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, self-determination 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 self-mastery. 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.1 It’s an attempt to understand how epistemic and political abstraction might be articulated from a Marxist perspective.
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.