What is at stake in posing the question of the aesthetic today, in light of shifts in recent philosophy towards both the speculative and the realist? Putting aside entirely legitimate concerns about the validity of such a substantive object as ‘speculative realism’ as school of thought or movement,1 and considering it instead as a moment or event reorienting thought within contemporary Continental philosophy in light of ideas of speculation on the one hand and realism on the other, how does this in turn recontextualise our understanding of aesthetics? If there is to be a positive upshot to such a conjuncture, it is surely to return us to the problem of representation. Into this mixture I want to throw an additional set of concerns. In essence, this is the question of a speculative aesthetics of the sociopolitical. Many of the political crises we are faced with are grounded in the problem of the abstraction, complexity, and multiscalarity of the social—and in the difficulty we face in adequately representing it. One way we could think about these issues is through a development of Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping.2 This would involve investigating the ways in which humans can marshal and master complex, abstract systems through representational interfaces, control centres, and quantitative modelling.3
I’m going to take a distinct but complementary approach, and try to outline the broader meaning of sociopolitical abstraction. As we will see, the term ‘abstraction’ in a sociopolitical context seemingly delineates at least two notions—broadly speaking, abstract phenomena emerging from material systems and processes, versus the real causal effects upon material systems and processes of our abstract representations. The key questions here are: Is Capitalism the only engine of abstraction, or is it merely one driver among many? Is it enough to oppose dangerous abstractions with ideology critique, or is the plane of the abstract itself a battlefield upon which we ought to set in play new abstractions of our own? If our age is one of increasing abstraction from our lived experience, is this something to be overcome—or, alternatively, to be embraced?
Firstly I’m going to talk about the political context for this question of abstraction. Many of the most pressing political issues of today’s world pose the problem of seemingly intractable alienation from our everyday, on-the-ground, lived experience—in particular, problems such as global climate change, economic crisis, and indeed the question of how to supplant capitalism more generally. Accompanying this alienation is a powerlessness, whereby politics recoils in a kind of horror at the vertigo of our abstract world. The best example of this is the rise of the idea of ‘localism’. In the years following the financial crisis of 2008, a fetishization of the local has emerged as a key political tenet across the political spectrum: from far-right secessionists to the soft-right triangulating manoeuvres of Philip Blond’s ‘Red Toryism’ and Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’, through to the left communism of communization theory and neoanarchism, all partake in a new credo of sustainable local communities, small-scale decision making, and localised production.4
The political economist Greg Sharzer has investigated some of the problems with this aesthetic of localism, in terms of the economic issues which confront a privileging of small business, ethical shopping, local currencies, and small-scale community initiatives.5 Sharzer argues that at the core of localist economic ideas is a refusal to think systematically, to ignore structural Marxist analyses of the global economic system in favour of an ethical and aesthetic discourse, where small is beautiful, and moreover, virtuous. Such an economics is ultimately incapable of challenging the very global system responsible for generating the effects it seeks to address. Political and economic localism is certainly damaging to politics on a practical level. But this still leaves open the issue of how we are to think the abstractions that it explicitly attempts to oppose or circumvent.
One of the most important attempts to think social abstraction is in the Marxist tradition, in the idea of real abstraction. This concept shifts the notion of abstraction from being about illusion or occupying a basically ideal register, towards the idea that abstractions can be generated by material processes. The paradigmatic thinker of real abstraction is Alfred Sohn-Rethel. For Sohn-Rethel, the commodity form and value emerge as real abstractions because of actual material spatiotemporal activities.6 What this means, as Alberto Toscano clarifies, is that ‘abstraction precedes thought’.7 In other words, the everyday practice of commodity exchange, rendering equivalent incommensurate commodities, is an abstraction which occurs before any individual or collective thought of abstraction.
Basically, on this account, real abstraction emerges from material processes, practices, and behaviours. But there remains disagreement among Marxians as to where real abstraction began or is presently to be found. Sohn-Rethel locates exchange, i.e. the emergence of money, as being the origin of real abstraction, whereas Roberto Finelli counters that it proceeds on the basis of the reality of the labour process under capitalism, i.e. within the sphere of production.8 But for both Finelli and Sohn-Rethel, real abstractions emerge from historically constituted practices, becoming hypostatised as abstractions, before once again taking on a new causal efficacy. Capitalistic processes of abstraction, embedded and emerging from real phenomena, become self-reinforcing and dynamic, as material feedback loops act recursively to generate entirely new domains of abstraction. The implications for action are reasonably clear: within the capitalist reality system, there exists no ‘real productive’ element to return to. Attempts to reform the system from within radically misread the intrinsic nature of the abstractions of capital. Moreover, because these abstractions are not so much in the head as in everyday life, in capitalist practices, mere ideology critique alone will never be sufficient to undo or challenge them.
But while Marxian accounts of real abstraction have much to recommend them, we ought to be wary of some of their more speculative conclusions. The temptation with many accounts of real abstraction is to shift immediately from explaining the complex dynamics of capitalism towards a rejection of abstraction in its entirety. If the essential problem of capitalism is abstraction, and abstraction is uniquely capitalistic, then this quickly leads, (perhaps detouring via the Adornian critique of instrumental reason),9 to the fantasies of the new localist political and economic thinkers. If abstraction is intrinsically capitalistic, then emancipation can only come via a romantic politics which seeks to undo modernity itself, in order to reclaim the vanished immediacy of prelapsarian myth.10 Real abstraction, therefore, captures some of the dynamics of sociopolitical abstraction, but fails to encapsulate others. While the spatial strategies of capitalism, towards globalization and greater integration of national markets, may partially be explained through real abstraction, this fails to grasp other globalized phenomena—for example, nonhuman ones, most seriously anthropogenic global warming. At the same time, the dynamics of real abstraction imply that sociopolitical abstraction, with its mutually reinforcing feedback loops between ideal abstraction and real/material systems, can also begin from the side of representation, as well as from practice.
What does it mean to think the causal impacts of representative abstraction from within a realist perspective? The starting point for a realist ontology ought to be minimally that the world has a reality independent of our thinking of it. In the case of social ontology then, as Manuel DeLanda has argued, social entities such as cities, nations, and communities would disappear were it not for the minds of the humans which constitute them.11 As such, to be a realist here is simply to say that the social may in fact be other than our representations of it—that our representations might be wrong. But this is not to say that such representations are incapable of having effects. The slippery reflexivity of the social means that representations, even ones that fail to grasp anything real at all about the social world, can, if properly embodied in material processes, become enormously efficacious. For example, the role played by DSGE economic theories in establishing an environment in which our present economic crisis could occur has been widely noted.12 To admit this is not to slide into the mire of a postmodern social constructivism, which would be to erase or obviate the real in favour of an absolute determination of the social by our representations—in our current example, to claim that, because of the social dominance of DSGE theories throughout the neoliberal world, markets really did always equilibrate. The reality is more complex. The causal efficacy of DSGE economics was only made possible by its embedding within material social structures—university economics departments, thinktanks and central banks. The abstraction of DSGE theories, embedded and implemented through such institutionalisation, established a hegemonic framework in which financial actors could readily engage in the most risk-taking practices to maximise profitability.
It may be argued that such abstractions are not in themselves causally efficacious, raising the question of nominalism, i.e. the claim that abstract objects do not have ontological reality.13 In a sense, however, the power of abstractions within the social field is distinct from the domain of the natural sciences, or mathematics. This is because, since the field is determined (at least in part) by human collective behaviour, it is amenable to influence by the kinds of representations that humans hold to be correct. Which means that, while it is true that such abstractions have no causal power on their own account, once they are coupled to human beings and the institutions they create, they are capable of contouring the manner in which human action operates. Another line of nominalist attack might be that, in this case, it matters little what the abstraction itself actually is (i.e. the structure or content of the concepts), and hence that, while it is necessary that there be an abstract entity, it has no effect of its own, as its specificity is irrelevant. But this ignores the history of ideas, and the specific interactions or resonances between the conceptual and the causal which lead certain abstractions to be favoured over others.
Here, then, we find a mirror image of the Marxian real wherein representations have real effects when mediated through human behaviour, institutions, technologies, and so on. We have abstractions which arise from real material systems, as well as abstractions which have real effects on such systems. But there is also perhaps a third kind of abstraction, that which arises from the physical and cognitive limitations of the human, emerging from the play of local and global.
Why is it that locality exists at all? We begin with the physical constraints of the human body. Existing only at a determinate scale, the ability of humans, without the addition of technological prostheses, to intervene in the world around them is distinctly limited. A physical scaling structure of nested localities immediately emerges as soon as human society spreads beyond the reach of an individual’s immediate senses and limbs. Such scaling also clearly relates to human cognitive capacity. A good example of this is the existence of Dunbar’s number—the finding that approximately 150 people is the limit for a transparent unmediated social assemblage. Dunbar’s number appears throughout social forms (from class sizes in schools to tribe numbers, and battle groups in militaries).14 Beyond Dunbar’s number, and outside the spatiotemporal locality implied by the body, abstraction necessarily begins. In this sense, then, we can conceive of certain forms of sociopolitical abstraction as being relational, the necessary effect of mediation generated by the physical and cognitive limitations of human anatomy. Our relation to an entity such as climate change, for example, is largely the result of our inability to effectively cognize it outside of technologically mediated models.15
A question now arises as to the mind independence of globality and locality as such. In other words, of locality-globality in-itself, or the ground of the abstract in its maximal genericity. What is the most general relationship of the local horizon towards its global or universal container? If abstraction is, in a sense, about a transit between the local and the more generic terrains of the global, what can we learn about the manner in which such traversals may be conducted? Here the most recent work of Reza Negarestani is informative. Working from a basis informed by developments in contemporary mathematics, as well as the pragmaticism of C. S. Peirce and the geometrically inspired philosophy of science of Longo, Mazzola, and Châtelet, Negarestani’s thinking on the relation between the global and the local begins with the idea of the continuum.16 Rooted in Peirce’s synthetic conception, the continuum is theorised as being an absolutely general concept, obtaining an absolute primacy over individual local instantiations. This is a concept of an absolute continuum in a sense beyond even that delineated by Georg Cantor, a ‘general whole which cannot be analytically reconstructed by an internal sum of points’.17 It is within the continuum that global and local properties are entangled. What Peirce terms ‘secondness’, actual existence or determination, is produced via breaks or cuts in the continuum, enabling the marking of differences to become possible.
Negarestani follows Peirce in considering the relationship between regional, localised horizons of the universal of the continuum in terms of ‘cut-outs’. Because all localities are cut from the cloth of the continuum, regional interiors need to be considered as indefinite in nature, blurry and fundamentally existing in a state of fusion, open both to other localities, and remaining in relation to the global of the continuum.18 Exteriority, therefore, always maintains multiple pathways by which it might enter an interiorized horizon. These potential pathways by which the exterior and more global can erupt into the local are considered to be vectors of trauma—as Negarestani puts it, a piercing ‘from multiple points of view, and nesting; it does not amputate, but transplants’.19 Hence the Negarestanian injunction, or ‘eleventh commandment’, to ramify every pathway, to explore the interconnections or addresses existing between localities and more global topological structures.20 What this kind of navigational rationalist account of the global and the local points out is that neither the local or the global is primary over the other; rather they are mutually bound up with one another, and there is always potential for perforation, and possibilities for transplantation or transition.
By way of concluding remarks, it is clear that abstraction is a necessary consequence of complexity (on a formal or social level). The nested structure of multiply-embedded localities, as well as mediational political or economic structures, are the price that human social systems pay for the benefits accrued through increasingly complex societal structures. As such, attempts to evade or otherwise obviate abstraction appear fated to failure. Deleterious social abstractions, such as those trafficked by neoliberal capitalism, cannot be destroyed through ideology critique alone, given their grounding in everyday practice. If abstraction is more than simply an effect of capitalistic systems, structures, and processes, being instead the very substance of modernity, we ought to disabuse ourselves of all notions of prelapsarian return to an intrinsically tractable world of organic wholeness. In its place, we must arrive at a coming to terms with abstraction itself. This is to say that a new politics, and indeed a new aesthetics, must aim towards an overcoming of the negative relationship to processes of alienation which are simply the indicative hallmark of our increasing ability to transcend the limits imposed on us by our evolutionary heritage.
1. For an appropriately unequivocal dismissal of ‘speculative realism’-as-movement, see R. Brassier, ‘I Am a Nihilist Because I Still Believe in Truth. (Interview with Marcin Rychter)’, Kronos, 2011, http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896; and Brassier’s postscript to Peter Wolfendale’s Object-Oriented Philosophy (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014).
2. F. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–57.
3. In this regard the recent work of Nick Srnicek is exemplary.
4. P. Blond, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (London: Faber & Faber, 2010); A. Finlayson, Making Sense of Maurice Glasman (London: Renewal, 2011); B. Noys (ed.), Communization and its Discontents (New York: Autonomedia, 2011).
5. G. Sharzer, No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change The World (Winchester: Zero, 2012).
6. A. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977), 21.
7. A. Toscano, ‘The Open Secret of Real Abstraction’, Rethinking Marxism 20:2 (2008), 280. It is interesting to note here the similarity between this account of real abstraction and Bailly and Longo’s theorisation of the gestural origins of mathematics in predatory eye tracking trajectories. See F. Bailly and G. Longo, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (London: Imperial College Press, 2010), 68.
8. R. Finelli, ‘Abstraction Versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s “Capital”’, Historical Materialism 15:2 (2007): 61–74.
9. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso, 1997).
10. N. Pepperell, ‘Beyond the Exchange Abstraction’, http://uncomfortablescience.org/2011/08/19/beyond-the-exchange-abstraction/.
11. M. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), 1–2.
12. DSGE stands for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibirum theory. For a thoroughgoing critique of this field of economics, see S. Keen, Debunking Economics—Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? (London: Zed Books, 2011).
13. For an overview of the myriad approaches to nominalist problems, see D. M. Armstrong, Nominalism and Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For an account specifically of nominalist issues associated with abstract entities see A. Hazen, ‘Nominalism and Abstract Entities’, Analysis 45:1 (1985), 65–8.
14. R. I. M. Dunbar, ‘Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates’, Journal of Human Evolution 22:6 (1992): 469–93.
15. For a recent take on the ‘becoming topological’ of human societies in the wake of abstractifying technologies such as network science and economic modelling, as well as the recent explosion in topological ideas in philosophy and social theory more generally, see C. Lury, L. Parisi and T. Terranova, ‘Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society 29:4–5 (2012): 3–35.
16. R. Negarestani, ‘Globe of Revolution’, Identities 17 (2011), 25–54.
17. F. Zalamea, ‘Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and Mathematical Approach’ (2001), http://acervopeirceano.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Zalamea-Peirces-Continuum.pdf, 7–8.
18. Negarestani, ‘Globe of Revolution’, 25–7.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. R. Negarestani, ‘Abducting the Outside’ (Public lecture, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2012).