Discussion
ALEX WILLIAMS: I find this very interesting, the idea James puts forward
of formal languages being a kind of technology, a technology which isn’t
just a way of organising intuitions about the world, but instead has the
potential to surprise us. Things could come out of them which are not
simply reducible to the input, in the sense that you can learn from them,
and that’s really intriguing. My question, given that abstraction of some
kind seems to be at the core of this (in that it’s not just expressive of
common sense) is how are we able to form these languages in the first
place—formal languages that are not just an abstract system, are not
disconnected from the world entirely to the point of just being a game.
They have some degree of traction within the real and yet they still
have abstraction. I wondered if you could expand on this, especially
given the current currency of the ideas of philosophers such as
Giuseppe Longo, who present a story about how abstractions,
mathematics for example, get ‘into’ us from the outside.
JAMES TRAFFORD:
Yes, it’s a good question; I think it’s tricky, partly
because there is no clear methodology for approaching it. I think the
short way of thinking about this would be to suggest that you take the
‘good’ bit of grounded cognition, where you can understand conceptual
activity as essentially grounded in some sense. We can think of this as
an essentially associative structure where there is a relationship
between this and the way in which a cognitive system is in bodily
interaction with the environment through various things like gestures,
etc. But this isn’t all that there is to cognition, reasoning, and so on.
Even six-month-old children, and even rats, seem to have some sort of
generalized association relating to negation—there are a bunch of
experiments suggesting that even very young children have some sort
of abstract concept of number, for example. These processes of
cognition are all going to be pretty mundane, and, of course, we use
things like elementary language to begin to structure these associations
and to modify them in different ways—systematizing social interactions
and that kind of thing. But that’s not the whole story—this is the point of
the account of doxastic conservatism—because we can use the
technologies of formalization to combat this, and think of it in terms of a
generative process which expands the resources of our language,
differentiates our abilities to reason, and so on. In other words, we can
develop new abilities that far surpass our initial biosocial conditioning.
For example, I think that the traditional idea that we can tether logic to
some sort of independent logical structure really holds this back by
presuming we have some kind of transparent access to semantics.
Instead, we need to think of logic in terms of rational constraints, which
are open to processes of revision and navigation, and then whatever
we understand by logical consequence and semantics is going to need
to be far more flexible.
AW: I’m also interested from the point of view of the geometric aspect
of Longo’s work: How is it that you go from some kind of bodily
movement through space, or eye-tracking, the ability of predatory
animals to track the motions of their prey, to this kind of conceptual
structure? The question is, in a crude sense, how do you transpose
from these physical gestures towards some kind of cognitive or rational
process—i.e. make the ur-abstraction or original abstraction? And
having begun such processes, how is it that the ur-abstraction is
preserved, maintained throughout (with mathematics, for example)
thousand of years of transformations and elaborations? How do you
preserve the originary abstraction?
JT : Basically, the initial processes of cognition of these things are going
to be grounded in the world in some sense. For example, something
approximating negation is going to be learnt by children, possibly as a
very basic incompatibility relationship: something can’t be both red and
green at the same time. And what happens is that you’re going to get
this introduction into representational structures or semantic structures
that are associatively conditioned by input, by the habit of these things
being triggered. But then we’re using language to systematize those
structures, to revise them, and using something like logic to construct
community-level norms.
TOM TREVATT : I was thinking of ways of drawing this whole conversation
into the more mundane sense of the aesthetic, of art. Ray spoke a bit
about this notion of Prometheanism. There are ways of connecting that
to things Benedict was saying earlier, about the role of design; and
there’s a way in which you can think of design as being precisely, in its
original function, to do with changing the world. This is a very important
aspect of design, but also, as Benedict pointed out, within this is a
disavowed sense of design as, increasingly, designing people’s
behaviour; and even reshaping their subjectivities—are they
comfortable with this?
To bring in art, now, what’s the relation of art to a promethean
Marxism? Can it be a tool within this sort of project of remaking
ourselves, remaking the world? Or is it something to do with the
structure of art—is its resistance to a purposiveness, to instrumentality,
going to be a block to that, limiting art to being a supplement to
something supposedly more instrumental? So basically, how do we
situate art in relation to that wider project?
RAY BRASSIER:
This is where the relationship of the aesthetic to the
conceptual becomes relevant, though also problematic. Art, whatever
physical medium it’s operating in, ultimately must have some
conceptual content. It must operate conceptually on some level. Now,
you can have a sophisticated understanding of conceptualization that
does not identify conceptual content with propositional content, so this
doesn’t have to be a banal claim. For instance, if you ask: How does a
piece of music embody thinking? Obviously it can do so in an incredibly
complicated way. The fact that its conceptual content cannot be
linguistically recoded in any kind of digestible propositional form doesn’t
mean that it doesn’t have conceptual meaning. The argument to the
contrary seems to run: Here’s a piece of music which is obviously
cognitively sophisticated in terms of everything that is actually going on
in it—but how could this possibly be conceptual if by ‘conceptual’ you
mean something that can be encapsulated in propositional form? I think
this is an unnecessary simplification. Although everyday
conceptualization—whose
primary
function
is
practical
or
communicative—uses linguistic resources, this doesn’t mean that every
thought can be straightforwardly individuated in terms of a set of
propositions. And this is as true for literary art as for music or the
plastic and performing arts. If concepts are understood in terms of
their functional role, then perhaps what distinguishes the thinking
peculiar to art consists in constructing nonpropositional functions by
making materials—linguistic, sonic, plastic, etc.—do things we don’t
expect in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. Art is the construction of
function, as opposed to the relaying of preestablished function.
By obliging you to conceptualize its nonpropositional content, art may
make you think about the status of sensation, about what hearing is or
what seeing is, and ultimately, what feeling is. So art can perform a
subversive epistemic function which feeds into Prometheanism’s
broader emancipatory agenda. It seems to me that modernism in art is
the idea that by challenging clichéd ways of perceiving, you can
encourage people to think about the way they see things, rather than
continue to see the world as it is generally accepted to be. This is to
begin to understand things differently, but also to expose the various
invisible mechanisms that condition habitual perception. This link
between cognitive subversion and emancipation is what I would like to
retain from the modernist ethos.
So I would say that art can play an emancipatory role consonant with
the Promethean imperative, but not by proclaiming this ideal in some
platitudinous sense. Promethean art need not be about
‘Prometheanism’: it can challenge our beliefs about ourselves and our
world in a way that invites us to remake both without having to
enunciate this as a propositional injunction. Art can further the
Promethean project without subordinating itself to it as an extrinsic
goal. In other words, it can be useful, but precisely by preserving its
uselessness. It is the subversion of designated function that functions
revolutionarily, not the assertion of the need for a revolutionary function.
Perhaps this is a cliché but I still believe that genuinely revolutionary art
has to be abstract in the sense of uprooting default modes of thinking
and feeling. It should challenge bourgeois epistemic norms, by which I
mean cultural conventions stipulating what we ought to think or ought to
feel. This is not a new idea, but I want to defend it, and insist that art
uses the sensible to teach you to distrust your sensations—don’t trust
what you feel!
PETER WOLFENDALE:
There’s a Deleuzian distinction between art as
communication and art as composition which is really useful here. I
think Deleuze’s critique of the communicative use of art, where the art
is giving a message to the viewer, as fundamentally reducing art to this
sort of discursive register, is valid. But you can easily go too far in that
direction and say that therefore art cannot have any sort of conceptual
element to it. I think the important point is that, even if you view art in
terms of composition of affects and percepts, concepts are materials
of composition. You can compose with concepts.
In relation to James’s presentation, I wanted to return to the whole
logic question, and why I think Brandom can answer the kind of things
you are talking about. In Between Saying and Doing Brandom gives a
really complicated story about what logic is and how we can have
logical abilities. His basic idea is called logical expressivism, and it’s
the idea that what logic does is enable us to make explicit—it’s a tool
for making explicit what’s already implicit in what we say. This doesn’t
mean there has to be a single logic—there can be different logical
vocabularies. I think this is interesting in relation to your idea of
doxastic conservatism. What I would add is that, if you take a sort of
Sellarsian approach to semantic content—if you see the semantic
content of a nonmathematical expression as constituted by its being
involved in material inferences, then you see these material inferences
as being fundamentally, principally, non-monotonic. You can tell quite an
interesting story about what it is to be caught up in a given horizon of
possibility, because basically what you get with non-monotonic
inference is that the inference is only good as long as you accept a
whole bunch of assumptions. Another way of explaining that would be
in terms of the shift from non-monotonic frames of inference to purely
monotonic frames of inference, which is what you get in mathematics.
So that is the way I saw your talk about semantic activation and
1
desemantification, and how this relates to logic. What I want to say to
you is, do you really resist this sort of semantic picture? Or do you
think that there’s an alternative semantic picture?
JT : To an extent I might disagree with some of this picture, though it’s
going to depend upon how it’s cashed out. One thing that’s really
important is that I don’t think that you can define the meaning of logical
terms using inferential rules if they are supposed only to explicate
underlying implicit linguistic moves. There’s a whole set of issues that
are raised within this understanding of inferentialism. These concern,
for example, the ways in which the sort of proof-theoretic
characterization of logic in Dummett is connected with anti-realism and
its emphasis on provability. Then, of course, there are issues relating to
what we say about bad inferential patterns such as the famous
example of ‘tonk’. This relates to how we understand meaning to be
defined by certain inferential roles; which roles get to count as defining
meaning, and that kind of thing. We need, for example, some way of
‘weeding out’ the inferential rules that seem like they should be kosher,
but clearly aren’t. In this sense, I think we require a very flexible
understanding of the way in which the semantics of expressions is
determined by inferential rules. I do think that this is entirely possible
though, when we move to an understanding of rules in terms of rational
constraints. Also, if we start with Gentzen’s symmetric sequents, then
there’s a clear sense in which the syntax can be seen as generative of
semantics (using a generalized form of Lindenbaum-Asser
constructions), and so, semantics is, in a sense, internal to the way in
which we construe syntactical rules, i.e. without reference to an
external reference or independent reality.
PW: It feeds into what was said about functional classification: there are
levels of functional classification of logical operators that are not so
fine-grained as to pick out an operator within a particular domain—they
don’t distinguish between classical negation and intuitionist negation.
ROBIN MACKAY:
James talked about the operations of desemantified
formal languages; then Alex talked about the fact that we can’t evade
the task of finding some new ways to grapple with the abstractions that
surround us. The question of how desemantification, abstraction from,
let’s say, the manifest image, works has emerged as a key question.
Now, if aesthetic experience is never preconceptual, if there’s no
ultimate guarantor of the distinction between abstract and concrete,
then surely all we are dealing with is abstractions (plural) from X to Y.
Certainly as far as animal perceptual behaviour is concerned, we can
say that it already operates through abstractions (Longo; but also,
already, Bergson’s point about perception always being a subtraction
from what is given).
New abstractions can come to command and direct the substrate
from which they emerged, and even potentially modify it in an enduring
way. It would be foolish to think that any abstract model can ever
perfectly fit the reality it’s trying to grasp, and therefore there is always
a gap where novelty can slip in, there’s always a kind of grinding of the
gears in which new problems are produced, no matter how powerful
the purchase of a given abstraction may be. Surely that production of
new problems simply is the story of collective cognition.
Because whatever may take place on an individual level in terms of
the loosening and shifting of these given abstractions only becomes
truly significant when it takes place within a collective cultural context.
And it seems to me that art (institutionally understood) simply doesn’t
do this: as an experience or set of experiences, it doesn’t have a longterm relation to behavioural feedback loops or to collectivity which
would enable it to make its abstractions real. Art doesn’t do that
whereas, for example, computer games, music, popular use of
technology, and so on, certainly do—they manifestly change behaviours
and modes of thought and gesture, action. Look at smartphones,
Facebook, Twitter: the way that people interact with the world
psychologically, physiologically, is genuinely being changed. It’s not
philosophers who are doing that, and it’s not artists, it’s corporate
design and strategy, and technology. It produces real change and real,
novel problems, pathologies even. Understanding the concretizing
processes of abstraction, the way in which they make themselves real,
is the only way one can hope to direct them in the Promethean sense
that Ray suggested. And it’s not clear how art might contribute toward
that task given its obsession with providing indeterminate ‘spaces of
reflection’.
BENEDICT SINGLETON:
My question is actually related, and is about
Prometheanism. That idea seems very important to all of you. What I
wonder is how that relates to whether there’s a sort of contradiction
between certain embodiments, cognition or whatever, versus the myth
of the given. I think it was suggested that there was some sort of
tension between the two.
RB: I don’t think there’s necessarily a tension between acknowledging
the embodied aspect of cognition and rejecting the myth of the given.
The tension can be dissolved by distinguishing between
conceptualization and representation, or thinking and mapping. The
hypothesis that brains originally developed as navigational mechanisms
suggests that the most elementary function of cognition consists in
representing the environment well enough to escape predators and
seize prey. So from a biological point of view, representation’s primary
task is to map the organism’s environment. To the extent that all
thinking developed as a function of biological locomotion, then it’s
correct to say that mapping is thought’s originary function.
But even if thinking originates in movement, it would be a genetic
fallacy to insist that all thinking is necessarily subordinated to navigation
and the plotting of trajectories in space-time. This may well be
representation’s most elemental function, but concepts are not
representations, and the concept’s role is not representational. It’s
crucial to distinguish these two aspects of cognition: the conceptual
and the representational. Concepts are individuated in terms of their
inferential role, whereas the role of representations is mapping. In one
sense, the myth of the given consists in conflating concepts with
representations, or inferential function with mapping function.
Of course, this is not to say the two modes of functioning are wholly
disconnected. We need to study the neurobiological mechanisms that
underlie our conceptual capacities using the resources of empirical
science. But the contemporary discourse of ‘embodiment’ is not
motivated by any regard for naturalism. It’s not concerned with
understanding the neurobiological basis of cognition. Embodiment is
understood in a phenomenological register as ‘lived experience’ and
inflated into an irreducible datum, an unexplained explainer. This is
precisely what a neurobiological understanding of embodied cognition
ought to displace. There is a way of understanding the constraining role
that our biological legacy exerts upon our conceptual capacity, but it
does not consist in reducing conceptualization to representation. To do
so is to fall back into the empiricist variant of the myth of the given by
treating concepts as representations. This is also to confuse reasons
with causes. The world causes representations and representations
may cause occurrences in the world, but even if concepts supervene
on representations, they are neither caused by things nor can they be
the causes of things. We have to use concepts to understand the
neurobiological processes that underlie conceptualization. But to
identify those concepts with the processes they are being used to
investigate is to engender paradoxes which threaten science’s
epistemic integrity.
BS: I think that perhaps in the account of Prometheanism there may be
a contradiction between the articulation of conceptual structures and
lived experience, which may be related to how we can understand
abductive thinking as being a kind of going back before going forward.
RB: Yes, perhaps there is. Abduction can be understood in terms of
cognitive neurobiology because it is rooted in association. Associative
synthesis is at the heart of connectionism. There’s good reason to
believe animal representational systems are basically connectionist. I
think James mentioned the kinds of associative networks that develop
these preestablished pattern configurations to synthesize information.
Churchland says something similar in A Neurocomputational
Perspective: a prototype vector is activated as the best explanation for
a heterogeneous perceptual input. He proposes a neurocomputational
account of abductive inference. Such inferences facilitate the sorts of
recognitional prowesses exhibited by higher organisms. But I would
insist that there is a difference in kind between the connectionist
machinery at the heart of animal representational systems, whose
operations are associative and Humean, and conceptual explanation in
the strict sense, whose functioning is inferential and Kantian. In other
words, we can explain how animals are engaged in predicting their
environment, and we know that we rely on some of these same
neurobiological resources in predicting our own environment, but we
are also able to conceptualize these resources such that they become
reflexively articulated. We are self-conscious about the ways in which
we are engaged in predicting the world, in a way in which animals
arguably are not (I don’t mean ‘self-conscious’ in a phenomenological
sense here; I just mean reflexive). So although there is a definite
continuity from sentience to sapience, there’s also a discontinuity or
phase transition: something important happens in between sea slugs
and humans—there’s a difference in the kind of cognition at issue,
rather than a mere difference in the degree of cognition, although I
realize some naturalists would want to deny this.
2
NICK SRNICEK:
Building on Ben’s comment regarding the origins of
rational thought, I want to think about how we understand the ends of
rational thought. I think there’s a huge open question here. For instance
in Reza’s work I think there’s this idea of ramifying the pathways of
conceptual consequences, and tangentially approaching a complete
picture. Sellars is right I think to highlight this normative aim of a
complete and true picture of reality, and I think that answers to the
regulative ideal of rationality. But is this aim of scientific knowledge
sufficient to underwrite political projects? I’m not sure it is. And so I
think there’s this big question about what the normative end of this stuff
might be: What is accelerationism for?
RB: But isn’t it part of the definition of acceleration that we don’t know
where it might lead? How could we anticipate its end on the basis of
our current cognitive resources? Still, I agree we must be able to
rationally conjecture certain necessary characteristics of this end,
otherwise it collapses into an ineffable alterity, which we have no good
reason to pursue. But this is not to say we can predict it.
AW:
There is certainly an element of that in Negarestani’s idea of
navigation—the notion that there isn’t a predetermined end point or
teleological objective, but there is a certain teleodynamic directionality.
I think this is part of what Nick Srnicek and I want to extract from
Reza’s work, to help develop a kind of leftism which is distinct from
traditional Marxism—the idea that we don’t know what the ultimate end
will be, and that processes of navigation, in thought and action,
inevitably open up new horizons, horizons which may be well beyond
our present imaginings.
RM :
Isn’t acceleration to do with hooking the project of human
emancipation to the essentially psychotic project of scientific rationality
which demands that, if any path can be explored, then it must be…?
Which is not an end as such, it’s just a protocol for escape.
BS: I think this relates to something which is a nice bit of a corporate
cosmology around platforms, and how companies like Facebook and
Google actually work, which completely wrongfoots traditional business
theories, because they are not products or services.
This relates to how we understand platforms, and how the design
aspects regarding platforms relate to plot form. One of the interesting
things about platform logic is the following: take Facebook moving into
Africa—‘the next billion Facebook users’, as they are quite explicitly
calling it. Is there a rationale for it? They just know if they do that then
there will be more stuff to do. I mean, it opens up massive space of
possibility. Because they are particularly in a capitalist position they are
able to persuade other people to give them money to do it. Effectively,
that kind of platform logic seems to be something which is in line with
certain of these ideas about acceleration and so on: you build it
because then you open up further possibilities….
AW: That’s why epistemic accelerationism is still accelerationism: there
is this psychotic element to it. It does not become reasonable. It is
rational but it does not necessarily become reasonable.
1. R. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
2. P. M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure
of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).