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
rather than by a predefined position, to the diagram of the classical perspective
in which the 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 abolition 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 posi
tion (first or last, particular or generic) is removed, it is finally possible to draw
a nontrivial passage from the local subject to the global structure, in effect realizing
a continuity that defines an absolutized nature as a universal continuum. lt is this
nontrivial continuity that uproots the subject from its immediate foundation and
reconstitutes it as a site in the reflexive relation of nature to itself.' For this reason,
the reflective relation of the deracinated subject to itself and to nature cannot
Throughout this essay, the concept ofnontriviality is used in a sense similar to its original
application in mathematical language. In terms ofconceptual behavior, triviality expresses
a condition according to which the behavior ofthe concept regardless ofthe context and
application is always the same (self-similar) and is not required to be modified. In terms
ofstructure, triviality suggests a local-global relationship in which the global structure is simply
the extension ofthe Iocal structure (for example, the image ofworld being the extension of
the image ofman, or a cylinder-a global structure-being generated by the revolution offiber
or a local structure around a central axis). Nontriviality on the other hand is the expression
ofan asymmetry between local and global levels ofthe concept and structure. For example,
a Möbius strip is a cylinder with a global twist; in other words, the global is not simply the
extension ofthe local. Nontriviality is often a condition arising from a multi-modal continuity
that permits different trajectories ofevolution, global structural plasticity, and complex local
orientations. Accordingly, nontriviality entails epistemic navigation ofdifferent behaviors ofthe
concept. lt demands the change ofperspective and action according to a Iogic ofrules, spatial
situations and structural parameters.
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SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
be addressed unless through the reflexive relation of absolutized nature to itself. In
other words, following Gabriel Catren's formula for absolving the Kantian legacy
from its reactive premodern 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 "transcendentaI dehuman
ization of experience" by way of opening a nontriviaI space for 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 magni
tude of nature and the magnitude of the subject) suggestive of the premodern image
of the world and the pre-Copernican account of nature. From a historical perspec
tive, 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 classic
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 (norma
tive causes) within the subject are 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
2
3
4
See Gabriel Catren, "Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism," in
T he Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek,
and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 333-67.
lbid., 333.
Hermann Grassmann, Lehrbuch Der Arithmetik (Berlin: Enslin, 1861), 1.
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in the interaction of different magnitudes within a subject; it is a marker of intelligi
bility 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 ofbalancing,compensation,suppression,translation,and further disequilibrium
offorces. Quantity is therefore the explicit or intelligible result ofarticulating or con
joining 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 (artic
ulatus) various intensive and extensive magnitudes, which abstract the interaction or
points of liaison (joints) between the subject in question and its surrounding matrix.5
Properly speaking,then,magnitudes are expressed through tension-spaces and
are rendered intelligible as quantities. Immanuel Kant suggests that magnitudes are always
articulated in negative fashion via an opposition-a dialectic offorces-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 ofthe magnitude ofthe 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 ofthe windmill in the above example),judgment
does not leave the thinking subject intact either. lt drives the subject and its faculties
(sense, imagination, reasoning, power of action, and so forth) 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 ofjudgment,a deep understanding ofaesthetics as a dynamic interactive
system that structures both certain modes ofcognition and action is impossible without
an analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment in terms of magnitudes and the con
ditions of their interactivity. Conditions of interactivity can be defined as schemas
of space or points of liaison that structurally parameterize and give orientation to
each magnitude; 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 ofthe conceptual matrix ofaesthetics in order to upgrade it-a task
whose absence in canonical art criticism has put art in jeopardy ofbecoming 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 histori
cally 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.
5
On the concept of articulation with regard to magnitudes and intelligibility, see Gilles Chätelet,
Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).
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SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
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 that delineate natural causes (or causal
determination) and normative causes specific to the rational agency. But the question
is, what is the manner ofarticulation ofaesthetic categories? Under which conditions
do magnitudes enter dialectical interaction within the subject? The answer lies in the
reflectivity ofthe reflective judgment. Reflectivity is a specific relation to the world. lt
is conditioned by a certain intuition ofthe spatiotemporal arrangement ofthe 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 direc
tion of the given and allegedly well-secured interiority of the subject. This orthog
onal orientation always registers nature as a magnitude both outside the subject and
greater than it-an immense entity that is growing, indeterminate, and in excess of
the subject. This is because the reflective orientation translates the rigid inside-outside
tension ofthe subject and the world into the open and-hence, indeterminate-mag
nitude of nature versus the strictly demarcated magnitude ofthe 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 ofany magnitude associated
with an unbound nature or the world is readily quantified against the subject. Here we
can identify a trajectory ofaesthetic and philosophical paradigms-from the Kantian
sublime to Bataille's exorbitance, Freud's model of trauma, and the philosophy of
Speculative Realism, for which the incalculable scales ofnature are readily expressed
in confrontation with the human subject. This is, of course, no arbitrary juxtaposi
tion, in that these aesthetic and philosophical paradigms are products of the same
model ofarticulation ofmagnitudes that is the extension ofa quasi-Ptolemaic struc
tural 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
ofexperience, its magnitudes external to the subject and its perturbing forces issuing
forth from the infinite, formless, and generic (that is to say, purposeless) trajectories
of nature. The still evolving trajectory ofthe 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.
6
Gilles Chätelet, "Sur une petite phrase de Riemann," Ana!Jltiques (Psychana!Jlse-Ecritures-Politiques),
no. 3 (Paris, 1979): 67-75.
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1
'
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' ''
' ' \'
\
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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 non-given universal (expressed by an inexact magnitude) for a given partic
ular, 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 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, it 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 rather 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 a formless object interacts with the intensive magnitude of
sensation, a quantity of this interaction for understanding is produced.7 If 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 effec
tuated. For Kant, beauty, for example, is also a quantity produced by an indetermin
able magnitude, but it is a quantity whose quality can be determined and is also in
harmony with understanding. lt 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 mag
nitude 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
7
The mathematical sublime-as different from the dynamic sublime ofworldly magnitudes
is generated by formally abstracted magnitudes.
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SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
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.
lf 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 magni
tudes is the history of shifts in the 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 that 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. lt is the hypothet
ical structure of the tension-space, its manipulable variables, its normative plasticity,
constructible horizon, and ramified orientations toward hitherto unenvisaged land
scapes 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 simulta
neously open up new 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 magni
tudes are in reality new platforms for expression, manipulation of forces, tensions,
syntheses, and judgments. The head-to-head model of collision between intensive
and extensive magnitudes can be replaced by magnitudes that enter dialectical inter
actions hitherto inaccessible to the classical subject of personal experience. A whole
bestiary of tension-spaces is born in which the interaction of magnitudes enables new
modes of extraction of intelligibility, modes of judgment, and, correspondingly, new
8
The examination ofmagnitudes 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 ofthe
Kantian philosopher and mathematician Hermann Günther Grassmann. A similar view has been
expressed by G. W. Leibniz in the context ofana/ysis situs and philosophy ofsituations. See
Hans-Joachim Petsche, Hermann Grassmann (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009); Vincenzo De Risi, Geometry
and Monadology: Leibniz's Analysis Situs and Philosophy of Space (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007).
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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. lt is the epistemological analysis of nature's protean continuity
that grants the possibility of the subject's 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/con
stant and discrete/variable structures but also structures with intermediate geome
tries.'0 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.
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 ener
getic rupture, defeat of senses, and the eruption of a messianic regime of force that
is deemed liberating and limiting in equal parts. 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 a 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 ten
sion-spaces. The aim of a tension-space in this case is not to express the quantitative
9
The continuity ofthe reflexive field should be understood as a nontrivial continuity insofar as its
structure does not permit overstretching any particular field or inflation ofany specific horizon
and its functions. Neither can everything be subject nor can everything be object. lnstead it brings
about the possibility ofintricate (diachronic,asymmetrical, entangled) co-constitution ofsubject
and object. Furthermore, the nontriviality ofthis continuity distinguishes the interaction of
magnitudes on the basis oftheir orientations. This allows for diversification ofmodes ofsynthesis
and,respectively,judgment. Suppose A is the oriented magnitude ofthe subject and B the
oriented magnitude ofthe object. AB is not equal to BA; that is they express two 11011-commutative
terms because they are different products ofmagnitudes and their specific orientations. Since
they suggest different syntheses,they occasion and demand different modes of judgment as weil.
10 On continuum as a protean continuity,see Fernando Zalamea, "Peirce's Logic ofContinuity:
Existential Graphs and Non-Cantorian Continuum," The Review oj Modem Logic 9 (2003). Also on
the theory oftopoi 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 oj the Logic Colloquium (Amsterdam: North Holland,1975),135-57.
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SYNECHISTIC CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT
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. lt is instead
to reparameterize and reprogram tensions or magnitudes that mobilize the field
of the subject by nontrivial 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 determine 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 geo
metrical relation in terms of interaction and operation of magnitudes is a propo
sitional content for the subject and is endowed with a pragmatic assertion. lt 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 there is a lesson to be learned by art from the speculative-scientific history
of the 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 inter
action 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 that not only shed the subject's local privileges but also reorient and rein
troduce 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 new ten
sion-spaces that are not limited to the trivial relation between a world out there and
a subject whose condition for experience is already given. lt is in its renewed com
mitment 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
11
The manifest image is "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as
man-in-the-world," a commonsense framework comprised ofintentions and thoughts through which
man correlates the observable image ofhimselfto the world and objects, and understands the world
as a global projection ofhimself. According to the American philosopher Wilfrid Seilars, the posterior
alternative to the manifest image is the scientific image in which the world consists ofmicrophysical
entities behaving according to natural laws that are no longer seen as "truncated persons." See Wilfrid
Seilars, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," in In the Space of Reasons: Se/ected Essays of Wilfrid
Seilars, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
374,381.
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the conceptual and the sensible that art finds its own political asymptote. If the global
dominance of neoliberalism aims to nullify all tension-spaces under the pretext of
fighting the evil of ideology, art is returned back to political consequentiality and
contemporaneity by the shift from scale of events (magnitudes of tensions and their
affective valence) to structures through which such tensions are expressed, manipu
lated, or translated into alternative driving forces for the subject. Only by seeing and
acting beyond the ready-made 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. lt is in how such magnitudes
force the sapient to renegotiate its own capacities and descriptions in each and
every turn. lt is in how tension-spaces drive the rational subject according to com
plex 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 that result from the systemic softening
of rigid designations of inside and outside. lt is an inhumanism that, rather than
antagonizing the human, takes "human significance" to its ultimate rational con
clusions. lt has nothing whatsoever to do 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 aesthetic judgment is not given; it is a matter
of struggle, revision, and construction.
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