought (it
is an exceptional kind of pattern formation amongst others in a material
semantic dimension). But does it then follow that even such a de-anthropolo
gized thought is non-correlational? Put simply, even if it is not a human subject
that thinks the real but an abstractly determined "person," if that generalized
rational thinking no less apprehends what it thinks in terms of its thinking,
even in what you identify as "an immanent, materialist account of the status
of rational normativity," it is nonetheless a (perhaps ex-anthropic) correla
tionism. lf it is to be non-correlational-and here, the conditional "if " is to be
stressed-how does inferentialism abdicate the thinking person it constitutes
with regard to what it thinks? How do you situate the realism rather than
materialism (non-anthropic cosmology) of rational thought qua inferentialism?
It's important to distinguish the good and the bad senses of "correlationism."
Correlationism as an epistemic doctrine is perfectly unobjectionable and indeed
undeniable. lt simply means that we can't know objects without concepts. This
sound epistemic doctrine only becomes objectionable if it's conflated with a con
tentious skeptical claim that we can never really know whether or not objects truly
correspond to the concepts through which we know them. The latter is rooted in a
fallacy commonly known as "Stove's Gern," which I've discussed elsewhere.6 The
inferentialism I endorse is a kind of naturalized Kantianism and it is correlationist
in the first, epistemic sense, but not in the second, skeptical sense.
I share Meillassoux's antipathy to the skeptical version of correlationism, but
I think he's wrong to think it follows ineluctably from the first, epistemic or Kantian
sense of correlation. Indeed, the suggestion that we can only refute skepticism by
dispensing with epistemic correlation, understood as the synthesis of concepts and
intuitions, seems to me untenable, since it assumes that either reason or sensibility can
separately intuit the real, the former being the rationalist variant of the myth of the
given, the latter its empiricist version. So I don't think Meillassoux's appeal to "dia
noetic intuition" successfully avoids the difficulties associated with what Kant called
"dogmatic rationalism." 7 Once correlationism is understood as a strictly epistemic
6
7
Ray Brassier, "Concepts and Objects," in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Graham Harman,
and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re-press, 20w).
See Quentin Meillassoux, "Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, lmmanence and Matter and
Memory," trans. Robin Mackay, in Collapse 3 (November 2007): 433.
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doctrine, it can be seen to be the condition for realism-not just empirical realism,
which is the corollary of Kant's transcendental idealism, but transcendental realism,
which asserts the mind-independent existence of theoretical entities (this obviously
requires a Jot of unpacking, but I don't have the space to do it here).
I find the idea of a "non-correlational realism" incoherent because the issue
of realism is tied to that of explanatory justification, which involves epistemic cor
relation. The point is to know what we mean when we qualify something as "real"
and to be able to adjudicate questions about something's "reality" on rational,
as opposed to dogmatic, grounds. Shorn of this rational constraint, the banner
of "realism" by itself becomes strictly meaningless. In fact, the relations between
"realism," "materialism," and "idealism" are of considerable dialectical complexity
so I think it's a mistake to brandish any one of them in isolation from the others.
They derive whatever philosophical sense they possess from their contrastive inter
dependence. Just as the assertion of an unqualified or indiscriminate "realism" is
uninformative, the proclamation of "materialism" has also become meaningless,
a genuflection to academic orthodoxy often licensing positions that are indistin
guishable from the most objectionable theses of "idealism" (subjectivism, spiri
tualism, pan-psychism, vitalism, the identity of thought and being, and so on). In
this context, I think the term "idealism" merits strategic resuscitation as a way of
reasserting the autonomy of the conceptual and combating the virulent anti-ratio
nalism of certain contemporary strains of "realism" and "materialism." "ldealism"
as a claim about the autonomy of the conceptual need not entail a "realism of
the idea" in Iain Hamilton Grant's sense, although the two are closely linked.8
I think what divides Grant and me is a divergence over the ontological status of
concepts as weil as the conceptual status of "nature." But we both proclaim the
necessity of articulating eidos and hyle, idealism and materialism. As I understand
it, this means upholding the primacy of reason together with the arationality of the
real. I'm not sure whether this makes me a materialist idealist or idealist materialist,
but in any case, oxymorons are dialectically instructive.
Let's return then to the distinction between rational norms, as you've fur
ther elucidated them here, and sociocultural norms-partly in order to
disambiguate the two and clear up confusions arising from the common term
"norm," but also to understand better if one informs the other and, if so, how.
The question here is a short one but its reasoning requires a fairly
lengthy elaboration. From your earlier responses, we can take rational
thought to be a bio-semantic or bio-social contingency particular on this
planet (so far) to the human: rational thought need never have happened
but it has, as a historical and conceptual fact qua Homo sapiens, and
8
lain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006). See also
Jeremy Dunham, lain Hamilton Grant, Sean Watson, Jdea/ism: The History of a Phi/osophy (Durham,
NC: Acumen, 2011).
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RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
you propose, against a recent tendency to deprioritize human agency and
specificity, that we need not be unduly modest about this human privi
lege with regard to reason nor unduly understate its capacity and effects.
Granting this exceptionality, rational inquiry renews cognitive interests
by, as you say, "breaking away from past modes of understanding." That
renewal-the work of reason, if you will-can be further specified: (a) it is
universalizing qua negation of particularized instances of understanding
(perhaps including its own bio-semantic ontic particularity of human
instantiation?); (b) it is not eternal since it emerges in cosmological time
and history and also because it is a temporal "self-correcting enterprise"
in discourse (reason is a contingent fact in the cosmological dimension
and there is no intellectual intuition); (c) yet reason is cosmological in that
it is how human intelligibility-which is for you defining of humanity-is
pierced by nonhuman non-terrestrial reality; and (d) rationalism is the
commitment to inferential adumbrations of any claim or proposition. Any
discursive or cognitive interest has to be committed to its consequences,
and consistently so (in your own case, the espousal of a materialist ratio
nalism requires you to abjure Kantian reason as itself a myth of the given,
hence the turn to Seilars).
This last determination of reason-meaning here only rational thought
and certainly not an autonomous realm of ideas-is how and why reason
is normative. lt is then clear why such norms ought not to be confused with
sociocultural norms insofar as the latter are historically (which is to say,
parochially and particularly) derived rather than rationally constituted (that
is, universalizing and inferentially rigorous). To return to the terms of your
earlier formulation: though rational normativity takes place discursively
in time-instituted in language, with all the historical contingency that
supposes-it is not constituted by given language or sociohistorical norms
(Jet us call such norms "cultures"). Rather, rational thought's inferen
tialist injunction is, if anything, directed against the necessarily residual
commitments of cultural norms. (Which is not to say that rational thought
is necessarily cast against this or that cultural given, only that its avowal of
the same takes place on another basis than that of culture: that of its episte
mo-semantic holism. For rational thought, culture must align with reason.)
Now, if this outline of the distinction between cultural and rational
norms stands, then does it not follow that reason qua rational thought is
a-if not "the"-cogent "engine" of counter-normative cultural transfor
mation (qua sociohistorical norms)? The reasoning is this: though rational
thought in principle negates the particularity of any culture or historical
fact in its universalizing tendency, rational thought nonetheless takes place
in time and discursively. As such, it is always occasioned in fact at a partic
ular time and in a particular language, however formalized that language
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may be (such a formalization could be understood precisely as a rational
undertaking in the continuing negation of the historical particularities and
parochialism of our languages as given cultures; but even this formaliza
tion is in fact specific and parochial: it has to be learned). In other words,
rational thought is in principle distinct to culture but is in fact instantiated
in the languages we have, perhaps modifying them along the way. Manifest
in and through a parochial language, predicated on a bio-semantic contin
gency, rational thought is historically located; or, again and in short, it is in
fact cultural. In its negation of the parochialism of culture and language,
its inferentialist imperatives even generate a cultural history. (Certainly, this
was the avowed task of the Enlightenment as a historico-philosophical
endeavor.) And even if rational thought were to confirm a particularity of
a given culture (a philosophy or scientific endeavor, say, but maybe also a
law or a mode of production), it would only do so on the basis of its univer
salizing inferentialism, redetermining that particularity in terms other than
the cultural ones in which it had been temporarily manifest to that point.
(The relevance of Hegel's dialectic of the idea that you mention above is
pressing here as, from another angle, are Edmund Husserl's writings on the
foundation of European science. But let's leave this aside for now since I
think it is clear enough that the inferential account is distinct from these in
having the advantage of not proposing a horizon to the rational endeavor.)
More generally, we can assume that rational thought negates socio
historical givens-particulars and norms-but it does so as itself a socio
historical fact. In any case a negation of sociocultural norms, reason is a
counter-normative functional process of rule-following with respect to cul
tures insofar as the latter are merely given-including those cultures in which
rational thought takes place discursively and historically. In fact, since it
is contingently occasioned in bio-semantic particularity, rational thought
is at origin culturally given. lt is not just that rational thought is articu
lated and instantiated in sociohistorical norms but is not subordinated to
them; rather, and moreover, reason countermands culture and, in doing
so, it proposes new cultural facts (less parochial discourses, unfolding in
time) and so renews culture. Without this cultural manifestation of thought
observing rational norms, there could be only intellectual intuition or a
non-discursive, atemporal reason-a meta- or ex-cultural reason-and so
no inferentialism at all (as per Plato).
If the argument has traction for you, the primary question here is:
Even while observing the difference between rational and sociohistorical
norms in principle, does their confounding not in fact realize rational
norms as new cultural norms via a process that from any given culture can
only be seen as a counter-normative violation? Accepting the distinction
in principle and prescriptive conditions between reason and culture, is it
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RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK
not then untenable to hold on to their distinction in fact and descriptive
differentiation? Does the inferentialist account of rational thought not have
to accept that the consistent adumbrations of any statement are somewhat
shaped by sociohistorical particularities (that is, limited in time and language)?
This is a very difficult question. The claim that, as you put it, "rational thought
is a-if not the-cogent 'engine' of counter-normative cultural transforma
tion (qua socio-historical norms)" is a good distillation of the project of radical
Enlightenment-with the proviso that the factual "is" be changed to a normative
"should be," since, understood as a factual claim, this formulation is obviously
refutable. It's the claim that rationality should be the engine of counter-normative
cultural transformation that I'm committed to, not that it is or has been. And I'm
committed to it precisely insofar as I'm interested in reactivating the project of
Enlightenment in its radical, Promethean form. But then the problem is precisely
the one you've pinpointed: having conceded that, as a matter of fact, rational norms
are always socially instituted, can I really insist that they have to be distinguished
in principle without relapsing into an objectionable dualism of rational form and
sociohistorical content? This would be another version of the traditional distinc
tion between logical form and semantic content, which is precisely something that
inferentialism calls into question.
Inferentialism starts from the primacy of material inference-from "lt
is raining" to "The streets are wet"-and maintains that semantic content is
individuated by the rules governing such material inferences. These rules are
constitutive of the meaning of linguistic expressions; they are not just some
thing derived from or applied to pre-existing semantic units. Moreover,
purely logical or "formal" inference is merely the rendering explicit, or
explicitation, of relations of discursive commitment, entitlement, and incom
patibility that are already implicit in everyday perception, reasoning, and
action. So logic, in Brandom's words, is merely "the organ of semantic
self-consciousness."9 This is to say that discursive rationality-the game of giving
and asking for reasons-is more basic than logic, which presupposes it. But this
also implies that what we mean is indissociable from what we do, that is, from
our everyday practical purposes. Since these practical purposes are embedded
in a social context, this means that our rationality, understood as our ability to
give and ask for reasons for what we do and say, cannot simply be abstracted
from the social practices in which this ability is embedded. This is to say that
discursive rationality cannot be dissociated from practical, which is to say social,
rationality. In this regard, inferentialism relays the old Marxian idea that concep
tual contradictions reflect practical contradictions. If the task of philosophy is to
render explicit the conceptual norms implicit in discursive practice, and to identify
9
Robert B. Brandom, Tales oj the Mighry Dead: Historica/ Essays in the Metaphysics of lntentionaliry,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), IO.
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contradictions at the level of theoretical discourse, then it is also bound to expose
the contradictions, or rather incompatibilities, between theoretical norms and
practical norms, as well as the incompatibilities pitting various practical norms
against each other. Because rationality is indissociably conceptual and social,
theoretical rationality is inseparable from practical rationality in the broadest
sense, which encompasses every variety of human practice, whether material or
intellectual. In this regard, what you call the "counter-normative"thrust of phil
osophical rationality is its latent revolutionary calling.
Philosophy does not (indeed, cannot) hold sociocultural norms account
able to some allegedly superior tribunal of pure reason. What it does do is hold
sociocultural norms accountable to their own implicit criteria of rationality
by rendering explicit both their conceptual inconsistencies and their practical
incompatibilities. In doing so, it exerts the minimum degree of discursive pres
sure required to initiate the process of revising and ultimately transforming both
social and cultural practices. I'm not suggesting that such discursive pressure is
tantamount to political pressure, or that rational critique is a sufficient condition
of revolutionary transformation. But I do want to suggest that it is a necessary
condition, and that cognitive, political, and artistic revolutions can be understood
as propelled by the obligation to achieve the rational supersession of incompatibil
ities between saying and doing, or between implicit norms and explicit practices.
This is the rational motor of universalization and, thus construed, it does not
imply any hypostasis of the universal. lt's an immanent and eminently Hegelian
conception of universalization as a process that is implicit in every human society,
no matter what its state of "development," and in every variety of human practice,
no matter how parochial.
Inferentialism is Hegelian insofar as it conceives of the universal as the self
supersession of particularity. In Badiouian terms, I think this is how truth-pro
cedures reconfigure the state of the situation-but the difference is that from an
inferentialist-Hegelian viewpoint, there are immanent cognitive criteria governing
the inception of the truth-procedure that brings about the situation's generic extension
(truth's subtraction from knowledge is still governed by extant knowledge: knowledge
supersedes itself by recognizing its own limitations). That the sociality of human
reason can compel us to overcome the shortfall between our practical ideals and
our practical achievements, whether in science, politics, or art, is the basic wager
of Enlightenment.
Inferential reasoning and the maximal prosecution of a proposition's
consequences that such reasoning requires have so far been understood
as a linguistic practice. That is faithful to Sellars's philosophy extended
by Brandom, how far the argument can be taken in termss of broader cul
tural practices, can the modality or medium of inferentialist reason also be
extended to nonlinguistic practices? What, if anything, would this change in
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the Sellarsian account of inferentialist practices? 1 n an interview with Mattin
on the political and philosophical resources of post-music noise you propose:
lf noise harbours any radical political potential [determined per
rational norms], then it needs to be elaborated via a process of
interrogation, which would involve working through questions such
as: What is experience, given that capitalism commodifies sensations,
affects, and concepts? What is abstraction, given that capitalism ren
ders the intangible determining while dissolving everything we held to
be concrete? What freedoms are we invoking when we proclaim noise's
"freedom" from the alleged constrictions of musical genre?' 0
The content and direction of such interrogations are in line with your
broad avowals of Marxism as the politics of a rational collective organiza
tion necessary to challenge neoliberalism as the currently prevalent con
figuration of capitalist domination. But the question that remains here is
whether such interrogations need to be overtly philosophical or linguistic
inferential consequences alloyed to noise but not themselves noise as a
material practice distinct from language, or whether such "interrogations"
and "deontological scorekeeping" can be undertaken through a cultural/
nonlinguistic material organization such as noise (qua genre) itself. That is,
can the nonlinguistic material practice draw up inferences and address the
questions you propose in its own logic and medium rather than in the con
verted and displacing terms of linguistic inference?
The task here is distinct from the inferentialism characteristic of a certain
modernism in which a particular artistic or cultural genre follows its formal
or material logic to the end: you propose that the interrogations a particular
genre or medium needs to make are not determined or limited to its specific
conditions and limitations but according to horizons external to it (experience
in conditions of capitalist abstraction, the content of emancipation, and so on).
To be clear: the question here is not about noise itself as a genre of
cultural production-the same argument and demands can presumably
be extended to other practices of material-cultural organization-but about
the kinds of "work" that can be done by cultural practices: either as
being in relation to (and therefore not immediately) the kind of rationalism
you advocate or, instead, as being at once such a rationalist practice but
undertaken in and as nonlinguistic quasi-communication.
1 think the answer to your question is yes, nonlinguistic practices can draw up
inferences and address the sorts of questions cited above in their own medium and
IO "Meta! Machine Theory: An Electronic Email Conversation"; available at www.mattin.org/essays/
M ETAL_MACH IN E_THEORY_1.html.
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independently of language. Although the inferentialist premium on discursive
practices privileges the game of giving and asking for reasons, this game is not only or
exclusively realized in specifically linguistic discourse. The category of discursive prac
tice is broader than that of linguistic practice. This is to say that reasoning understood
as the unfolding of discursive commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities, is
not confined to the medium of explicitly self-conscious theoretical discourse, which
unfolds in and through language. Not every rational discursive practice operates in
this specifically linguistic medium. Artists think, and some artists think as rigorously
as any theoretician, albeit in and through a nonlinguistic medium.
Where noise is concerned, an artist like Mattin is engaged in thinking through
the implications of the commitment to the ideal of "free improvisation." In the
course of working out these implications, he has discovered an incompatibility
between what is implied by the norm of free improvisation and the conventions
governing its actual practice. So he has undertaken a series of experiments designed
to test the limits of what is allowable within those conventions and in doing so he
seeks to expose the latent contradiction between the norm and the practice. I see
Mattin as someone engaged in an eminently rational cognitive practice, in which
self-consciously linguistic theorizing is just one element deployed alongside other,
nonlinguistic elements: sonic, gestural, verbal, visual, and so forth. His perfor
mances frequently bring all these elements into play. And the fact that the rational
reconstruction of the complexity of assertions implicit in these performances is
often retrospective in no way compromises their discursive rigor: the rationality of
a discursive practice is always retrospectively constructed. This is what it means to
say that thinking takes time; the rationality implicit in a discursive practice-where
"rationality" is understood as the intersubjective elaboration of discursive commit
ments, entitlements, and incompatibilities-is never immediately accessible to its
participants at any single stage of its unfolding.
Moreover, Mattin's work is characterized by its self-consciousness (1 mean
this in the sense of cognitive awareness) about the status of artistic practice in late
capitalist society and, in this regard, it explicitly addresses issues such as the nature
of abstraction and the content of emancipation. Thus he is doing more than merely
testing the conditions and limitations of a specific artistic medium-"noise" and/
or "free improvisation" -he is exposing the ways in which specific artistic practices
are implicated in broader social and discursive contexts. And the "philosophical"
tenor of his interrogation of his chosen medium has been generated in and through
his practical engagement with it: it is not an extraneous imposition. In interrogating
the limitations of a specific artistic practice, he has been compelled to investigate
whether and how these limitations may be conditioned by the nexus of other prac
tices in which it is enveloped. Thus the engagement with universality follows from
unpacking the logic of a specific practice.
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