Ray Brassier
Prometheanism and Real Abstraction
There are lot of materials here to try and synthesize; I’ll just try to talk
about a couple of things, and to pick out what I take to be the decisive
factors in Nick’s, James’s and Alex’s presentations.
First of all, Nick’s distinction between epistemic and political
accelerationism is absolutely crucial. Making this distinction allows us
to understand the core issue of acceleration and to frame the problems
of accelerationism correctly. The problem of acceleration has both an
epistemic and a political aspect, and it’s tied to this issue of
abstraction: to the epistemic status of abstraction on the one hand, and
to the political valences of abstraction on the other. So, I agree that the
question is how these two can be articulated.
Now this is also tied, I think, to the emphasis on navigation that Nick
indicated. That is, to understand the coordination of epistemic and
political abstraction is to understand how representation functions; and
this is to see representation from a naturalistic perspective as well as
in terms of what humans have in common with other animals—in other
words, we have a whole set of cognitive capacities that are basically a
navigational system. That the problem of thinking is tied to the problem
of movement is a very interesting hypothesis: you need to have a brain
because you need to be able to move.
Here it’s important to distinguish conceptual function from
representational function. Now, conceptual function is inferentially
articulated, whereas representational function is basically a mapping
function. And mapping is about navigation. The prospect of achieving a
stereoscopic synthesis of the so-called manifest and scientific images
is really about integrating conceptual function with representational
mapping. Now, both of these are practices—they are both forms of
knowhow. Knowing how to connect, combine, and dissociate concepts
is a kind of knowhow, it’s a cognitive skill that human beings acquire by
being inducted into the cultural dimension. By way of contrast,
representational function is straightforwardly biologically determined on
some level. So achieving an integrated understanding of these two
aspects would require explaining how conceptual function can augment
or amplify navigational capacity.
In other words, the suggestion is that concepts can facilitate the
production of fine-grained mappings of reality. This is what I think
Wilfrid Sellars means when he talks about the stereoscopic synthesis
or fusion of images: the ideal end of cognitive inquiry consists in a
fusion of theoretical and practical knowledge in which our theoretical
understanding allows us to realise all our practical goals and purposes.
This would be the point at which the distinction between theory and
practice is dissolved.
Now, the key thing, I think, is the question of social construction,
because both conceptual function and representational function are
embedded in a sociocultural context. So in order for this stereoscopic
integration of the manifest and the scientific, the theoretical and the
practical, to be achieved, we must understand how each can be
virtuously injected into the other.
This is a speculative proposal, but I think there is a clear tie here to
the legacy of the Enlightenment, in so far as enlightenment is
understood as the achievement of autonomy, which is to say, selfdetermination through rational self-governance. So, in other words, the
stereoscopic integration of theory and practice, or of truth and
goodness, can only be achieved through a project of collective selfmastery. When human beings have understood themselves—including
their biological inheritance and their physical constraints—sufficiently
well to be able to refashion themselves, they can refashion the world to
make it amenable to rational ends.
This, I think, is the most philosophically significant component of the
Marxian legacy: its insistence on the need for the material realization of
the Promethean prospects opened up by the Enlightenment. I take it
that this also underlies Marx’s claim about what is distinctive in human
species-being: human beings have this unique capacity to transform
themselves and their world because of the fundamentally social nature
of human existence.
Now, any attempt to expand both the cognitive and the political
ramifications of the mapping function will require a fuller understanding
of the political debilities that afflict much contemporary left theorizing.
For instance, Jameson’s emphasis on cognitive mapping seems to be
dissociated from any kind of practical political consequence beyond
that of critique. The critical task is to produce cognitive maps of
capitalist reality which will provide traction on the real abstractions
dominating every aspect of contemporary existence. This is certainly
valuable, but it does not seem to be tied to any kind of political
practice. Mapping for the purposes of critique alone is not going to help
you overcome capitalism.
This disjunction between critical theory and political practice is
paralysing. I think there is a long story to tell about how it has come
about, and I think that Jameson here is the inheritor of something that
arguably originates with Lukács. My suggestion is that, given that
Marxism is about achieving the integrated fusion of theory and practice,
of understanding and transformation, it is imperative that we reengage
with a hundred and fifty years’ worth of cognitive development in
physics, biology, cognitive science, etc. And here I think James’s
account of doxastic conservatism is related to the way in which
conceptual functions take conceivability as constraint, and are limited
by some combination of bio-socio-cultural functioning. So I take James
to be pushing forward with the project of epistemic acceleration.
Philosophical blindspots constrain conceptual possibility, and this
constraint on conceptual possibility has political consequences.
Now interestingly, what is controversial about this is finding a way of
rooting conceptual practice in social practice without simply identifying
the former with the latter. A straightforward criticism of this move is the
claim that conceptual norms are overdetermined or constrained by
sociocultural norms. I think there is a way to overcome this kind of
objection, but doing so requires a theory of function that dissociates
conceptual function from representational function: conceptual function
involves a certain plasticity because it is equipped with a kind of inbuilt
machinery for self-revision.
This kind of conceptual revision becomes the condition for practical
revision, for the coordination of means and ends. Because if one
refashions one’s understanding of the space of conceivability, this has
obvious ramifications for how one understands what is possible, and
for what one can actually achieve in a given practical situation.
A few concluding remarks about abstraction: The key thing is to
understand the distinction between the abstract and concrete
methodologically rather than metaphysically, and I think this is precisely
what will prevent, for instance, the Marxist theorization of social
abstraction from lapsing into a kind of nostalgia for a prelapsarian unity
before social relations became mediated by abstract forms. The notion
that human means and ends will only be harmoniously coordinated
once reembedded in an organic community uncontaminated by
abstraction is a neo-Aristotelian fantasy that afflicts too many Marxists.
By the way, I think Alberto Toscano’s recent work on real abstraction is
really very important here. It’s an attempt to understand how epistemic
and political abstraction might be articulated from a Marxist
perspective.
1
It’s also important to avoid giving a circular definition of real
abstraction by explaining the reality of abstraction in terms of its causal
efficacy, while defining causal efficacy as whatever makes a difference
in reality. This is not a very helpful explanation of what constitutes the
reality of abstraction. Once this is understood, one realizes that there
is nothing one can invoke as any kind of infallible index of the difference
between the concrete and the abstract. This is the whole point of
Sellars’s critique of the given. Once you have dispensed with the idea
of the given, you realise that nothing is either abstract or concrete in
itself: there is no metaphysical fulcrum for this distinction. Even at the
level of perception, no immediate experience would provide you with a
litmus test for distinguishing the two. Concrete immediacy is constituted
through abstract form. In this regard, alienation can be understood as
the constitutive fissure of self-estrangement through which sensation is
conditioned by conception. Understood in this way, alienation is
constitutive of rational agency and hence the condition of freedom. So
there’s a sense in which alienation can be understood as an enabling
condition for the achievement of collective self-mastery and
refashioning which I take to be constitutive of Prometheanism. There is
no going back to some allegedly originary state of organic immediacy.
To be rational is to have always already been expelled from the state
of nature. This is basically to ratify the realization of abstraction as a
kind of research programme.
Unless Marxism reasserts its commitment to Prometheanism, and to
the transformative power of conceptual rationality, the result will be a
politics of fear masquerading as a politics of emancipation. It is quite
striking to observe the extent to which the contemporary Left is
paralysed by fear of the future. A hundred years ago, it was the Left
that laid claim to the future, whereas the Right wanted to return to or
reestablish the past. Now the situation seems to have been reversed,
and what’s striking about the kind of abject terror sparked by
evocations of ecological catastrophe is that it is politically paralysing.
But you cannot have an emancipatory politics rooted in fear, because
freedom from fear is the precondition of emancipation. The politics of
fear is ultimately the politics of reaction, of self-preservation at all
costs. But a species whose only concern is its own perpetuation does
not deserve to exist. If the best we can hope for is just our own
perpetuation then there is no reason to perpetuate ourselves.
What are the implications of all this for aesthetics? Well, perhaps it’s
not so much a question of pitting the conceptual against the aesthetic,
or concepts against affects, but of developing a conception of
aesthetics which is not exclusively governed by either: one dedicated to
reconstructing sensation on the basis of new modes of
conceptualization. A Promethean constructivism will engineer new
domains of experience, and it is these new domains that will need to be
mapped by a reconfigured aesthetics.
1. See e.g. A. Toscano, ‘The Culture of Abstraction’, Theory, Culture and Society 25:4 (2008),
57–75; ‘The Open Secret of Real Abstraction’, Rethinking Marxism 20:2 (2008), 273–87.