Synechistic Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
Reza Negarestani
Even though the interwoven yarn of science and speculative philosophy has long frayed into
separate individual threads, evolutions of both are driven by the same impetus – the history of
shifts in perspectives. This is the history of the invention and modification of new perspectives as
modes of epistemic mediation. From the eye of Zeno’s tortoise that sees the geometrical synthesis
of infinitely many terms to the medieval angel whose transitory location is defined by its noetic
operation not by a pre-defined position to the diagram of the classical perspective in which
vanishing point is the homothetic center of the observer’s scope launched into infinity, to the
telescopic perspective of the Copernican subject, who sees itself only from an imaginary point
beyond the orbit of its manifest location: the trajectory of speculative and scientific thought takes
shape as the evolution of perspective, an abstract technology for the systemic deracination of the
subject. Rather than heralding the abolishment of the subject, the perspective operator cuts the
subject loose from its immediate foundation by mapping it from one domain to another. Once the
subject’s reference point to any privileged instance or position (first or last, particular or generic) is
removed, it is finally possible to draw a non-trivial passage from the local subject to the global
structure, in effect realizing a continuity that defines an absolutized nature as a universal
continuum. It is this non-trivial continuity that uproots the subject from its immediate foundation
and reconstitutes it as a site in the reflexive relation of nature to itself.1 For this reason, the
reflective relation of the deracinated subject to itself and to nature cannot be addressed unless
through the reflexive relation of the absolutized nature to itself. In other words, following Gabriel
Catren’s formula for absolving the Kantian legacy from its reactive pre-modern proclivities and
remnants of anti-Copernicanism, the reflectivity of the subject must be subsumed within the
reflexivity qua self-reflection of nature.2 This subsumption is indeed tantamount to a
“transcendental dehumanization of experience” (Catren) by way of opening a non-trivial space for
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1
Throughout this essay, the concept of non-triviality is used in a sense similar to its original application in
mathematical language. In terms of conceptual behavior, triviality expresses a condition according to which
the behavior of the concept regardless of the context and application is always the same (self-similar) and is
not required to be modified. In terms of structure, triviality suggests a local-global relationship in which the
global structure is simply the extension of the local structure (for example, the image of world being the
extension of the image of man, or a cylinder – a global structure – being generated by the revolution of fiber
or a local structure around a central axis). Non-triviality on the other hand is the expression of an asymmetry
between local and global levels of the concept and structure. For example, a Möbius strip is a cylinder with a
global twist or in other words, the global is not simply the extension of the local. Non-triviality is often a
condition arising from a multi-modal continuity that permits different trajectories of evolution, global
structural plasticity and complex local orientations. Accordingly, non-triviality entails epistemic navigation of
different behaviors of the concept. It demands the change of perspective and action according to logic of
rules, spatial situations and structural parameters.
2
See Gabriel Catren, ‘Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism’ in The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), pp. 333-367.
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transcendental faculties and modes of judgment, including aesthetic judgment.3
If the subject is now immersed in a continuous global structure, the separation of the subject from
nature is a required epistemological distinction, not an inherent ontological severance. And if such
separation is not ontological, then instantiations of the absolutized nature cannot be measured or
scaled against the subject. The Bataillean ‘nature as immensity’ connotes a ‘magnitude’ only
possible by a radical break in nature, thus conditioning a dialectics of magnitudes (between the
magnitude of nature and the magnitude of the subject) suggestive of the pre-modern image of the
world and the pre-Copernican account of nature. From a historical perspective, both the aesthetic
judgment and aesthetic paradigms of art have been directly influenced by the determination of
nature or a global structure for the subjective faculties in terms of magnitudes. Along with the
history of shifts in perspective, the history of articulation of magnitudes should indeed be identified
as the second defining trajectory for the evolution of speculative thought and science.
In order to briefly investigate the influence of the evolution of articulations of magnitude on art
and reinterpret some of the concepts of aesthetics in terms of the determination and interaction of
magnitudes, it would be best to begin with a classical but helpful definition of magnitude.
“Magnitude is anything that may be said to be equal to or not equal to another. Two things are
said to be equal, if in each statement you can substitute the one for the other.”4 In this sense,
magnitude is articulated through the dialectic of sameness-otherness or equality-inequality within
the same subject. The credit and debit columns of a ledger represent magnitudes of gain and loss.
A bar of iron expands as its temperature rises, expressing the magnitude of heat extended over the
arrow of time. A windmill moves under the pressure of two different wind currents and, most
importantly, the epistemological determination of nature that requires the dialectic of nature
(natural causes) and thought (normative causes) within the subject – both expressions of
magnitude. Mathematically speaking, quantity is the product of the dialectical articulation of
magnitudes within ‘one subject’: the total balance of a ledger page, the extension of a bar of iron
due to being heated, the amount of ground flour produced by the windmill, or a judgment
undertaken by the thinking subject. Here quantity denotes the productivity implicit in the
interaction of different magnitudes within a subject; it is a marker of intelligibility that can be
extracted by measurement. In each of the previous cases, quantity is characterized dialectically as a
negative link between two positive predicates or magnitudes whose opposition is not that of logic
(i.e. it is not a contradiction) but that of balancing, compensation, suppression, translation and
further disequilibrium of forces. Quantity is therefore the explicit or intelligible result of articulating
or conjoining magnitudes, no longer as passive parts but instead as distinct dynamic and
oriented/vectorial forces. This is in fact the meaning behind the late scholastic concept of
articulation as related to measurement and quantification: To express degrees of intelligibility of a
subject, form or phenomenon by putting together and joining (articulatus) various intensive and
extensive magnitudes which abstract the interaction or points of liaison (joints) between the
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4
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Ibid. p. 333.
Hermann Grassmann, Lehrbuch Der Arithmetik (Berline: Enslin, 1861), p.1.
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subject in question and its surrounding matrix.5
Properly speaking, then, magnitudes are expressed through tension-spaces and are rendered
intelligible as quantities. Kant suggests that magnitudes are always articulated in negative fashion
via an opposition – a dialectic of forces – that joins them together within one subject. To this end,
judgment is a tension-space for articulation of magnitudes insofar as judgment is the determination
of the magnitude of the universal (nature or a natural law for example) with regard to the
magnitude of the particular (the manifold of subjective or cognitive faculties) for and within the
thinking subject. Just as the articulation of magnitudes always exerts a dynamic expression that
drives the subject (for instance, the motion of the windmill in the above example), judgment does
not leave the thinking subject intact either. It drives the subject and its faculties (sense,
imagination, reasoning, power of action, …) according to the manner by which it expresses and
effectuates the interaction of the universal and the particular, nature and thought, stimulation and
sensation. From this perspective, since aesthetics is a category of judgment, a deep understanding
of aesthetics as a dynamic interactive system that structures both certain modes of cognition and
action is impossible without an analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment in terms of
magnitudes and the conditions of their interactivity. Conditions of interactivity can be defined as
schemas of space or points of liaison which structurally parameterize and give orientation to each
magnitude and by doing so, they dictate the manner by which magnitudes act upon themselves or
one another, and consequently drive or mobilize the subject in a specific way. The analysis of the
conceptual matrix of aesthetics in order to upgrade it – a task whose absence in canonical art
criticism has put art in jeopardy of becoming a bastion for human narcissism and a playground of
myopic alliances – leads us to perhaps the most systematically developed account of aesthetic
judgment. This is Kant’s historically consequential attempt at outlining aesthetics, not in terms of
eternal categories, but in terms of the spatiotemporal positioning of the subject within the world
and by doing so, putting it in the direction of a thoroughgoing disenchantment.
In The Critique of Judgment, Kant formulates aesthetic categories as categories of reflective
judgment, while defining modes of judgment themselves in terms of interaction and expression of
magnitudes which delineate natural causes (or causal determination) and normative causes specific
to the rational agency. But the question is, what is the manner of articulation of aesthetic
categories? Under which conditions do magnitudes enter dialectical interaction within the subject?
The answer lies in the reflectivity of the reflective judgment. Reflectivity is a specific relation to the
world. It is conditioned by a certain intuition of the spatiotemporal arrangement of the subject and
the world with regard to one another. The reflective is a topographic model of interaction
according to which the magnitudes of thought and nature act upon each other in a specific way. In
the reflective relation, the subject is invariably delineated by two vectors, one facing out toward
the world and the other facing inside in the direction of the given and allegedly well-secured
interiority of the subject. This orthogonal orientation always registers nature as a magnitude both
outside the subject and greater than it – an immense entity that is growing, indeterminate and in
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On the concept of articulation with regard to magnitudes and intelligibility, see Gilles Châtelet, Figuring
Space: philosophy, mathematics, and physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).
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excess of the subject. This is because the reflective orientation translates the rigid inside-outside
tension of the subject and the world into the open and – hence, indeterminate – magnitude of
nature versus the strictly demarcated magnitude of the subject. Moreover, since the reflective
relation posits a spatial model in which the world always faces the subject and “is lived as a
confrontation”6, the articulation of any magnitude associated with an unbound nature or the
world is readily quantified against the subject. Here we can identify a trajectory of aesthetic and
philosophical paradigms – from the Kantian sublime to Bataille’s exorbitance, Freud’s model of
trauma, to the philosophy of speculative realism, for which the incalculable scales of nature are
readily expressed in confrontation with the human subject. This is, of course, no arbitrary
juxtaposition, in that these aesthetic and philosophical paradigms are products of the same model
of articulation of magnitudes that is the extension of a quasi-Ptolemaic structural model of the
world. ‘Why quasi-Ptolemaic?’ one might ask. Because worldly magnitudes – that is, nature’s
dialectics of sameness-otherness, equality-inequality and the relaying of this dialectics by means of
magnitudes of tensions and calculi of forces – are always articulated according to a privileged
frame of reference: Whereas in the Ptolemaic model, for a subject on the surface of the stationary
earth the sky is given as the world above, in the quasi-Ptolemaic model – by virtue of the subject’s
privileged frame of reference – the world always confronts the subject as an object of experience,
its magnitudes are external to the subject and its perturbing forces are only issued forth from the
infinite, formless, and generic (i.e. purposeless) trajectories of nature. The still evolving trajectory of
the Copernican Revolution terminates this isolating difference between the world above and the
world below, and in the process, it problematizes the subject’s privileged frame of reference.
Figure 1: Kant’s reflecting bonhomme and its tale-telling world
In the sense that for Kant the aesthetic judgment is a reflective judgment that seeks to find a nongiven universal (expressed by an inexact magnitude) for a given particular, it is bound to a certain
mode of articulation of magnitudes, as seen in Figure 1. In Kant’s aesthetic judgment, nature is
inherently susceptible to being expressed by way of a great magnitude that always confronts the
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Gilles Châtelet, “Sur une petite phrase de Riemann” in Analytiques (Psychanalyse-Écritures-Politiques), n° 3
(Paris: 1979) pp. 67-75.
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subject. This is a restricted tension-space in which forces of the world and the subject, thought and
nature, are perpetually posited in a head-to-head collision and generate both privileged visions of
nature and bound conceptions of the rational subject.
Accordingly, there is no surprise that at the pinnacle of Kant’s aesthetic judgment rests the
aesthetic paradigm of the sublime. The sublime and its subject qua genius are not quandaries for
the aesthetic judgment, as one might suspect, but are the logical consequences of how worldly
magnitudes interact and condition a specific judgment for a subject. When an external
indeterminate magnitude associated with an unbound nature or formless object interacts with the
intensive magnitude of sensation, a quantity of this interaction for understanding is produced.7 If a
subjective faculties cannot determine a quality for this quantity because it is an overwhelming
quantity that scrambles the senses of the subject, the feeling of the sublime is effectuated. For
Kant, beauty, for example, is also a quantity produced by an indeterminable magnitude, but it is a
quantity whose quality not only can be determined but also is in harmony with understanding. It is
important to note that the external indeterminate magnitude associated with a formless object or
boundlessness does not directly give rise to the sublime. The sublime is the consequence of how
the indeterminable magnitude is parameterized by the structure of the reflective relation of the
experiencing subject to itself and to the world that now appears to be confronting it. The sublime,
in this sense, is the outcome of a judgment formed by a subject whose privileged position and
frame of reference have not yet been assimilated within the reflexive relation of an absolutized
nature to itself. From this perspective, the sublime is not that of the impersonal abyss of nature; it
is quite simply confined to the personal.
If until now art has not managed to fully dispel the omnipresent specter of the sublime, it is
because: (1) It has not seen the world and the subject within different geometries of interaction,
and (2) it has not explored alternative tension-spaces in which magnitudes of this or that event are
articulated in different ways and as a result drive the subject in entirely different trajectories. The
history of articulation of magnitudes is the history of shifts in geometry of interactions between
magnitudes and the examination of complex tension-spaces. In other words, it is the realization
that magnitudes, like forces, interact and act upon one another according to the underlying spatial
organizations which influence terms of interaction through orienting, arranging and liaising
magnitudes. In order to expand frontiers of action and understanding for the subject of judgment,
the geometry – that is to say, the spatial organization – of interactions between magnitudes should
be treated as a hypothesis. It is the hypothetical structure of the tension-space, its manipulable
variables, its normative plasticity, constructible horizon and ramified orientations toward hitherto
unenvisaged landscapes that broaden the horizon of understanding and augment the
armamentarium of possible action. Constituted by the interaction of magnitudes, judgments are, in
this sense, sites for reorientation and navigation according to new rules and spaces.
Within the tension-space, magnitudes play the role of vectors that simultaneously open up new
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Mathematical sublime – as different from the dynamic sublime of worldly magnitudes – is generated by
formally abstracted magnitudes.
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hypotheses of orientation (forcing the subject of judgment to orient toward …) and dimension
(introducing the subject to new spaces of rule-based navigation). Since every magnitude carries its
own space or parameterizing structure with it, judgment as a site for the articulation of magnitudes
always yields new orientations and dimensions.8 Here magnitude is no longer seen as something
that affects the subject by decrease or increase (of scales, quantities or intensities) but as
something that is capable of creating complex situations of productivity and production for the
subject, even new complex magnitudes. Such complex magnitudes are in reality new platforms for
expression, manipulation of forces, tensions, syntheses and judgments. The head-to-head model of
collision of intensive and extensive magnitudes can be replaced by magnitudes that enter
dialectical interactions hitherto inaccessible to the classical subject of personal experience. A whole
bestiary of tension-spaces is born in which the interaction of magnitudes enable new modes of
extraction of intelligibility, modes of judgment and correspondingly, new decision-making
directives, rational orientation and action. The diversification of these tension-spaces, as well as the
complex modes of judgments they unlock, is impossible without annulling the subject’s privileged
frame of reference and immersing its so-called personal reflectivity within the impersonal reflexive
continuity of nature to itself. It is the epistemological analysis of nature’s protean continuity that
grants the possibility of the subject access to a range of complex structures and modes of
interaction otherwise inexistent from the reflective perspective.9 Likewise, the conceptual
foundation of aesthetic judgment must be revised from the viewpoint of this impersonal reflexive
field, whose continuity allows not only continuous/constant and discrete/variable structures but
also structures with intermediate geometries.10 This is the kernel of what we shall call – following
Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine of continuity or synechism – the synechistic critique of aesthetic
judgment.
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The examination of magnitudes within a continuous medium (rather than a discrete identification)
demonstrates that magnitudes are vehicles for transporting spatial situations (such as orientation and
dimension) and structural parameters. This is a revolutionary insight of the Kantian philosopher and
mathematician Hermann Günther Grassmann. A similar view has been expressed by Leibniz in the context of
analysis situs and philosophy of situations. See Hans-Joachim Petsche, Hermann Grassmann (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2009), and Vincenzo De Risi, Geometry and Monadology: Leibniz’s Analysis Situs and Philosophy
of Space (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007).
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The continuity of the reflexive field should be understood as a non-trivial continuity insofar its structure
does not permit overstretching any particular field or inflation of any specific horizon and its functions.
Neither everything can be subject nor everything can be object. Instead it brings about the possibility of
intricate (diachronic, asymmetrical, entangled) co-constitution of subject and object. Furthermore, the nontriviality of this continuity distinguishes the interaction of magnitudes on the basis of their orientations. This
allows for diversification of modes of synthesis and respectively, judgment. Suppose A is the oriented
magnitude of the subject and B the oriented magnitude of the object. AB is not equal to BA, i.e. they express
two non-commutative terms because they are different products of magnitudes and their specific
orientations. Since they suggest different syntheses, they occasion and demand different modes of judgment
as well.
10
On continuum as a protean continuity see, Fernando Zalamea, “Peirce’s Logic of Continuity: Existential
Graphs and Non-Cantorian Continuum” in The Review of Modern Logic 9 (2003). Also on the theory of
topoi as what “allows the passage from constant to variable sets (and back) and is a basis for studying
relationships between (variable) quantities and (variable) structures” see, Francis William Lawvere,
“Continuously Variable Sets: Algebraic Geometry = Geometric Logic” in Proceedings of the Logic
Colloquium (North Holland, 1975), p. 135-157.
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The exhaustion of aesthetic judgment and paradigms in contemporary art – what perpetuates the
illusion of a fast approaching death for art practices – is largely due to an overinvestment in a
model of subjectivity in which the world is always readily lived as an experience, a personal
experience. According to such a model, novelty is always the expression of a world that confronts
the subject. But since indeterminable magnitudes of a confronting world are always articulated in
excess of the magnitudes of the subject, novelty becomes synonymous with energetic rupture,
defeat of senses and eruption of a messianic regime of force that is deemed equally liberating and
limiting. Any account of aesthetic novelty is surreptitiously built upon a classical regime for the
articulation of magnitudes, a trivial tension-space between a subject whose conditions of
experience are already given and world that by definition always faces the subject like a tale-telling
outside. To overcome the exhaustion and replenish the inventory of aesthetic paradigms as
hypotheses through which art further deepens its sovereign trajectory and broadens its scope, it is
imperative to accentuate new regimes of tension and diversify tension-spaces. The aim of a
tension-space in this case is not to express the quantitative or qualitative measure of the
magnitude of the object and the subject, nature and thought, or the stimulation and sensation, in
terms of greatness, intensity, size, scale, escalation, intensification and general dissensus between
forces. It is instead to re-parameterize and re-program tensions or magnitudes that mobilize the
field of the subject by non-trivial orientations and spaces of navigation. These tension-spaces bring
about the possibility of renegotiating the geometries of interaction between the universal and the
particular. The renegotiation of formal dialectical maps between inside and outside, thought and
nature, is equal to changing how magnitude finds expression and forces interact. And insofar as
the interaction and expression of magnitudes within and for the subject directly determines the
mode of judgment, we can say that redefining the spatial situation of local-global products
(subject-world, immanence-transcendence) allows new modes of judgment and action. Every
geometrical relation in terms of interaction and operation of magnitudes is a propositional content
for the subject and is endowed with a pragmatic assertion. It calls for a specific action by
conditioning judgment as what forces the subject to enter a complex system of rational
commitments, to contrast between existing judgments and taking judgments to their ultimate
conclusions. Here lies the meaning behind the task of diversifying modes of judgment by
diversifying tension-spaces.
If a lesson to be learned by art from the speculative-scientific history of articulation of magnitudes,
it is that magnitudes by themselves – regardless of how great and singular they might be – do not
offer any particularly liberating or speculative opportunity for the subject of judgment. The
liberation both in terms of judgment and the paradigms it offers is to be found not in the extent of
this or that event, the intensity of this or that experience but in the non-trivial fields of interaction
between them – that is, in the structure of tension-spaces and their valence for moving the subject,
even systematically deracinating it, according to complex judgments which not only shed the
subject’s local privileges but also reorient and reintroduce it to new spaces of navigation, in effect
perpetually revising the self-portrait of man drawn in sand. In order to reinvigorate the aesthetic
judgment and overcome the paralyzing illusion of the crisis of aesthetic paradigms, art must adopt
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new tension-spaces that are not limited to the trivial relation between a world out there and a
subject whose condition for experience is already given. It is in its renewed commitment to
highlighting and crafting new tension-spaces between the artist and her materials, between the
spectator and the art, the manifest and the scientific images,11 the conceptual and the sensible that
art finds its own political asymptote. If the global dominance of neo-liberalism aims to nullify all
tension-spaces under the pretext of fighting the evil of ideology, the shift from scale of events
(magnitudes of tensions and their affective valence) to structures through which such tensions are
expressed, manipulated or translated into alternative driving forces for the subject, returns art back
to political consequentiality and contemporaneity. Only by seeing and acting beyond the readymade regime of affect (itself a trivial mode of articulation of worldly magnitudes) and mobilizing its
resources in the direction of alternative tension-spaces as navigable hypotheses of understanding
and action, can art stave off the realization of a so far illusory death. Without manipulative and
navigational possibilities of tension-spaces that align the subject with the deracinating trajectory of
modern thought, the prospect of breaking away from existing liberal models of interactivity and
trivial tension-spaces of non-cooperation and dissensus is indeed truly remote.
(As for the jaded fascination with great scales of the beyond and their aesthetic import for art: If a
genuine inhumanism is to be found, it is not in the expression of great magnitudes of abyssal
timescales or vast spaces. It is in how such magnitudes force the sapient to renegotiate its own
capacities and descriptions in each and every turn. It is in how tension-spaces drive the rational
subject according to complex fields of synthesis and navigation maps in which there is no
privileged frame of reference whether in the name of the given conditions of experience or the
global orientation of an environing world. This is the inhumanism intrinsic to articulation and the
dynamics of complex magnitudes ensued by the systemic softening of rigid designations of inside
and outside as well as conforming to the self-actualizing orientation of reason. It has nothing to do
whatsoever with a mystical antihumanism that seeks to belittle the rational subject by imposing
upon it the so-called great and singular magnitudes of the universe. Inhuman’s aesthetic judgment
is not given, it is a matter of struggle, revision and construction.)
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The manifest image is “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-theworld” (Wilfrid Sellars), a commonsense framework comprised of intentions and thoughts through which
man correlates the observable image of himself to the world and objects, and understands the world as a
global projection of himself. According to American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, the posterior alternative to
the manifest image is the scientific image in which the world consists of microphysical entities behaving
according to natural laws that are no longer seen as “truncated persons”.
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