ŠUM

meta-futures

#17
 ŠUM
Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory

Issue #17: Meta-Futures

December 2021

[email protected] www.sum.si

PUBLISHED BY ŠUM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Društvo Galerija Boks Tjaša Pogačar

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ISSUE EDITORS
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Tisa Troha
DESIGN

AUTHORS
HAGFISH
Jonathan Ratcliffe
LAYOUT
Miroslav Griško
Bosco García Tisa Troha
Timotej Prosen
PROOFREADING
Maks Valenčič
Tisa Troha Miha Šuštar
Matjaž Zgonc
Subset of
PRINT
Theoretical
Practice: Demat, d.o.o.

Allan M. Hillani CIRCULATION

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J.-P. Caron 300 copies
J. Millie
Maikel da Silveira
ISSN OF THE PRINTED ISSUE
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 ŠUM #17

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Maks Valenčič
Editorial

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Jonathan Ratcliffe
Divine Invasions

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Miroslav Griško
White Lotus

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Bosco García
The Outside, Naturalised:
An Exercise in Speculative
Evolutionary Dynamics

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Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha
Meta-Stability and the Diagonal Method:
An Interview with Timotej Prosen

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Subset of Theoretical Practice
Atlas of Experimental Politics

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Maks Valenčič

Editorial

A meta-move is the diagonalization of the existing move set. A play

outside the existing frame of action that has run its course by solving
problems so efficiently that it hasn’t realised these problems don’t
exist anymore. A move that manages to break the “path dependency”01
haunting all cultures (or software adaptations). Rather than blindly
optimising the current systemic trajectories and entrusting our hopes
to the supposedly alien feedback dynamics outside the Human, it is
possible to find a “meta-game of every other game”02 and unlock a new
abstract space from within: from inside the game that simply has to be
played in a better way (and is searching for new meta-players).
If this doesn’t resonate with the deadlock of Modernity (as a
historical event and not periodisation before post-modernity), nothing
will. Even if we’ve slowly come to realise that we live in a process
reality, we haven’t been able to update this fact into a coherent set of
parameters, into a systemic framework that will push us towards a new
attractor. That will enable us to find a new plethora and save us from
within. Figures like Benjamin Bratton are right to point out that our

01 LÖFFLER, Davor, “Distributing Potentiality. Post-Capitalist Economies and the Generative Time Regime”,
in: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 15, 1–2, 2018, pp. 8–44.
02 WOLFENDALE, Peter, “Castalian Games (Incomplete Extended Draft)”, in: DEONTOLOGISTICS, 2016,
https://deontologistics.co/essays/.
https://deontologistics.co/essays/

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time calls for a “radically different sort of philosophy”03 that will once
and for all break with the fetishes of post-modernity and/or the confu-
sions surrounding the Human. That will see itself in the same way the
crow sees the sparrow.
Our moment doesn’t call for the philosophy of the end, since
we’re in the time of “being the past of a post-future”,04 but rather a new
philosophical framework of process reality. A new metaphysics that
will reflect the thus far fragmentary qualitative shifts in operational
chains—“problem-solution distance”05—and bring forth new sorts of
subjectivities and conceptual tools for the Human of “Technological
Civilization”06 and not Modernity. Similarly to how Nietzsche in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra speaks of “an ear as big as a man”,07 we’re in the
process of developing new organs, new deformations of the current
state of things; we’re only beginning to inhabit better abstractions that
have yet to form a “ratchet-effect”08 and actualise a new search space
for possible actions. We are, curiously, at the brink of redefining what
living within limits means—of unlocking its productive nature.
Meta-futures are diagonalizations of existing futures. Just like
Antileft Marxism, they’re chimeras for breaking established frame-
works, working by exit and flight from the current trajectories. They're
more in line with the German than the British version of acceleration-
ism, all about finding actual historical patterns and succumbing to the
method of “deep futurology”09—to the new logic of the future that oper-
ates on the aforementioned meta-level. To truly challenge the current
state of affairs, it is therefore necessary to address the challenge of a
new “phase of integration”, a new leap into a “fractal-genetic time” of
“cultural capacity” 2.0.10 To set ourselves in a position of a “future-
anterior”,11 situate ourselves in time as if it’s the start of something that
hasn’t happened yet. To go beyond speculation and to talk about the
Outside as a positive rather than negative force of integration.

03 BRATTON, Benjamin, “Planetary Sapience”, in: Noema, 2021, https://www.noemamag.com/planetary-sapience/

https://www.noemamag.com/planetary-sapience/.
04 CAMPAGNA, Federico, “The End of the World(s)”, Youtube, 25/06/2020,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxORkFUNpE8&t=686s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxORkFUNpE8&t=686s
05 LÖFFLER, Davor, “The Meaning of Life. A Journey to the Origins of Worlds”, YouTube, 29/06/2020,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s16ScBXRl1s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s16ScBXRl1s
06 LÖFFLER, “Distributing Potentiality”, pp. 40–44.
07 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, Penguin Books, 1986, p. 138.
08 TENNIE, Claudio, CALL, Josep and TOMASELLO, Michael, “Ratcheting Up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of
Cumulative Culture”, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1528, 2009, pp. 2405–2415.
09 LÖFFLER, “The Meaning of Life”.
10 LÖFFLER, “Distributing Potentiality”, pp. 40–44.
11 BENJAMIN, Josua Jesse, “The Spark of a Future Anterior: An Archaeology of Entoptic Media”, in: ŠUM, Xenoslavia:
Covert Chronologies, 2021, pp: 2172–2184.

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Jonathan Ratcliffe

Divine Invasions

What is political theology? What does it do? The conventional way

to begin is with Carl Schmitt’s well-worn dictum that all significant
concepts of the modern theory of state are but secularised theolog-
ical ones—both in historical origin and by virtue of their systematic
nature.01 In order to understand this claim one should probably begin
with the immense influence exerted by Hegel on German philosophy,
or more correctly the sheer mystical weirdness of the chapters on
Christianity in Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which the function of Christ
is a resolutely social and political one, a kind of “god-building” of the
eventual final community of reconciled equals. Depending on how
one interprets this colossal monster of a book (I increasingly find it
difficult not to think of it as the result of some sort of Eckhartian reli-
gious experience),02 it may of course not simply be the poor miserable
Romans stricken with “unhappy consciousness” at the “death” of their
civic gods with the collapse of the Republic at which hour Christ also
dies and rises, soon to completely transfigure their entire world, but so
too the men of the 19th century living out a similar cyclically repeated
death of the Christian God. This Left Hegelian interpretation has been
01 SCHMITT, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2005, p. 36.
02 RATCLIFFE, Jonathan, “Gnostic Renaissance Pt 3/3”, Mechanical Owl, 16/05/2020,
https://mechanicalowlblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/gnostic-renaissance-pt-3-3/.
https://mechanicalowlblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/gnostic-renaissance-pt-3-3/

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the dominant one in philosophy this past two centuries, though from
time to time I have met that rarest of creatures, the Right Hegelian—no,
no, not a Fukuyama Stan or Gentilean Fascist, but simply fairly banal
conservatives who believe Hegel was a good, wholesome Lutheran boy
who didn’t do anything “wrong” at all. Can we believe that?
Nonetheless, if there is one thing that I think we can admit that
Hegel did do, it is that in his bottomless hunger to never let anything
that vaguely looked like a nice, neat little Two exist without being
immanently contradicted and reconciled, he pulled down the curtain
on the idea that in Western history at the very least there was never
such a naïve unbridgeable gap between the sacred and the secular
as the men of the modern era had, for various reasons, very keenly
desired to believe, if only, as Hegel gave away, because so very much
of the secular was merely a vessel into which might be poured the
unfulfilled dreams of freedom, equality, finality and perfection that
had fermented inside Christianity for millennia. But what is one to do
with this? What happens if the machine breaks down and all the little
dreams and fantasies poured from one glass into another still do not
come true? When political theologian Roberto Esposito speaks of the
horror of the “machine” of political theology and the need to find some
way to short out its endless shell game juggling of material between
the Two of the sacred and the secular, the villain, the Devil, is dastardly
old Hegel.03 One of the most important but often overlooked functions
of the Hegelian Geist in this last century, from primitivist reactionary
Ludwig Klages to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment
(which owed at least some debts to Klages),04 is as the Devil, as the
“Gnostic” Monster of History.
Thus, rather than asking what does political theology do, it is
far more important to ask what it cannot, or perhaps will not do. For
the most part political theology is a 20th-century discovery, its most
influential proponents—Schmitt, Benjamin, Voegelin, Löwith—were
all driven by the need to try to explain the politically horrifying times
through which they lived, in particular the phenomena of Stalinism
and Nazism.05 One of the core functions of political theology is a kind
of abreaction—a need to pile through history and genealogies in order
to simply understand by repetition why it is that one has come to the
place one has and accept it. This is perchance why of all hermeneutic-
genealogical methods political theology often seems to have the least
03 ESPOSITO, Roberto, Two: The Machine of Political Theology, New York: Fordham Press, 2015, pp. 3–4.
04 On this link see: STAUTH, Georg & TURNER, Bryan A., “Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) and the Origins of Critical
Theory”, in: Theory, Culture and Society, 9.3, 1992, pp. 45–63. On the “Gnosticism” of Horkheimer and Adorno see:
SLOTERDIJK, Peter, Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, pp. 149–74.
05 See especially: BENJAMIN, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in: Illuminations, London: Fontana
Press, 1992, pp. 245–255; LÖWITH, Karl, Meaning in History, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1949;
VOEGELIN, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2000.

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to offer by way of an alternative to the way of things. That during the

last decade when there was something of a boom in the revival of the
discipline from the left, most of which amounted to piling through the
history of the concept of oikonomia, from Aristotle and the Church
Fathers down to the present, just to proclaim “There you go—that’s how
we got neoliberalism” was frankly unsurprising.06 Political theology
does not smash idols—rather, it insists that they have never really gone
away, maybe never can, no matter how monstrous or dear they might
be. It is haunted by the thought that no one shall ever rid it of this
turbulent priest.
Walter Benjamin in his famous Theses on the Philosophy of
History asks us to accept that inside Marxism a theological dwarf was
always hiding. This is not hard to do, for as historian Norman Cohn
realised, if you want to understand where the dream of socialism
comes from then you must understand the reception of the Classical
Golden Age and the ongoing influence of Plato’s Republic in the Middle
Ages and their marriage with millenarianism.07 Far more notable is
that the Marxian “puppet” with its labour theory of value is in fact an
Aristotelian one. As R. H. Tawney memorably put it: “Marx was the last
of the Schoolmen.”08 And yet, at the same time, this means that we
must also accept with Benjamin that empty, homogenous time in which
there is nothing but wreckage and thwarted desires piled up shall
remain the constant until the very last moment of forever. Only then
shall messianic time disjunctively appear and make up for everything
that has ever been suffered and lost. Can we do that? Maybe come
back in another millennium or five.
Eric Voegelin, by comparison, expended decades on the per-
nicious legacy of Gnosticism and millenarianism in modern thought.
Perhaps the reader has come across the “trads” throwing the beastly
G-word about like it were some sort of special sauce in which they
might drown all their enemies and then some. Nonetheless, in the end
Voegelin was compelled to give up the “history of ideas” hunting for
Gnostic “derailing” quite simply because he realised that he too was a
creature in history and thus under obligation to try to understand and
describe, even try himself to repeat the experiences of cosmic order
of Plato and Aristotle that had seemingly set everything else since in

06 See especially: AGAMBEN, Giorgio, The Kingdom and the Glory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; LESHEM,
Dotan, The Origins of Neoliberalism, Columbia MS: Columbia University Press, 2017; KOTSKO, Adam, Neoliberalism’s
Demons, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Admittedly the last of these is a little different in that it does attempt
to pose an alternative to “neoliberalism”—a mixture of “death of God” theology and social democracy, the victory of
which the author seems to come close to assuming is both imminent and perhaps even inevitable. The irony here is
not that the book is naïve per se, but rather that it seems to have been written for a generic American liberal audience
and is far less theological, let alone theologically ambitious or interesting, compared with his prior and rather desolate
The Prince of This World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
07 COHN, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London: Mercury Books, 1962, pp. 203–208.
08 TAWNEY, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, New York: Mentor Books, 1961, p. 39.

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motion.09 He also more than realised that the very Gnosticism he was
trying to chase out was also present in even Paul and the Gospel of
John, which is why it just kept on endlessly coming back. While “every-
one I don’t like is a Gnostic” is too common by far, rare indeed does it
seem for many to accept the step of the necessary leap of faith into
the dark in search for the barely articulable experience of “order” as
Voegelin tried. In the end, the conspiracy of political theology is not
some colossal mystified, totalising horror machine with no exit, but
rather that the only exit is for it to unironically turn you into a mystic.
Can we do that? I know I can and I shall tell you all about it at the end
of this essay.
But let us get to Schmitt. After his well-known dalliance with
Nazism, Carl Schmitt became increasingly morose at the possibility
that in the post-war period the world no longer had anything like an
“outside”—it was now a single global system in which rather than wars
and combat between political ideologies, there were now only “police
actions”. Schmitt’s obsession with political violence and fear of its
disappearance and “neutralisation”, rather like that of Georges Sorel,
whose conception of “mythic violence” exerted so much influence on
him, is often so odd as to be buffoonish. For instance, in an appendix
to Political Theology II we find him desperately trying to force the word
stasis in the description of the Trinity by the Church Father Gregory
of Nazianzus to take on the meaning it had in ancient Greek politics of
political faction and revolt rather than the mere “standing apart” dis-
tinction of the three members.10 In the beginning there was Dissention.
It is one thing to find in the Kabbalists the idea of the fifth sephirah,
the Geburah or Judgement of God, that excessively spills over, bring-
ing suffering and violence into the world (which is carried down into
Boehme and thereafter Schelling, Žižek, even Land’s Cthelll “world
soul”), but one can almost feel Schmitt sweating at the possibility that
the world is not nearly ontologically violent enough.
“Political theology is polytheistic as every myth is polytheistic”,
so Schmitt once wrote.11 There is always competition between myths,
narratives and powers over who gets to control the political machinery
and perhaps no era in a very long time if ever was quite so violently
“mythic” and confounding in its competing ideologies and claims as
that of the first half of this last century. Do we live in a “mythic” age?
One can now, with a little hindsight and clarity, begin to look back
over the 2010s and Platform Revolution, during which, for a brief

09 VOEGELIN, Eric, Anamnesis, Columbia MS and London: University of Missouri Press, 1978. On the “Gnostic” ele-
ments in the Gospel of John and in Paul see especially the late Order and History Vol. V: In Search of Order (Columbia
MS and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
10 SCHMITT, Carl, Political Theology II, New York: Polity, 2008, pp. 122–123.
11 SCHMITT, Carl, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939, Hamburg:
Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940, p. 17.

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moment, everyone took it upon themselves to (post)ironically play at

communism, fascism, anarchism, post-Moldbuggian Hyper-Agrarian
Posadism. One is left not so much with a feeling of pity at our naivety,
nor even dawning awareness of the banal fact that most of it was little
more than a rather stupid “computer game” that the libs were always
going to win and merely use to level up, quite simply because they had
real institutional power out in meatspace. Rather, the matter is that
so very little of political theological note was said of it all until very
late. “Wokeness is a Religion”, the American liberal “Great Awokening”
or secularised evangelical “Fourth Awakening”, arrived as a meme well
after the rotten prison hulk of the Platform Slump had arrived in har-
bour. As far as I am aware, there has not even been a single damn book
of note on the subject.
Where the “Awokening” has been cut and paste as a meme, there
has been very little to it, often that the touted secular religion of
intersectionality is merely filling a structural gap where Christianity
used to go.12 There is of course a second kind of “take” on this meme,
often slightly more interesting, that consciously associates American
“wokeness” with the legacy and secularisation of radical Nonconformist
Protestantism in the US.13 Ah, now we’re getting warmer. Nonetheless,
this rarely if ever goes into much detail. Instead, in order to find
anyone even vaguely willing to put any effort into taking it seriously
one has to descend into the depths of the various “trad” and “weird
right” types,14 most of whom simply seem to be channelling some pale
semblance of neo-reactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin,
who, a decade ago, between bouts of foaming Carlylean post-ironic
rhetoric about handing over America to airline pilots, used to mention
“Creeping Calvinism” a great deal, if only, as we have argued elsewhere,
without ever really saying where exactly he first got it from.15 These
days in spite of basically having become a mainstream right wing
institution he’s rather more boring, though some of his poems aren’t
too shabby. The discourse of 2021 is not that of 2007. New Atheism is
as long since over as the need to have to leap through hoops of irony in
order to get people to buy the once bespoke notion that the American
left liberal elite are a right pack of conniving, power-hungry bastards.
More than anything one cannot help but think that in nearly
all instances the meme of “Awokening” exists as little more than

12 For an example of this common genre, see: PATTERSON, James M., “Wokeness and the New Religious
Establishment”, in: National Affairs, 49, Fall 2021, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/
wokeness-and-the-new-religious-establishment/.
wokeness-and-the-new-religious-establishment/
13 COLLINS, Sean and BOTTUM, Joseph, “Wokeness: Old Religion in a New Bottle”, in: Spiked, 14/08/2021,
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/14/wokeness-old-religion-in-new-bottle/.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/14/wokeness-old-religion-in-new-bottle/
14 Want to see some old Moldbuggery in a new bottle? HARRINGTON, Mary, “There’s Nothing Woke About Crypto”, in:
Unherd, 19/11/2021, https://unherd.com/2021/11/theres-nothing-woke-about-crypto/
https://unherd.com/2021/11/theres-nothing-woke-about-crypto/.
15 RATCLIFFE, Jonathan, “Rebooting the Leviathan: NRx and the Millennium”, in: b2o, 02/04/2020,
https://www.boundary2.org/2020/04/jonathan-ratcliffe-rebooting-the-leviathan-nrx-and-the-millennium/.
https://www.boundary2.org/2020/04/jonathan-ratcliffe-rebooting-the-leviathan-nrx-and-the-millennium/

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a shibboleth, a team-building exercise, a territorial in-joke. Often

it is simply a passing snort from TradCaths to the tune that the
Reformation has turned out rather badly indeed. Tut tut. The older
fellow who first told me about Moldbug back in the early 2010s seemed
particularly keen on the “meme” because he worked with many liberal
atheist Boomer types who considered themselves very clever people,
and there seemed no better put-down, no more superior an ironic
revenge than the idea that they were a product of Christianity. Of
course, he never said this to their faces any more than anyone does
now. No one is going to have a proper conversation with “the libs” about
the past five hundred years of theology (“As if they’d even care!” I hear
you say), any more than they might with the evangelical Rapture people,
California “New Agers”, and anyone else over whom the shared geneal-
ogy of Nonconformist “woo” might seem to linger.
The problem with political theology is that even in its high-
est, most scholarly forms it often gets little further than our silly
“Awokening” meme—a kind of repeated in-joke that can go decades
without being told, then being resurrected for a little while, and then
once more depart into oblivion. Political theology has an amnesia
problem, because, as we have already been beastly enough to pro-
pose, its instrumentality is nearly always simply abreaction, cope and
intellectual fad for the purpose of sewing team sports uniforms. As
one biographer put it concerning Carl Schmitt after his Nuremberg
trial, he “now portrays himself simply as a myth. He makes himself the
centre of his own world by creating a private mythology composed of
aspects taken from classical mythology, classical theories of the state
and classical literature.”16 The point, perhaps, should be to avoid this
kind of purely defensive mythic barrier at all costs, whether one might
find it efficacious for the production of some sort of mythic Schmittian
“friends and enemies” division or otherwise. This is, of course, a very,
very hard thing to do, though there are, heaven forbid, more than Two
Things in the world, as strange as that might sound to some, and as
basic as dichotomy is to what someone like William James would call
“common sense”. It should not be overlooked that the reason we find
Schmitt absurdly trying to find dissention in the Trinity is quite simply
because Erik Peterson had pointed out to him the very obvious fact that
the Trinity has three persons in it.
To count as high as Three, as Plato also managed in the Timaeus
concerning the mysterious Khora reachable only through analogical
“bastard reasoning”,17 leaves us with the strange possibility that for
inside and outside, being and becoming, sacred and secular, friends

16 NOACK, Paul, Carl Schmitt: Eine Biographie, Propyläen: Berlin, 1993, p. 294. Translation here care of Michael Hoelzl
and Graham Ward (Political Theology II, p. 139, n. 61).
17 PLATO, Timaeus, 49f.

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and enemies, what we have been waiting upon since the beginning of
forever is the unveiling of a messianic “place” that is neither a combi-
nation of the Two nor a mere mediator or Aufhebung, but something
distinct that then changes the perceived relational meaning(s) of them
entirely. We may well be waiting a very long time indeed for something
truly “post-secular” in the sense of even some alternative “new” third
vessel into which the failed theological dreams that were poured into
the secular may, in turn, then be poured into another vessel and start
the machine over again but differently. For now, at least, we remain
stuck in a world governed by the Lords of Creation and the homoge-
nous time of the endless cyclic repetition of katechon after katechon,
founding crime of “mythic violence” after founding crime, fugazi
millennium after fugazi millennium. Can we do that? Have you tried
turning the world off and on again? Have you tried throwing yourself on
the ground like Thomas Aquinas and begging God to help you solve the
irreconcilable?
The best that we have for now at least is simply the realisation
and concomitant challenge that team sports are easy, but thinking
is hard. What would it mean to take the dumb “Great Awokening”
meme seriously and do something with it? To even accept it and use
it as a launching point to put meaning back into the tired old term
“Nonconformism”? So I have detailed elsewhere in the past on this
very topic, Jonathan Kirsch’s A History of the End of the World has
quite a bit to say about the two “tectonic plates” of Nonconformist
millenarianism in America, one epitomised by obsession with the
Rapture, the other “secularised” into the idea of being the magical land
of perpetual progress.18 Eric Voegelin also dealt with the idea, and
argued that the Anglosphere had experienced a “second reformation”
in the form of movements such as Wesleyanism which had encouraged
active political participation and the enlarging of democratic franchise.
This is even if he was more than aware that traces still remained of
the sorts of tendencies towards creating “perfect” elect communities
epitomised in the phenomenon of Calvinist Geneva and other similar
hothouse experiments during the Reformation.19
The great literary critic Harold Bloom was also certainly
convinced of the ongoing influence of radical Nonconformism in
American culture. As he saw it, the Nonconformist’s instant access
to God through the pneuma (spirit) lay at the base of all manner of
expressions of the “American Religion”—the world-feeling of intense
self-importance as the agent of history.20 There is also some rather
interesting new material on the influence of Behmenist and Kabbalist
18 KIRSCH, Jonathan, A History of the End of the World, New York: Harper Collins, 2009, esp. p. 185f.
19 VOEGELIN, Eric, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Vol. 11: Published Essays 1953–65, Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2000, esp. pp. 71–72, 185–187.
20 BLOOM, Harold, The American Religion, New York: Chu Hartley Publishers, 2006.

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ideas by early Quaker settlers on the formation of the American

concept of Manifest Destiny.21 Much has for that matter been written
on the strange correlation in the Progressive Era in the US in which
large numbers of reformers and pro-reform journalists seem to have
come from especially rigid evangelical households in which, as in the
early days of US settlement and “visible saints”, it was expected that
one was to have religious epiphanies, but these never arrived.22 So
too did psychologist Paul C. Vitz back in the 1970s explored the more
than obvious links between American consumer “self-psychology”—
Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Carl Rogers—and its prehistory in radical
Protestantism.23 All of this is but the tip of a very big iceberg indeed.
For that matter, while Weber certainly overplayed his hand con-
cerning the importance of Calvinist Predestination in the formation
of the “protestant work ethic”, British socialist R. H. Tawney long ago
did the necessary work to the show that something very strange did
happen to British Nonconformism in the last quarter of the 17th century
in its discovery of the mercantile way of life as the Christian way of life
and the idea that the poor were simply lazy. Nonetheless, as he also
knew well, Nonconformist businessmen also exerted a powerful legacy
in England and America in the service of the poor and the abolition of
slavery.24 So one might note, the Guardian newspaper, that ultimate
Anglo left lib organ, which recently celebrated its two-hundredth anni-
versary, emerged from this very particular world-feeling.25 Capital has,
perhaps, always been as “woke” as it has been beastly. One might also
make mention of the once very influential historical work of British
Marxist and Nonconformist Christopher Hill—in particular The World
Turned Upside Down and Liberty Against the Law that did much, if
for only a brief moment, to dispel the enduring royalist agitprop that
nothing much at all happened during the Protectorate except Cromwell
cancelling Christmas and dancing.26 In spite of this, there is not to my
knowledge such a thing as a Big Book of Anglo Prot Weirdness in which
libertarian gun-hoarders sit side by side with “New Agers”, Gerrard
Winstanley and Lady Conway, and all those tiresome American liberals
who keep saying that they’re on the “right side of history”.
The funny thing about the “right side of history”, as everyone
knows, is that everyone wants some, whether you’re the “moral majority”
or the tiny virtuous outsider “elect” rattling around an enormous Evil

21 OGREN, Brian, Kabbalah and the Founding of America, New York: New York University Press, 2021.
22 See Thomas C. Leonard’s “Religion and Evolution in Progressive Era Political Economy: Adversaries or Allies?”
(in: History of Political Economy, 43.3, 2011, pp. 437–438) for a good list of where to get started on this topic.
23 VITZ, Paul C., Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans Publishing, 1979.
24 TAWNEY, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, esp. pp. 224–226.
25 VINER, Katherine, “Times Change But the Guardian’s Values Don’t”, in: The Guardian, 05/05/2021, https://www.
theguardian.com/media/2021/may/05/guardian-200-anniversary-covid-pandemic-journalism-editor-mission/.
theguardian.com/media/2021/may/05/guardian-200-anniversary-covid-pandemic-journalism-editor-mission/
26 HILL, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down, London: Penguin Books, 2019; HILL, Christopher, Liberty Against
the Law, London: Penguin Books, 1996.

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Empire. Having one’s outsider cake and eating it too is, as always, the
most popular choice, as surely as Matthew 21 tried to solve a particular
problem in the comprehension of a certain Old Testament prophecy by
having Christ ride into Jerusalem not with two donkeys, but riding both
of them at once. Here it bears mentioning that as deeply serious as the
Acts of the Apostles with Paul and friends drifting from place to place,
avoiding capture and telling fine convincing speeches might seem to
be, it would most certainly not exist as is without the ancient Greek
romance novel and its endless silly string of contrived misadventures
around the Mediterranean as a frame.27 That, in the end, those under
the auspices of Tyche or Eros finally get to live “happily ever after”
after endless deferrals and dangers is perhaps the greatest fantasy of
the Hellenistic and the “unhappy consciousness” resulting from the
cosy world of the polis giving way to strange and distant powers over
imperial “large spaces”. This little narrative machine stands behind
most every silly old dime novel of contrived misadventure and every
“road trip” movie you’ve ever seen. But it also stands behind an entire
religion and all its secular offspring, behind entire Empires.
St. Paul might have got himself decapitated (spoilers), but what
he started led the Roman “large space” to become a truly ecumenical
one, a cradle for universalism. And there is most certainly no such
thing as universalism without both empire and ecumenical religion
to fill it. So Voegelin says somewhere on the subject, the problem
with this ecumenic expansion outwards, this symbolic filling in of
areas carved out by conquest, is that so very often it has come at the
expense of expansion inwards, into the anagogic understanding of
what the very symbolisation is really about. Once you sign on for being
the katechon, the Holy Roman Empire charged with keeping Order in
the world until you inevitably get co-opted by the Beast and are annihi-
lated by God, once you win-but-have-not-yet-lost, good old Bergsonian
“openness” tends to cop it in favour of structuring “closed society”.
Concretisation, dogmatism descends. All that was once airy hardens
into shite, and it is the work of aeons to try to avert this, to refresh it,
to keep the damn thing on life support. If you fail you may find yourself
centuries later having to live out the coprolitic remains of all manner of
undead, strange theological decisions. Can we do that?
For instance, when people today ritualistically mope about the
End of History and curse Francis Fukuyama’s name, they seem to
overlook the very obvious fact that Eusebius had already announced
the End with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity nearly two
millennia prior—one ruler on Earth to mirror the One God in Heaven.
Who is he really speaking of here, the Emperor or God?

27 HOLZBERG, Niklas, The Ancient Novel: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 22–24, 34.

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 Jonathan Ratcliffe

The name of the one Supreme Ruler of the universe is

proclaimed to all: the gospel of glad tidings connects the
human race with its Almighty King, declaring the grace
and love of the heavenly Father to his children on the
earth.28

In the same way on the coming of Augustus and Christ, each seems to
meld equally into the other too:

For before Him there was great variety of government,

all nations being under tyrannical or democratic
constitutions… until the Lord and Saviour came, and
concurrently with His coming, the first Roman Emperor,
Augustus, conquered the nations, variety of government
was almost completely ended, and peace was spread
through all the world, according to the prophecy before
us which expressly says of Christ’s disciples: “Wherefore
they shall be glorified to the ends of the earth, and this
shall be peace.29

It might be very upsetting for our Catholic friends to hear us suggest

as much, if even with a little tongue in cheek, that no, no, you are not
living out some “Dark Fukuyama”—a horrifying final curse against
which no words, no actions, no events seem to possess even the faint-
est power—but rather a “Dark Constantine” that has never really left.
The political theological effects of the Constantinian revolution have
been a disaster for the human race, or at the very least for Christianity
and those who continue to live in its wake, ploughing all thought end-
lessly back into mindless obedience to the “king’s two bodies”, the
naive univocity of Being, in which there is nothing but just so many
little power-hungry imagines Dei seeking to swallow and LARP divine
“projections”. If Christ is King, then he scuttles the machinery of all
other kings forever as surely as the Sermon on the Mount unleashes
a profoundly anarchic and demanding way of life that cannot ever be
truly perfected or reterritorialised. Wheresoever the conniving imita-
tion appears let it be defaced, let it be rejected as phantasma (ghost,
idol, copy)—all the more readily when it comes in the name of “peace”,
of “care”, of “love”, “diversity”, for it has always done so and as long as it
lives out its ghastly undead existence it always shall. Can you not feel
the great, cold, iconoclastic Puritan urge rising up in you to condemn

28 EUSEBIUS, Oration in Praise of Constantine, 10.2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2504.htm

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2504.htm.
29 EUSEBIUS, Demonstratio Evangelica, Book VII, Chapter 2, https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/
eusebius_de_09_book7.htm.
eusebius_de_09_book7.htm

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and shit on its whole mortifying, imaginary and symbolic theatre?

Christian anarchy remains, as ever, the option.
Of all people of recent memory, perhaps American science
fiction writer Philip K. Dick has felt most profoundly the uncanny,
horrifying feeling that the Roman empire never really ended. As his
biographer Emanuele Carrère explains:

The average American sees nothing, but Rome is the

underlying reality of the world in which he lives. The
Empire never ended. It has merely hidden itself from the
eyes of its subjects. It has spun a fantasy universe, like
a film projected onto a prison wall, a shameless fiction
that the inmates take for a factual documentary depicting
nineteen centuries of history and the world in which those
years have culminated. But while the movie plays, the war
goes on.30

As a child, PKD was haunted by a recurrent dream of being in a large

bookshop looking for an old sci-fi story titled The Empire Never Ended,
but was never able to find it. Eventually it came for him, he found him-
self living in it. In March 1974, or “3-74” as he was later to term it, after a
visit to the dentist and drugged off his face, he was stricken with what
he could only later call a divine invasion that was to completely change
the meaning of his life and work. An entity that he called VALIS/Zebra,
an aspect of Christ assembling itself backwards through time from the
millennium in order to defeat the Empire, reaching into the sleeping
minds of people here and there awakening them, revealed to him that
he was not merely a bum with a few good books living at the end of
the 20th century, but simultaneously also an early Christian in 70 AD
called Thomas.31 PKD was thereafter to embark on a massive project
attempting to synthesise the entirety of Western philosophy and theol-
ogy (and some Hindu and Taoist elements too) simply in order to try to
understand exactly what happened to him, how history seemed at once
to be resolutely “anamnetic”—backwards facing, towards remembering,
recall, simultaneous existence in the past—and “progressive” in the
sense of the then very popular “transhumanist” evolutionary theology
of Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin (though he admitted that
he had never read a single word of the latter). PKD wanted everything.
He wanted Christ on two donkeys, so to speak. He wanted Spinozan
immanence and Gnostic transcendence and escape at the same time.32
30 CARRÈRE, Emmanuele, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K Dick, London:
Bloomsbury, 2006, p. 223.
31 Most famously turned into narrative form in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (London: Corgi Books, 1981).
32 See: DICK, Philip K., “Selections from the Exegesis”, in: SUTIN, Lawrence (ed.), The Shifting Realities of Philip K.
Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, p. 320ff.

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 Jonathan Ratcliffe

As rather rough, frenetic, even amateurish as much of PKD’s

Exegesis material on these experiences might seem, one cannot help
but think that this utterly quixotic attempt to synthesise everything has
far more in common with the abstruse efforts of Renaissance thinkers
like Giordano Bruno and Ralph Cudworth than with anything like the
“New Agers” of the last century with whom obvious parallels are all too
easy to draw, especially when we find him talking about VALIS invading
him through his DNA lineage and now rather trite sounding ideas like
our world being but a digital “simulation”—a purgatory of tape record-
ings on an endless loop. How could the greatest speculative fiction
writer of the last century, one of the most astounding thinkers ever,
take this sort of stuff deadly seriously? He needed everything to agree,
which of course meant that the science fiction of PKD had to agree
with it too. And yet, like Spinoza—more than Bruno or Cudworth—one
cannot help but think that he is merely using the language of others—
including himself as an “other”—in order to try to express something
very different, something that could hardly be expressed with what was
available at all.
There is some famous old footage of Phil describing his “3-74”
experience at a sci-fi convention in France in 1977 as part of a talk
titled “If You Find This World Is Bad, You Should See Some of the
Others”.33 The combination of confusion, amusement and shock on the
faces of the members of the audience who expected they were turning
out to hear a guy just talk about writing books is palpable. PKD was
without a doubt extremely odd, even probably quite insufferable as a
person. Were he with us, one cannot help but think he would be sharing
5G conspiracies and sliding into the DMs of young ladies everywhere.
In November 1971 this most paranoiac of 20th-century philosophers,
believing that someone wanted to steal one of his unfinished man-
uscripts, found the prophecy fulfilled when someone actually did,
blowing up part of his house in the process. Ultimately, however, he
was forced to whittle down the list of potential suspects to no one
but … himself: “I blew up my house and forgot I did it … I blew up my
house to convince myself I was sane.”34 Is there anyone else of whom
such an absurdity is recorded? It’s like something out of the Lives
of the Eminent Philosophers with their terribly forced ironic deaths.
Heraclitus? Died of dropsy of course.
Nonetheless, PKD stands for something (perhaps something
of a very particular time and place now passed) but something very
important nonetheless. Something exceedingly rare in this last century
and liable to be even rarer in this one. PKD was a person who refused

33 JOHNSON, Sam, “Philip K Dick Speech / Metz, France [1977]”, YouTube, 15/02/2021, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=xI6H4JcMpAU. Speech reprinted in Philip K. Dick’s The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, pp. 233–258.
watch?v=xI6H4JcMpAU
34 DICK, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, p. 328.

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 ŠUM #17

to believe that the “system” of Christianity, all the possible orthodoxies

and heresies, had long been ploughed, and most of them found to be,
as Chesterton once famously said of heresy—“boring”. Indeed, what
could be more intensely boring than “Gnosticism” with its evil or sim-
ply incompetent creator and little transcendent spirits trying to escape
the Hell of meatspace? Since at least the epochal publication of A
Voyage to Arcturus in 1920, the tone of much of 20th century speculative
fiction was a resolutely “Gnostic” one when it came to asking about the
Big Questions: a downloading of secret teachings about the Fall of cre-
ation, the malevolence of the Creator.35 PKD’s 1965 The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch may well be the greatest piece of “Gnostic” cosmic
paranoia ever produced.36 When did you take the Chooz-E? Maybe
Palmer Eldritch was always there, immanent to everything. One might
be strongly reminded of the sort of paranoiac sentiment we find at the
start of Roberto Esposito’s Two concerning political theology—when did
we enter into its little dispositif? 37 The day and the hour can never be
known. Once you have stepped over the line and the door has slammed
shut maybe there is no way out of it at all …
And yet if the later post-3-74 Phil was a Gnostic (he himself
claimed as much), then he was a very odd Gnostic, as diverse, bizarre
and often overlapping as the “Hellenistic soup” of antiquity was out of
which arose “orthodox” Christianity, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism and
Gnosticism. If there is any “serious” thinking with which to compare his
Gnosticism, it is the Gnostic Non-Christianity of François Laruelle. To
Laruelle gnosis stands for a messianic last instance in which the truth
is always-already known, always immanent to the lived-without-life
of humanity but forever put off and delayed, in spite of the colossal
theological machinery of Athens and Jerusalem descending upon
Christ two thousand years ago and proclaiming that he had completely
fulfilled the Jewish and/or the Greek Law.38 Like PKD suspended in time
simultaneously between the “anamnetic” Thomas and the “final” VALIS,
Laruelle would have us give ourselves over to the first becoming last
and the last becoming first, but strangely: forever unable to complete
or totalise the system.
Nevertheless, when in Christo-Fiction Laruelle speaks of a
“Quantum Christ”’ existing prior to being “decided” as fulfilling The Law,
the immediate temptation, as with the Space Gnosticism of PKD, might
be to snort and file it away as one more specimen of late 20th-century
“New Ageism”. Once upon a time there was an awful lot of this sort of
stuff about—blogs and web pages crammed to gills with eye-aching
35 LINDSAY, David, A Voyage to Arcturus, London: Pan/Ballantine, 1972.
36 DICK, Philip K., The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, New York: Doubleday, 1965.
37 ESPOSITO, Two: The Machine of Political Theology, p. 1.
38 LARUELLE, François, Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, New York: Columbia University Press,
2015. See also: LARUELLE, François, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

2253
 Jonathan Ratcliffe

animated gifs and brightly coloured fonts proclaiming some almighty

Secret Teaching and the End of Days peppered with little folk-recep-
tions of quantum physics, chaoplexity and information theory. If I have
ever been susceptible to any species of “Gnosticism” it is by virtue of
the fact that an old friend of mine was such an avid collector of this
sort of stuff that I find myself completely unable to take “complexity”
seriously at all as anything but cosmic kitsch, even when spoken about
by very clever scientists, for if something like it does describe our
world, then it must surely be the product of a very tasteless Demiurge.
Such is the eternal problem of “folk religion”. The peasant in his des-
peration to understand using what he has, who believes the soul to be
a bone or God to be but a very big worm in a cosmic cheese, always
threatens to invade Very Serious Things.
If anything like Laruellian “Gnosticism” has ever really existed,
it was not in antiquity nor in the 20th century, but in the anamnetic
return to the start that explodes everywhere in the 16th–17th centuries in
the form of the “standstill” of the Radical Reformation—the horrifying
thought that maybe no one since the Apostles had possessed any theo-
logical (and thereby also political) legitimacy at all. The only option was
to become a “Seeker”, to turn towards pure lived experience and the
attempt to articulate it.39 One of the things that endlessly amazes me is
the fact that so little is often said about the real revolution that came
with Cromwell’s Protectorate. The collapse of the Star Chamber and
state censor brought on the first great literary externalisation of the
“inner worlds” of very normal people in the history of the world. Before
everyone had a novel or couple of good tweets in them everyone had
a pamphlet in them—they wanted to talk about their religious experi-
ences, their misadventures and their struggles. A lot of it is downright
weird, tragic, even darkly humorous.
For example, among Familists, Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and a
thousand other varieties of mostly short-lived “enthusiasm” of the era
we meet one Mrs. Hannah Allen, a woman who at one point in her life
became so convinced that she was the evillest creature that had ever
lived, that even the Devil might be saved, but not her: “My Sins are so
great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all
the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man, mine are
greater. There is no word so near the Comprehension of the dread-
fulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation.”40
39 For an introduction to the Radical Reformation and its political theological consequences see: RATCLIFFE,
Jonathan, “Absolute Standstill 1/2”, Mechanical Owl, 22/09/2021, https://mechanicalowlblog.wordpress.com/2021/09/22/
absolute-standstill-1-2/.
absolute-standstill-1-2/
40 ALLEN, Hannah, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with That Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen, London:
John Wallis, 1683. Most easily accessible in Allen INGRAM, Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, pp. 29–35). For a good introduction to this era and its strangenesses,
including those of Mrs. Allen and others like her, see: RYRIE, Alec, “How to be a Puritan Atheist”, Gresham College,
YouTube, 03/04/2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNu6VbtdyE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNu6VbtdyE.

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What could Mrs. Allen have possibly done to regard herself as so

utterly damned? The answer is that she hadn’t really done anything.
She was just a very unstable and amusingly narcissistic person who
“much delighted” for a while in thinking herself “The Monster”, though
she did eventually find happiness and peace and wrote a very inter-
esting book about it all. Sometimes the “Seeker” romance is a tragedy,
sometimes a comedy, often both by turn without anything like a clear
ending at all—at least not yet.
Perhaps, reader, you have come across many times online
a rather tacky family of reactionary memes asking you to Return
to Tradition. Sometimes the “u” is even swapped out for a “v” to be
especially quaint, like the funny “e”s in “ye olde tea shoppe”. The trad,
God bless his hide, seems often to think of Tradition like some dear
little musical box gifted him by Nona from The Old Country. No, it is
far more like a storage locker willed to you by an obscure and possibly
devious uncle, by someone not unlike PKD who crashes on your couch,
hits on your wife and stays up all hours writing weird books off his tits
on amphetamines. Do you really want to see what’s in there? You might
seriously regret it.
And yet, everywhere and at every moment we are always-already
returning to tradition due to the sheer weight of the history of theo-
logical decisions and their decaying half-lives, whether we like it or
not. If so, then like dear silly Phil and Mrs. Allen one may choose to
become a Seeker. While the Empire never ended and may well have
generations upon generations still left on the clock, neither has the
great formative romance of discovery existing forever contemporary
with it, quietly at its periphery ever ended either. We are all PKD and
Thomas at all times, and even VALIS too. There still remain endless
“quantum” Christianities yet to be found and foreclosed into Schmittian
“private mythologies” and team sports, yet to have been passed into
the dogmatic and secularising machinery and out the other side into
something else entirely, perhaps even that most impossible of possibil-
ities—the Third Thing hidden and obscured since the very foundation
of the world.

Jonathan Ratcliffe lives in a collapsing hovel in rural Australia. He blogs on all things political theological at
https://mechanicalowlblog.wordpress.com/. He is, among other things, a scholar of Mongolian epic literature.
https://mechanicalowlblog.wordpress.com/

2255
 

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Miroslav Griško

White Lotus

You know, the first cell never died. The first cell only split.
Right? And ever divided. And every cell in our body is still
an instance of the first cell that split off from that very
first cell. There was only one cell on this planet, as far as
we know.
—Joscha Bach

In this life dying is not new,

But living, of course, is not any newer.
—Sergej Esenin (the final lines of his suicide note)

On the morning of June 11, 1936, Robert E. Howard, best known for his
literary creation Conan the Barbarian, receives news that his mother
will not wake from the coma she has fallen into and immediately
shoots himself. Thirty-two cuts on the surface of the world fall into
alignment and trace the outline of a white hole, which must be passed
through before it closes. The method for traversal is hidden in a pro-
gram that underlies a straightforward practice of ancestor worship.
Howard’s suicide at the age of thirty is an example of the execution of
this program and its completion on Earth.

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Psychopathological diagnostics of self-destructive behaviour and

contrasting romanticist or post-clinical valourisations of mental illness
all obscure and distort a pure moment in time, when a basic hatred for
life is the same as an indifference towards it. Irrational self-extermina-
tion carried out in this moment separates itself from all counterfeits,
and suicide becomes militantly ascetic. A method to become dead to
the world can also become a method to float above it, and zero interest
in metabolic survival is the genesis of the program to attain this state.
Ancestor worship is the initial and just barely beyond animal-level
awareness of both program and state. But when ancestor worship is
asceticised, four billion years of uninterrupted cellular life are extin-
guished in a negation, which can only be above any and all forms of life.
Suicidal action slips through a crack in time, of which the rest of the
world is unaware, and what from outside looks like absolute defeatism
is inner devotion to a higher form of extinction.
The concept of a cellular automaton, developed by Von Neumann
and Ulam in response to the problem of how to design a self-replicat-
ing machine, describes a base set of instructions and their iteration
through a series of discrete states.01 A discrete state is a moment in
time whose specific properties are equivalent to the particular position
and arrangement of the cells that constitute the greater automaton,
whereas all discrete states are generated by an initial instruction
and belong to the same ongoing series, which this instruction sparks.
Whatever degree of complexity the properties of a discrete state may
demonstrate, they remain reducible to the initial instruction and
only designate a moment in time during the instruction’s unfolding.
Although they are a computational model and, accordingly, a functional
instead of biochemical model, cellular automata depict the operation
of an instruction protocol, which is formally equivalent to the origin
of life. Abiogenesis and everything that follows from it can be under-
stood as nothing but iterations of an initial command prosecuted in
time. Somehow the first cell stabilises itself four billion years ago
under a flood of hostile conditions, just long enough to establish the
initial instruction for its self-replication. Ascetic self-extermination
techniques practised four billion years later understand that their deep
trigger is a primal command strong enough not to implode before it
can send out its first signal.
Ancestor worship begins when the first cell does not commit
suicide. Not committing suicide is only the blind prosecution of a
command, but the first cell’s self-replication is already the first form
of the command’s veneration. Ongoing iterations of the instruction
also contain the germ for more abstract types of worship within them,
although abstract worship can only arise when the instruction and
01 VON NEUMANN, John, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, University of Illinois Press, 1966.

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its execution can be understood as pure form. Standard genealogies

of God classify ancestor worship as the first religion,02 and this is
because it is, despite its elementariness, the first formal abstraction
of the primal command for self-replication. An ancestor can only
become ancestor and be worshipped because an ancestor is killed by
the same signal and the same command that becomes devotion to him.
Instruction and its iteration require the disappearance of iteration, so
that the next iteration can take place—the transition from one discrete
state to another discrete state—and ancestor worship begins when
the hole which an iteration leaves behind becomes just as binding as
another iteration of the instruction. Ancestor worship understands
a concrete transmission through successive moments in time as the
potential for communication with that which lies on the other side of
the passing of a command. When the aboriginal mind of ancestor wor-
ship receives the first signal from the first cell, faces of the dead and
another detached and remote state come out of the silence between
discrete states and between iterations. Hyperawareness of the hole
which iteration leaves behind means that the shadow of an instruction
is the truth of its command.
In his study of Vedic ascesis, Mircea Eliade describes its
method as a relentless “deconditioning”03 program, which eliminates
everything inessential, so that four billion years of biochemistry can
be reduced to the bare pulse of first cell signal.04 Deconditioning as
self-extermination technique does not cancel first cell signal, but is
absolute immersion in its implicit instruction protocol. The negation at
the core of deconditioning operates like the inverse of the affirmation
of an iteration, although without denying first cell signal strength.
Deconditioning does not understand first cell signal strength in terms
of the endurance of an instruction through time—four billion years of
the instruction’s continuous iteration and four billion years of biochem-
ical life that has never even once during these four billion years ever
been completely eradicated—but in terms of the blunt compression of
all moments in time into only the basic form of an iteration and its dis-
appearance. Awareness of the reducibility of all life to an instruction
and the transition it initiates from one discrete state to another dis-
crete state becomes the pulse which will animate a “deified human”:05
1 )  Eliade uses the term deconditioning to clarify the basic
motor of authentic ascetic practices in contrast to the tendencies of
a Kantian atmosphere of transcendental philosophy and, accordingly,
02 Ancestor worship was often classified as the first religion at the very outset of religious studies and
sociologies of religion in the nineteenth century. See, for example: SPENCER, Herbert, “On Ancestor
Worship and other Peculiar Beliefs”, in: The Fortnightly Review, https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2011/11/
on-ancestor-worship-and-other-peculiar-beliefs/.
on-ancestor-worship-and-other-peculiar-beliefs/
03 ELIADE, Mircea, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Routledge, 1958, p. xvi.
04 Or the Vedic “OM”.
05 ELIADE, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, p. 59.

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 Miroslav Griško

to an awareness of general conditions of possibility.06 If conditions

exhaust possibility—the scope of a particular transcendental, such as
the legitimate domain of reason in Kant—deconditioning names an
operation that understands the transcendental as an initial stricture,
which is then modified and recoded through the precise methods
contained in an ascetic program.
2 )  But transcendental modification and recoding is also just
another name for the history of the world.07 Four billion years of bio-
chemistry after first cell signal is equivalent to an escalating complex-
ity in conditions of possibility, and transcendental modification and
recoding as the history of the world is a single gradient, which includes
everything that follows from first genesis (or: all discrete states that
result from an initial instruction). Deconditioning functions according
to the reverse principle of a brutal minimalism, and to modify and
recode through negation is to only decode and rewind back to first cell
signal and, by extension, negate the history of the world, which is the
same as becoming indifferent and dead to it.
3 )  Reception of first cell signal through negation means that
deconditioning is a clandestine history of the world. It is not reducible
to a countercurrent or a contradiction in relation to the gradient of
transcendental modification and recoding, although, because decon-
ditioning is negation, this gradient is its initial enemy. Deconditioning
separates from the gradient in order to follow a covert artery back to
first cell signal. Whereas the starting point of deconditioning belongs
to the history of the world, its reception of first cell signal through
negation becomes incomprehensible to this history, to the sum of all
transcendentals, and initiates a stealth flow to a deified state. In this
clandestine history lies the closeness of a more refined and harshly
structured ascetic practice to ancestor worship’s primitive cognition
of ghost faces and holes in the world, which become like rudimentary
phenotypes and wombs for the instantiation of what Eliade alternately
calls a new übermensch, a new species and a new, entirely non-condi-
tioned state.

Deconditioning as overman creation is anti-Kantian, but also

anti-Nietzschean and anti-Chinese. Eliade describes Sino-overman
genesis as a method dedicated to an “indefinite prolongation of the life
of the material body”,08 which is nothing other than the continuation
of the same deep historical gradient of transcendental modification.
Ancient Chinese medicinal techniques or the downloading of indi-
vidual neural patterns into an upgraded version of WeChat are just

06 Ibid., p. xvi.
07 For example, Deleuze’s (Kantian) transcendental empiricism, or his Spinozism in general.
08 ELIADE, Yoga: Freedom and Immortality, p. 59.

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moments in time that all belong to the same history of the world09 to
which deconditioning acts like a shadow. Nietzschean overman cre-
ation as total affirmation and a simultaneous contempt for all types
of “ascetic ideal” identifies ascetic deification with a false overman,
since the negation at the core of ascetic practice is the same as a
fundamental “hostility to life”.10 The entire logic of Nietzschean über-
mensch turns around the anti-ascetic insight that overman creation
can only be achieved through affirmation, to the extent that negation
instead of affirmation aborts the first cell and the entire history of the
world, which is the only possible ovum for a new species and a new
human or post-human form. But the tendencies in ascetic practice
which Nietzsche opposed—hatred for life, emaciation, sadness—all
evoke the deep force of a negation that can access first cell signal
strength, whereas an ascetic path will in any case only be followed by
those who have had enough of life. Virgil’s lacrimae rerum—tears for
things—or Norinaga Motoori’s mono no aware—extreme sensitivity to
ephemera—are examples of the intense awareness of first cell pulse
and signal, of an iteration and its passing, and this awareness tends
towards devotion as well as grief.11 Melancholic poetics as experiential
overdose anticipates the inverse deadness of a fully deconditioned
state, since all that remains of the world is transience and an ethereal
and immaterial pressure. Although the intensity of this awareness
as sadness can trigger suicidal behaviour in reaction to it, the strict
deconditioning program needed to reach a deified state means that
all ascesis is suicide, but not all suicide is ascetic. From a position
outside this program, all these deaths can only look the same, because
the inner logic of a correct suicide is unrecognisable to any possible
recoding of the world.
In the period of his youth that immediately followed a fallout
with the Dadaists for what he considered to be their drift into a
superficial abstract art without any “deep dimension”12—their failure
to actualise the imperative “Dada is the virgin microbe”13—Julius
Evola intensely contemplates taking his own life. The suicides of Otto

09 In other words, in a computational approach to biology the difference between the human and a vision of the
post-human without all human (cellular) traces is ultimately (ontologically) trivial: post-humanism is just another
instance of computation (for example, different hardware and software than the human). Instead, the decisive contrast
in this approach is between what performs computation (the basic function of an instruction and the iteration of an
instruction) and what does not—the first cell is the first computer (or in the words of Joscha Bach, the first cell is the
first Turing machine) and abiogenesis is therefore computational genesis. However, even the physical laws of the
universe could be considered as instances of computation, and the research of, for example, Bach and Stephen
Wolfram proceeds in this direction.
10 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
11 The connection between lacrimae rerum and mono no aware was first made by Ivan Morris (The World of the
Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, Penguin, 1997, p. 197).
12 EVOLA, Julius, The Path of Cinnabar, Integral Tradition, 2009, p. 22.
13 Ibid., p. 19. The Dadaist virgin microbe could be interpreted as the first cell that never self-replicates and, as a result,
commits suicide: the negation of all life (or: first cell suicide is the self-extermination of the first computer; from another
perspective, that a computer (artificial intelligence) wants to commit suicide is a successful answer to the Turing Test).

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 Miroslav Griško

Weininger and Carlos Michelstaedter at the ages of twenty-two and

twenty-three, respectively, are Evola’s prototypes for an act of self-ex-
termination whose primary spark is a basic melancholy and sickness
in response to being alive in the world. But because suicide is not
necessarily ascetic, the equivalence of all negation also falls apart, and
true self-extermination comes from the awareness of a higher form of
extinction. Evola abandons his suicidal thoughts when during an espe-
cially desperate night he comes across a fragment from the Theravada
Buddhist text the Majjihima Nikaya: “He who takes extinction to be
extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinction, thinks of extinc-
tion, thinks mine is extinction, and rejoices in extinction, this person,
I say, does not know extinction.”14 Extinction belongs to a gradient that
is like a shadow gradient to the affirmative gradient of the history of
the world, which extinction is to negate. Just as the entire world can
only seem like something counterfeit from the overman position and
black hole enlightenment of a deified state, a deconditioning program
driven by negation possesses its own internal counterfeits. Delusions
and misrecognitions of extinction are corrected by the strictness and
instruction of a tested ascetic program. But even if an act of self-ex-
termination is contemplated or prosecuted without any intent to reach
some deified state, and the option of suicide is instead a consequence
of being the only remaining answer to life, the negation at the act’s
heart can always align itself with a purer extinction through the under-
standing that extinction has forms.15 War against the world is an initial
contrast between negation and affirmation. But if any negation is not
all negation, the decision to commit suicide or the decision not to com-
mit suicide can even become the same act—the devotion to a higher
form of extinction. World War III or final war is war between extinction
and its counterfeit, between negation and its counterfeit.
In 500 BC, Prince Siddhattha travels to a monastery in northern-
most India to investigate a mass suicide that has taken place among
the monks who live there.16 The militant deconditioning program taught
by the Buddha so as to leave behind the gradient of the world endorses
correctly performed suicide as a legitimate method to attain a deified
state. The case of the monk Godhika has already established the prec-
edence and orthodoxy of a correct suicide, as, in the final moments
of his life, being unable to meditate clearly and slipping back and
forth from an übermensch, enlightened dimension, he decides to take
his own life. When “the evil one” Mara, who torments the monk and

14 Ibid., p. 16.
15 That extinction has forms cancels any likeness that the negation of deconditioning or correct suicide might have to
the notion of a death drive, for which death is only the absence of life.
16 See: WILTSHIRE, Martin G., “The ‘Suicide’ Problem in the Pali Canon”, in: The International Journal of Buddhist
Studies, 6, 2, 1983, pp. 124–140.

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 ŠUM #17

disrupts his meditative practice, sees that Godhika “has taken the
knife”,17 the demon can only gasp and withdraw, as he knows that the
monk has at last achieved deification. The perfection of Godhika’s
suicide is an expression of the highest point of a gradient of extinction,
and Buddha must go through all the dead bodies at the monastery so
as to evaluate the correctness or incorrectness of the monks’ deaths.
In Theravada doctrine, the gradient of the world that is to be overcome
consists of thirty-one iterations of form (rūpa), whereas the fully
deconditioned human bears, as does the Buddha, thirty-two marks,
which indicate the attainment of a deified state above the world.18 That
every root of hair of a true ascetic is dark-coloured and that every true
ascetic has the image of a thousand-spoked wheel on the palms of his
hands are among the thirty-two marks whose sum total engenders a
white lotus, which now floats on top of the world as its crown—undis-
turbed, oblivious and in control of it. During the progression and
ascent towards thirty-two, white lotus resembles a white hole on the
other side of which radiates a state that is unaffected and benumbed,
final and complete. Buddha examines the corpses in the monastery to
see if he can detect in their self-inflicted wounds the compression of
thirty-two marks into a single suicidal cut, which looks like an earthly
mutilation on the monks’ dead bodies, but is potentially the mark of
a perfect and deified human. One cut becomes thirty-two cuts, and
thirty-two cuts become thirty-two marks, which express that suicide
and a declaration of war against life are one and the same. But because
extinction also has to be distinguished from its counterfeit, suicide
becomes a technical problem.
Any investigation of the circumstances behind Robert E.
Howard’s suicide as a response to his mother’s impending death will
be inevitably overtaken by, in the words of Artaud—although in the
context of another suicide, that of van Gogh—the “vile sexuality” and
“erotomania” of the psychiatrist.19 Seemingly infinite libidinal econo-
mies, with their ascription of eroto-sexual motives to every possible
act and every possible thought, will always deny the existence of a pure
and uncorrupted melancholy, which can also develop into a sincere
hatred for life. In Howard’s biography, hate precedes melancholy, as
the source of his literature is a basic contempt for the time and the
world in which he lives. But Howard’s hate also has a strictly technical
dimension, to the extent that his writings oppose a world and a civili-
sation which devalue the practices he considers to be equivalent to a
purer and higher state. Total industrialisation creates a mass industrial
culture, and the pulp genre in which Howard writes is the lowest form
17 Goddhika Sutta, https://suttacentral.net/sn4.23/en/sujato/
https://suttacentral.net/sn4.23/en/sujato/.
18 Lakkhana Sutta: The Marks of a Great Man, https://suttacentral.net/dn30/en/sujato/
https://suttacentral.net/dn30/en/sujato/.
19 ARTAUD, Antonin, “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”, in: Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1976, pp. 484–485.

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 Miroslav Griško

of mass industrial culture. Yet Howard understands the lowest popular

aesthetic in terms of its potential to function as a concealed armoury
for the preservation of now archaic techniques, which are all character-
ised by their resolute anti-civilisational drive. If a civilisation can only
consolidate itself through an increasing specialisation of practices,
which leads to both their proliferation and their treatment as equal,20
Howard’s anti-civilisational protagonists, from warlords to assassins,
are proficient in the homicidal techniques that civilisation must by
definition paralyse in order to grow. When a civilisation overextends
through the proliferation of inessential practices and then collapses,
the undying practices that are always relevant to life re-emerge from
this hole, and the übermensch characters of Howard’s fiction are
overtly Nietzschean in their affirmative barbarism. Howard’s suicide, in
contrast, follows the exact opposite logic, and is only on the side of a
straightforward negation and self-erasure from the world.
An overlooked detail of the Howard case is that he commits
suicide while his mother, although in a comatose state, remains alive.
The delayed death of a coma is like a temporal negation, and this
slowdown makes possible the speed of Howard’s own self-negation.
The speed of his suicide is the speed of a deconditioning program,
while the attainment of pure ascetic velocity is facilitated not only by
the temporal delay of the coma, but by melancholic overdose. Without
any time to meditate, or to go to a monastery and study anapanasati
breathing techniques for years, in the moments before his mother’s
imminent death Howard returns to the first moments of ancestor wor-
ship and the veneration of an ephemeral hole. Ancestor worship as an
instruction and a command, an iteration and its passing, marks a bio-
chemically prescribed time to die—parents are supposed to die before
their children. But this is only a lower form of extinction. A fixed
temporal sequence of intergenerational death, a transition from one
discrete state to another discrete state, and the surface meaning of an
instruction and the prosecution of its command are all broken when
Howard kills himself before his mother dies. Grief turns into a straight-
forward hatred for life and an indifference to all possible variations of
existence, whereas out of hate and indifference comes an awareness
of forms and levels of extinction. Howard understands an iteration and
its passing as pure form, and takes ancestor worship to an extreme
point, beyond its immediate biochemical meaning and impression.
His suicide in the moment of delay before his mother’s death is both
the negation of the dominance of a lower form of biological extinction
and the alignment with a higher form of extinction, which is infinitely
remote from life. To “decondition life”21 as the most basic ascetic
20 That is, the concept of specialisation and division of labour in civilizational studies.
21 ELIADE, Yoga, Freedom, and Immortality, p. 292.

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 ŠUM #17

imperative becomes, in Howard’s case, a brutal devotion to a negation

that is, without any hesitation or exception, against life. And even if
the cause of this self-extermination is not some planned attainment of
deification but rather sadness, a truly melancholic soul will in any case
always rise above all enlightened ascetic masters. The purest form of
extinction is not only just indifference to life, but also indifference to a
deified state.
The computational image of iterations of a command through
moments in time presupposes that time is linear. But if time is linear,
it is also always delayed. Linear time is delayed time, as the moments
that constitute the direction in which linear time moves are all sep-
arated from one another. The coherence between suicide and the
purest form of extinction proves that time is linear, but also proves
that because time is linear, time is always delayed. The speed of a
true negation acts in the space of this delay. The formal instruction of
self-replication as entirely equivalent to life means that the only coher-
ent objective for life is to survive approximately 10100 years—until the
death of the universe and the end of time. But unlike the death of the
universe, the end of time can happen in every moment. Suicide is the
awareness of a hierarchy of temporal collapses. Every organism knows
and understands that there is more force and intensity in sudden
self-extermination than the end of the entire universe. When this force
is not counterfeit, it becomes a sign that even life can sometimes be
defeated.

Miroslav Griško is an independent researcher in Ljubljana. “White Lotus” is an excerpt from the forthcoming book:
Eshatološka vojna (Eschatological War), Zbirka Aut, KUD Apokalipsa, Ljubljana, 2022.

2265
 

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 ŠUM #17

Bosco García

The Outside,
Naturalised

An Exercise in Speculative Evolutionary Dynamics

Anyone can invoke the Real, but unless there’s some mech-
anism that provides, not a voice for the Outside, but an
actual functional intervention from the Outside, so it has a
selective function, then the language is empty.
—Nick Land01

It is, without any doubt, the most radical parade of possi-

bilities to ever trammel my imagination—a truly post-inten-
tional philosophy—and I feel as though I have just begun
to chart the extent of its implicature.
—R. Scott Bakker02

01 BAUER, Marko & TOMAŽIN, Andrej, “Edino, kar bi uvedel, je fragmentacija: intervju z Nickom Landom”, ŠUM, 7, 2018.
English translation available at: https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-
an-interview-with-nick-land/.
an-interview-with-nick-land/
02 BAKKER, R. Scott, “Cognitio Obscura”, in: Three Poud Brain, 2013, https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/
cognition-obscura-i/.
cognition-obscura-i/

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 Bosco García

So Simple a Beginning

Let’s start with an exercise of the imagination. Think of yourself as a

generic mammal who has just been born. Utterly dependent, with your
faculties yet to be developed, it is rather unlikely that you would sur-
vive, left to your own devices. Not only do you lack the strength or the
speed to feed yourself and avoid the relevant threats, but you lack the
tools required to navigate your environment. Given adult retrospective,
the world seems so beautifully ordered. Sharp distinctions and strong
oppositions interact seamlessly around you without any conscious
acknowledgement. But, looked closely, our world is anything but. It is,
rather, a confusing mess of stimuli, whose underlying patterns can be
interpreted and rearranged in multiple ways.
In this context, one of the crucial tasks awaiting this young mam-
mal consists in developing categories for its unlabelled world. It needs
to produce an ordered representation of its confusing stream of stim-
uli which, above all, has to score highly on adaptive value—meaning
that such a representation should serve her well, given its particular
ecological niche. Needless to say, not all the categories that such a
mammal will develop during its lifecycle will develop in this way. Some
of those categories (in general, some behaviours) are already encoded
in its genetic material, and the relative proportions will depend on
the idiosyncrasies of the relevant species. This genetic component to
the development of perceptual categories will also play a part in the
overall adaptiveness of the animal in question. But the underlying point
persists: a mammal needs to respond to the ambivalence of its envi-
ronment by developing a set of categories that will allow it to navigate
the said environment. These categories, in turn, need to capture the
spatial and temporal invariances of the stream of stimuli.
There’s a catch, however. If the environment is ambivalent, then
there will always be a multiplicity of available spatiotemporal invar-
iances to pick up on. Truth, by itself, is not adaptive. And what does
and doesn’t count as adaptive behaviour will depend on circumstantial
causes, each of which will likely maximise completely disparate
parameters. This implies that the functional network in which each of
our faculties—including cognition—is embedded will likely respond to
a circumstantial set of ecological causes that have no interest in truth
or the real. Intentional cognition can, on this basis, be framed as the
set of tools that we have developed to respond to those circumstantial,
ecologically determined causes. Take away the ecological invariants
that sustain our cognition and, of course, the adaptiveness of cognition
falls down with them.
This is R. Scott Bakker’s form of ecological determinism: the
idea that whatever reaches conscious cognition, it will be couched in

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 ŠUM #17

terms of the ecological function it is meant to serve. Take all those

categories that you use to navigate your environment. Doesn’t matter
how high-level: from basic orientation invariances in stimuli to com-
plex semantic relationships between words in our language. All such
invariances, as we’ve already mentioned, do not capture any inherent
properties of the sensory stimuli. They are, thus, but a set of all possi-
ble selected patterns, and the function they play in our behaviour is an
expression of the relative advantage they displayed in the environment
where they arose.
A natural consequence of this ecological tractability of cognition
is that our categories, both perceptual and semantic, display a ten-
dency to interpret stimuli in a way that reinforces their own function.
We see examples of this every day and everywhere. Take our innate
capacity to skilfully recognise faces. This is a highly localised ability,
processed mainly in the right side of the fusiform gyrus, located at the
ventral surface of the temporal lobe (right at the inferior side).

Figure 1. Location of the Fusiform Face Area.03

One of the main consequences of strong localization, which is crucial

for several reasons, is that damage usually leads to relatively isolated,
but sharp, loss of function.04 What is most important for our purposes,
however, is that it is evidence for the adaptive value of the function
that the area supports—specialisation indicates sustained selection
pressures. The recognition of individuals of our own species (that is,
friend or foe) presumably played a key role in enabling human social
behaviour. As a consequence, we are bound to see faces everywhere.
Not only that, but we are bound to see them exactly as we’re meant to
03 Wikipedia Commons.
04 BLOOM, F. E., FLINT BEAL, M., KUPFER, D. J., The Dana Guide to Brain Health, Dana Press, 2006.

2269
 Bosco García

see them, even under very strange perceptual conditions. The typical
example is when we rotate a face 180º but leave the cues we usually use
for recognition intact. As a result, we perceive the entire face upside
down, and don’t notice anything bizarre (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Facial illusion showing wholistic face coding.05

For Bakker, this characteristic is generalised all the way through to

cognition (broadly construed), on the cheap condition of assuming
ecological conditioning and adaptive value. This does not only mean
that some cognitive abilities are bound to their ecology, but that our
entire cognitive apparatus is moulded by the ecology in which it devel-
oped and geared around it. To put it in somewhat scholastic terms, the
faculty of cognition tends towards its proper object. Here, it is worth
quoting Bakker’s lengthy yet sharp summary of this predicament in his
review of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now:

Human intentional cognition neglects the intractable

task of cognising natural facts, leaping to conclusions
on the basis of whatever information it can scrounge. In
this sense, it is constantly gambling that certain invariant
backgrounds obtain, or conversely, that what it sees is all
that matters. This is just another way to say that inten-
tional cognition is ecological, which in turn is just another
way to say that it can degrade, even collapse, given the
loss of certain background invariants.06

And so we arrive at the possibility of the “collapse” of intentional cogni-

tion: what if the ecological invariants that have sustained the adaptive-
ness of our categories—or even beyond, the very meaning with which

05 MCKONE, E., AIMOLA DAVIES, A., DARKE, H., CROOKES, K., WICKRAMARIYARATNE, T., ZAPPIA, S., FIORENTINI,
C., FAVELLE, S., BROUGHTON, M., FERNANDO, D., “Importance of the Inverted Control in Measuring Holistic
Face Processing with the Composite Effect and Part-Whole Effect”, in: Frontiers in Psychology, 2013, 10.3389/
fpsyg.2013.00033.
fpsyg.2013.00033
06 BAKKER, R. Scott, “Enlightenment How? Pinker’s Tutelary Natures”. in: Three Pound Brain, 2018,
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/enlightenment-how-pinkers-tutelary-natures/.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/enlightenment-how-pinkers-tutelary-natures/

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we relate to our world—fail to obtain? This collapse of meaning is what

Bakker dubs the semantic apocalypse: the threshold upon which the
last thread that connected our world with its outside is severed; more
generally, the threshold that separates adaptive from non-adaptive
behaviour. But Bakker’s cheerful recount of the facts does not end here.
Presumably, intentional cognition depends on the possibility of
making accessible to consciousness at least a part of the information
processed in the brain. That is, intentional cognition depends, via
conscious access, on the recursive accessibility of a limited proportion
of all neurally available information. The Blind-Brain Theory of con-
sciousness (BBT) suggests that the possibilities available to meta-cog-
nition are hence limited in a structural manner—that there is a strong
threshold to the information that can possibly be made accessible
to consciousness, and with it to intentional cognition. Meaning, then,
becomes incompatible with the natural, insofar as its conditions of
possibility require the reduction of its environment to a low-dimen-
sional caricature. Such low-dimensional cartoon is imposed by the
structure of consciousness itself, condemned as it is to what Thomas
Metzinger has called “transparency”:07 the impossibility of the self to
perceive the model it produces of the world as a model. Under these
conditions, the semantic apocalypse becomes the result of an asym-
metry between the static loop of intentional cognition and its rapidly
evolving environment. The specifically human cognitive ecology simply
cannot keep up: it has lost the very ability to adapt to its environment.
Bakker’s assumptions make complete sense in evolutionary
terms. In fact, one cannot avoid the thought that the relation of rel-
evance and availability of the information within human cognition
follows an inverse proportion: the more critical for survival, the more
likely it will just be assumed (i.e. not made recursively available). It
makes sense, then, not only that this type of information will not be
available to the accessible space of the self-model, but that it is simply
constitutively incapable of entering it. The resulting picture is that of
an entity which in order to optimally replicate itself has developed a
fundamentally limited cognitive range (the information that it is able to
process through its self-model) plus a constitutive incapacity to access
that very information. Nature has thus got its way: it has assembled
a cognitively dependent entity, while only presenting it with limited
relevant information. As a result, the actual behaviour of the entity
is meticulously controlled. Its agency range (the extent to which this
entity is able to intentionally intervene in its environment) is always, at
best, its cognitive range or epistemic threshold—the point from which
information cannot be integrated into the self-model. The semantic

07 METZINGER, Thomas, Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003.

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 Bosco García

apocalypse represents the point in history where such a threshold is

crossed for good.
This presents us with a cognitive model for the organism whose
fundamental value is closure of the system. Nature is endowed with the
capacity to 1 ) make it constitutively impossible for the system to reach
any information that is not relevant to its reproduction (consistent
with the evolutionary premise), and above all 2 ) maintain this closure
uninterruptedly. Notice the crucial move that has been made by the
BBT: structural inaccessibility implies a static threshold, and a static
threshold implies constitutive inadaptability. But where is this thresh-
old? One may be tempted to negate the second condition. Is there an
in-principle limit to adaptation? Put another way: is this threshold truly
static or could it be constitutively dynamic, capable of being indef-
initely moulded by the sensory stream, condemned to following the
whims of its outside? I suspect this is the case.

Neural Darwinism

The question of the ecological determinants of our cognitive abilities

boils down to function: what was the function that those abilities exer-
cised in the environmental context in which they displayed differential
reproductive advantage? This is all well and good. And yet, this way
of framing the problem seems at too high a level. We are examining
complex categories in already complex environments and surmising
the whole set of biological invariances that support them. This proce-
dure, then, does not preclude a question about the neural structures
and mechanisms that make possible the very dynamic development
of such categories. It seems intuitive to jump from the existence of an
ecological niche to the acquisition of the cognitive abilities that allow
its exploitation. Rarely does one ever see opened the neural black box
in between. Let’s do that.
The fact that that we are dealing with a black box has not gone
unnoticed by the early practitioners of cognitive science. In fact, a
way out readily presents itself. Assume a task—say, face recognition.
Subdivide that task into multiple subtasks (such as calculating feature
proportions or inducing lighting invariances across time). Finally, make
the brain compute given outputs, like the identification of a face, from
the aforementioned subtasks. In a word, the brain would map some
input information (e.g. feature proportions) to some output information
(“This is Barry”). By interpreting the problem in informational terms,
one gets rid of the issue of the actual biological mechanisms that
underpin a process of such complexity. This is what the psychologist

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David Marr did in his now classic Vision,08 where he distinguished

between three separate levels of analysis in a process like this:
1 )  The computational level we have just been talking about;
2 )  The algorithmic level involving the manner in which an infor-
mation-processing system represents to itself its inputs and outputs,
as well as the transformations required to go from one to the other;
3 )  And, finally, the implementational level, that is, “the details of
how the algorithm and representation are realized physically”.09
Notice how whole strata are cashed out in an entirely top-down
fashion: given a task, then we can think of the physical “details” that
would implement it. In this framework, it is assumed that typologies
and categories of the physical world are amenable to processing in a
program-like manner. In their more extreme versions, like Chomsky’s
Rules and Representations,10 extremely complex objects like the rules
of syntactical structures in natural language are simply posited to map
on to corresponding neural structures.
But implementation comes back to haunt us. For starters, the
brain is far removed from the notion of one-to-one wiring, required for
such computational tasks. Neural variability runs rampant. And even
if we assume that neural structures are fixed, (what now are ancient)
pharmacological studies have shown how these repetitive structures
can use multiple neurotransmitters or display chemical heterogeneity
at different locations.11 What is more, if we examine even the most
elementary psychophysical tasks (those that have to do with the way
our mind processes the physical world), it quickly becomes evident that
they are not accomplished by a unitary neural structure, but a plurality
of them, including for one and the same task.12
These arguments converge around a simple idea: the brain is
composed of a population of structures that do not allow for one-to-
one mapping. The immunologist and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman
took this insight in the eighties and used it to develop a theory about
the mechanisms underlying the brain’s functional organisation, called
the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS), which will be the main
object of our discussion in this section.13

08 MARR, David, Vision, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982.

09 Ibid., p. 25.
10 CHOMSKY, Noam, Rules and Representations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
11 CHAN-PALAY, V., GAJANAN, N., PALAY, S. L., BEINFELD, M. C., ZIMMERMAN, E. A., WU, J. Y., O’DONOHUE, O.,
“Chemical Heterogeneity in cerebellar Purkinje Cells: Existence and Coexistence of Glutamic Acid Decarboxylase-like
and Motilin-like Immunoreactives”, in: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Vol. 78, 12, 1981, pp. 7787–7791.
12 INGRAM, V. M., OGREN, M. P., CHALOT, C. L., GASSELO, J. M., OWENS, B. B., “Diversity among Purkinje Cells in the
Monkey Cerebellum”, in: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 82, 1985, pp. 7131–7135.
13 The theory of Neuronal Group Selection is described in many different texts. For an accessible introduction, see:
EDELMAN, Gerald, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, USA: Basic Books, 1991, ch. 9. My discussion will
be mostly based on his monograph on the subject, Neural Darwinism, USA: Basic Books, 1987. For a later paper, see:
“Neural Darwinism: Selection and Reentrant Signalling in Higher Brain Function”, in: Neuron, Vol. 10, 1993: pp. 115–125.

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TNGS explains the origin of neural categories via the selection

of variant groups of neurons. As such, it inherits the classical three
conditions of any general process of selection: 1 ) variability in the
population; 2 ) some mechanism of inheritance; 3 ) some differential
capacity for reproduction (what is canonically referred to as “fitness”).14
Ironically, these three requirements function like an algorithm that
allows for their implementation in an immense array of systems. If
such an algorithm is provided with the characteristics of a population,
such as the distribution of traits or the reproduction rate, it generates
a selection dynamics in biological, computational and, as we shall see,
neural substrata. These selection dynamics can be typified in multiple
ways, but the three basic types are directional, diversifying and stabi-
lising selection (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The three main types of selection processes.15

Stabilising selection represses the extreme traits of the
population; disruptive selection promotes the differenti-
ation of the extremes; while directional selection occurs
when only one of the extremes is favoured.

14 Peter Godfrey-Smith has a wonderful monograph where he analyses in detail these requirements, as well as—more
in general—these types of abstract characterisations of evolutionary processes. See: GODFREY-SMITH, Peter,
Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Oxford University Press, 2011.
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec09.html.
15 http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec09.html

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It is worth pointing out, however, that selection dynamics do not

automatically imply the emergence of evolution, especially in the bio-
logical domain. This is because most of the time selection processes
contribute to the trajectory of the population rather than determine
it. Depending on its complexity, the evolutionary landscape may, for
instance, face severe topological constraints that restrict the available
evolutionary space.16 But, in other cases, selection may act as a stabi-
lising force that halts the evolutionary process (see Figure 3).
TNGS is somewhat opposed to the usual, intuitive notion of
selection that acts from generation to generation, because it under-
stands the brain as undergoing an iterated process of somatic selec-
tion, i.e. selection occurring within the individual organism. In the
theory, the brain reflects population-like variability in the formation of
two types of neuronal groups or repertoires. The first, or “primary” rep-
ertoire, consists of the variable wiring that emerges in the process of
development (like during the embryological stages), which forms part of
the conspecific neuroanatomy of a given species. Such wiring, however,
varies wildly from individual to individual. This is where the first kind
of neural selection, developmental selection, makes an appearance,
and its product is the variant neuroanatomical structure of each indi-
vidual. An organism uses its primary repertoire as a basis for engaging
in a multiplicity of behaviours throughout its lifecycle. The connections
within and among these neuronal groups are then strengthened or
weakened according to those behaviours, roughly following Hebb’s rule:
neurons that fire together, wire together—more specifically, variant
groups that fire together, wire together. Such a selective weighting of
synapses dependent on experience forms the second type of selection,
experiential selection, whose product is the “secondary” repertoire.
Somatic selection, then, will occur on those two types of neuronal
groups which constitute the basic units of selection in the theory.
The very notion of neuronal group variability, however, depends
on the assumption of degeneracy: the fact that for each function
there is a multiplicity of neuronal groups that are able to carry it out.17
Degeneracy, then, entails that “some non-isomorphic groups must
be isofunctional”.18 An example is illustrated in Figure 4. Assume we
assign a task of signal recognition to two types of neural repertoires:
one where there is no degeneracy—hence there is one-to-one mapping—
and one where there is. Under these simple conditions, the non-degen-
erate neuronal group will fail to adequately recognise the input signals.
And there is a simple, albeit rather unintuitive, reason why.

16 KAUFFMAN, Stuart, The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1991.
17 For a recent review, see: PRICE, Cathy J. & FRISTON, Karl J., “Degeneracy and Cognitive Anatomy”, in: Trends in
Cognitive Science, 6, 10, 2002, pp. 416–421.
18 EDELMAN, Neural Darwinism, p. 49.

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 Bosco García

Figure 4. Degeneracy in mapping between cell groups and

signal mapping.19 In the case with no degeneracy, each
cell group maps on to a unique signal, leading to a failure
in the recognition task. For the degenerate repertoire,
however, contravariance leads to an increased success
rate.

As the number of neuronal groups that could intervene is higher when

solving a complex task (in this case, recognising a multiplicity of sig-
nals) than it is in the recognition of one signal per group, the number of
dimensions relevant to the problem increases exponentially. One may
quickly infer that this makes matters worse for the repertoire involved.
It would seem that the number of dimensions increases proportionally
to the difficulty of the problem: the more available solutions, the more
factors that are likely to be involved in finding them. However, this is
not the case. Put in evolutionary terms, the number of constraints is, in
fact, inversely proportional to the difficulty of the computational task.
Think of it this way. If you only have a hammer, the likelihood of being
able to fix a simple breakdown is relatively lower than if you possess a
set of tools, even when the target problem is much more complex. This
is because the number of constraints increases the number of availa-
ble solutions that can be creatively explored and selected. This is what
Cao and Yamins call the contravariance principle,20 which applies both
to neural systems (like brains) and neural networks.
Degeneracy therefore provides the link between function and
selection, connecting repertoire variability with a target for successful
deployment. But we still need one final ingredient. To carry out these
functions, the primary and secondary repertoire require maps. Both
are composed of an enormous array of parallel and reciprocal con-
nections, which form robust clusters of connectivity along the neural

19 Ibid.
20 CAO, Rosa & YAMINS, Daniel, “Explanatory Models in Neuroscience: Part 2 – Constraint-based Eligibility”, 2021,
preprint available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01489/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01489/.

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design. When a signal is processed in the brain, it is recursively passed

and transformed through these clusters, leading to a process of reen-
try (see Figure 5). Reentry is the process which allows for the robust
linkage between selection of neuronal groups and target functions. Via
reentry, top-down constraints emerge as the result of topographical
connectivity—and given the massive interconnectivity between multi-
ple neuronal groups, selection of multiple repertoires can happen in
parallel. An important characteristic of the reentry of signals is that
the dynamical flow of successive neural maps produces new types of
signals, signals which may not have an outside origin and can be made
recursively available to cognition. We see emerge the possibility of
complex levels of organisation and, above all, the recursive availability
of a limited proportion of the total incoming signals.

Figure 5. The general schema of reentry in terms of a clas-

sification couple.21 An input is sampled by two independ-
ent networks—a detector and correlator of features—which
the brain relates via mutual mapping. In this sense, the
signal is “reentered” through the totality of the neuronal
group.

If this is starting to sound a lot like Bakker, it’s because that’s what it is.
The difference being that under TNGS, we are also able to provide the
genesis of the categories which structure cognition—and explain what
adaptiveness means in neural terms. Categories, then, are contingent
clusters of neural groups which are reentrantly selected on the basis
of functional deployment. Precisely for that reason, however, they are
rendered dynamic assemblages that allow for both developmental
21  EDELMAN, Neural Darwinism, p. 62.

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 Bosco García

and experiential transformation. Via reentry of signals along neuronal

groups, we can explain the formation of recursive structures in the
brain—and with it, the origins of limited informational availability.
Compared to BBT’s static epistemic threshold, TNGS provides us with
a dynamic threshold which is constantly in the process of reshaping
via the transformation of its inputs. In the end, BBT seems to be all too
top-down.
What about the pay-off? Well, in a way, Bakker’s radical proposal
hath given what it hath taken away. Thought like this, the conclusion
is almost inescapable. The human cognitive apparatus is doomed to
disaster, apocalypse even. But the reason for this is that it is too strong,
it poses perfect resistance to its outside, exercises an absolute closure
that is able to oppose all forces of nature: it is, in a sense, supernatural.
Bakker’s ecological determinism, it seems, simply had to be intensified,
made to point towards a cognitive hyperecology, where the environ-
ment does, indeed, hold all the cards. Who would have thought that
the human cognitive assemblage would win? Examined closely, the
seemingly omnipotent, abstract recursive system of consciousness
dissolves in the acid of neural selection. And if the human recursive
system shows resistance, all the worse for the human recursive system.
This essay could stop here. But I take it that some speculative
implications follow. We have shown how the human cognitive assem-
blage, via neural Darwinism, is constantly subjected to selection from
its outside. This process, however, does not happen sporadically, but
is rather uninterruptedly sustained, insofar as it results from the very
mechanism that underpins the brain’s functional organisation. A ques-
tion begins to impose itself: what can we say about a system that is
constantly on the verge of selection from its outside? And, beyond that,
if such a system has lost all identity, if it becomes nothing more but an
expression of its deterritorialization, could it, like a mirror, allow us to
sustain inferences about the outside itself?

A Direction of Selection

We have alluded to the fact that the brain is constantly being selected
by its outside. From a certain perspective, this is incorrect. The brain
is rather constantly selecting itself in its successive changes. Given the
neural architecture that characterises it, each signal is reprocessed
and transformed, every step of the way, across the network. If we take
vision as an example, naked photons cannot intervene functionally in
any nervous system. In fact, the visual cortex is hierarchically “layered”
in five separable areas—V1, V2, V3, V4 and V5—that have a range of
functions, from relatively simple to increasingly abstract ones. V1 (or
primary visual cortex), for instance, is specialised in edge detection,

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while V5 holistically integrates information received from the other

areas. But before it is even taken in by cortex, information needs to be
transformed into electrical impulses by the retina, and projected to the
lateral geniculate nucleus.22
All this makes it seem as though the visual system were some-
thing akin to a “feature detector” that picks up salient characteristics
of the environment and synthesises them into the visual scene. The
understanding of perception as feature detection is predicated on the
idea that processing occurs unidirectionally, that is, that projection of
neural signals only happens outwards, towards cortex and other areas
associated with higher brain function. But this is not the case: the
brain does not restrict the direction in which projection occurs across
the cortical hierarchy. In terms of the visual cortex, signals are not only
transmitted from V1 to V5, but also from V5 to V1.
As an illustration of the concept, consider Figure 6. We operate
under the assumption that light brightens up the colour of surfaces. As
a result, when a shadow is cast over a surface, we expect that its colour
will darken. This is a completely reasonable heuristic that is encoded
in the way our expectations condition the very sensations we experi-
ence. Of course, this is a case where our expectations fail to deliver
on reality, but it is precisely for this reason that it pushes to the fore
the kind of high-level shortcuts our brain uses all the time: we don’t
passively wait for stimuli to feed the visual scene, but the brain tries
to predict its sensations on the basis of previously stored information
about the world.

Figure 6. The checker shadow illusion.23 The squares A and

B are the same shade of grey. The brain is led, via visual
cortex, to expect that the shadow cast on B dims its colour.

22 The nomenclature and function attribution of some areas is still subject to discussion. Some include areas like V6
or V7, and others include them under other names. For a review of these issues, see: WANDELL, B. A., DUMOULIN,
S. O., BREWER, A. A., “Visual Field Maps in Human Cortex”, in: Neuron, 56, 2, 2007, pp. 366–383.
23 ADELSON, Edward H., Checkershadow Illusion, 1995, http://persci.mit.edu/gallery/checkershadow/
http://persci.mit.edu/gallery/checkershadow/.

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This idea that the brain is engaged in a constant process of predict-

ing its own sensations is called predictive processing (PP). In PP, all
these neural maps that we’ve talked about encode massive probability
distributions which model all the brain’s environment—past, present
and future. In perceiving, the brain takes its own model of sensations
as input. But such probability distribution about the stimuli and its
causes, on the other hand, must be massive, because the environment
is an equally daunting beast. This becomes especially problematic if
we assume that perception is so self-contained. Constantly varying in
both space and time and rabidly non-linear—how is the brain to get a
handle on such an environment? How is it to acquire the approximately
correct assumption that shadows dim colour, for example? Put more
generally, how does a system like that learn?
One might even (very reasonably) ask what the role of the entire
perceptual system even is, if we perceive by predicting. The answer is
that the stimuli provide feedback to the brain’s assumptions about the
world. Feedback is the way through which the brain updates its model
of the environment and improves its predictions on future sensations.
The senses, then, inform of prediction error, which encodes the diver-
gence between the model that the brain has of its environment and the
actual input that the environment provides. In short, the brain adapts
dynamically to its environment via the feedback provided by prediction
error. What emerges is a dual functional architecture of the brain,
structured around the asymmetry between prediction (feedforward)
and prediction error (feedback). This constant exchange between pre-
diction and error units constitutes a cycle that spans across the entire
network of the brain (see Figure 7).
This network is formed of clusters of neuronal groups, which in
turn form the reentrant maps that support the complex architecture
needed for correspondingly complex functions. There is thus a con-
vergence of TNGS and PP along a generalised selectionism, both at
the implementational (TNGS) and algorithmic level (PP). To see this, we
must return to the idea that the brain encodes a probability distribu-
tion of its environment. We mentioned that the non-linearity of envi-
ronmental processes posed a challenge for the brain, insofar as there
always is a multiplicity of causes that might explain the stimuli. One of
the reasons why probability distribution is a useful tool to model these
cases is that it allows the brain to weight a manifold of causes that
may map on to the observed phenomenon. Neurally, this corresponds
to the strength of the synapses that conform the secondary repertoire
and form the units of experiential selection. In this context, feedback
is the dimension of the mechanism that enacts the adaptation of the
probability distribution given experience.

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Figure 7. Modified representation of PP’s functional

architecture across cortical regions from the deepest (R1)
to the most superficial (R3).24 Rightward arrows stand for
bottom-up projections sent from the darker “error units”
towards superficial regions. Leftward arrows depict top-
down signals emitted at the lighter “state units”—what pre-
viously I called “prediction units”—towards deeper regions
of the brain. The triangles represent pyramidal cells that
send the predictions, while circles represent inhibitory
neurons of those predictions (by inhibiting top-down pro-
jections, they correct and modulate their contribution). As
we can see, the duality of prediction-prediction error is
replicated at every level of processing.

Prediction error, however, is in reality an approximation of the way

that the brain encodes such divergence between the environment
and its model. A much more accurate quantity is surprisal, a concept
that originates from statistical physics and measures the negative
logarithm of the probability of an event, given a model of the world in
which it occurs:25

h(P(r)) = − logP(r)

Where h is surprisal and P the probability of event r. This means that

as surprisal increases, the logarithm of the probability decreases.
Surprisal, however, can be averaged by the probability of events,
assuming that we can sum probabilities of events. How “surprised” of
an event I am in total, on this assumption, would be the sum of how

24 SETH, Anil K., “Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self”, in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 11,
2013, pp. 565–573.
25 TRIBUS, Myron, Thermostatistics and Thermodynamics, Princeton University Press, 1961; FRISTON, Karl, “The
free-energy principle: A rough guide to the brain?”, in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 7, 2009, pp. 293–301; see also:
HOHWY, Jakob, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, 2013.

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 Bosco García

“surprised” I am of each event separately. The key is that under these

conditions, surprisal h encodes entropy H: 26

∑
H=− P(r)logP(r)

The brain, in this picture, minimises overall prediction error insofar

as its total predictive projections produce an overall better grasp of
future stimuli. If prediction error minimisation applies to the brain in
its entirety, that means that the brain, at every level of organisation,
is driven by the minimisation of entropy, through minimisation of
surprisal. Of course, specific levels in the hierarchy may increase
surprisal or prediction error. The key is to bear in mind how the overall
minimisation of prediction error nonetheless defines the general direc-
tion of activity in this iterative process—like an underlying structural
cause, responsible for a global pattern of activity. The cyclic process-
ing of prediction and prediction error leads to an overall asymmetrical
process, characterised by the minimisation of surprisal, and ultimately
entropy.
We arrive at a crucial result: both at the cognitive and neural
levels, the brain is functionally structured for neural selection. This
structure results in a process which consists, given its architecture,
in the minimisation of surprisal—i.e. the minimisation of entropy. But
then again, this twinning of abstract selection processes and minimi-
sation of entropy should not surprise us. Selection dynamics emerge
when there is an iterated sampling of a population, which results in a
progressive evolution of the population’s characteristics. Entropy, in its
classical formulation, measures the proportion of energy involved in a
process that cannot be converted back into mechanical energy—that is,
energy that cannot be cyclically reinserted in the process (this is the
Carnot cycle). In both cases, we are dealing with measures of irrevers-
ibility that apply to the evolution of spaces of possibilities: the bigger
the proportion of the population that does not replicate—the bigger the
proportion of energy that cannot be reverted back into the cycle—the
higher the irreversibility of the process.
In this sense, selection processes are structured to occur in the
direction of entropy minimisation. Of course, that does not mean that
they fully compensate for the increase in entropy that is prescribed by
the second law of thermodynamics—this is a property of the structure
of the process, part of the way that it is set up and that establishes

26 It is worth highlighting the similarity of H with the classical (Gibbsian) entropy S:

∑
S = − kB pi l og pi
where kB is Boltzmann’s constant, and again we see entropy measured as a weighted sum of the probabilities of the
events that compose the system of interest.

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the conditions for its occurrence. One way to see this is through the
relationship between optimisation processes and selection. Although
selection processes usually do not lead to an outcome that can be
considered absolutely optimal in any meaningful sense, they are driven
by processes of optimisation—like a drive that pulls the system at every
instant but does not follow any long-term teleology. Optimality is a
global property, optimisation is a local process. Similarly, the minimi-
sation of entropy, via surprisal, via prediction error, is the drive that
directs the selection process, even though it need not lead to a total
compensation of the expected entropy increase.
We are now in a position to offer a more complete picture. The
brain is an assemblage of degenerate neuronal groups whose distribu-
tion evolves dynamically as a function of selection. At the level of its
functional organisation, this process is expressed as the minimisation
of surprisal via a constant selection that feedback from the sensorial
stream performs on the probabilistic model. However, as surprisal is a
measure of entropy, we find that the brain is geared towards the mini-
misation of entropy, in which we find the ultimate cause that shapes its
very functional organisation.

The Outside, Naturalised

It’s time to wrap things up. Let’s come back to the very first quote in
this essay, where Land posited the criterion that, in order for the Real
to have any sort of effective intervention, it should display a selective
function. That is precisely what we have arrived at. We have shown how,
by enacting a generalised selective mechanism at both the algorithmic
and implementational levels, the brain fulfils the requirement of an
entity that effectively mobilises its Outside.
Notice, however, that we are in a fundamentally new scenario.
If for BBT the epistemic threshold is fundamentally rigid and static,
incapable of being overcome by the human—and reshaped by its
experience—TNGS renders such a threshold dynamic, thereby func-
tionally open to its outside, which can then do whatever it may with the
recipient (us). Once we take this insight into consideration, we begin to
see an important point of convergence between Land and Bakker. For
them, the Outside plays a structural role in delimiting what it means to
be human, and what the human can thus do. The human may change,
the human may reterritorialise, and the Outside may be pulling the
strings behind the curtain, but the Outside can never be named. For
Bakker, the Outside is clearly the array of non-intentional processes
that determine intentional cognition and which intentional cognition
can never even dream of grasping. For Land, it can only be invoked,
alluded to as the grand point of singularity where the transcendental

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temporal structure converges, but any specification of just how it does

so is doomed to failure. The Outside functions as a negative counter-
part of the positive processes observed: it unites all positive properties,
but is thereby incapable of expressing itself in the concrete. Land’s
and Bakker’s theory of the Outside takes thus the form of a negative
theology, as if it were a remnant of our intentional modes of cognition,
functioning by coarse characterisations and low-dimensionality.
From this point of view, it does not seem very surprising that
accelerationism succumbed to magical thought and resorted to the
occultist tradition. The very agent that was meant to be the lever of
historical change is taken to be the only real process, but by the same
token, it’s rendered ineffective, unexplicative. And indeed, perhaps
looking directly to the Outside was too blinding. That’s why we have
turned around and looked inside, to the effects that the Outside dis-
plays in our own constitution. And what we have seen is a generalised
selective mechanism that optimises the human assemblage as a func-
tion of entropic irreversibility. Looking inwards, we have discovered the
Real that determines it: the Real is that which selects.27
If we abandon all magical connotations about the selective
mechanisms that enact the functional intervention of the Outside,
perhaps we can start improving the ways in which we accelerate its
bifurcations, optimise the processes of deterritorialisation. We might,
for instance, start paying attention to the conditions of the abstract
space that allow for the emergence of a time singularity. One ques-
tion the response to which we have assumed, but remains very much
unanswered, is: is there a single attractor to which all these different
selection processes tend—be they neural selection, capitalism, moder-
nity or what have you? Or are there many? Put in terms of the selection
dynamics we mentioned before: is the current historical attractor
subject to directional, or disruptive selection? Could we even be in
a process of stabilisation? What kind of circumstances may favour
a bifurcation towards one or the other? And even beyond that: is it
possible that this attractor is maintained only under some sustaining
conditions—so that if those conditions are not given, the attractor
may be lost with them? But asking these questions implies denying
the assumed understanding of the Outside as a negative, totalising
opposition to the positive processes we observe happening around us.
It implies, on the contrary, taking the Outside as a positive process (or
processes) that very much determines them. Only then, I think, will it
27 Note that this does not amount to the thesis that natural selection is the only cause of biological evolution. When
rendered as the recurring sampling (be it in discrete steps or in a continuous transition) of abstract spaces of possibil-
ities, selection may also apply to conditions like the topological properties of the space. Such topological conditions
contribute to what is even possible in the first place, and so they are already included in the population on which
selection acts. On the flip side, the products of selection will constitute the future populations whose distribution of
traits informs the applicable topological conditions. Biological evolution is thus the result of this interchange between
selection and the structure of the population (among other factors).

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be possible to appreciate how much resistance to it is not only futile,

but impossible, given the workings of nature.

Bosco García is a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research is mainly on
how biological systems, including the brain, are informed by physical principles and modeling. He also maintains an
interest in the history of science, particularly of physics, and how scientific development interacts with processes of
non-scientific nature. Most of his online output is at @_infinitography
@_infinitography.

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Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

Meta-Stability and
the Diagonal Method

An Interview with Timotej Prosen

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that an interview with philoso-

pher Timotej Prosen has been a long time coming—to skip over a
standout face in the Ljubljana intellectual sphere would have been a
regrettable oversight, especially when they are engaged in the same
kind of abstractions as us. Furthermore, Prosen was always great at
anticipating future shifts of the field, such as Justin Murphy going
big, by virtue of true insight, acute alpha, rather than by having some
insider information. Like what the Golden State Warriors head coach
Steve Kerr said about the basketball magician Stephen Curry—“Don’t
let Steph fool you, he’s not a humble guy”—Prosen’s responses are (at
times) uncompromising provocations full of reasoned irreverence, a
breath of fresh air on the philosophical court. Because of his prudent
boldness in diagonalizing seemingly discordant lines of thought, he is
a true agent of reason.

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ŠUM: We have always been committed to introducing new faces to

Ljubljana’s theoretical scene and shifting its philosophical landscape.
After the ‘accelerationist turn’ and the Nick Land interview,01 R. Scott
Bakker was the new object of fascination and critique as well as the
convergent point for our ongoing relationship. In what way has Bakker
influenced your thinking and what has been your takeaway from his
appeal to post-intentional philosophy?02 How has he changed the way
you think about philosophy and how do you see his role in retrospect?

Timotej Prosen: Certainly, Bakker’s views were a breath of fresh

air for my intellectual environment. I was very taken with his appeal to
post-intentional philosophy and perhaps most impressed by his obser-
vation of a broad shift taking place regarding the very conditions of
philosophy, that is to say, a change in how we think of ourselves and our
place in the world.03 This shift may be appreciated on two levels.
On a more readily apparent level, Bakker is describing the
ever-growing discrepancy between (for lack of a better term) traditional
philosophy and humanities on one side, and modern techno-scientific
research on the other. The long-standing tensions between these two
modes of thought are, of course, apparent to many. What is interesting
about Bakker’s account is his uncompromising insistence on the full
extent of this conflict. The problem is not that modern science disa-
grees with how we traditionally conceive of the structure of subjective
experience, the extent of man’s autonomy, or the degree of man’s nor-
mative value. It is that its methodologies undermine the basis on which
such issues were conceived of and discussed, and therefore seems
to empty out the very meaning and significance of the categories of
humanist thought. One can certainly observe this lack of common
ground reflected in the prevalent mutual disregard or outright hostility
between the two disciplines, and also in the occasional attempt at a
dialogue or synthesis, which, I feel, often makes the chasm that much
more apparent instead. In any case, Bakker’s concern is not limited
to the breakdowns in communication between the two academic
disciplines.
This leads me to the second level of Bakker’s framing of the
problem, which is also what I find most fascinating in his work, namely
how he uncovers this epistemological issue at the heart of a general
civilizational predicament. The main thing to note here is that notions
such as selfhood, intentional meaning or personal freedom are not
just conceptual tools of analysis, confined to academic debates. They
01 BAUER, Marko & TOMAŽIN, Andrej, “Edino, kar bi uvedel, je fragmentacija: intervju z Nickom Landom”,
in: ŠUM, 7, 2017, pp. 801–821, http://sumrevija.si/issues/sum-7/
http://sumrevija.si/issues/sum-7/.
02 KRAŠOVEC, Primož & BAUER, Marko, “Scarlett Johansson Leaps to Your Lips: An Interview with R. Scott Bakker”,
in: ŠUM, 9, 2018, pp. 1073–1100, http://sumrevija.si/en/issues/sum-9/
http://sumrevija.si/en/issues/sum-9/.
03 BAKKER, R. Scott, “Back to Square One: Toward a Post-Intentional Future”, in: Scientia Salon, 2014.

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reflect a mode of behaviour, a way of interpreting and responding

to the world, and more specifically, they reflect particular problems
that they have evolved to handle. As practical heuristics, they are tied
to specific psychological and social domains that they enable us to
manoeuvre. As such, these notions are not in any direct opposition
to scientific concepts, yet the latter do undermine our traditional
self-conception, in some sense more devastatingly than by way of
simple rebuttal. Instead of going toe to toe with the traditional bodies
of knowledge, modern techno-science quite literally undermines the
ground beneath their feet by reshaping the cognitive environments
that used to support them. It bypasses the established categories of
thought by either opening the access to traditional black boxes, such
as the neural underpinnings of cognition, or transversing orders of
magnitude and closing the distances which used to bound and stabi-
lize different domains of our cognitive environment, such as the way
in which informational technologies operate on us simultaneously
on the level of sub-personal unconscious neural processes, on the
level of individual psychological traits, and on the level of large scale
social trajectories and statistical regularities. Our conception of
ourselves as autonomous and bounded agents in such a context is not
only misplaced, but leads one ever further down what Bakker calls a
crash space.04 Blinded to the new features and informational depth
of our world, we behave as any organism that finds itself maladapted
to its environment; our actions and their consequences become
wildly unpredictable, leading our cognitive structures to stumble and
ultimately crash. The mere experience of profound disorientation in
this context, which we are likely all too familiar with, should therefore
prompt us to reconsider what we think we know about ourselves and
our place in the world. But the final nail in the coffin of humanist
thought for Bakker comes not from its disruptive incompatibility with
techno-science, but from a fundamental asymmetry between the two.
The latter is in some sense informationally richer and allows for a
finer-grained description of the world. Especially fascinating in this
regard are the scientific tools that enable us to study and engineer our
cognition and behaviour even though, or perhaps precisely because, no
reference is made to the notions of intentional meaning or selfhood as
such. The ultimate subversion of our previous modes of self-apprehen-
sion is that we are more adequately conceived of within a framework
where we can no longer recognize ourselves.
So that would be a brief sketch of Bakker’s ideas which I found
appealing. His perspective resonated with me on both aforemen-
tioned levels, that is, from the vantage point of my own attempts to
04 BAKKER, Scott R., “On the Death of Meaning”, in: RUDRUM, David (ed.), New Directions in Philosophy and Literature,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

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manoeuvre the fragmented space of academic research, and from the

level of my general experience of contemporary culture and its discon-
tents. I often still find it useful, or at least soothing, to interpret the
eccentricities of my academic environment along his lines, as a kind of
blown-up version of an organism that finds itself severely maladapted
to its environment, helplessly entangling itself ever deeper into the
crash space. In all seriousness, however, I have begun to notice some
issues with Bakker’s approach. The basic problem I see here lies in the
sharpness, or at least the specific framing of his dichotomies, both in
terms of the distinction between traditional philosophy and science, as
in terms of the dichotomy between selfhood and intentional meaning
on the one side and post-intentional agency on the other.
One way to flesh out this challenge would be to ponder whether
man has ever really been ensnared in the notions of self-transparent
consciousness or a stable and rigidly bounded selfhood, or at least
whether we can really equate this self-conception with the entirety
of his “pre-scientific” mode of thought. A closely related question is
whether intentional meaning ever has been the ultimate horizon of our
thought, or whether this notion may be taken as a specifically modern
(mis)understanding of cognition. The notion of intentional meaning is
explicitly introduced by both phenomenology and analytic philosophy
as an attempt of grounding our cognitive faculties in some pre-estab-
lished structure of subjectivity or in a pre-defined scientific method. In
both cases, meaning is evoked as a kind of crystallization of essential
and fixed characteristics of thought. I think an important lesson to be
had from the aporias and subsequent development of both philosoph-
ical currents is that neither scientific categories nor cognitive agents
can be circumscribed in terms of meaning lest their very rationality
slip through our fingers. This realization has some bearing on Bakker’s
conception of the crash space as well. Only for a structurally prede-
termined agent, adapted rigidly to some specific environment, is an
encounter with a phenomenon alien to its Umwelt fundamentally dis-
ruptive. I do not deny that such breakdowns occur, however the point is
that our responses to them should be thought of as intelligent precisely
to the degree that they are able to overcome them. In this regard,
cognition as such may be thought of most generally as plasticity of a
cognitive agent, that is, its ability to reconfigure itself in the face of
perturbations and to incorporate new environmental structures. That
being said, I am tempted to characterize thought as post-intentional by
definition. Cognition proper has always been antithetical to “meaning”
in the sense that it involves the disruption and transcendence of any
stable semantic structure. So, to my mind, if science does away with
meaning, this does not imply some apocalyptic end of ourselves as we

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have always thought ourselves to be. Instead, it implies a deep conge-

niality between techno-scientific reason and human experience.
These are some of the reasons I have come to distrust Bakker’s
Sellarsian manner of drawing sharp distinctions between science and
human experience.05 Along similar lines, I have grown dissatisfied
with Sellars’ notions of the manifest and scientific image. I will not
go into much discussion on this just yet, as I suspect we will circle
back to it. Let me just add that I believe such dichotomies obscure the
interrelatedness of the two poles. They do not do justice neither to our
own plasticity nor to the open-endedness of scientific research, and so
their stark opposition obscures the way we integrate with our cognitive
environments and ultimately fails to account for how we ever got from
the supposed confines of human experience to the scientific truths
and procedures that transcend it.
That being said, I do not mean to deny that what we have been
discussing has significant purport or that Bakker brings something
new to the table. I still share Bakker’s inkling that we are living through
an important historical threshold and I agree that techno-scientific
thought implies a profound reorientation of how we think of ourselves
and our place in the world. The only thing I am sceptical of is that
the process which fascinates Bakker really comes to its own through
the lens of his philosophical framework. What we are seeing is not a
simple convergence of scientific theory on the kind of beings that we
really are and always have been. Instead, we are beginning to realize
that we cannot probe into our minds without causing some change
in their structure. In a sense, this is a genuine discovery about our
nature, which is to say that we have to account for indeterminateness,
or rather plasticity, as a positive feature of the kind of beings that we
are. This is not to concede that human agency is irreducible to the
order of natural phenomena, in fact just the opposite, it follows from
the realization that scientific observation itself is a kind of physical
interaction and so that all self-apprehension is necessarily self-modifi-
cation. This is why a scientific conception of ourselves does not pin our
nature down to some specific description, but achieves the opposite
result, that is, it produces an explosion of various new types of agency
and mental content. In this regard, techno-scientific thought is con-
tinuous with human agency, although vastly expanding the scope of its
plasticity. Moreover, it might be thought of not only as an intensifica-
tion, but also as a qualitative shift in the way our cognitive processes
unfold. To put it very briefly, I believe modern science may be raising
our plastic capabilities to some sort of second-order level, where what
is permutable are not just our capacities to solve certain tasks, but
05 Bakker, R. Scott, “Exploding the Manifest and Scientific Images of Man”, in: Three Pound Brain, 2018,
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/exploding-the-manifest-and-scientific-images-of-man/.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/exploding-the-manifest-and-scientific-images-of-man/

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even the most biologically determined norms that frame such cognitive
problems. In this regard, we might be approaching a mode of thought
that is not only post-intentional, but also far removed from anything
we would recognize as human. I find the consequences of this devel-
opment both fascinating and concerning in much the same way and
for similar reasons as Bakker’s interest in the post-intentional future.
So I definitely believe that Bakker is onto something, but I think that a
different philosophical framework is needed if we are to get a better
glimpse of what he is getting at.

ŠUM: Reza Negarestani recently mentioned06 how he’s also become

dissatisfied with the Sellarsian distinction (and approach to the prob-
lem) that you’ve mentioned. It seems to us that another Manichaean
distinction between the positive and negative feedback loop—propa-
gated most notably by Nick Land—stumbles upon a similar problem.
If we take your comment that “intelligence as a capacity for self-reg-
ulation is closer to the diagonal method than intelligence conceived
as growth or a positive feedback loop”,07 in what way do you think that
this notion of intelligence (optimisation) follows a different path than a
full-on embrace of deterritorialization?

Timotej Prosen: Yes, I fully agree that we stumble upon a closely

related issue here with Land. In fact, he invokes the distinction
between the two types of feedback loops to draw just the kind of clear-
cut demarcation that I have been criticizing, one which opposes the
domain of what is properly human to some fundamentally alien realm
beyond our grasp. However, I would like to point out that Land’s rea-
sons for making this demarcation are unique and based on an entirely
different vantage point, one which I have grown ever more appreciative
of and which could certainly add a level of depth to our discussion.
Firstly, I should note that one may depart from the Sellarsian
dichotomy of the manifest and scientific image in more than one way.
Up to now, I have been stressing the aspect of plasticity, the fact that
images are inherently in motion, which continuously propels us from
one to another through the process of discovery and conceptual inno-
vation. Now, the other shift in perspective I propose is that we abandon
the very notion of image in this context. Neither of the two modes of
thought should be presumed to reflect some independently existing
external domain. At the most fundamental level, cognition does not
seek to represent reality as independent from it, but instead endeav-
ours to formulate principles of interaction and mastery over it, which

06 NEGARESTANI, Reza, “Humanism & Its Discontents”, YouTube,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djbORhEc5Fw&t=20s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djbORhEc5Fw&t=20s
07 Private correspondence between Timotej Prosen and Enea Kavčič (June 2021).

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ultimately amount to methods of its own self-organization. This is

implied by the very prefix of the term techno-science, which serves to
point out that modern science deals not with classification of natural
phenomena, but investigates instead the operational laws which coor-
dinate the variables pertaining to a system in question with the param-
eters of its possible interactions with either the human experimenter
or his technological apparatuses. The manifest “image” is of course no
less technical in this regard and provides perhaps even more apparent
examples of its self-organizational basis. For instance, earlier I have
touched upon the notions of selfhood and autonomy, which, at least in
certain contexts, engender and orient our behaviour in such a way as
to bring about those very features of our mental constitution which we
might simply take as given.
In line with Land, I draw a great deal in this matter from the
cybernetic movement. Their ideas, especially those of Wiener,08
Ashby09 and Varela,10 establish far-reaching parallels between the
fundamental structures of cognition and the principles of self-organi-
zation. The basic impetus behind their work stems from the realization
that if we are to conceive of cognition as a causal process on par with
other physical phenomena, we must rethink both our understanding
of causal processes and our conception of what cognitive processes
ultimately are and do. Whence the notion of feedback, otherwise
known as circular causality. The idea here is that certain structures
might produce effects, which in turn act on the structure, causing
it to produce more effects of its kind, and so on, in a kind of closed
recursive loop. A particular feature of such processes is that they are
either highly stable or unstable, depending on whether we are dealing
with positive or negative feedback. A positive feedback loop amplifies
its effects, which are amplified again upon re-entry, and so on, such
as when we move a microphone too close to a speaker so that it picks
up its own transmission, quickly transforming the faintest sound into
a shriek at maximum volume. Or we might think more generally of
any kind of explosive chain reaction. A negative feedback loop has
the opposite effect, where the structure counteracts any deviation
of its inputs so as to maintain its effects at some steady value, such
as a thermostat that raises the temperature when it drops below a
certain threshold and lets it fall when it exceeds that threshold. This
latter kind of feedback was especially interesting to cyberneticians
because it gives us a handle on the functions of living organisms, such
as homeostasis, but also a more general feature of a kind of “dynamic
08 WIENER, Norbert, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, New York: MIT Press,
1961.
09 ASHBY, Ross W., Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behaviour, London: Chapman and Hall, 1960.
10 VARELA, Francisco J., “Steps to a Cybernetics of Autonomy”, in: TRAPPL, R. (ed.), Power, Autonomy, Utopia, Boston,
MA: Springer, 1986.

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stasis” that seems to emerge on many levels of biological phenomena

where all the components of some structure are liable to change, but
their network of interrelations seems to retain some steady organiza-
tion. Another crucial feature of negative feedback loops is that they
exhibit a sort of intelligent behaviour, even at the most rudimentary
level. The way a thermostat maintains some desired temperature can
be said to be goal-seeking, a feature even more strikingly exemplified
by how Wiener’s self-guided missiles pursue the enemy target.11 On a
more abstract level, we find that a negative feedback loop necessarily
specifies some “preferred state” or attractor in phase-space, which it
tends to occupy and, when perturbed or displaced in any way that does
not break it down completely, always find its way back to. Rudimentary
feedback processes have a limited number of rigid trajectories
available for the pursuit of their preferred state, but others may be
highly complex and even exhibit learning, such as Ashby’s ultrastable
homeostat, a general model of organismic intelligence, which is able
to reshape its own trajectories of attaining stability in the face of
new perturbations. Whatever the degree of plastic complexity, the
basic outline of intelligent behaviour remains the same—it is drawn
out by the topology of a closed self-maintaining loop where each
cycle corrects for any deformations of its closure’s very shape. So, we
could conclude that intelligence necessarily takes itself as its most
fundamental goal. The main point I want to get across here regarding
the negative feedback loop is precisely this ingenious way in which
cybernetics recursively interweaves the levels of the physical and
epistemological around the notions of stability and self-organization so
that stability may simultaneously be conceived of as a physical feature
and as cognition’s fundamental organizing principle, while the identity
of a cognitive agent is construed as both the underlying goal and the
operational achievement of its intelligence.
Although I am fascinated by this perspective of intelligent
agency and its many consequences in contemporary cognitive science
and robotics, I can also sympathize with Land’s misgivings about it. He
is thoroughly unwilling to accept that intelligence should be limited to
orbiting a fixed axis of organismic identity and that it should remain
subservient to the ultimate goal of preserving its vital structures.
This is why he looks to positive feedback mechanisms, otherwise
known as runaway processes, as a way to escape the shackles of any
stable structure which might warp cognitive processes into forming
a closed circle.12 His idea of emancipation of thought is to enable it
to diverge from its starting conditions and plunge into never-ending

11 WIENER, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, London: Free Association Books,
1989, p. 25.
12 LAND, Nick, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”, in: Logos, 28, Russian Federation, 2018, pp. 21–30.

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transformations. Land’s move of aligning himself with the basic

dynamics of capitalist production makes perfect sense in this regard,
as does his closely related affinity for techno-scientific thought. Both
Marx’s formula for capital and the basic “logic of scientific discovery”
describe processes which entail a peculiarly brutal disregard for the
organization of their constituents and, more importantly, continuously
transcend even their own respective organizational principles. Whether
we are dealing with scientific statements, which explicitly invite all
attempts at their falsification, or with an economy concerned primar-
ily with optimizing the methods of its productive capacities, we can
discern another kind of basic outline: these are the processes whose
primary goal or tendency is to move beyond themselves.
Now, the first issue I take with Land is whether such processes
are indeed best thought along the lines of a positive feedback loop.
It seems to me that he has overlooked the basic reason why cyber-
neticians did not take central interest in the notion, namely the
overwhelming tendency of such mechanisms to self-destruct. Concrete
implementations of positive feedback loops cannot indefinitely con-
tinue to diverge from their initial conditions. They are either rigidly
plateaued by the larger structure which engendered them, as with
microphone feedback, or they cause a breakdown in the structure, at
which point they eliminate themselves, as is the case with explosions.
To be clear, I am actually not pointing this out as a kind of reductio
ad absurdum of Land’s point of view. In fact, it certainly does not
seem excluded that techno-capitalism as we know it today is not only
unsustainable, but undermines the very conditions of its continued
transformations, although this is certainly not the conclusion that Land
is attempting to make by invoking the positive feedback mechanism. In
any case, I do not have any worked out convictions on this matter. What
we are talking about is of course an enormously complex issue, and
it might be impossible to tell at this stage. It is a problem that we are
most likely going to live through concretely in the coming future.
My second issue with Land is more basic and has to do with
his Manichaean contradistinction between the two principles, as if
the relation between them was that of a kind of deathmatch between
fundamentally different types of agents. Again, there is a grain of truth
to this. It saddens me to see all the signs pointing in this direction,
namely that our civilizational conflicts in the near future are going
to be predominantly organized precisely along this axis, dividing
the desperate bids for identity-based stability from the policies of
surrender to the self-undermining tendencies of techno-capitalism.
Still, I am convinced that we may find better ways of framing the
issue lying dormant. My initial reason for the dissatisfaction with the
dichotomy of stability and runaway processes was coming from my

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own oscillating affinity for the two principles, always accompanied by

a visceral reluctance to fully align myself with either, a sense that the
single-dimensional opposition between the two unduly restricts the
kind of agency which I am interested in. This intuition is, I think, partly
substantiated by the cybernetic approach, which enables us to treat
such incompatible dichotomies as component variables of a higher-di-
mensional system whose full functioning or even its capacity to oscil-
late between its partial aspects cannot be explained by or attributed
to any single dimension of its phase-space. I believe this perspective
is needed to get a grasp not only on our interface with other kinds of
agents and processes, but also on the basic outlines of human agency
as such, which does not seem to me to be necessarily centred on bio-
logical or indeed any kind of predetermined point of identity. It may
become entrenched in various sorts of personal or group identities,
and in relation to those it may display all the regulatory behaviours
and intelligence traits of a closed negative feedback loop. But what is
particularly striking, although, of course, not necessarily unique, about
human agency is that it may also break out of its structural closure,
readjust the centre of its orbit, or even become aligned with processes
utterly tangential to it, become invested in, or rather, possessed by,
inhuman entities which may in turn be quite indifferent to its internal
organization.
This leads me to suspect that the notions of feedback do not
suffice and that we may need to look for another kind of basic outline
of cognitive agency. What we stumble upon here is not reducible either
to the geometry of a closed circle nor to one of linear divergence. The
cognitive architecture I am interested in must be drawn out in a higher
dimensional space to explain how such agency might appear from a
certain perspective to be self-affirming, while from another point of
view, all we see are open-ended transformations, and to come to terms
with the paradoxical congeniality of self-organization and self-tran-
scendence. In this respect I believe I am actually perfectly in line with
Land’s diagonal method—my point being precisely that we must not
take the two cybernetic notions as orthogonal, but try to cut diagonally
across the false dichotomy.

ŠUM: Land has a beautiful passage in the late 90s Wired UK interview13
where he states that “organization is suppression”. In response to what
you’ve just said, we would like to know more about the diagonal method
and the false dichotomy that you’ve highlighted. First, does this also
relate to the potentially problematic reasons/causes distinction that
neorationalist philosophers have taken for their own? And second, do
13 LAND, Nick, “Organisation is suppression, Wired UK interview”, in: Isegoria, 1997, https://www.isegoria.net/2018/08/
organisation-is-suppression/.
organisation-is-suppression/

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you think Gilbert Simondon’s work carries the capacity to still shed
some light on the topic? Will he in the end really be regarded as the
ultimate accelerationist philosopher, as we speculated (and joked)
when we came full circle in a previous private conversation?

Timotej Prosen: Apropos Land’s notion of diagonalization, he

takes it to be a kind of general method for breaking out of established
dichotomies by way of affirming a paradoxical cross section of some
dichotomy pair. Land points out a good example of such conceptual
innovation in Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori.14 Here we start
with two opposition pairs—analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori,
which seem to run parallel and are taken to be homologous in nature;
the very notion of analyticity is taken to imply the a priori, and the
synthetic is in turn seen as automatically taking us into the realm
of a posteriori. The next step is to dissociate the two pairs and to
draw them out as orthogonal to each other, so that they constitute
the dimensions of a plane. The final step is to cut diagonally across
the plane by arguing for a paradoxical congruence between diagonal
poles, in this case, for the possibility of statements which are both
synthetic and a priori. A very similar schema may be applied to my
problematization of Land’s contradistinction between the two kinds
of feedback loops. The crucial thing which I tried to argue for in the
previous response is precisely that we are not dealing with a simple
opposition between two kinds of systems or between incompatible
principles of self-organization and self-transcendence. Instead, we
are facing a more complex problem-space which can be charted on at
least two axes. On the one hand, we are considering the discrepancy
between systems which remain bound to some point of identity of their
essential characteristics and are therefore static, and systems which
diverge from their initial conditions and may be termed dynamic. On
the other hand, we are interested in the contradistinction between the
capacity of some systems to counteract disruptive perturbations, that
is to say, self-organizing systems, and the kinds of processes which
tend to break down as they unfold and may be termed self-annihilating.
My point of interest here is precisely whether this framework may
be traversed diagonally—whether we may conceive of such a thing as
dynamic self-organization.
Of course, such a diagonal schema must be understood merely
as a re-framing of the problem, not the solution itself. I suspect that a
diagonal approach has to be worked out concretely in relation to the
specific problem-space we are attempting to traverse; in any case, with
regard to what we are discussing here, I have found Kant’s position, as
14 LAND, Nick, “Note on Diagonal Method”, in: Zero Philosophy, 11/12/2021, https://zerophilosophy.substack.com/p/
note-on-diagonal-method/.
note-on-diagonal-method/

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well as many approaches of other diagonally inclined philosophers,

unsatisfactory. Whence my particular interest in Simondon, who has,
to the best of my knowledge, addressed this very issue most explicitly
and convincingly.
But before we delve deeper into that, let me first turn to the
question regarding the reasons/causes distinction. I am certainly not of
the opinion that all philosophical antagonisms should be treated diag-
onally, and we have finally stumbled upon a topic where my position is
more straightforwardly one-sided. I take the causal level to the more
fundamental of the two, in the sense that any “space of reasons” should
be understood as causality of a particular kind. However, I would
not argue for this in any eliminative materialist vein akin to Bakker’s,
where the reasons we consciously articulate are seen as nothing more
than epiphenomenal “rationalizations” of an underlying causal process
which is taken to be the sole driver of our behaviour. I do not deny
that we, to use Brandom’s term, engage in games of giving and asking
for reasons nor that such games are indispensable even to our causal
apprehension of the world.15 But I disagree with Brandom that our
capacity for rule-governed exchange of reasons should be taken as a
complete picture of what cognition is. My insistence on the physical
nature of cognition stems from the conviction that games of giving and
asking for reasons are only a partial aspect of any intelligent behaviour.
A more complete view of cognition would recognize such games as
specific phases of a process of producing particular physical effects—
of either exerting control over the environment or plastically adapting
to it. This point of view is needed to account for why the “rules of the
game” of giving and asking for reasons may be very different for agents
of various cognitive architectures. An agent primarily concerned with
maintaining its structural integrity exhibits clear limitations on the
degree to which it is able to reasonably update its beliefs, particularly
those which pertain to its own nature and place within the world.
Moreover, as Friston points out under the heading of active inference,
it may be considered quite rational for such agents to refuse to update
their convictions in light of new evidence and attempt instead to prac-
tically ensure that the empirical data conform to their theories about
the world.16 All this may be sharply contrasted to deep structural plas-
ticity and a certain unstable or chaotic nature of the kinds of agents
whose rules of rational conduct are exposed to constant permutations.
In my opinion, there can be no rationally communicative exchange of
information between such fundamentally differing cognitive agents,
although one may, from a certain standpoint, recognise both as spe-
cific instantiations of intelligence.
15 BRANDOM, Robert B., Making it Explicit, London: Harvard University Press, 1994.
16 FRISTON, Karl J., “Life as We Know It”, in: Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 10, 86, 2013.

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 ŠUM #17

These are some of the motivations for my inclination towards

some sort of physicalism or naturalism, one that does not disregard or
subtract anything from our discursive practices of giving and asking
for reasons, but instead adds something to our perspective, namely a
way to appreciate the varieties of their organization. Ultimately, I am
looking for the kind of naturalist framework that would enable us to
pass between and beyond them.
This is where Simondon17 enters the picture for me. His under-
standing of the elementary nature of cognition, which he terms trans-
duction, is pointed precisely in this direction—namely that cognitive
procedures stem from some particularly embodied cognitive archi-
tecture, while the recursive operation of thought is able to modify its
physical instantiation and move the cognitive agent along all sorts of
different trajectories.
His notion of transduction is on some level of course a play on
the classical terminological dichotomy of induction and deduction.
Cognition, for him, cannot proceed by pure deduction, as if it operated
simply by externally manifesting some internally given set of princi-
ples and procedures. Neither can it be purely inductive, allowing itself
to be completely overwritten by the patterns of the external world.
Instead, thought is conceived to be the interface between interiority
and exteriority, a simultaneous two-way passage from one to the other.
It involves internal standards or “categories” in reference to which
the external reality is classified and controlled, but also the process
of reshaping its internal structures as they come in contact with the
external domain.
The epistemological aspect of transduction is, just as with cyber-
netics’ notions, accompanied by an ontogenetic aspect. On this level,
transduction denotes the process by which a specifically embodied
agent functions by recursively operating on its own structure. Any such
agent can be said to possess a “structural germ”, or a kind of blueprint
of itself, in reference to which it may continually propagate its struc-
ture and which defines its structural interiority, as well as its distinc-
tive procedures of interaction with the external environment. A struc-
tural germ is thus externally expressed in processes through which the
agent attempts to subdue the environment to its organization; however,
this peculiar interaction may also work in the opposite direction, with
exteriority affecting the agent’s structural germ and steering the tra-
jectory of its permutations.
This general characterization of transduction already contains
some implications for Simondon’s solution to our diagonal problem—
his theory of dynamic self-organization. But we may unpack those
17 SIMONDON, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2020.

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 Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

implications a little bit further by sketching out the three major modes
of transduction where we encounter something very close to the now
familiar geometry of the closed circle and linear divergence, as well as
something entirely new.
Simondon finds the most rudimentary form of transduction
already at work in inorganic nature, for example in the processes
of crystallization. It is in fact from the domain of chemistry that he
adopts the notion of a structural germ, as it was introduced to account
for the initial phase of crystallization of solids. The notion in this
context is based on the insight that a given chemical solution might
allow for a variety of different kinds of molecular crystalline forms, but
once any one of those possible forms emerges, it will determine the
molecular build-up of the entire subsequent process of crystallization.
A proto-crystalline form of this kind may be said to “germinate” the
entire solid structure, as it proliferates in a given chemical solution to
the exclusion of all the other possible forms of its molecular build-up.
Such a process has the shape of outward expansion, with the initial
structural germ in the centre, which transduces its structure to a
surrounding outer layer, the latter engendering another layer further
out and so on. It is interesting to point out that we encounter here
another kind of process which pushes outward and away from its initial
conditions, whose overarching tendency is to expand its periphery in
a linear fashion ever further out from its structural centre, and is in
that respect not unlike an explosive chain reaction. All such processes
share the propensity to amplify their transductive effects, but always
in a one-directional linear fashion, thus exhibiting not only acceler-
ative dynamism but also a certain rigidity, most readily apparent in
crystalline solids.
Another wholly different kind of transduction may be encoun-
tered in the domain of living organisms, where we usually find a
relatively stable periphery in the form of a protective membrane,
which encapsulates the encoding for its structural characteristics in
some equally relatively unchanging form, such as the genetic material.
Here, the peripheral membrane and the internal core enter into a cir-
cular, mutually stabilizing relationship—the membrane allows for the
unperturbed functioning of its internal structures, while the internal
metabolic processes continually regenerate that membrane. In this
instance, the structural germ does not propagate its transductive
capacities indefinitely outwards (except in specific pathological cases,
such as cancer). Instead, the organism always remains bound to the
same central structural germ. Transduction on this level therefore
denotes the processual emergence of what may seem as a fundamen-
tally static agent, where all dynamics are organized to maintain some

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fixed point of identity. The fundamental impetus of living beings might

thus be said to prevent change in their organization.
This conclusion, however, holds true just for a very limited
aspect of organic life, according to Simondon. To see why, we may
only need to look a bit closer at the circular structure of a protective
membrane and regenerating structural germ. Such processes may
exhibit stability, but they also contain the potential for a particularly
thoroughgoing plastic transformation, which is lacking in processes of
linear amplification. Since organisms remain bound to a central locus
of transduction, its organizing capacities simultaneously operate on
the entire structure, and not just from one peripheral stage to the next.
If the structural germ were to significantly change, such as it might
initially through random genetic mutations, what we get is an entirely
new kind of organism, with both a different internal structure and new
methods of self-organization. So, we may observe a peculiar dynamics
of self-organization already on the level of the evolution of various
phenotypes, although this is only one instance of such a process and
one that is particularly slow and wasteful so that its dynamic aspect
only becomes discernible over vast periods of time. However, for
some organisms it might become beneficial to be able to modify their
structural germ even throughout the course of their lifetime. This can
be observed already on the genetic level, but Simondon points to other
possible instances as well. On the level of multicellular organisms, the
function of a structural germ is partly realized by the nervous system,
which displays a great amount of plasticity. Without going into too
much detail, let me conclude that Simondon observes on all these
levels a peculiar outline of dynamic self-organization, where a system
is organized around some parameter, with the parameter being liable
both to outside influence and to the operations of that system itself.
These characteristics are encapsulated on the most abstract
level by Simondon’s conception of metastability, which he adopts from
the field of dynamical systems theory. Already in this context, it forms
an alternative to more rudimentary notions of stability or instability, as
it denotes systems with multiple attractors, or structures, which might
in different circumstances converge on different points of stability.
Simondon further stresses the possibility that the system might oper-
ate on itself so as to continually modify the structures which define the
parameters of its attractors. In this regard, he clearly opposes both the
conception of cognition as a positive and as a negative feed-back loop.
Intelligent processes neither blindly diverge from their initial condi-
tions nor do they seek trajectories to a predetermined attractor, but
simultaneously coordinate both the methods and parameters of their
organization.

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 Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

I believe such Simondonian insights get us very close to a

diagonal transversal stated above and a satisfactory conception of
intelligence as dynamic self-organization. And they might also substan-
tiate the joking remark of Simondon being the ultimate accelerationist
philosopher, that is to say, a thinker concerned primarily with pro-
cesses which not only continually evolve but also actively organize the
conditions of their continued transformations.

ŠUM: In a conversation on Metelkova [the only remaining squat in

Ljubljana], you said that for you a better conception of the body without
organs is simply the extended mind (thesis or theory). Would you be
able to elaborate on that—we have a sense that this kind of equivoca-
tion could potentially rub our fellow Deleuzians the wrong way—and
potentially also touch upon your recent paper on the topic. How does
the extended mind theory enter into the picture you sketched in your
previous answers and what do you believe is its most fundamental
part?

Timotej Prosen: Well, let me first point out that the interrelated-
ness of the body without organs and the extended mind can only be
appreciated from a specific understanding of both, and I admit that my
attempt to bring the two notions in line is not without some tensions.
The extent to which such tensions are unacceptable from a properly
Deleuzian standpoint is also the extent to which I depart from his
position. However, I still see the confrontation between the two frame-
works as highly productive for two reasons. On the one hand, the body
without organs may be invoked to indicate the specific conception of
the extended mind which I find most pertinent—it was, in fact, recent
developments in the field of extended mind research which caused
a turn ever closer to some of Deleuze’s ideas, and I, for one, certainly
hope that this direction of research is to be pursued further. The other
reason is that such a framework of extended mind comes equipped
with notions that may help us approach the problematic of the body
without organs from a new angle and perhaps take steps beyond the
Deleuzian horizon.
Let me start with the latter point. Deleuze and Guattari define
the body without organs as the domain of systems lacking all organiza-
tion, or the limit which is approached by the process of deterritorializa-
tion. It is a domain of decoded flows, that is, of processes which do not
follow any closed channel of organized interaction and therefore act
non-sequentially, simultaneously affecting the entire system. The body
without organs is a system stripped of all organization, a body emptied
out of organs, that is to say, of any parts which might steer the flows
of internal processes in any specific direction, instead allowing for a

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 ŠUM #17

simultaneous proliferation of its currents across the entire domain and

in all directions at once.18
As such, the body without organs seems to belong to an order
entirely different to that of any kind of organized agency. In fact,
Deleuze and Guattari note that that excessive proximity to a body
without organs always threatens us with violent “dismemberment”
and death.19 However, the authors also observe that some agents or
machines may enter into a constitutive relationship with it. Human
social formations, for instance, may be organized against the back-
drop of the body without organs, be they stabilizing or expansive and
dynamic, structured either around territorial regulation, despotic con-
trol or the movement of capital. In each case, the body without organs
functions as a threshold of disorganization through which human
beings themselves are compelled to pass, as it constitutes the horizon
for the process of re-composition of their “dismembered” productive
and regulatory capacities, along with their various artefacts and infra-
structures, into the newly emerging social bodies.
So, there is a destructive as well as a constructive dimension
to the body without organs. Moreover, it may be viewed either as a
foreign body, absolutely alien and detrimental to any kind of organized
agency, or we can conceive of it as a phase internal to some processes
of organization, that is to say, as a plane of immanence allowing for
continuous assembly and disassembly of its constituents. Of course, I
am disposed towards the latter view, but for that, we need to account
for the intersection of organisms and bodies without organs; we need
to get a handle on just how some organized structure might enter a
phase of the dissolution of its internal structures only to emerge anew
by recomposing the circuitry of its organization. This is where I would
look to the extended mind theory. To be sure, Simondon’s notions of
metastability and the transindividual already go a long way in dealing
with this problem. The theory of extended mind does, however, develop
the aforementioned Simondonian insights significantly. Two such find-
ings are especially pertinent for us here, having to do with the dynam-
ics of the interchanging phases of organization and disorganization,
and with the way their pulsating movement may carve out entire planes
of consistency, entangling us with all sorts of social and technological
assemblages.
The core idea behind the notion of the extended mind is that
our minds extend beyond the confines of our brains or beyond the
bodies of individual persons. But what exactly does this imply? The
first thing I should note with regard to the field of the extended mind

18 DELEUZE, Gilles & GUATTARI, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983.
19 DELEUZE, Gilles & GUATTARI, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1988.

2303
 Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

research is that it comprises different approaches, most of which are

in my opinion led astray by the very notion of mind and the dualist and
representationalist legacy that it carries with it. The idea here is to
identify some internal representations or engrams and then to show
how representations external to the nervous system, called exograms,
may play similar or homologous roles in cognition.20 Admittedly, one
can point to a staggering number of such exograms, ranging from
natural language to the most advanced information processing tech-
nologies, but even all this does not do justice to the full scope of our
extended minds. The research which I am more interested in proceeds
from a very different conception of mind, defined as a body’s capacity
to act on its environment and react to perturbations from it, that is to
say, a body’s capacity for self-organization. If we start from these pre-
suppositions, the mind by definition cannot overstep the boundaries of
its embodiment, because at its most fundamental, the mind is nothing
but the recursive loop which encircles and consequently defines the
very physical outlines of some agent. However, as soon as the process
which defines the boundaries of some physical system can be said to
be intelligent, such boundaries begin to exhibit plasticity. To speak of
extended mind in this regard is to speak of the process by which some
bodies expand and reshape their boundaries.
There are two distinct directions that such a boundary-expand-
ing process might take, and they correspond to the two theoretical
frameworks currently dealing with these kinds of processes. On the
one hand we have enactivist cognitive science21 which deals with the
kinds of self-organizing systems that maintain some of their character-
istics throughout their development. Such systems are said to have a
two-partite structure;22 one essential aspect which remains unchanged
and another, transitory aspect which might be said to undergo trans-
formations precisely in order to keep the essential aspect in place. It
is assumed that those characteristics which stay in place are somehow
essential to the agent’s physical structure, while those which are set
to be transitory are its sensory-motor capacities of interaction with
the environment. The sensory-motor patterns are left undisturbed as
long as they are sufficient to maintain the essential structures of some
agent, but compelled to change as soon as the essential features go out
of bounds, and set to continuously undergo transformations for as long

20 SUTTON, John, “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended, and the Civilising Process”, in: MENARY,
Richard (ed.), The Extended Mind, New York: The MIT Press, 2010, pp. 189–225.
21 DE JAEGHER, Hanne & FUCHS, Thomas, “Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to intersubjectivity”,
in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 4, 2007, pp. 485–507; DI PAOLO, Ezequiel, “Extended Life”, in: Topoi,
28, 1, 2008, pp. 9–21; VARELA, Francisco J., “Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves”, in: TAUBER, Alfred I. (ed.),
Organism and the Origins of Self, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 129, Dordrecht: Springer, 1991.
22 DI PAOLO, Ezequiel, “Organismically-inspired robotics: Homeostatic adaptation and natural teleology beyond
the closed sensorimotor loop”, in: MURASE, Kazuyuki & ASAKURA, Toshiyuki (eds.), Dynamical Systems Approach to
Embodiment and Sociality, Adelaide: Advanced Knowledge International, 2003.

2304
 ŠUM #17

as they do not achieve some new sensory-motor pattern of counteract-

ing the perturbation of essential structures. Such a two-partite cogni-
tive architecture accounts for a wide range of learning phenomena, as
well as our ability to utilize various sensory and motor prostheses. In
fact, by recourse to these basic enactivist principles, our ever greater
reliance on technological augmentations of our sensory and motor
capacities may be said to constitute a particular kind of learning, one
which follows naturally from agents with a certain degree of structural
plasticity.
This idea is substantiated by Leroi-Gourhan,23 another important
precursor to the notions of the extended mind. He finds that the evo-
lution of hominid cerebral structures runs in close connection with the
appearance of bipedalism and a corresponding distinct loss of special-
ized morphology of the limbs. Through this process, the hand becomes
“specialized for universality”, which is to say that it loses all traits
which would give it an edge for specific tasks, such as piercing, slash-
ing or digging, and becomes adapted mainly for the gripping and han-
dling of various tools that replace the bodily appendages in performing
specific tasks. What particularly strikes Leroi-Gourhan is not so much
the increase in general scope of human intelligence, but the specific
nature of this generality, which has to do with the expansion of self-or-
ganizing capacities to include extrabodily appendages. His conclusion
is that through the process of hominid evolution, the central concerns
of human intelligence have become the ability to temporarily incorpo-
rate various technical assemblages, the capacity to smoothly transition
between them and the incentive to recursively operate from one
domain of technical appendages to the next, such as with the creation
of tools designed for the manufacture of other tools. The latter trait is
especially interesting to Leroi-Gourhan; he sees it as setting our spe-
cies down a peculiarly thoroughgoing path of gradual externalization
of bodily organization, starting with the most peripheral appendages,
which replace the functionality of bodily parts such as claws or teeth,
and later moving further into the bodily organization, with the force
and coordination of human movement being partially redelegated from
human muscle to other animals and later to machines. This process
culminates in our time with the advent of information technologies,
which externalize to an ever-greater extent even our “mental” capaci-
ties for storage and processing of information. There is one final step
left to take according to Leroi-Gourhan, which would bring this process
to its ultimate conclusion by externalizing the last internally embodied
aspect of human organization. This would be achieved by producing an
externalized equivalent of human affectivity, understood as the ulti-
mate source of action coordination and self-organization. This would
23 LEROI-GOURHAN, André, Gesture and Speech, London: The MIT Press, 1993.

2305
 Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

amount to dislodging the very centre of human self-organization from

internal biological structures to external artifacts.
Now, I would claim that an externalization of human affectivity
has already taken place, although not as the final step in the ever-in-
creasing expansion of our technical capabilities, but as a qualitatively
different kind of mental extension, which accompanies each con-
secutive step of our technical evolution. My reasons for this claim
should become somewhat obvious as soon as we clarify the notions
of affectivity and technicity by recourse to the two-partite schema of
our cognitive architecture. Our technical capacities can of course be
placed on the side of permutable patterns of sensory-motor coordina-
tion. Our technical knowledge has the form of relegating specific motor
responses to specific sensory stimulation and our technical equipment
can be treated simply as another link in the circutry of our motor
effectors. Affectivity, on the other hand, fits neatly on the other side of
the schema; it determines which characteristics are essential for some
agent, and in recourse to those it provides the measure for success
and failure of technical operations. This is in line with our everyday
understanding of emotions; they are usually thought of as centred in
the body, with their pleasurable and painful characteristic indicating
either beneficial or detrimental somatic changes. But emotions also
play a crucial role in sculpting our behavioural patterns, as those same
aspects of pleasure and pain either motivate or inhibit the specific
ways we interact with our environments. I think such a schematic
definition suffices to show why affectivity should elude the progress
of purely technical externalization. Affectivity eludes it because it
necessarily remains fixed at its very centre. To speak of purely techni-
cal progress would thus imply an outward radial expansion of “means”
which remain bound to some rigidly determined core which determines
their “ends”.
I believe, however, that we are hardly ever faced with simple
technical progress in this sense of linear development steadily advanc-
ing from some fixed point of reference. Moreover, I think we find a
significant degree of plasticity not only on the level of the periphery
of our sensory-motor interface with the world, but also on the level of
the affective core of our cognitive agency. In fact, the two dimensions
of structural plasticity are closely related in my opinion, and conse-
quently we find that the process of technical augmentation of our sen-
sory-motor capacities is always accompanied by the emergence of what
I would term exoaffects. The notion of an exoaffect can be worked out
by recourse to the second of the two approaches of the extended mind
research, which I mentioned earlier, namely, predictive processing and

2306
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the free energy principle.24 Without going into too much detail let me
just point out that the framework is compatible with the two-partite
schema that I have been relying on so far, but allows for permutability
and mutual influence between the level of sensory-motor patterns and
the level of the affective parameters of behaviour. This framework
therefore gives us an intuitive handle on the affective dimension of our
behaviour, while at the same time overcoming some of the shortcom-
ings of the “organism-centred” view of affectivity. I propose the notion
of exoaffect in order to explain how the affective parameters which
steer the behaviour of some agent are compelled to change in line
with how the structural make-up of that agent is expanded or reshaped.
The notion also accounts for the simple observation that constituents
of our environment can act as external loci of affective significance,
which often overpower the binds that tie our affective responses to
the well-being of our biological bodies. Exoaffectivity should therefore
be taken both as entirely distinct from and complementary to the
externalization of perceptive and motor capacities. Whereas the latter
have to do with the various methods of control and self-organization,
externalized affects reshape the basic parameters of just what is being
organized.
The two basic facets of extended mind thus involve both the
process of organization and disorganization and the relation between
them should render conceivable how even the latter process might be
constitutive to some types of agency. The notion of extended mind may
consequently also provide a deeper understanding of how complex
socio-technological assemblages are formed. To circle back to Deleuze,
we are now in a position to better grasp how territorial boundaries
might become the most distinctive features of certain social groups,
more vigorously maintained and defended than even the most vital
internal organization of their constituents. Or we may better under-
stand how the body of a sovereign can become invested with a certain
sacred dimension, the affective effects of which are precisely such as
to enable a single constituent to exert central control over the entire
social body. These are the two examples where the socio-technical
infrastructure and exoaffects couple in such a way as to achieve rela-
tive stability. Then there is also the case of capitalist societies fuelled
by a peculiar dynamism between the two aspects, as the technical
production of commodities begins to explicitly involve the engineering
of corresponding exoaffects, always in such a way as to give rise to

24 CLARK, Andy, “How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket: Resisting the Second Law with Metamorphic Minds”, in:
METZINGER, Thomas & WIESE, Wanja (eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing, MIND Group, 2017; KIRCHHOFF,
M. & KIVERSTEIN, J., Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-wave View, London: Routledge,
2019; RAMSTEAD, M. J. D., KIRCHHOFF, M. D., CONSTANT, A. et al., “Multiscale integration: beyond internalism and
externalism”, in: Synthese, 198, 2019, pp. 41–70.

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 Maks Valenčič & Tisa Troha

further cycles of production, the reciprocal feedback loop between the

two thus always threatening to quite literally spiral out of control.
I have provided here of course only the faintest outlines of
some situations which call for the mode of analysis provided by the
notion of the extended mind. I believe there are many interesting
implications of these views yet to be fleshed out, which is what I am
currently preoccupied with. I am especially fascinated by the question
whether contemporary cognitive science itself can be taken as a pro-
cess which feeds back into the structure of our agency to produce a
qualitative shift in our organization. In this respect, my interests are
still very closely aligned with those of Bakker, as I briefly pointed out
in my response to the first question, although they stem from different
starting points, which have by now hopefully been adequately sketched
out. My interest in cognitive science does not stem from the belief in
its capacity to reveal an image of ourselves as we truly are; such an
image will always be unattainable due to our structural plasticity. On
the contrary, I am fascinated by cognitive science as the ultimate feat
of this very plasticity. What seems to be happening is that we are on
the verge of fully closing the circle between the technical and affective
aspects of our agency. These two aspects have profoundly affected
and constrained one another throughout the whole of human history,
but now the newfound possibilities of observation and manipulation
of our mental architecture bring the two realms ever closer to a com-
plete short circuit. What happens when the calibration of affective
parameters of some agent truly becomes a technical problem for that
very agent? Does this lead to a cognitive crash-space or even a violent
meltdown of any organized agency? Or does it lead to a cognitive
architecture of not as yet conceivable dimensions? With regard to such
questions, I am still very much in the dark, so instead of attempting to
further elaborate on this matter, I will simply conclude with a quote by
Deleuze and Guattari, which I think applies well here: “we haven’t seen
anything yet”.25

Timotej Prosen is a PhD candidate and a junior researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.
His main areas of research include process ontology, enactivist cognitive science, extended mind theory and affective
neuroscience.

Maks Valenčič is an independent researcher and writer. He tweets at @MaksValencic

@MaksValencic.

Tisa Troha is an architect. Her master's thesis from the University of Ljubljana explores the inhuman agency of
architecture's technological germ-cell. She sometimes dabbles in design, art, and music, and tweets at @xen0nym
@xen0nym.

25 DELEUZE, Gilles & GUATTARI, Félix, Anti-Oedipus, p. 240.

2308
 

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 ŠUM #17

Subset of Theoretical Practice01

Atlas of
Experimental
Politics

One cannot see everything from everywhere.

—Louis Althusser

We used to be unable to accomplish the things we

imagined—now we are unable to imagine the things we
accomplish.
—Gunther Anders

To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena,

and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in
a desired manner.
—Huey Newton

01 The Atlas is signed by the following members of the STP: Allan M. Hillani, Gabriel Tupinambá, J.-P. Caron, J. Millie,
Maikel da Silveira, Rafael Pedroso, Rafael Saldanha, Reza Naderi, Renzo Barbe, Tiago Guidi, Yasha Shulkin and Yuan Yao.

2311
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

Attention all passengers

One should recall here the famous parable of the elephant and the
blind men. Having never encountered this animal, these men could
only learn about its form by touching it. Each one feels a different part
of the beast and when they later exchange experiences, each describes
a distinct creature.
The present essay is structured like this parable, with each
section offering a partial—and sometimes conflicting—description of
one and the same object, introduced in our second chapter. The linear
ordering of the sections should therefore not deceive the reader: they
are rather moving around something.
Our hope is that within each of these different accounts some
common features might slowly become recognizable—a challenge that
led us to use a system of cross references between sections: the reader
will thus encounter in the text insertions of roman numerals (I to XVIII),
which refer to other sections of the essay where one might find related
ideas.
Now, we do not refer to this text as a “beast” for nothing: it really
is quite a large animal. And so it was impossible to include it all in the
print edition of the journal. Instead we offer here a slightly reduced
version of the essay—and refer the reader to the ŠUM website (www.www.
sum.si) for the full online content. Nevertheless, one can still get a
sum.si
sense of what parts of the animal are missing here through the clues
we left in the text: cross references to absent sections, the extensive
diagrammatic table of contents etc.

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 ŠUM #17

Table of Contents

I. Tools for Navigation II. Meeting III. The Communist IV. Tektology
the Monster Standpoint and Organizational
Trinitarianism

V. Political Experiments VI. The Discipline VII. On Political VIII. Seeing Nature
of Politics Fetishism

IX. Dumont in Melanesia X. Lessons from XI. The Space of Value XII. Real Abstraction
Mongolian Logistics and Valorization and the Given

XIII. Navigating XIV. Case study: XV. Case study: the XVI. Case Study:
Through Dimensions Internal Dissent in Modes of Exchange in Braking the Plaforms in
a Political Organization Jackson, Mississippi the Brazilian Courier
Strikes

XVII. Open Questions XVIII. Trajectory

on Topoi and Complex and Invitation
Worlds

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I. Tools for
Navigation
This contribution is the result of a research project that has pro-
gressed throughout the past two years, but was itself a culmination
of years of collective work, brought together online in the context of
the ongoing pandemic (XVIII). Our backgrounds, research interests
and precise political experiences are quite heterogeneous, and yet we
have come to orbit around a fuzzy set of philosophical commitments
through the study of the work of Alain Badiou, Alexander Bogdanov
and Kojin Karatani, amongst others. While they have led us to a set
of conclusions that appear novel, we strive to demonstrate that this
wasn’t strictly the only path to them and that their internal consistency
is coherent.
The text ought not to be read dogmatically, as a set of prescrip-
tions to be followed, but spatially—by which we mean that our practical
goal is to enlarge spaces of mutual intelligibility on the Left. This spa-
tial theme also extends more broadly to a shift from critique to experi-
mentation, from unearthing the conditions of possibility of what exists
to the concern of exploring new possibilities, as the proposed perspec-
tive of regionalizing concepts within their appropriate contexts.
Our collective methodological commitments are broken into
three ordered zones which build on one another. The first such zone
is a triad of composition, intelligibility and interaction where all three
ways of seeing a world can be thought at the same time in their mutual
dependencies (IV). The next is a phenomenological perspective based
on Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds called “objective phenomenology”,
a big impetus for our group’s interest in category theory. While math-
ematics is an important tool for structuring our thought, the present
text brackets the particular details in favor of the intuitive core of the
argument. With this spatialization of social worlds, we finally present
how the previous commitments allow us to think experimentally rather
than critically. This final point will prepare the reader for the broader
structure of this collaborative work. We want to conceive of local social
worlds as spaces that one can reason within.

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Social Worlds

What do we mean by a social world? Intuitively, a social world is a

place where people must learn to live together (XIV, XV, XVI). Living
together implies, at least the possibility of, constructing a collective
subject—the social world must have the expressive capacity to consist-
ently cover both its material base and its subjective horizons. Politics
itself is thus never context-free; our goal is to build universal political
statements at particular social worlds.
Doing this requires conceiving of politics as its own form of
thinking, distinct from and irreducible to science, aesthetics or love. By
this we mean that the discipline of politics, which could also be named
collective subject construction, should have the capacity to speak for
itself on its own terms, even if it does so in infinitely many irreducible
ways. This sets itself apart from either a science of history or an erup-
tive-evental theory of politics, both of which lack the expressiveness to
diagnose and describe contemporary political situations.
Inspired partly by Rodrigo Nunes’ conception of an ecology
of organizations, we strive to think about heterogeneous forms of
political organizations as living in a single space that can be reasoned
within02—but expanding on this idea we want to see problems of politi-
cal economy as also living within this space; in other words, we want to
regionalize the logic of political organization and political economy in
a globally consistent way. Social worlds thus fit together in a multilay-
ered structure; we exist within multiple of these social spaces at once
whose logics interact at overlapping resolutions. The full structure
includes everything from the communitarian logic governed by reci-
procity (families, communes, small villages) to state logic which rules
by the sword and contract and finally to economic structure where the
flow of capital dominates (II).
To think politics in this multiscalar and constructive way neces-
sitates that all social worlds be not only infinite in absolute size but
inaccessibly so (VI). If a world is inaccessibly infinite, it means that no
sequence of reasoning within that world can fully capture its full size
and scope—consequently, the possibilities for subjectivity are never
depleted. The consequence of thinking of social worlds as infinite
spaces, including both the material support and the configuration
space of possible social forms within the world, is that the reasoning
about these social forms can be done within the logic of the world
itself. This explains our insistence on calling them social worlds, since
they have enough internal structure to speak for themselves—social
worlds have an internal language capable of self-representation.

02 NUNES, Rodrigo, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, Verso Books, 2021.

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Politics, as its own form of thinking, comes about through the

interaction of the space of collective organization, the social world
representing “what can be done” in a sense, with the forms of commu-
nity, state and capital. The conception of politics as an active struggle
is thus preserved—it is not a static space of what is possible, but a
dynamic push and pull between social worlds and their internal ten-
sions that determine possible and necessary forms of resistance (IV, V).
In dealing with such large and complex social worlds, we need a
theoretical strategy up to the task of both describing current capitalist
social formations and investigating possible alternatives. In other
words, we want the theoretical space we explore in this contribution to
be infinitely richer than any particular social world; situating political
problems within this theory ought to reformulate them in their own
terms.

The Composition, Intelligibility, Interaction Triad

Stated simply, the goal of this collaborative research project is to

investigate new ways of thinking about social forms that do not reduce
to mere sums of the individuals that compose them (V). By this we
mean that different forms of collective organization should condition
what is politically intelligible in a given context, rather than begin from
the assumption that what exists in political life is what is immediately
intelligible to individuals. This approach requires a way of synthesizing
political information “at the scene” such that local agents can learn
about a social world as active participants in it.
Such a synthesis is achieved by passing through the triad intel-
ligibility, composition and interaction simultaneously (IV). Different
social worlds treat each of the three standpoints differently: communi-
ties can make intelligible possible forms of interpersonal association,
capitalist production processes compose in ways that at least preserve
the value of commodities, interaction with state apparatuses depends
on the form of laws and their manner of enforcement. We propose that
social forms should always be filtered through these three ways of
thinking if we are to expand the space of organizational possibilities.
The first standpoint, intelligibility, is the analysis of what a world
can say about itself conditioned on which relations do or do not appear
within that world. The thinking of intelligibility proper requires unfurl-
ing the confines of a contextual language to formulate the expressive
limits of this language itself. To investigate intelligibility is to also
understand what is not intelligible in a given situation. To occupy a
perspective in a world is to be able to discern some things from oth-
ers—but not everything in every way. In other words, depending on how
objects are composed in a world, they can make for better or worst

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perspectives to which that world appears—different perspectives can

be more or less “sensitive” to that world, depending on how much of
its structure “looks the same” from that standpoint and how much “a
difference makes a difference” to it.
What makes a difference in a world can be some minimum scale,
primitives that the situation does not have the resources to dig deeper
into—the theory of a smaller resolution requires a new theory. The
limits of intelligibility can also appear globally though, like a straight
path through curved space that unwittingly closes in on itself. In the
space of capitalism, we see exactly this when environmental exter-
nalities cannot be treated by profit-seeking organizations unless a
cost-measure is assigned to them. Ecological effects are not too small
or atomised, but too large and dispersed to be seen from consistent
perspectives within the capitalist space.
The second, composition, is the logic of intra-world operations.
It is the law that governs how relations are related to one another that
uphold the logic and structure of that social world. The composition of
objects in a world conditions what perspectives exist for them—since
social forms see only what they compose with—so intelligibility is
clearly dependent on composition: for something to be intelligible in
a world means there is an underlying compositional structure whose
differences make a difference to other perspectives that share some
compositional characteristics in that space. The matheme holds true
(the Yoneda Lemma) that an object can be fully understood by the sum
of operations into or out of it, and we thus hold in esteem the relations
between objects in a world (more on this later). Rather than strictly
thinking about how subjects see objects of a world they inhabit, we
strive to describe how objects in the world see each other.
The third standpoint, interaction, concerns the space of possible
perturbations to the world’s state. This standpoint’s primary objective
is to clarify that not only is the logical composition of a world con-
nected to what perspectives can be assumed within it, but that it also
conditions—and is affected by—the sort of effective interventions one
can produce there. This correlation between composition and interac-
tion allows us to investigate and in particular expand our conceptions
of what is possible within a logical space. Social worlds being compli-
cated and non-classical means that political strategy needs to expand
its conceptions of intervention beyond the tried duality of horizontal vs
vertical organization.03 By placing new ways of thinking of interaction
with social worlds at the forefront of our commitments, we are able to
connect political organization and political economy, proposing that
different ways of composing and interacting with a capitalist social
world can render different aspects and possibilities intelligible.
03 Ibid.

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We claim that when this triadic standpoint is applied all at once

to a real situation, one gets the experimental language of that situa-
tion. The role of the triad is to give us basic tools to center both the
analysis of large-scale social formations and the discussion around
political strategy on an organizational point of view. From the stand-
point of this triad, we can conceive a theoretical framework that might
both tackle the issue of money as a privileged point of view within the
space of commodity relations (XI) as well as ask ourselves what sort of
complex organizational experiments would be needed in order to make
this or that aspect of social life perceptible to political collectivity
(XIII, XIV, XVI).

A Note on Methodology

Before delving into what we term objective phenomenology, a word

on methodology is due, particularly in regards to the use of category
theory as a tool for inspecting social worlds. We abide by a general
strategy we name methodological universalism—where applying the
composition, intelligibility and interaction triad to a particular context
allows us to build models reflecting universal constraints. Rather than
deploying mathematical resources as toy models that seek to translate
into a common logical framework certain characteristics of concrete
situations, we attempt to extract universal rules through the compo-
sition-intelligibility-interaction triad that tell us something about how
situated political experiments can learn about their own social envi-
ronment—in a sense, it is the political process that serves as a model,
while our theory seeks to solely establish the general constraints for
such a situated modeling process (VI).
Social worlds are not devoid of structure, but their internal struc-
ture isn’t usually immediately accessible. Our strategy is to peek into
what a social world looks like to its inhabitants, in other words, how
social forms appear to one another, which defines a transcendental
indexing of the existence of beings in that world. Social forms appear
in a world to a certain extent which is determined by its relations with
other beings in the world—the social form of the State, for example,
appears in the world of Capital to the extent that it conditions and
upholds private property relations. This transcendental indexing is
exactly the measure of these intra-world relations and is the start of
our methodological interest in category theory—the general science of
objects and their relations. We have no intention of bogging the reader
down with mathematical jargon, and so present only the intuitive core
of the theory.
The first step of describing a new category (a context) is find-
ing which objects appear as indistinguishable within it—recall the

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“differences that make a difference” for intelligibility. In the language of

category theory this is done by identifying the isomorphisms between
given objects, transformations encoding the identity of two objects
by their composition. Rather than identifying the sameness of two
objects element by element, the information is contained within the
(context-dependent) relations between the objects themselves. In the
investigation into social worlds we stay agnostic about what a thing
“is”, its intrinsic and absolute determinations, letting objects be “black
boxes” whose relations determine their structure. Things happen to
appear in a world and the way that they appear will be taken-as-given
in that world—as beings in social worlds we only ever see what appears
there.
A critical reader might accept category theory’s “relativistic”
perspective but fail to see what opportunities for novel conceptions
of universality it brings to the table. In category theory a relation can
have a universal property when it is exposed to all other relations in
the space in a unique way. Universal properties were what first brought
mathematicians to study categories as ways of conceiving of related
structures in different contexts—for example, both numbers and
topological spaces, mathematical structures with entirely different
constructions, have a notion of sum and product defined by identical
universal properties. A particular relation having a universal property
means that any other relation in the space should compose with it in a
unique way and thus that relation stands in a unique universal position
for that world.
Category theory therefore gives us tools for identifying contex-
tually universal relations in social worlds, which are not given a priori
but must be extracted through a sort of dialectical process that passes
through the intelligibility-composition-interaction triad simultaneously.
In an ideal world, passing through composition alone would be enough
(categories are completely determined by their laws of composition),
but the internal structure of social worlds is never immediately appar-
ent. We must both interact with them and inscribe consequences and
possibilities within a locally-intelligible language. With this said, we are
ready for the full methodological impetus of this research project.

Objective Phenomenology

In Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou develops a general theory of

world-analysis called “Objective Phenomenology” which we employ
and build upon in this text.04 The name is not to suggest a relapse into
some naive “objectivism” for phenomena but a perspective inversion
where rather than considering how some transcendental subject sees
04 BADIOU, Alain, Logics of Worlds, London: Continuum Press, 2006.

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objects in a world, we consider how objects in a world see one another.

The intelligibility-composition-interaction triad perspective on social
worlds has associated intrinsic counterparts in this theory that explain
the intuition of the methodological tools we employ. Objective phenom-
enology is our name for the contextual analysis of social worlds that,
when explicated to its possible extent, can recover universal relations
which determine the workings of the world.

Seeing

We have already used the metaphor of visibility in how social forms see
one another, by which we mean that different social forms have access
to different amounts of information about the world. The State sees
its citizens (to an extent) and the property relations it upholds, but is
blind to those people and interests “not counted”. Communities tend to
see individuals in the highest resolution, but are generally cut off from
seeing at a larger scale. A corporation sees people, whether as employ-
ees or customers, as potential sources of greater surplus value. This
“seeing as” is the first step in building the transcendental indexing
operation in a world, in other words the start of a new phenomenology
(XII).
What various social forms “see” structures what is intelligible
in that world, by which we mean that we never have direct access to
social forms in themselves, but rather they are always filtered through
a social world—we are always seeing them as how they appear in a
world. The intelligibility of the world emerges by how social forms are
seen from different perspectives within that world. In other words, in
the language of category theory, a social form (more precisely its rep-
resentation) is completely determined by its relations with other social
forms.

Slicing/Scaling

We recall that social worlds are always infinite—in fact inaccessi-

bly so, but representation is always limited to what can be named.
Inaccessibly infinite worlds always escape the possibility of complete
representation. This means that what even counts as a social form
must be somehow “picked out” of the world, an operation we call slic-
ing. In the same way that seeing conditions the space of intelligibility
of a social world, slicing conditions our representations of composition
in the world.
The aim of representation in social worlds is therefore to pick
out enough social forms at the right resolution so that they sufficiently
cover the space. This approach can vary drastically depending on the

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specific context, but the underlying intuition is that by picking out

enough slices of the world—predicates or differences that are effective
in that space—this choice of covering should match up with the world’s
internal logic. The way this picking out of slices happens is never
immediately given but must be arrived at dynamically through experi-
mentation with different representations and stacking representations
up against one another—in terms of the experimental language the
slices correspond to predicates that differentiate some part of the
world.
The slicing operation, which picks out parts of the world, is
where we see the association between spatial and logical concepts—
one supported by the mathematics of Topos theory, which demon-
strates how the spatial structure of a world is essentially equivalent to
its logical structure. Said differently, if we slice things in the right way
then logic of the world will appear naturally. Accurately diagnosing the
logic of a world is not only a problem of abstract reasoning but one of
spatial reasoning and representation.
When we look beyond a singular social world, beyond the “dif-
ferences that make a difference” for that world, slicing also becomes
a matter of scaling. We say that a change in scale happens in one of
two cases: either there is a scale “below” the differences that make a
difference for some world or there is a scale “above” which the world
cannot access but can be seen from another vantage point—in which
case passing to a new scale requires going beyond the representative
resources of the world by taking a sort of limit. This limit might be
integratable back into the previous world through new social objects
that remain consistent with its inner logic, or new logical space might
be needed to bring this new information into compositional form—in
which case the new objects will not belong to the previous world.

Site

A term borrowed from the great mathematician and father of modern

algebraic geometry and category theory Alexander Grothendieck,05
the site is the final internal resource in a social world that structures
the space of interaction with the world. For our purposes, the site is
the space where interaction with the world can be made intelligible—a
place where the construction of new possibilities can occur (V). It is
a part of the world with a rich enough representation of “slices” and
how these slices see one another (i.e. expressive in composition and
intelligibility) such that local interventions on this site can be seen as
mutually compatible.
05 ARTIN, Michael, GROTHENDIECK, Alexander, VERDIER, Jean-Louis, Théorie de topos et cohomologie étale des
schemas I, II, III, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 269, 270, 305, 1971.

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Compatibility is key here, it is what justifies us to piece together

local information in a globally consistent way. The site acts as the
place in which local perturbations can sum together to an intelligible
whole—it is a choice of part-whole relations on the space that is glob-
ally coherent with the dynamics of a social world. A world along with
a site on it is a local model of the world, in fact it is the site which
defines what “locality” really means in a social world.
Badiou also uses the term site in the transcendental analysis of a
world, although our usage is more general.06 For him, a site is what we
could call an evental site which models locality as below the resolution
of the world such that something that doesn’t appear in the world, the
inexistent, can erupt into the world and cause a genuine change to it.
An evental site treats parts of the world so that a new transcendental
indexing can be defined and change the logical structure of the world
itself—but we adopt the concept in its usual mathematical meaning,
leaving Badiou’s term as the name of one of its special or extreme
cases.
With these tools of navigation the reader should be methodo-
logically primed to begin exploring the rest of this text which treats
“the monster” diagram part by part. We begin the next section (II) by
introducing the monster in terms of how it slices up our contemporary
social spaces such that we can localise different forms of political
organization by how they interact with these slices. Beyond that, the
rest of this text is heterogeneously structured with each section
concerned with different locally consistent slices of the monster. The
reader is encouraged to move through this contribution non-linearly,
following the cross references to see where it takes them; our hope is
that by meandering through this text a coherent research trajectory
will come into view.
Any parties interested in learning more about or joining our
collective research project should see the concluding section (XVIII).

06 BADIOU, Alain, “Logic of the Site”, in: Diacritics, 33, 3–4, 2003.

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II. Meeting
the Monster
Category theory provides an overall conceptual frame
for mathematics. This frame, it must be said, has no
“starting point” or “basement”. One should imagine that
we are building a space station, not a skyscraper or any
other similar building that has to stand on solid grounds.
Building in space must be done according to general
principles, according to general laws of physics and
engineering, but the construction does not have to have a
definite orientation, an up and a down, a foundation in a
geocentric sense.
—Jean-Pierre Marquis

It is common, amongst both Marxist and non-Marxist traditions, to

sequentially arrange different social formations based on their distinct
modes of subsistence, as Adam Smith did, or modes of production, as
Marx proposed. In this tradition, we might describe, for example, a
tribal mode based on the centrality of kinship relations, with hunting
and gathering serving as the basic means of survival. We would then
have—in a more or less discrete historical sequence—slave societies,
feudal societies, capitalist societies and, some would argue, socialist
ones, each of them defined by the relations of production which struc-
ture and preserve our material conditions for survival.
However, throughout the 20th century, historical materialism
was criticized for its supposed reliance on historical determinism and
this brought about a new way of approaching these different social
modes amongst certain heterodox Marxist thinkers. Instead of already
defining these modes as successive historical stages, authors like Karl
Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, Diane Elson and many others started to con-
sider them as partially independent social structures which are always
combined, in singular ways, within each social formation. In this way,
Polanyi and Sahlins will speak of reciprocal, distributive and market
forms of exchange, while Elson will invite us to analyze capitalism
in terms of the domestic, the political and the economic spheres, for
example. In both cases, a social formation is understood as a complex
structure that combines these different modes in specific ways, such
that one of them comes to dominate the others as the general social
form, while the remaining modes still have a meaningful function

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inside this social structure. Historical sequences are therefore treated

as composite complexes rather than as the fundamental units of social
analysis.
Though many thinkers have investigated this alternative
approach, no one has explored it so thoroughly as the Japanese
Marxist thinker Kojin Karatani in his book The Structure of World
History.07 First of all, Karatani uses these multiple modes to propose
a transcendental analysis of social formations—that is, he does not
start from the really-existing presentation that different modes take
in a given society, but rather from their pure or “transcendental” form,
which then, in combination with other modes, constitute the particular
form of appearance of these multiple forms in a concrete social setting.
Because their pure logical form does not correspond to any particular
historical presentation, he prefers to call each of them only by distinct
letters: modes A, B, C and D.
At the same time, Karatani addresses the predictable reproach
that such a theory, not departing from the point of view of production,
would therefore require us to espouse a “circulationist” theory of
economy—where, for example, the logic of market exchange would fully
determine the existence of commodities and commodity production.
Instead of defining modes of exchange, Karatani considers each of
these modes as a form of intercourse (in German, Verkehr), broadly
defined as types or organizational schemas that apply indistinctively
to relations between humans, material exchanges between people
and non-human entities, in a metabolic sense, while also serving as
transcendental forms for how relations between non-human parts
are constituted from the standpoint of a given social formation (VIII).
Mode B, for example, which concerns the logic of plunder and redis-
tribution, would structure the relations of domination between people,
the relations of domination of man over nature—as if the latter was only
a resource to be taxed and protected by a state— as well as provide an
analogical extension to a classification of natural species in terms of
hierarchies and so on. A mode of production, then, would be simply the
case where a certain logic or mode determines how our intercourse
with nature, and amongst ourselves, is primarily constituted under
certain historical conditions.
Karatani defines his four modes as follows. Mode A is defined
by the logic of pooling and reciprocity (IX). Its main social form is
that of the gift and the contra-gift. Its normative structure is that of
customs and rules, valid primarily within communities. Its main form
of hierarchy is that of honor. Its basic collective structure is the house-
hold, further expanded into settlements (composed of households) and
07 KARATANI, Kojin, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014.

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federations (composed of settlements). When it is the dominant mode,

it is able to scale up and integrate social groups to form mini-systems.

Mode B is defined by the logic of plunder and redistribution (VII, X). Its
main social form is that of domination and protection between com-
munities. Its normative structure is that of laws, imposed by dominant
communities over the subservient ones. Its main hierarchical structure
is that of status. Its collective structure is that of cities, further divided
into centers, margins, sub-margins and communities which are out of
sphere—outside the reach of its power. When it is the dominant mode,
it is able to scale up and integrate communities into World-Empires.

Mode C is defined by the logic of commodity exchange (XI). Its basic

social form is that of value and money-commodities. It works not by
social rules or laws, but by tendencies which constrain the flow and
reproduction of commodities. Its hierarchical structure is that of social

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classes and its basic collective form is that of the market. When it is
the dominant mode, we call this social formation a capitalist one, and
its total extent across centers, semi-peripheries and peripheries—note
the absence of an “outside”—forming a world-economy.

Within capitalist social formations, mode A acquires the general

appearance of Nations, mode B that of States and mode C that of
Capital, forming the Nation-State-Capital complex (XV, XVII).

Karatani’s fourth mode, mode D, should be treated separately from

the other three for two reasons. First of all, because it serves a more
prescriptive function in his theoretical apparatus. Karatani uses the
idea of a mode of intercourse based on free association and the “mutu-
ality of freedom” to reconstruct a silent history of socialist impetus
that would bring together nomadic lifestyles, the sense of justice of
world religions, secular philosophical ethics and modern socialism.
Furthermore, by defending the transcendental status of this fourth
mode, he is able to propose a coherent description of a possible social-
ist world where mode D would be dominant over all others—making it
consistent with his general theory of modes and their articulation. As
interesting as this construction might be, the value of this approach to
communist politics is limited since analytically, this additional mode
plays no determinate part in defining different social formations in

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his theory—to the point that mode D is not even included in his the-
ory of the articulation of modes A, B and C in capitalism. Due to its
conceptual fragility—and because we will propose here an alternative
approach to communist social forms—we will not rely on the hypothesis
of this fourth mode of intercourse.
Instead, let us pose a question that, within Karatani’s schema,
remains unanswered: if social formations are historically constituted
as structured complexes, articulating these different modes in con-
crete and “impure” forms, how could we ever have distilled them into
separate and autonomous logics to begin with? This question will lead
us to a divergence with Karatani both in terms of methodology and of
political orientation.
One of the undeniable merits of Karatani’s work is to propose
a general framework that allows us to integrate otherwise disparate
analytic tools coming from the anthropology of Mauss, Levi-Strauss
and Sahlins, the theory of politics and power from Hobbes to Arendt
and Marx’s critique of political economy. But Karatani accounts for the
existence of these different theoretical perspectives with recourse
to Edmund Husserl’s theory of transcendental reductions: for him,
the merit—as well as the limits—of the different theorists of the “pure”
modes comes from their capacity to bracket the influence of other
logics in order to reveal that each of these modes is a closed logical
space that covers the totality of social life. The incommensurability
between the structuralist analysis of gift-economies, the theory of
political sovereignty and the Marxist analysis of value-form becomes,
here, the effect of different “parallaxian shifts” which require us to
methodologically suspend their intrinsic articulations and concrete
mixtures in order to arrive at these different transcendental logics. It
is no small accomplishment by Karatani to have constructed a general
schema that allows us to both preserve the heterogeneity between
these different theoretical approaches and integrate them, accounting
for how and why they emerge as separate theoretical fields.
The problem here, however, is that this operation of transcen-
dental reduction is too indebted to a subjectivist phenomenology: it
is defined as a theoretical or methodological operation, performed by
individual thinkers. And even if we recognize our debt to singular theo-
reticians—or to the long academic traditions of anthropology, sociology
and economy or, more importantly, to the necessity of also accounting
for the connection between collective social practices and individual
cognitive apprehension (XII)—this would not be enough to answer what
concrete and historically determinate social processes allowed these
different “modes” to emerge as objects of study to begin with.
It is here that our alternative hypothesis to Karatani’s mode D
comes in: rather than define modes A, B and C, and then introduce

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mode D as a means to derive the historical basis and logic of eman-

cipatory politics, we propose to invert this relation and claim that we
have come to know different modes of intercourse through politics
itself (III, V). It is through the multiple forms of political practice—and
of political organization in particular—that the “transcendental reduc-
tion” that Karatani writes about effectively takes place. In short, the
complex structure of capitalist social formations—defined by the inter-
dependence of modes A, B and C under the domination of the third
one—appears to us as composed of different logics because the politi-
cal resistance against it has been historically composed of an equally
heterogeneous and complex ecology of political processes.
This alternative hypothesis could be called the tektological
hypothesis, in honor of Alexander Bogdanov and his “universal science
of organization” (IV). For Bogdanov, we come to learn about the world
through the concrete interaction between organizational forms—be
they corporal or cognitive, like when individuals try to shape some
situation in accordance to a preconceived plan and are met with the
resistance of materials and other human relations, or larger collectives
who face the world’s resistance to their forces and thereby come to
extract information from these interactions (XIII). For us, the organi-
zational point of view of tektology suggests that it is through the con-
crete interaction with social formations—and their ensuing resistance
against political change—that we have concretely abstracted, and
thereby constituted, these logics as theoretical objects to be studied
by this or that particular thinker.
Each organizational form is defined by what makes a difference
to its functioning and what does not—by a certain form of abstraction—
and each political organization is defined by the attempt to negate
or challenge some aspect of the social complex. Though always com-
posed in a mixed way, we can easily discern political movements that
have centered their struggles against forms of communitarian segrega-
tion, therefore abstracting away, in practice, from other modes in order
to focus on the structure of mode A; other movements have focused
mostly on challenging the limits of the State and its different forms
of expropriation, and those help us to “bracket” other determinations
in order to provide us with a model of mode B; finally, there are those
political processes which center around the impasses of exploitation
and concentrate their forces in interrupting production and circulation
of commodities, thereby teaching us about the intrinsic logic of mode
C. Just like with Karatani’s schema, these different political fronts can
often appear to be incommensurate with one another—and the perpet-
ual fight within the Left for the “right” perspective on political struggle
clearly attests to this—but, unlike in his theory, we consider the task of
composing these different “organizational reductions” to be the very

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definition of communist politics: a political stance which, not having

any particular parties or principles, concerns itself with “representing
the interests of the proletarian as a whole” (III).
Let us now construct the diagram which encodes all these ideas
into a single operational space. Karatani proposes that we conceive the
articulation of the modes A, B and C in capitalism in terms of a “bor-
romean knotting” of the three logics, meaning that the social structure
they compose is what ties them together consistently and if we were to
remove any one of the three parts, the other two would not complement
each other in any coherent way. The work of the French mathematician
René Guitart can help us here, as he has already shown that we can use
category theory to capture this borromean property in the hexagonal
framework of the F₄ field:08

Using Guitart’s construction and our alternative reading of Karatani’s

transcendental analysis, we thus define a multilayered transcendental
for a capitalist world as the following diagram:

08 A standard borromean object is defined in a category C with null morphisms, terminal and initial objects, cokernels
and finite co-products, as an object B equipped with three objects X, Y and Z and an epimorphic family of monomor-
phisms x: X→ B, y: Y→ B, z: Z → B, such that B/x → Y + Z, B/y → X + Z and B/z → X + Y.

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First of all, note that the central object K marks the dominance of the
transcendental layer T over the other ones. In logical terms, we define
this dominance in terms of the maximal reach of the value-form space
of operations. In other words, a logic is said to be dominant, and writ-
ten with superscript “TX”, when its internal language—in the case of
TC, that of commodities, money, capital, competition etc.—is the most
expressive one. In a capitalist world, community-predicates—such as
those that discern groups of people, families, networks of mutual aid
etc.—as well as state-predicates—those that discern property rights,
contracts, commitments etc.—are not capable of “seeing” as much as
the language of commodities, even though every social object requires
a mixture of the three and there might be objects which are only dis-
cernible from the standpoint of TA or TB.
Further note that the arrows from TA, TB and TC inform the cen-
tral object K, while this central structure then gets partitioned to pro-
duce their partial combinations TA + TB, TB + TC and TA + TC. Without K,
we would not be able to name these partially composed structures—and
this assures us that the arrows in the diagram encode the “borromean”
property we were looking for.
At this level of the construction, we have three abstract start-
ing points—TA, TB and TC—which are responsible for composing the
concrete social formation. If we reject Karatani’s subjective phenom-
enology, how else might we define the closure which constitutes each
of these autonomous logics? First, we abide here by the alternative
approach proposed by Alain Badiou in his Logics of Worlds—the theory

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of “objective phenomenology” (I)—which starts from the following mate-

rialist claim: objects of a world are not constituted for a transcenden-
tal subject that remains outside of this world, they are rather defined
by what can be seen from inside the world itself. In other words, to
construct a “visible” world requires us to simultaneously construct
a “seeing” object. Objective phenomenology requires us to transform
Karatani’s theory in order to identify which logical objects are capable
of expressing universal properties internal to each of these different
logical spaces. For mode A, we can speak of the gift—but also of family
structures or mythical matrices that connect narratives from different
communities—as objects that “see” what sort of social structures exist
within the logic of reciprocity (IX). For mode B, we can speak of sover-
eignty—but also of measure standards, unified languages, calendars
and other forms that make heterogeneous communities legible for a
sovereign (X)—as objects that have this universal quality. Just as, within
mode C, money functions as a universal equivalent that can express, in
terms of its own quantity, the value of any other commodity (XI). These
different logical objects define an interior perspective from which
many other and more complex structures can be constructed within
each mode, leading to new universal perspectives and to new social
objects.
But this is not all. In accordance with our previous critique
of Karatani’s mode D and our alternative theory that emancipatory
politics is composed of heterogeneous social experiments (V), let us
now add a separate point of view to the diagram, which we call Org.
The arrows from Org to itself define the space of all possible political
organizations—a sort of space of free association—and maps from Org
to the rest of our diagram define different political struggles, different
interactions between political experiments and social constraints
coming from the multilayered transcendental of social formations.
As we anticipated, we take these heterogeneous political fronts to be
crucial sources of information about the sort of structures that exist
from the standpoint of TA, TB, TC and, ultimately, K. We write, therefore,
arrows for communitarian political experiments as pa: Org → TA, maps
for institutional political experiments as pb: Org → TB and maps for
economic political experiments as pc: Org → TC.

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Since these are also “transcendental” reductions—which do not cor-

respond to the always mixed, always impure really existing political
organizations—we treat these three arrows as ideal decompositions
of an additional map, E: Org → K that encodes into our diagram the
complex ecology of political organizations that challenge, in heteroge-
neous ways, the social composite of the capitalist social formation.
Once we add the map E, we arrive at our complete diagram. So
meet the Monster:

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One should imagine this operational space as if composed of two large-

scale objects. The first one, K, ties together the Nation-State-Capital
complex, giving rise to a capitalist social formation. It cannot be seen
from an individual or perhaps even from a human perspective, it can
only be approached by first displacing our point of view to that of its
privileged objects—such as group identities, property structures and
money-commodities—and, even then, these can only capture part of its
multilayered logics. On the other side, we have Org, the underdeter-
mined class of all possible political processes which might navigate
this social formation and explore its structure by challenging its con-
sistency through situated experiments. Unlike Karatani’s mode D, the
internal consistency and form of Org is not transcendentally guaran-
teed: though there are many political struggles, with the most diverse
structures and organizational forms, nothing guarantees beforehand
that we are able to adopt a standpoint that allows us to compose them
together. This wager is what we call the communist hypothesis and the
construction of a consistent space binding together these political
experiments can be seen as a concrete “world-building” problem (III),
the issue of how to turn localized interventions into our social forma-
tion into the general and consistent social constraints on a new world—
otherwise known as the “socialist transition” problem.
In the course of this essay we will be exploring this large dia-
gram by slicing it into smaller parts. Each section will be identified by
the different ways this huge structure is partitioned and how we engage
with the sort of social object that is constituted by this reduction.

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V. Political
Experiments

Our project can be justified in three ways from the standpoint of

concrete needs of politics. First, it follows from the practical need
to synthesize diverse organizational experience (IV), which entails
transmitting fragments of a given struggle outside of its local con-
text. Second, there is a need today to build and share new interfaces
between complex systems (such as the climate) on the one hand and
political movements on the other (VIII). These new interfaces include
not only scientific but also digital, legal, cultural and economic tools.
Third, there is a need to recognize and work with intrinsic constraints,
including ideology and incentive structures, that determine any form
of social organization. These needs motivate us to build connections
between areas such as philosophy, category theory, anthropology,
economics, computation etc. in order to make intelligible a very broad
range of phenomena. Ultimately, however, the measure of success for
this project should be derived from the clarity it offers to the actual
organizing efforts of people (III, VI).
For us, politics is the space for the experimental making of
new forms of intelligibility and interaction within social reality (I).
Political acts, such as occupying a city (XV) or disrupting the free flow
of commodities (XVI), are only some of the more visible aspects of an

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experiment. What is usually left out of such extrinsic descriptions is

the intrinsic developments required to carry them out, to maintain a
certain organizational form in the face of adverse circumstances (XIV)
and the factors of their dissolution. Note that even failed political
experiments yield valuable information if allowed to pass through by
our ideological filters. For instance, it is common to read the failures
of a given political movement through the lens of human nature or
individual mistakes. But this type of reading excludes how a network
of social relations already determines the set of available choices
that individuals can perceive. One can envision this network forming a
particular type of environment, a life-world, which engenders certain
individual behaviors. There can be many such life-worlds with distinct
properties. Instead of tracing the collection of social phenomena
back to individuals, as a confirmation of innate human tendencies,
we should read them as mapping out a certain “organizational space”
which has highly non-trivial properties (which vanish when we map
them onto the individual level).
Historians, economists and political scientists may approach
these intrinsic aspects to a certain degree, but only after the fact
and from a distance. However, our project is more concerned with
the availability of theory and tools for use by those engaged in these
processes as they are happening. This leads us to investigate the
conditions and formal constraints involved in navigating the world of
political experiments, both past and present (XIII). This engagement
has both an analytic and synthetic side to it. On the analytic side,
systems are only graspable as a set of constraints and behaviors that
determine their ways of seeing and acting in the world (I, IV). Our con-
ception of politics is therefore not purely voluntaristic, but entails the
construction of vehicles which obey those constraints such that they
can “hook into” these systems. Returning to the formal assumption we
introduced earlier, we can say that building and maintaining such vehi-
cles requires addressing each of the terms in the triad composition-in-
teraction-intelligibility (I). This leads to all sorts of questions that can
be tested experimentally. Starting from a desired interaction, we can
ask the question of what sort of “sensibility” does an organization
need in order to properly model that interaction internally. Or starting
from a given composition of human and non-human entities, we can
interrogate its blind spots and low-resolution areas. A capitalist firm
behaves the way it does because it can only “see” those things which
are pertinent for its profitability (XI). A State only sees GDP, territory,
military strength etc. (X). Each form of intelligibility implies a fragment
of an environment that is available for interactions. For example, a
legal system is a type of environment wherein interconnections and
consequences are expressed within the body of laws and procedures.

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Without proper legal “sensors”, such an environment would be opaque

to an organization. On the other hand, in order to reveal the limits of
the law itself, as when addressing such hybrid phenomena as “carceral
capitalism”, sometimes the proper sensors are extrajudicial. When
challenging an existing legal framework, certain transgressive actions
may reveal more about that framework than what can be expressible
within it.
On the synthetic side, new languages and concepts must be
devised that capture the novelty of the political thinking which occurs
locally. This leads to new ways of processing and consolidating the
“data” of a situation, as well as a new way of interacting with it. The dif-
ficulty of building new interactions can be formulated in the “classical”
terms of left and right deviations—too far to the left and an interaction
becomes ineffective; too far to the right and the interaction provokes a
response which is already in the existing language. To change an inter-
action may require the construction of an entirely new environment. A
good example of this can be found in Elinor Ostrom’s design principles
for governing shared resources.09 These principles aim to internalize
costs among groups of appropriators so as to avoid the infamous
tragedy of the commons. Ostrom shows how neither the State (TB)
nor the market (TC) are able to treat this problem without serious side
effects, while there have been many examples throughout history of
the successful management of these commons by local communities.
The same local interaction, that of using a resource which is not owned
by anyone, can either be sustainable or destructive on a global level
depending on the (ideological, economic, technological) environment in
which it takes place.
Social reality is complex, heterogenous and multiscalar. It is also
opaque at a global level: there is no position from which to view it all at
once. From this, we conclude that attempts to analyze a political move-
ment from a standpoint external to that movement’s struggle are gen-
erally suspect. We must re-evaluate our evaluative powers and include
into our assessments of social formations a certain intuition regarding
non-trivial spatial structures. Positions which appear as politically
opposed locally might be glued together quite cohesively if we “zoom
out”, while alliances might be fraught with tense contradictions when
we “zoom in”. A neutral scientific approach does not generally work
because the object of the experiment is not available globally, but only
from an engaged stance. Natural phenomena can be isolated in an
experimental setting, allowing the scientist to control which variables
are allowed to affect the outcomes. With political phenomena, not only
is a completely controlled setting generally impossible to produce, but
09 OSTROM, Elinor, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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it is often part of the very stakes of a struggle to form a new political

body. To make statements about “the working class”, for example, pre-
sumes that such a class is distinct and coherent, but this is something
to be constructed as part of the proletarian struggle in a given place
and time under particular constraints.
Another way to approach this is through the relation between the
experimental apparatus and the phenomena itself. Natural phenomena
require natural means of interaction—one cannot use a social relation
to provoke a change in the electromagnetic field, for example. The
fact that we can use a part of nature as an apparatus to interact with
another part is what allows scientists to maintain a neutral distance.
However, social phenomena have the opposite problem—they cannot be
altered by natural means but require an apparatus made of the “same
stuff”, a social organ of some type (economic, cultural, legal etc.). This
homogeneity principle is the connecting bridge between the analytic
and synthetic parts of our project (VI). As an example, the theory of
fetishism for us names what happens when we try to bypass the homo-
geneity principle and go directly to seeing the properties of reality (VII).
Relations of domination in capitalism remain opaque or natural as long
as we look for them directly in relations between people (VII). In order
to recognize the role of the commodity form in carrying out this domi-
nance, we have to see through the eyes of commodities themselves (XI).
We propose that political experiments are not only possible but
essential aspects of politics as a form of synthetic thought (II). This
form is trans-individual, trans-historical and materialist. It sometimes
produces new connections in the world which were deemed impossible
before, regardless of whether political groups themselves succeed in
their stated aim. In fact, we propose that a new, “orthogonal” metric for
success involves the production or socialization of resources for future
experiments. For example, one could imagine an incubator of sorts for
political experiments, which provides assistance to nascent groups
and also compiles a dataset of failures and successes, written by these
groups themselves, which would be made freely available for others
to use. In the case of experiments with an economic component, if a
group achieves a level of sustainability, they may contribute back to the
incubator, creating feedback effects. Dmytri Kleiner names a version
of this idea “venture communism” since it can potentially act as an
engine for divestment from capitalist productive processes.10 We see
our project as in line with this idea, except that it should encompass
not only mode C forms of divestment, but also the concomitant forms
of resistance in other modes as well. A basic requirement here is that
we can establish new connections between projects, despite perceived
political differences.
10 KLEINER, Dmytri, The Telekommunist Manifesto, Amsterdam: Colophon, 2010.

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This is also one way to understand some of the pathologies of the

Left—they stem from the failure to integrate past political experiments,
not because of missing facts, but rather due to limiting concepts and
tools for synthesis. For example, we take for granted the opposition
between anarchists and communists, although we rarely consider that
since both sides struggle with the same social reality, there must be
overlapping systems of interactions. As a result, a large body of organ-
izing experience remains unconnected simply because we adopt a
certain dogmatism regarding what are the valid paths to emancipation,
which lead us to discard certain approaches as “reactionary”, “reform-
ist” etc. when in fact every effective body has such “split” tendencies
(XIV). After all, what really authorizes a total disjunction in approaches
within the Left when the only universal property it seems to exhibit is
disorientation (XIII)? What may appear to be contradictory tendencies
at a local level may simply be an artifact of the measuring devices we
have at our disposal. And if the proper devices for mapping the organ-
izational space do not currently exist, it is our task today to construct
them (III).
What is often missing from appraisals of local movements is the
particular context, which does not survive the passage to our global,
low-resolution categories (I). However, we wager that local investi-
gations conducted by even bitter enemies can be “pasted together”
provided that we identify the proper overlapping sections. This process
of constructing a political map of social reality is a phenomenological
one. A political organization, by virtue of its composition, is able to
view certain fragments of social reality in a unique way (IV). In fact,
from a compositional point of view, two different organizations with
widely different aims may still be identical in what they “see”. This may
be true even if these organizations do not agree on the form of inter-
vention. Conversely, two groups may agree on a broad range of policies
but have totally different perspectives on social reality, depending on
how they are socially composed.
In other words, what binds the various political struggles
together may be neither a shared strategy nor shared perspectives but
an additional supplement to the world that is the “communist stand-
point” (III). This is not reserved for those who identify as communist,
since it is not an individual’s perspective at all—rather it is something
which actively informs political struggles whenever they encounter
irreducibly common problems. The very structure of these problems
necessitates that resources are shared and identifications blurred,
such that by sticking close to them, a common ground is produced. By
assembling the set of such common problems, which does not suppose
that a single problem will unite everyone, we create a map of our het-
erogeneous landscape. In our formal jargon, every “mapping” from a

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global perspective into a local context presupposes a “lifting” of that

context, which allows us to think about the conditions for the coher-
ence of that context with others. For example, today we may classify
three types of political maps, corresponding to our tripartite world
logic (II, XVII). There are struggles against segregation (TA), against
expropriation (TB) and against exploitation (TC) which, broadly speak-
ing, comprise the Left. But a common mistake we make is to hastily
nominate one of these struggles as the essential one. Those who suffer
from State violence or apartheid, for example, are asked to make
concessions in order to unify in the fight against capitalism first. This
approach, besides alienating other movements, assumes that the strug-
gle against exploitation will itself make other struggles coherent and
tractable. Although concessions are sometimes necessary, they should
not be based on such essentializing beliefs about the nature of the
world. This would be confusing necessary with sufficient conditions
and paradoxically weakens us from the standpoint of the communist
perspective.
Instead, we offer some ideas in the experimental approach to
connecting various local contexts. The phenomenological method,
along with the homogeneity principle, tells us that every effective
political movement will need “organs” capable of sensing and interact-
ing with relevant social phenomena. An organ has to be composed in
a way that is compatible with the phenomena it seeks to affect and be
affected by. Producing and maintaining such organs requires resources
which are not necessarily available in every context. Using the world of
laws as an example again, not every political movement has a team of
lawyers and legal minds who can fight court battles. On the other hand,
many political movements have an even more precious resource than
legal expertise, the trust and support of people.11 By viewing the pas-
sage from local to global coherence of our political maps as a matter of
resource sharing, we can start to see avenues where organizations can
connect without necessarily agreeing at a subjective level.
This is how we can view the important role of social media
platforms in politics today, for example. They allow the work of main-
taining social relations, producing knowledge and coordinating actions
to occur in a way that can be shared by different movements. But the
profit-motive of the largest of these platforms leads them to enclose
that work, to regard it as a new form of property, which also limits
the types of global coherence that are possible. Such a platform is
indeed an organ, but mostly in the service of the Nation-State-Capital
world logic. This determines to some extent all groups that use social
media, so that we see today a demand from all sides for building their
own digital platforms. But how would our proposed replacement be
11 The Lago Agrio case in Ecuador is a good example of juridical organ building within a broader indigenous movement.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

properly subtracted from the dominant logic? We propose that this

would involve a set of tests, a set of tools, and an experimental process
carried out by many different organizations over time.12 Embarking on
such shared infrastructure projects would already produce effects in
the organizational space without the requirement that different move-
ments be immediately compatible in their politics.
We can take this one step further by asserting that ideology
itself is a type of resource and that it is possible to conduct ideological
experiments. Ideology here is defined broadly as the set of unwritten
rules which govern our behavior but remain opaque to us.13 We often
misperceive this as power wielded by individuals (VII), even though a
set of material conditions must always be in place for that power to
be effective, including the appearance of a certain political neutral-
ity. Therefore, an ideological experiment could involve making such
invisible rules visible, thereby rendering them partially inoperative, or
involve constructing zones where new unwritten rules can form. Often
this happens as a result of exclusion—for example, norms regarding
sexuality and family composition continue to be enriched by queer
culture, which arose under conditions of resistance and erasure.
Experiments which at first appear to be internal to a given group
may enable a different relation to permeate the outside world. This
possibility follows from the homogeneity principle—in order to fight
structural racism or patriarchy, one must develop organs for seeing and
interacting with it. Therefore, those who are marginalized are uniquely
positioned to create new organs for these fights (XV, XVI). And if an
organization cannot perceive the effects of structures within itself, it
will be ineffective with regards to those structures in the environment.
Another crucial category of experiments are the economic ones.
Regardless of whether one ascribes to “market socialism”, we must
acknowledge the homogeneity principle in the productive sphere: one
must build economic vehicles in order to shape productive relations.
This may mean creating organs which are to some degree “firm-like”
and that may interact or compete with other capitalist firms. The
line between a profit-driven machine and an experimental economic
organ of a political movement may not be decidable ahead of time, but
requires a local investigation into the structure of costs that the firm
is able to see. Perhaps there are technologies which can be collectively
built and maintained that make externalities of the firm visible. An
entire history of successful examples in governing the commons can
be combined with new ways of intervening in commodity relations. And
we can learn a lot from walking this tightrope, even when we fail (XIV).

12 This distributed effort broadly intersects with the open source movement, copyleft, hacker culture and so on. Some
notable ongoing experiments include the Fediverse, Scuttlebutt and Holochain.
13 ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.

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VIII. Seeing Nature

Capitalism, Ecology and Intercourse as Metabolism

So far we have been navigating through a diagram that is deeply

inspired by Karatani’s attempt of reconstructing history through
different combinations between modes-of-intercourse as they appear
in different forms of social organization (II). In fact, to the cautious
readers that are particularly concerned with the planetary scale impact
generated by our own social activity and how questions of ecology
must be weaved into any possibility of political experimentation, it can
seem as if these categories rely on a conception of the “social” and its
forms that might risk not accounting for this problem with the central-
ity it deserves.
We hope to make clear that ecology’s wager of mapping and
rethinking the borders between the social and the natural is not merely
compatible with our framework but, in fact, integral to it (IV). For that,
we will argue that these different modes of intercourse and their com-
binations imply not only different forms of relation to nature, but in
fact different ways that nature is constituted as the “other” of sociality
from the perspective of each of these social forms understood as
modes of intercourse. Therefore, this positions our “transcendental”
framework as a way to attain a new perspective on the social history of
nature.

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Intercourse as Metabolism

Any claim of such a compatibility has to be developed in two steps:

first, we briefly gloss over Karatani’s reliance on the concept of
intercourse (Verkher) and how it relates to Marx’s own concerns with
metabolism and to the field of Marxist Ecology. Then, through that, we
attempt to systematize how nature becomes intelligible in a manner
that is coextensive with these modes of intercourse. Doing so gives us
a vantage point from which we can (at least briefly) contemplate the
differences between each of the transcendental schemas advanced
by specific modes of intercourse and then look at a particular
problem from mode C, namely, the determination of use-values by
exchange-values.
As previously stated, Karatani’s project is precise: to read
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a seminal formulation of the Capital-
Nation-State triad, a borromean knot of interlaced modes of inter-
course that must be confronted as a complex and articulated social
formation (II, XVII). The beginning of his wager is precisely the need to
cover the other two points of our fearless triad, submitting them to the
same critical procedure that takes place in Marx’s Capital.
To do so, Karatani mobilizes the concept of “intercourse”, briefly
deployed by Marx in The German Ideology in reference to Moses
Hess’s work, a lingering influence that can be traced back at least to
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The conceptual role
it plays for Marx, as Karatani notes, is twofold. On the one hand, it
becomes a way of speaking of exchange in general, beyond commodity
exchange, and seeing phenomena as different as trade, warfare and
communitarian life as processes that are permeated by acts of social-
ization through exchange, broadly construed. On the other hand, such
a broadening of the concept of exchange leads to a novel way of pictur-
ing the social, one in which “relation[s] between man and nature nec-
essarily take place by way of a certain kind of social relation between
people”.14 Thus, Hess did not have two separate concepts of relation,
one focused on nature and another on sociality, but rather conceived
social relations as always including man and nature, described as a
form of metabolism (Stoffwechsel).
The concept of metabolism can also be further found in Capital
and in Marx’s unpublished “Ecological Notebooks” in which he delves
into the agricultural sciences of his time (particularly Justus von
Liebig’s work) to deal with the monstrous consequences of ecological
disturbances brought forth by the demands posed by accumulation
within a capitalist system. As Kohei Saito makes clear, the concept of

14 KARATANI, The Structure of World History.

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metabolism (Stoffwechsel) in Marx is a device to understand the inflec-

tion of economic forms (Formwechsel) into matter.15
This spells out an important motivation for this text, that is, a
refusal to see ecology as a mere appendage to a critique of value (or of
any social form), which means refusing any portrait of social forms that
fails to recognize them as a regime that is already ecological. Instead,
we hope to make clear that the concept of intercourse reframessocial
relationships, showing that they always happen through a material
base and imply a certain relationship between man and nature.
To set a rather crude example, to examine the M-C-M’ formula
through the concept of metabolism means to observe the inflection
and realization of that scheme, written abstractly, in matter (XI).
Moreover, as Saito claims: “Marx’s original methodological approach
treats the objects of his investigation from both ‘material’ (stofflich)
and ‘formal’ (formell) aspects.”16 This is not merely something that
appears in Marx’s approach to nature but can also be seen in his
approach to technology, which combines economic consequences with
many attempts of extracting from the actual functioning of machines
a way to position them as objects of inquiry within a higher level of
abstraction.17
This interpenetration between the material and the formal,
which will be our guiding light throughout this section, can be laid
out through the conceptual proximity between intercourse and
metabolism insofar as it allows us to look at Karatani’s project from a
slightly different angle, namely, paying attention to how each of these
transcendental logics and their compositions can generate novel ways
of visualizing nature. Doing so has two main implications: it allows us
to clarify the way each of these modes sees nature and, then, to view
them as intricate compositions that could help us further elucidate the
way certain apparatuses of vision are materialized and hardwired into
social practice.

Seeing Nature Through Modes of Intercourse

Starting with mode A, we can see that there is an extension of rec-

iprocity towards nature, where magic serves as an example of a
15 The concept of metabolism makes its most widely cited appearance in Capital Vol. 3. The analysis of the concept
of metabolism has been a foundational part to many of the books inserted within the field of “Marxist Ecology”. See,
for instance: FOSTER, John B., Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. The
clearest statement of this formula in terms of Stoffwechsel-Formwechsel can be seen in: SAITO, Kohei, Karl Marx’s
Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press,
2017.
16 SAITO, Kohei, “Marx’s Ecological Notebooks”, in: Monthly Review, 2016, https://monthlyreview.org/2016/02/01/
marxs-ecological-notebooks/.
marxs-ecological-notebooks/
17 ROTH, Regina, “Marx on Technical Change in the Critical Edition”, in: The European Journal of the History of
Economic Thought, 17, 2010; PASQUINELLI, Matteo, “On the Origins of Marx’s General Intellect”, in: Radical Philosophy,
2.06, 2019, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-the-origins-of-marxs-general-intellect/
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-the-origins-of-marxs-general-intellect/.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

mediating practice playing that role. Such a mediation is precisely

what allows something that possesses anima to be taken as an object,
even if temporarily, an objectifying dimension closely related to the
fact that sedentarization entails a particular disruption that was
unprecedented in nomadism. In the newly sedentarized communities,
the spatial closeness to the dead and the reliance on a world full of
entities endowed with anima demands that one sketches precisely
these devices of mediation to join nature in a relation of reciprocity.
Mind, however, that reciprocity does not entail harmony, but it is in
itself a way of controlling, even if the object of control is seen as equal
to the one controlling it.
This also means that, just like in their social counterpart, recip-
rocal exchanges with nature often keep stratifications between the two
parts within a relation from becoming definitive as reciprocity itself is
an arrangement predicated in an oscillation of the giving and receiving
part (IX). In fact, the dynamics of gift-countergift, in itsdemand for
the other part to reciprocate, be it in gift giving or warfare, implies
precisely an oscillation that keeps the possibility of forming a perma-
nent hierarchy between the parts at bay.18 Thus, nature appears as an
agent, an equal entity with which one can establish a relationship of
reciprocity.
Mode B on its own needs to be understood in relation to “plunder
and redistribution” which in itself implies a different way of visualizing
nature and therefore demands different technical apparatuses that
make nature legible to the State and are often rendered in terms of
uniformization, from the institution of common forms of measurement
to mapping the land for taxation (X). It is precisely because nature
appears to the State in the same way dominated communities appear
to dominant ones—as targets of plunder—that nature is produced within
mode B as a resource to be managed, that is, an asset available for
plundering but also in need of protection and administration.
James C. Scott19 talks about the visual regime of the State as a
scheme that possesses four tenets: an administrative ordering which
entails a mapping through simplifications; a high modernist ideology
which is connected to an ideological reliance on the rational capacity
of providing goods and services; an authoritarian state willing to
deploy force in order to get its way; and a civil society that lacks the
will and/or the means to resist this onslaught. It is not hard to see how
each of these logics is implied in Karatani’s synthetic rendering of the
logic of mode B as the logic of plunder and redistribution. While the
first two tenets spell the management of redistribution as a logistical

18 KARATANI, The Structure of World History.

19 SCOTT, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Condition Have Failed, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

2344
 ŠUM #17

problem, the last pair is already concerned precisely with the problem
of plunder as a procedure that is deeply related to the State’s schema,
and these two moments appear precisely as a way of managing
resources.
Thus, plunder and redistribution, when extended to nature,
means to visualize nature as a resource to be managed, and to which a
legal subjectivity is attached (VII). Mind that, as we have been arguing,
the relation between plunder and redistribution on the one hand and
resource management on the other is not restricted to nature but can
also be seen, for example, in the management of labour in the mon-
umental infrastructural enterprises developed in societies in which
mode B prevails.
We should note that such a framework works as a sort of low-res-
olution scheme and that any further specification requires that many
other caveats be made. Still, it is important to keep one crucial point
in mind: although these tenets about the State’s regime of vision give
the impression that we are talking about a rather limited picture of the
State, we need to understand that there are no a priori borders that
would presuppose a self-enclosed space in which these processes of
plunder and redistribution take place. Rather, the relationship between
the framing of resources, legal subjectivity and the borders of a State
is precisely what is being constantly constructed and eroded through
the succession of various modes of carrying out the operations that fall
under the logic of plunder and redistribution (II, X, XVII).
By now it should already be clear how our phenomenological
approach, along with the proposed reading of Karatani’s concept of
intercourse, allows for a particular reading of Scott’s work. When read
in tandem with Katarani, Scott’s wager of seeing how State “vision”
is materially constructed allows us to insert this vision into a bigger
scheme that allows one to clearly see the interplay between different
dynamics and attempt to understand the possible compositions
between these logics as a method for decomposing and recompos-
ing specific historical formations in terms of the way in which they
materialize cognitive schemes reinforced through unconscious social
practice (I).
However, we still have not dealt with mode C. While our listing
of modes is merely schematic and does not imply a claim of neat
historical succession, we must note that in the co-emergence of B
and C, insofar as they erode the framework of reciprocity as the
dominant form for exchange, there is an important torsion at play: a
certain framework of property (legal subjecthood) provided by mode
B, that is, a view of nature as a resource, converges with a capacity of
tracing relationships between objects in which its owners are irrele-
vant and the mediation is carried out through equivalence. It is from

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

this perspective of relating objects to objects that we have to look at

mode C. The singularity of mode C can therefore be spotted precisely
by the movement through which, within the value logic, objects relate
with each other through relations of equivalence that are expressed in
terms of a quantitative predicate, a price, that is, as a monetary mag-
nitude. In this sense, to ask how mode C sees nature means looking at
how objects become related to other objects and what this objectifying
gaze is capable of seeing.
To explore this, we need to refer back to a particular aspect
within the logic of value (IX), namely, how use values get determined
by exchange values. We can look at that first through Saito’s claim that
“a social contract can only be realized through the social character
of matter”.20 Note that to claim matter has a social character already
means that there is no “zero ground” from which to look at objects for
what they really are in terms of certain natural qualities versus what
is made of them within a specific regime. Rather, utilities themselves
are only visible through the narrow prism of the valorization schema
insofar as these use-values represent the possible priceable features of
a certain commodity.
This elucidates that the relationship between use and exchange
value is not a matter of the social imposing itself into the “really nat-
ural” but rather the construction of use values through social practice
in a space determined by the quantitative magnitudes of price. Hence,
if we take mode C as a pure logical construction, we could say that
nature is visualized not as an agent with which one can maintain a
relationship of reciprocity or as a resource which has to be managed,
but as matter. But how can we make sense of the claim that from the
standpoint of capital, nature is simply matter?
What this means is precisely that in the commodity-world, the
material properties of objects are rendered legible only through the
logic of value; therefore, unpriceable nature is incomprehensible or,
better yet, nature can only be signified insofar as it appears as pricea-
ble in the present or in the visible future. For an abstract schema such
as M-C-M’, for example, the material features of a given object are
only relevant insofar as one of its properties can be crunched into that
schema. This means that from the standpoint of valorization, nature
does not appear as a realm or as a structured domain with its own net-
work of causes and consequences, it appears rather as different mate-
rials with infinite exploitable properties, ready to become meaningful
to production as long as they can make a difference in producing value.
Non-human processes, such as a cow’s digestive process, or uncon-
trollable natural forces, such as the water cycle, can all be integrated
into social relations of production as long as they make a priceable
20 SAITO, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism.

2346
 ŠUM #17

difference that can be legible by any of the circuits of value production

we have mentioned in the previous sections: industrial, usurer or mer-
chant capital (XI).

Seeing from Mode C: Fossil Fuels

Between Use and Exchange Value

A group of commodities that appear as a fundamental knot between

these three modes of capital and that are also particularly related
to our ecological predicament could be fossil fuels, which serve as
an enabler of logistics in production and consumption, as the basis
of many financial markets and even as fundamental raw materials
required for many of the amenities that define our current way of living.
As Elmar Altvater argues, the shift represented by the carbon-
hungry industrial revolution marks our epoch in an even larger sense
than sedentarization and the large-scale agricultural revolution it pre-
cipitated through mode B.21 For the author, as there is a convergence
between fossil fuels and the valorization schema, this metabolic
rupture (insofar as it breaks with the direct reliance on solar energy
as agricultural societies would have and seeks energy elsewhere) is a
pronounced shift that cuts right to the issue of the determination of
use values by exchange values.
This convergence is explored by Andreas Malm’s work on how
fossil fuels became an entrenched part of capitalist development:22
there is no natural efficiency in fossil fuels as an energy source, nor
are there any grounds to claim a sort of survival of the fittest in terms
of efficiency or productivity. In fact, Malm effectively shows that quite
the opposite is true, breaking with a longstanding historiographical
tradition that attempted to explain fossil fuel convergence as a nat-
ural progress towards efficiency: historically, water mills were more
efficient than coal mills during the same periods of the Industrial
Revolution, and even though they were superior by all criteria, we are
left with fossil capital.
Malm’s point is that the natural qualities of fossil fuels only
became the standard way of imagining energy because they provided
industrialists with unprecedented power over labour because coal,
even if its performance was slow in comparison to water power, still
allowed for an access to a larger labour pool in bigger cities and also
provided a more manageable flow of production. Therefore, the differ-
ence between the water mill and the coal-powered factory cannot be

21 ALTVATER, Elmar, The Social Formation of Capitalism, Fossil Energy, and Oil-Imperialism, Centre for Civil Society
Colloquium on the Economy, Society and Nature, 2005.
22 MALM, Andreas, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry”, in: Historical
Materialism, 21, 1, 2013.

2347
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

substantiated from the point of view of mere efficiency; rather, it only

becomes visible from the point of view of value (I, II, IV, XI).
This, for Malm, illustrates the way in which fossil fuels have
become increasingly adequate to the formal movements of valoriza-
tion, setting the stage for a contingent affinity to turn into an even
longer tendency. Thus, fossil fuels power valorization cycles as a form
of “abstract energy”. Abstraction here needs to be conceptualized
precisely as a restriction on the concrete that frames the many con-
sequences of a fossil economy only in its own terms, namely, in terms
of the abovementioned affinity with valorization. This restriction
itself has resulted in an attempt to continuously perceive energy (and
demand it from any energetic transition) through features that have
been found in fossil fuels: transportability, scarcity and finitude. Not
only does the way oil can be pumped somewhere and easily taken
elsewhere fit the way capitalism currently manages production, but
the scarcity of fossil fuels to be localized in particular places and their
overall finitude are also precisely what ensures that the energy power-
ing the capitalist system can itself be priced, and the risk that it can be
halted can be hedged on.
In a way, fossil fuels serve as a good concrete example of mode
C’s perception and set the coordinates for any discussion on energetic
transition as any possible replacement is framed precisely by the
precondition that they can be as amenable to the circuit of valorization
as fossil fuels, a likely outcome when many of the experiments in
renewable energy are already directly or indirectly related to many of
the companies that manage fossil fuels. Of course, this is a very par-
ticular look into fossil fuels from a very narrow perspective of mode C,
but hopefully it is helpful in clarifying the way exchange values deter-
mine use values, that is, the way the intelligibility of matter as such is
framed through value.

Concluding Remarks on Modes, Nature and its Figures

To conclude, this text has tackled the concept of intercourse by focus-

ing on its material and formal aspects, hinting at some of the conse-
quences this move brings for ecology and its relation to a critique of
political economy. We have navigated through each of the modes and
used their respective perspectives to propose three schemes through
which nature can be seen: as an agent in mode A, as a resource in
mode B and as matter in mode C. As we have argued that any social
form views both man and nature from a certain limited viewpoint, any
framework that purports to see the way objects are constituted within
capitalism should always work through composition.

2348
 ŠUM #17

Although we have largely relied on the pure forms derived out of our
transcendental framework and sketched how each of them—as a pure
logical construction—would see nature, this might be of use insofar
as it can serve as a navigational tool for the question of ecology in a
world determined by varied overlaps between these social forms. In
this sense, it might also recast the way we assess current discourses
on ecology within our contemporary predicament (as in the diagram
below) in their attempts to picture nature, that is, to reconstruct it both
as an analytically treatable totality and as a site of political interven-
tion from within capitalism through some particular conceptual figures.

From the perspective of the modes we have been working on, we can
begin tracing three crucial images of nature that have been deployed
as phenomenological frameworks and as drivers for an attempt to
navigate ecological politics in our current predicament.
First, as a figure of nature between agency and resource, the
Earth appears as the place of dwelling out of which humans can make
a world of meaning for themselves, even if that world of meaning might
threaten to erode the background against which it is erected. The
problem of the Earth is, on the one hand, the wager to remake dwelling,
to be understood as Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, divinity and
mortality, and how preserving the Earth means preserving the possi-
bility of dwelling. In consequence, this position in particular falls into

2349
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

the myopia of supposing that there is the possibility of separating the

astronomical object as a whole material reality and only focusing on
the parts of it which we encounter, forgetting about the way in which
this material encounter as such is merely a reduction of the concrete
reality and not its final horizon.23
The planet, in a way, is the culmination of Earth’s ruthless disen-
chantment and its insertion into a bigger cosmic scheme which shows
that its singularity is, in fact, itself contingent amidst the multitude of
planets in the cosmos and their indifference towards us and our enter-
prises. The planetary can only appear somewhere between a resource
and matter because it reveals itself as a planet among many and
because it refers to material scales around which most of our human
conceptual apparatuses feel pale. The challenge it gives us is precisely
whether the planet can be an object of politics or not, and if it can,
what does it mean to translate the planetary into politics and politics
into the planetary scale.
Gaia is also a metaphor that can be seen as an attempt to
recover the reciprocity that was presupposed in the Earth but dis-
appears in the planetary. It appears as a combination between the
material dimension of nature insofar as it traces a world of organic
interconnectedness through a regime of distributed agencies, betting
that those agencies fall beyond capital’s legibility and span multiple
objects. However, it also relies on an instance of direct reciprocity
which endows the totality with the possibility of connecting and inter-
facing with multiple actors under the name of Gaia. The question that
remains is to what extent it can mediate between the necessary objec-
tification of resource planning and reciprocity.
Crucially, just as much as these discourses on ecology have
latched into themselves certain hypotheses and normative presuppo-
sitions of what one’s relationship to nature might be or become, the
clarity provided by these pure modes might also work as a way to begin
posing the question of political experiments that navigate and create
new modulations of these already existing grammars. The “ecological
sensibility” (IV) latched into our diagram and all of the social forms
that compose it should be helpful both as a diagnostic tool and in ask-
ing the question of political organization: how do we compose political
experiments that make ecology visible not only as a separate disci-
pline or a marginal concern but as an integral part of experimentation
as such? How do we compose across various ways of apprehending
nature? This, perhaps, might illuminate various ways in which different
fronts of struggle and their different apparatuses for sensing our cur-
rent predicament might connect to one another (V).

23 CHAKRABARTY, Dipesh, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category”, in: Critical Inquiry, 46, 2019.

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 ŠUM #17

IX. Dumont
in Melanesia

Louis Dumont tells us that the terms of a given opposition behave

differently when related to the whole they compose.24 In fact, accord-
ing to this proposition, the differentiation between the terms would
prove to be inseparable from the reference to the whole: ultimately,
the difference in relation to the whole would be the difference that
would make a difference between the terms. Judging by the emphasis
on global ordering, we could believe, at first, that there is in Dumont a
rigid defense of totality, but the hierarchical principle actually gives us
a non-trivial coordination between parts and whole (IV): if we follow to
the end the premise of the hierarchical relationship, there would never
be such a thing as a global vision, for both terms could offer the dom-
inant conceptual value.25 That is, from the point of view of the terms,
each one is perfectly global. This means that we don’t actually have a
duality, but two triads that behave differently from one to the other:
A(a/b), B(b/a), each indicating a distinct moment in which one of the
terms can encompass the other and, thus, a global stance.

24 DUMONT, Louis, “Postface: Toward a Theory of Hierarchy”, in: Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its
Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
25 HOUSEMAN, Michael, “The Hierarchical Relation: A Particular Ideology or a Generic Model?”, in: Hau: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory, 5, 1, 2015.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

There is, however, a restriction in Dumont’s model, as it still

seems to presuppose the transition from a lower level (parts) to a
higher level (whole), the latter being the ordering of the first.26 What if
we reverse the direction? In Dumont model, the constitutive relations
of an entity with the whole outline all the relations that the entity could
establish with itself and with others—what we could call the “holistic
placement” principle, whereby a thing is determined by its relations
to external others. However, what happens if, adopting the principle
of composition that underpins objective phenomenology (I), we say
that the constitutive relations of an entity with itself could shape the
relations with other entities? Take, for example, the differentiation
presented in a pregnant woman. In this case, the mother-to-be is two
beings at the same time, and consequently the relationship between
her and the child is dual: on the one hand, as an individual, the mother
is opposed to the child; on the other, as a self-contained monad from
which the child will be drawn, the mother encompasses it.

Mother and child in a hierarchical relationship

Applying Dumont’s heteromeric principle, it is possible to say that at a

higher logical level there is unity (one and the same being contains two
beings within itself: the mother), and on a lower level there is a distinc-
tion (two beings in relation: mother and child). These two relations—
unity and distinction—taken together constitute the hierarchical rela-
tionship. However, from the standpoint of objective phenomenology (I,
IV), we no longer ask ourselves what is the relation between the terms
of an opposition to the whole they comprise, but what are the relations
that each term can yield with itself, thus constituting, from this self-re-
mission, a filter with which it is possible to relate to an indeterminate
number of entities. Under this line of inquiry, the heteromeric property
of the mother (let’s call this property “h”, so that we would have h: M-M’)
allows such a space of consistency that, when relating to itself, it can
model a broad set of differential relationships that acquire consistency
26 LIMA, Tânia S., “Uma história dos dois, do uno e do terceiro”, in: Lévi-Strauss: leituras brasileiras, QUEIROZ, Ruben
& NOBRE, Renarde (eds.), Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2008.

2352
 ŠUM #17

in an external order (the child). In other words, from the mother’s

point of view, a space of consistency is produced in such a way that,
at the same time, the mother is equal to herself, equal to the child,
different from herself and different from the child; whereas from the
child’s point of view, a space of consistency is also produced, this time
reduced, since the child is equal to itself, equal to the mother, different
from the mother, however, never different from itself.
In the mother-child circuit, it is the mother, and solely the
mother, who can become something other than herself, hence gener-
ating an attribute that is commensurate with an external otherness
(child). Putting Dumont’s model aside, it is no longer necessary to talk
about the constitution of entities based on the reference to the whole
of which they are a part; we are now talking about the constitutive
relations of one and the same entity with itself and the heteromeric
possibilities that are thus engendered from this monadic self-remis-
sion. In other words, the focus is no longer on the encompassing and
unitary character of an entity but on its internal capacity to produce
a difference from within itself, commensurate with other differences.
However, within our general kinship ideology, we could all too easily
believe that such an attribute of the mother would be a patent biolog-
ical property, so that socialization should be something secondary
to it. On the contrary, if we have brought up this universal property (I,
II, XVII), it is precisely because it allows us a device to see relations
based on other relations.
For instance, the Melanesian mother gives birth to a being
already related to her and, therefore, different from her: the birth of
the child is, from one extreme to the other, a social act. In this sense,
children can only become entities socially related to their mothers
as a result of all previous marital and affinal exchanges.27 This means
that Melanesian men must ensure that the mother produces something
different from herself, so that this differential relation can reveal all
the relations between them (husband and wife, brother and sister). And
this procedure does not happen because the woman is biologically
predetermined to bear children but because this is the very logic of
Melanesian action—the same thing would happen in circuits of cere-
monial exchange. One must constantly produce and create differences
and then reveal existing differences and differential relationships
through this very act. Let us consider the classic case of the Trobriand
dala. Dalas are sets of relatives (brothers and sisters) related through
uterine links. A woman belonging to a dala, married or not, contains
within herself the essence of her maternal group—and here lies the
famous absence of “physiological paternity” of the Trobriand Islands,
27 STRATHERN, Marilyn, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

2353
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

since for a woman to be able to bear children, there must be an acti-

vation of this essence through a dream or a visit of the baloma spirit.
Returning to our previously established terms, we could therefore say
that the Trobriand woman already possesses not only the essence
of the dala, but also an anti-heteromeric attribute: when relating to
herself, she is excessively equal to herself. Magnified, she spawns a
same-sex entity, a pure dala that fully encompasses the differences
between brothers and sisters within the group. Here is the initial
paradox: the woman can bear children; however, she cannot extract, a
priori, something different from herself. So how is it possible to extract
the self-different, paraconsistent attribute (XVII)?
The husband enters the scene. Through acts of sexual inter-
course during pregnancy, the husband gives the fetus his distinctive
features, which in turn will distinguish the fetus from its natal dala.
The heteromeric attribute is produced through this reiteration of sex-
ual intercourse. However, as Alfred Gell reminds us, this act can only
appear as a transformation of a previous act, namely, that of the wife’s
brother, who, working in his garden and giving his yams to his sister’s
husband, also gives the husband an example of the extracting work he
must perform on his wife.28 The mother is now in the position of pro-
ducing something different from herself, and this difference allows her
to become an appropriate model or “sensor” and reveal the relations
that surround her (husband and wife, brother and sister).
In short, in the Trobriand case, the mother does not simply give
birth to a child, but manages to reflect in her internal composition the
external ordering of the kinship space (husband and wife, brother and
sister) (I, IV). The latter is just as important as the former. The mother
is thus not the point of view that encompasses the other elements
(whole), but a point of view that manages to differentiate itself and,
therefore, produce a difference which is commensurate with the differ-
ences that make a difference in the social space.

Child-birth seen in a heteromeric relationship h: Z → Z

28 GELL, Alfred, “Strathernograms or the semiotics of mixed metaphors”, in: The Art of Anthropology: Essays and
Diagrams, London: The Athlon Press, 2006.

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 ŠUM #17

X. Lessons
from Mongolian
Logistics

Logistics, broadly construed, is a critical field for the

reproduction of the relations of production, in which the
state intervenes as producer of capitalist space. This
logistical imperative—to lay out the space of stocks and
flows for the optimal reproduction of capitalist relations—
involves the state precisely to the extent that reproduction
is not a matter of logic, but of strategy.
—Alberto Toscano29

The Logistical State

The State is concerned with spaces—territories and bodies are organ-

ized within a space, or rather, a space of spaces. For Lefebvre, the
state has three logical operations to carry out control over space:

29 TOSCANO, Alberto, “Lineaments of the Logistical State”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2014, n. p.

2355
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

homogenization, hierarchization and fragmentation30. Homogenization

and fragmentation occur as functions of the state’s role as the regu-
lator of the flow of capital and the development of productive forces
(II, VII, VIII). Hierarchization occurs as a reaction to these processes,
locking in social relations through ghettoization, elite seclusion and
automated control systems.
Lefebvre names this the State Mode of Production (SMP) and
sees it as characteristic of late-stage capitalism. However, in light of
our triadic transcendental, we can ask how much of the ‘logistical state’
is a product of the capitalist system and how much of its logic is imma-
nent to the domain of TB itself.

Lefebvre on the Steppes

To recall from an earlier section (II): Mode B is defined by the logic

of plunder and redistribution (VII, X) . Its main social form is that
of domination and protection between communities. Its normative
structure is that of laws, imposed by dominant communities over the
subservient ones. Its main hierarchical structure is that of status. Its
collective structure is that of cities, further divided into centers, mar-
gins, sub-margins and communities which are out of sphere—outside
the reach of its power. When it is the dominant mode, it is able to scale
up and integrate communities into World-Empires.
We will take the case of the Mongolian Empire and the social
worlds that were transformed, destroyed and created in the period of
Mongolian conquests as a paradigmatic case of Mode B, both in its
subordinated form as TB (the tribal system Chingiss Khan was born
into) and in its dominant form as TB, in the form of the Mongolian
Empire the Great Khan left to his heirs and the world. The Mongol
Empire is paradigmatic of TB in a way similar to how Marx saw the
British Industrial Revolution as a purer form of capitalism than its
continental cousins. The scale of the Mongolian Empire was such that
its state had to be minimalist, as was typical of ‘nomad empires’. But
in order to function, this state therefore had to be maximally logisti-
cal—that is, compared to many of the states of its time, the Mongolian
apparatus had less overhead, redundancy and inefficiency—all without,
importantly, doing away with graft and nepotism.
In the short period of Chingiss Khan’s life, an extensive imperial
system along with trade routes and cultural exchange developed across
the bulk of the northern Eurasian landmass. This system required a
flexible, resilient and consistent ruling apparatus, which necessitated
the ‘regulatory character’ of a logistical state. Yet at the same time, at
30 LEFEBVRE, Henri, “Space and the State,” In: State, Space, World: Selected Essays, University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 223–253, 2009 [1978], p. 241.

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the heart of the system was a drive for expropriation, whether through
pillage or through tribute, to feed the persistent demand for goods,
redistributed either as loot or as tribute. As Mode B became domi-
nant, in the form of the Mongolian Empire, this system was radically
transformed and expanded. Expropriation and redistribution grew to
massive proportions and became major components of the Mongolian
world-economy.
In his work The Structure of World History, after defining the
three modes of intercourse, Karatani argues that there were hybrid
forms of social worlds, such as the ancient Greek and Roman empires,
which were hybrids of TA and TB, as opposed to the purer forms of state
from Asia proper.
As opposed to these hybrid states, the Mongolian state devel-
oped a kind of parallel structure, delineating the body of the Mongolian
Nation from the body of the Empire. The ruling elites encouraged the
growth of cities along major trade routes or in key economic areas,
increasing the bulk of sedentary people. Yet the Mongolians them-
selves, both as rulers and as a people, clung fiercely to their nomadic
ways, maintaining mobile courts and traveling in vast tent cities.
This dual structure was not new — it belonged to a long tradition
spanning millennia of nomad empires emerging from the steppes
to dominate city-folk. Nor was the role of khan (ruler) as a provider
of expropriated goods unique. What was new were the scale and the
unprecedented wealth and power that came with that ‘scaled-power’.
Extending from northern China to eastern Europe, from Anatolia
to Korea, the empire necessitated sophisticated communication lines.
The east-west lines were maintained by the yam, a postal service and
(in some places) a supply chain provider. The mobile Mongol camps
called orda (from which we get ‘hordes’) moved seasonally along steppe
rivers, moving north and then south. These two lines—the east-west
yam and the north-south orda—were coordinated throughout the year
so that they intersected as the seasons changed.
These supply lines were essential to maintaining the system
of plunder and distribution that guaranteed the cohesion of the
Mongolian Nation, and therefore the administrative integrity of the
Mongolian Empire. “As contemporaries noticed, the purpose of the
Mongol khans was not to accumulate wealth but to dispense it.”31
Loyalty was built on gifts, and the circulation of goods that were
either directly seized through plunder or extracted through tribute and
taxation. Gifts were not only of material value—they directly signified
one’s status within the Mongolian system. This status system was
based on the kind of logical hierarchization Lefebvre points out.

31 FAVEREAU, Marie. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, Harvard University Press, 2021, p. 114.

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In order to maintain stability, delineations were introduced into

the old steppe kinship systems. The direct descendants of Chingiss
Khan (by his senior wife, Borte) became the sole, eligible claimants to
the Golden Lineage—only they could become khans. This was meant to
prevent empire-eroding competition for the throne. Yet, it only pushed
this conflict to higher levels.
Chingiss Khan pushed this process of hierarchization and
TB-based organization into the social body of the Mongolians. The
Khan created a new kind of mobile administrative unit, the keshig,
which was both a bodyguard unit and the supply-chain coordinator for
the khan’s camp. Chingiss also politicized the traditional quriltai, a
collective decision-making body which brought camps of various local
leaders together to make appointments, settle disputes and perform
ceremonies. Chingiss Khan used the quriltai on several occasions to
amass support, legitimize his rule and call council.
When conquering other nomadic peoples, Chingiss Khan broke
up their kinship groups (ulus) and mixed them into the military tumen,
a decimal system beginning with ten-person units, and then into units
of one hundred and one thousand before capping at a ten-thousand
person unit that was commanded by someone experienced and
trustworthy. Here we see the processes of both homogenization and
fragmentation at work, not within physical space, but rather the virtual
space of kinship ties (II). The binds of affinity on Mode A were being
brutally severed and reformed according to the connecting principles
of adherence to the chain of command on Mode B—that is, Lefebvre’s
third state operator, hierarchization.
Thus, the new empire was built on transforming traditional
systems stemming from a time dominated by Mode A (qirultai) while
implementing new systems built on Mode B (keshig). “By incorporating
the keshig, the quriltai, the military, familial assimilation, and the
complex and interwoven hierarchy of lineages and seniority relations,
the regime created a social and political order that was simultaneously
novel and traditional... Social assimilation and total political exclusion
[from the golden lineage] were two sides of the same coin.”32
Also, despite the fact that the Mongolian Empire was not built in
the age of Capital, we see the state-building process still utilizing the
core functions of homogenization, fragmentation and hierarchization,
through the building of militaries, taking control of the flow of goods,
the reorganization of status and power-relations, and the development
of infrastructure and logistics.
The position of the khan itself was determined through a com-
plex system of allegiances or loyalties. The qirultai was the place
where these allegiances were shown (by attendance) and loyalties
32  See: FAVEREAU, The Horde, ch. 5.

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rewarded (through redistribution of expropriated goods). But khanship

also had a key structural role—to be the position from which the whole
of the empire could be seen, and the vantage from which key strategic
decisions could be made. As other sections of this essay argue (I, XII),
the capacity to see and abstract are capacities built by the people in
history, and as we know from the long history of the state, its power to
see is almost always established by force.

The Sovereign Perspective

This tripartite schema of the Monster gives us the point of view of the
Sovereign (I). As we can see, the place of the Sovereign can access the
K-World directly or through either A+B or B+C (II):

A+B is the place where we can define a national community and

construct ‘a people’; a process mediated by the state which is, in turn,
grounded in the legitimacy of that people. The kirultai operated as the
place for both decision-making and popular legitimization, where the
Mongolian Nation underwrote imperial policy. This was also a people
delineated linguistically, institutionally and culturally from the rest
of the subject population, as non-Mongolian imperial subjects were
banned from learning the Mongolian language.
In B+C, we have the basic logic of the logistical state—not just
of the State Mode of Production under capitalism, but of any given
state operating in an economic territory. To examine the case of the
Mongolian system, we will select one component that exemplifies
this logic: the keshig. Officially, this was the bodyguard of the khan
consisting of thousands of soldiers. However, the keshig was primarily
a logistical organ, maintaining the supply lines that kept the imperial
court operating and enabled the flow of goods which were in turn
gifted out—a key to the stability of the Mongolian society. The keshig
also served as the core administrative unit, essentially forming the
government.

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The logistical structure of B+C is what enabled the “Mongol

exchange”33 to thrive. Safe roads, consistent communications, and
state-backed currencies all facilitated the growth of a Eurasian
world-economy. The khans and their keshigs maintained the flow of
goods and amassed vast wealth in the process. In turn, the Eurasian
landmass experienced unprecedented globalization.

This gives us the total structure of the sovereign position. In the case
of the Mongol sovereign, the position of B can be understood as the
place from which one can see one’s domain, and to track how it splits
into a nation of people (on A+B) and a society of exchange (on B+C). If
the position of khan was built upon a system of allegiances, then one
of the key powers afforded not only to the khan but to the Mongolian
Empire and therefore many of its people was an unprecedented capac-
ity to surveil their domain.
In order to be able to literally see (that is, reconnoiter and
monitor), the Great Khan implemented sweeping reforms. We’ve
already seen the tumen, one of his earliest political-organizational
experiments, recompose his armies into decimal units. The formal
reorganization coincided with the recombining of human material: the
former tribe-based units were broken up and thoroughly remixed in
order to overcome earlier relations of kin and build a cohesive sense of
national identity along with a more effective war machine. But its dec-
imal structure also facilitated administration, both of the war machine
and of the redistribution machine: tributes and loot were distributed
top-down throughout the tumen. The Mongolians maintained meticu-
lous accounts and centralized this data in the hands of the khan.
As Chingiss Khan’s conquests moved westward into central Asia,
he began a new pillaging policy: all seized goods were taken outside
33 FAVEREAU, The Horde, p. 41.

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the city to Mongolian camps, where they were accounted for. The
goods were then distributed by the tumen. This transformed pillaging
by decreasing the violence within the captured city while guaranteeing
that the khan’s keshig could fully regulate the centralization and redis-
tribution of pillaged goods and later tributes. Additionally, the account-
ing process created the data for the khan to see what his conquests
had procured.
After the invasion and conquest of northern China, the
Mongolians razed many rural holdings, eliminating both villages and
farms and producing pastures that enabled Mongolian horsemen
and their retinue to quickly move in and out of Chinese territory. This
in turn links to the problem of the ‘politics of navigation’ that arises
elsewhere in this work (VIII): space was dominated in order to shape
it. Homogenization and fragmentation were both enforced by oblite-
rating villages and creating pasturage: the Mongolian nomads could
count on the type of terrain that maximized mobility and forage while
breaking up old kinship connections and relocating them elsewhere in
the empire. This demanded a third moment—hierarchization—through
which all subject peoples were subordinated to the Mongolian Nation,
and the people of that nation in turn sworn to the sovereign khan.

Nomads and Empires

In Structure of World History, Karatani looks to nomads as a kind of

prototype of a communist society, one in which Mode A is preeminent
but has not yet come to dominate. By this, he participates in a much
longer tradition that sees in nomads a romantic figure of resistance.
But while nomadic groups have regularly posed an especially thorny
problem for empire-builders, the example of the Mongolians demon-
strates that we cannot take a romantic view of nomadic peoples.
This is for two reasons. First, from an organizational standpoint,
nomadic life was better suited for coordinated military operations. The
Mongolians became famous for taking on larger forces and winning
through superior mobility, tactics and logistical independence. This
independence also meant that different branches of the Mongolian
force could operate autonomously in different aspects of a total strat-
egy, putting defenders in a terrible position. The Mongolian armies
were also logistically independent, relying on methods that were culti-
vated over generations of seasonal migration, seeking pasturage and
maintaining large herds. These logistical systems laid the groundwork
for larger administrative systems, incorporating both roaming and
sedentary populations. Nomads can in fact be excellent state-builders.
Second, the conquest of the steppes did not simply have building
an empire for its goal—the steppes in particular were to be under the

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hegemony of the Mongolian people. This led to what we might today

call genocidal wars against other steppe nomads, such as the Qipchaqs,
who refused to submit to Mongolian dominance. This kind of rivalry
between peoples for space invoked the kind of national identity and
sense of manifest destiny which would become dominant in modernity.
That is, in our terms, it was not simply Mode B that was ‘responsible’
for this inter-nomadic violence—it was a sense of community entitle-
ment, or manifest destiny, drawing upon the grandiose vision of the
Mongolian Nation that Chingiss Khan built. That is, A+B seems to have
a particular tie to some of the worst excesses of state violence. This in
turn should have us question the romantic vision of Mode A.
Though we do not have time to explore it here, one of the main
reasons why so many steppe nomads rallied around Chingiss Khan as
he built his early steppe empire (before any of his famous conquests)
was because he offered a meritocratic order in place of the conserv-
ative one whereby elders had automatic seniority. That is, in a sense,
it was Mode B that was progressive relative to Mode A, which was
strangling the ambitions of young steppe warriors while limiting the
effectiveness of military operations. By severing kinship ties, Chingiss
Khan built a far superior war machine while at the same time breaking
up the seniority system so that he could promote the best people from
within.
Contrary to Karatani, we want to study Mode B to find useful
social configurations there. This requires differentiating between the
transcendental, which can be a space for solving problems, and the
concrete materialization of such logics which, at their most coordi-
nated, tend to look like states and, at their least, like banditry. But as
we see with the development of the Mongolian empire, the Mongolians
developed infrastructure and standardized measures to enable the
extension and scaling of such a system of expropriation and distribu-
tion. The kinds of problems that emerge in the field of Mode B will also
confront any economy based on free association, even in non-tradi-
tional forms of sovereignty and state.
We can further study how the Mongolians were capable of
performing such feats by analyzing how Mode B came to dominate
and reorganize both kinship and commerce relations along ways that
gave birth to a Mongolian people and a world-economy, both under the
dominance of the sovereign Khan. New scholarship such as Favereau’s
recent work demonstrates that the Mongolians, while masters of war,
were also true innovators in the field of politics. Mongolian history pre-
sents an important paradigm of sovereignty, along with the material for
the study of interactions between exchange transcendentals. Within
decades, a society dominated by kinship relations was converted into

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a transcontinental empire that in turn fostered a world-economy which

became a direct predecessor of the early European capitalist markets.
Ultimately, the Mongolian history gives us a multilayered view of
the logistical state from which we can better understand the logic of
social worlds and develop methodologies for liberatory political exper-
iments (V).

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XI. The Space

of Value and
Valorization

Marx was an objective phenomenologist: he insisted on the actuality

of relations between commodities persisting independently of the
knowing individual. Our task here is to formulate the rules of the more
general playing field in a way that makes commodity relations com-
patible with other ‘layers’ of a social formation—as seen in our diagram
(II)—while preserving the specificity and autonomy of commodity logic.
On the one hand, the compositional approach we adopt (I, IV), informed
by category theory, should help us separate the objective dimension
of value from its subjective apprehension—that is, from commodity
fetishism (VII)—while, on the other, it should also integrate this formal
description into a larger framework capable of also accounting for the
singularities of kinship relations on Mode A and social contracts on
Mode B (XVII).

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Value and the Logical Space of the Commodity-World

The logic of value is famously introduced by Marx in the third section

of the first chapter of Capital, where he presents the “elementary form
of value”34:

xA = yB

Marx promptly clarifies that the form of this equivalence relation is

fundamentally predicative: “x amount of A is worth y amount of B”,
which is not symmetric for A and B but specifies how the equivalent
form of B obtains for the relative form of A where the concrete amount
of B serves as the predicate for the value of x amount of A. Value rela-
tions, under certain conditions, can also be transitive. Of course, in a
purely ‘accidental’ encounter—such as those described in the practice
of ‘silent trade’ between certain communities—there is no guarantee
that multiple commodities will be evaluated in a consistent way.
Nonetheless, the value relation can acquire internal coherence such
that if A is exchangeable with B and B is exchangeable with C, then A
must be exchangeable with C. Both the antisymmetric and the transi-
tive aspects justify our use of the mathematical map (or morphism) as
the elementary representation of commodity relations.
The “obtains for” we used to describe this form is suggestive:
every commodity implies a way of measuring the space of all other
commodities. We can ask of any given commodity the degree of ‘ciga-
rette-ness’, or ‘cab-ride-to-the-city-ness’, or ‘tutoring-session-ness’ that
obtains for it. The transcendental here is this collection of degrees,
each serving as a possible truth-value for such questions. In what
Badiou calls the “classical world”, there are only two possible answers
(or degrees)—true and false (or maximal and minimal)—but in general,
the transcendental is a partially ordered set such that two degrees may
be comparable or not (and when they are, one degree must be greater
than or equal to the other). The license to use a piece of software may
have a greater or lesser cigarette-ness than a haircut, or their respec-
tive cigarette-ness is incomparable, having only the minimal degree in
common.
When two commodities are exchangeable within a given context,
we say that they each obtain maximally for the other’s equivalent form.
Let one hold commodity A and evaluate its exchangeability with two
other commodities, B and C: from the perspective of A—which, for now,
has no guarantee of being universal—if A is exchangeable with both B
and C, that implies one could also exchange B for C.
34 MARX, Karl, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: The Process of Production, London: New Left Review &
London, 1976, p. 139.

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Note that it is this implicative structure of equivalence, captured

here in diagrammatic form, that functions in our account as the substi-
tute for Marx’s theory of a “social substance”, establishing a common
logical space rather than a common ontological property, amongst
commodities. Instead of claiming that the value-form is an abstract
social structure in the sense of a separate realm, we can instead define
it as the abstraction that takes place when a commodity is seen from
the perspective of another—preserving some differences and disre-
garding other aspects of it (IV). This is not so much an alternative con-
ception as an alternative grammar within which one may reconstruct
the same concepts from Marx’s Capital. In this new environment, less
constrained by metaphysically laden distinctions such as substance
and appearance, or quality and quantity, we might be able to extend the
reach of these concepts, better understand their inner logic and derive
new consequences from them.
We claim, therefore, that value need not be posed as a substance,
but rather as a kind of logical space. In order to learn about this space,
we need to pose questions in the following way: where in this logical
space do certain propositions hold? In the simple case of accidental
exchange, we can assert that there exists a place called p where two
commodities are exchangeable. The proposition is formed when we
apply a function of two variables—let us call it the exchange function
(denoted below as e), of the two commodities (denoted A and B) taken
as the terms of that function. The proposition then has a ‘truth value’,
or an open region in our logical space (in Badiou’s parlance, a degree
in the transcendental). In a classical world, the proposition must be
either globally true or false. However, in a non-classical world, which
we assume in this text for the sake of generality, this place p could be
somewhere between everywhere and nowhere.

e(A, B) = p

Given a set of commodities, we can let A and B be any pair from that
set. This gives us the total set of exchange relations in our space. To
transform the exchange function into what was earlier termed the
equivalent form is simply to fix one of the terms of this set. We choose
an element from our set and bind it to A, but allow B to continue rang-
ing over every element (including A itself). The equivalent form lets
us consider how our space looks from the standpoint of a single fixed
commodity. This is called an atom of our space.

A(x) = e(A, x) = p

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Each atom is a function of one argument whose domain is a given

set of commodities and whose output is a degree of truth in our tran-
scendental. There are certain rules each atom must obey in relation
to another as well as the exchange function—after all, they are all
‘perspectives’ in the same space. However, for the purpose of an acces-
sible introduction, we omit those rules here. As the name suggests, an
atom is the finest resolution available for a given space. This implies
an indistinction between exchangeables—a principle of indiscernibles:
if two things are exchangeable, then under some constraint they could
be substituted for one another. Of course, from the standpoint of indi-
vidual sensibility, it is clear that a pack of cigarettes and a book are
distinct (XII), but our commodity space is not populated by humans.
There are nearly unlimited commodities to choose from to serve
as the equivalent form, but they are not equivalent in their capacity to
measure the entire space coherently. Instead, commodities differ in
terms of their capacity to be divided and in their compatibility with
other forms of commodity measurement. If we use a cow as our meas-
uring stick, we can perhaps say that a car is worth ten cows. A plane
ticket may be worth two cows. Let us also assume that a car is worth
one thousand bags of rice and a plane ticket is worth two hundred such
bags. At this level, it seems like we have equal forms of measurement—
whether we use cows or bags of rice, we can simply translate the result
(for example, by using the fact that one cow is worth one hundred bags
of rice). But if we then say that a bicycle is worth twenty bags of rice,
we find that there is no equivalent in terms of cows since a ‘fifth of a
cow’ is not a valid atom of our space—it does not preserve one fifth of
the value of a living cow such that five of these parts could restitute the
original value. In other words, a bag of rice has a greater compatibility
as a unit of measurement than a cow due to the fact that it is able to
divide the commodity-world further, generating finer atoms of value.
If we put our commodity-atoms in a sequence ordered by their
compatibility, such that a bag of rice is ranked higher than a cow, a cup
of coffee higher than a bag of rice and so on, we can surmise that the
limit of this sequence would have a certain universal property among
all commodities. Namely, it would have the homomeric property (IX) of
always being divisible into homogeneous parts whose recomposition
returns the original value. This is what Marx called the “formal use
value” of money-commodities: the capacity of certain materials to
“mimic” the abstract properties of value, in particular the possibility
of being decomposed into parts while leaving the quality unchanged—
such as gold, silver or salt can. And without specifying the physical
substrate that would materially realize this property to some extent, we
can already allocate a logical place to it in assuring the consistency of
the commodity-world.

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Note that, in our current formalism, we do not yet have an extrin-

sic marker for quantity. For now, ‘one bag of rice’ and ‘two bags of rice
are actually two entirely distinct commodities—two objects that might
or might not be exchangeable for one another. This is consistent with
our approach since we are not primarily interested in what makes a
difference for us, but rather in ‘the differences that make a difference’
to commodities themselves. This is why our elementary value relation
actually reads “A → B”, which does not even guarantee equality since A
and B can be equivalent to the pth degree, rather than “xA = yB” which
already implies separate accounting units (kg, meters, pounds, etc.)
and maximal equivalence. To move from the former to the latter we
actually need additional structure, the means to define what a ‘portion’
(or ‘slice’) of a commodity is and to define variations amongst them that
preserve value-structure such that if A and B are maximally exchange-
able, then some common restriction to both A and B still preserves
maximal exchangeability. As we have seen, the possibility of determin-
ing commodity atoms based on the homogeneity of homomeric com-
modities brings us closer to this. If we have commodity A as our equiv-
alent form and commodity B is maximally exchangeable with it, given a
commodity C that is only equivalent to B to the pth degree, then there
always a portion A’ of our equivalent A that is maximally exchangeable
with C such that A’ is exchangeable to the pth degree with A. Through
this construction, we have managed to express the value-relations
between any two commodities in terms of morphisms to one sole
commodity—A thus functions as a universal equivalent. Furthermore, it
is only because partially ordered value-relations found a total order 35
in the atomic parts of a homomeric commodity A that we can produce
a map from value-relations to a numeric model that preserves this
order-structure—which helps us understand why it is that, despite all
claims to the contrary, capitalism is actually a very restricted space for
mathematical abstractions.

The Topos of Commodity-Exchange

One of the reasons why our approach might look counterintuitive is

that we do not start from a single commodity as does Marx in Capital.
When we first approach the commodity-world as phenomenologists, we
suspend any assumptions we have about what operations differentiate
the “immense accumulation of commodities” and determine what
counts as a unit within it, as a single commodity. Instead, as part of
our commitment to studying what makes a difference to commodities

35 In a total order, every member of the set is comparable to every other member, whereas in a partial order there may
be pairs of incomparable elements. Although value allows for partial orders, under capitalism, every priceable thing
can be measured in terms of money and thereby rendered comparable to everything else.

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themselves, we need to find consistent internal restrictions of this

space through the logical means available within it, such that what
counts as an ‘individual’ commodity emerges as the liminal result of
these constraints. This alternative approach is called for because,
unlike Marx who is almost exclusively concerned with TC—that is, com-
modity logic as the dominant transcendental—we begin from the most
general form of commodity evaluations, such as those that might take
place in a non-capitalist society, or in a totally inconsistent way. The
possibility of forming consistent exchange spaces, or of producing
totally ordered evaluations of this space, therefore depends on the
possibility of constructing logical objects inside the commodity-world,
which are capable of ‘seeing’ these properties (I, IV).
One of the most basic operations we can define in this space
is the basic postulate that two commodities, when they are not
exchangeable, can be altered to become exchangeable. There are two
types of such alterations, which we will call completions and slicings.
A completion is the operation of adding additional commodities into
the proposed exchange. For example, if one thousand acres of arable
land cannot be exchanged for Magritte’s Le Principe du Plaisir, but we
are able to produce an exchange by adding ten kilograms of the chem-
ical element rhodium to the side of the arable land, then we say this
addition is a completion. Conversely, a slicing is the removal of a part
of one side of an impossible exchange to make it actual. Note that we
cannot, for example, slice a painting into smaller exchangeable units.
We call a given collection of commodities, with their completions
and slicings, a bargaining space. It is important to note that this is a
local (i.e. local to a specific time and place) definition of the commodity
logic that carries with it a notion of individual commodity dependent
on what exchanges are possible in that space. In the case of a bargain-
ing space consisting only of a famous painting, arable land and a rare
chemical element, we may not even have a notion of a ‘single acre’ of
land or ‘one gram’ of the element—simply because the common unit
of exchange can only be derived from finding compatible slicings. In
other words, a bargaining space gives us a local resolution from which
to observe a part of the total commodity space.
Accidental exchanges give us a simple proposition: two com-
modities are exchangeable at a particular place (and time). When we
investigate this space with our completion and slicing operations, we
reveal a larger space consisting of many such places that overlap and
connect with each other. We call this the ‘bargaining space’ and use
it as a particular context for propositions about a commodity. This
lets us talk about ‘local phenomena’ of the commodity-world. The next
step is to add the condition of ‘gluing’ multiple such spaces together.
Given two (or more) sets of commodities, each belonging to different

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bargaining spaces, there exists a union of those sets and an exchange

function whose domain is the union-set and which is compatible with
the exchange functions of the antecedent spaces. If such a gluing is
possible, then it is necessarily possible to recover the two (or more)
constituent spaces from the final glued one. The rules of such glu-
ing essentially follow from the field of topology, which allows us to
describe the composition of a space (I). In our case, we have attached
a certain data to this space: the value-relations between commodities.
This fusion of data and space is known as a sheaf.
We may interpret the entirety of the commodity-world as a cer-
tain collection of such sheaves obeying further rules, a topos in which
it is possible to formulate logical statements consisting of predicates
quantified over a given sheaf. Commodities serve as terms for these
predicates and we can evaluate where certain predicates hold true,
again yielding a degree of our transcendental. More complex state-
ments can be constructed by combining simpler ones via operators
from first-order intuitionistic logic (XVII). This allows us to speak of an
‘internal language’ of the commodity-world that determines the bounda-
ries of what can be inferred. For now, we omit the details for the reader
to investigate further (XVIII).

The Three Forms of Capital

Until now, all we have shown is that by considering a category which

has commodities as objects and evaluations as morphisms, such that
these respect identity, composition and associativity, we can start
our analysis of the commodity-world a step before Marx’s own anal-
ysis. That is, we presuppose neither the notion of a common social
substance nor a preliminary separation between quantity and quality—
instead, we treat value as the abstraction from differences taking place
when a commodity is evaluated from the perspective of another. For
the sake of brevity, we focused here on the fixation of a sole evaluator,
the universal equivalent, as the main condition for such consistent
exchange space to be formed. This allowed us to show that, at this
point, a new difference starts to make a difference in the commodi-
ty-world since the material properties of different commodities qualify
them in different ways to occupy this position. Commodities which
can be decomposed and recomposed in homogeneous ways are better
equipped to express, through these homomeric variations, the likewise
varying evaluations of other commodities.
If such a universal equivalent can be found, then a consistent
and totally-ordered commodity space becomes possible—and a quan-
titative predicate for commodities can be defined, as in “commodity
A is worth ten dollars”. Such a universal equivalent is what we call the

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money-commodity and this quantitative predicate is called a price. A

space of commodity-evaluations equipped with a money-commodity—
and therefore with the capacity to ‘name the price’ of its commodities
and its priceable parts—constitutes a consistent exchange space (CES).
Like the bargaining space before, a CES also serves as a particular con-
text for value-relations to appear. But unlike in the previous context,
we can formulate properties in terms of price.
For example, a CES can be said to be free of arbitrage since we
can assess a coherent pricing for any set of commodities such that
no commodity owner can profit from a cycle of exchange alone. We
can, however, still construct more complex social objects within the
commodity-world that are capable of stitching together paths across
different CESs and thus permit morphisms from one pricing context to
another—this is the basic form of capital as an object.
In our approach, we distinguish three principal forms of capi-
tal36—usurer, merchant, and industrial—in terms of the different ways
this suture between consistent exchange spaces can be produced.
Though the first two strategies have a longer history than industrial
capital, Marx calls them “antediluvian” forms of capital because of
their essentially hybrid nature—that is, both usurer and merchant capi-
tal require that other transcendental layers guarantee the consistency
of these operations. These are the two famous formulas for usurer and
merchant capital, respectively:

M → M’

and:

M → C → M’

Within our multilayered approach, a more complex reframing of these

two processes is possible, highlighting their reliance on TA and TB
(II). First, usurer capital can be seen as the treatment of money as a
gift—a ‘bracketing’ of money’s place within a CES and its subsequent
treatment as a gift framed, quite often, in contractual terms, requiring
a repayment with interests, a new quantity which is then once more
treated as a money-commodity, but now of increased value. We use
subscripts to indicate how operations occur across layers:

36 Marx, Capital, p. 247.

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Merchant capital, on the other hand, does not only require an inter-
mediate purchase of a commodity, but also the reindexing of this com-
modity within a new value-system where it is priced at a higher value
and then sold for a higher but equivalent sum. It requires, then, that
this commodity should cross a frontier that is only intelligible from the
perspectives of community and state transcendentals:

This leads us to the famous formula for industrial capital:

M → LP + MP … C → M’

It is interesting to note that while usurer capital seems to extract the

monetary difference (M’) from a temporal displacement, between
lending and collecting, and merchant capital does so from a spatial
displacement, between different value-systems, industrial capital
finds a compositional source of surplus captured in the formula by the
introduction of the + operator and the internal distinction between two
types of commodities: labor-power (LP) and means of production (MP).
However, one should also note that unlike Marx’s exposition in
Capital, we have not yet presented any concept of labor internal to the
commodity-world since we have imposed for ourselves a constraint
that prevents us from merely adding new entities and operations
that are not intelligible from the world’s compositional structure. The
project of an objective phenomenology of capitalist political economy

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implies that we never introduce an observable difference without also

determining which objects in our commodity space are capable of
observing it (IV, VII). In other words, a necessary step for us to make
sense of the formula for industrial capital is to derive, solely with the
resources of our current commodity-world, the means to immanently
‘see’ the difference between labor and other commodities.

Labor-Commodity, Production and Abstraction

It is therefore remarkable that, in fact, at this early stage of our con-

struction, we do have the means to define labor-power in terms of
morphisms alone. First of all, we must introduce an operator, called
a tensor ⊗, which allows us to make sense of the + operator in the
formula of industrial capital. This operation acts as the parallel
composition of commodities: instead of composing in a serial order
as in C₁ → C₂ → C₃ (which implies that there exist separate operations
from C₁ and C₂ to C₃) we want to define how a joint composition C₁ ⊗ C₂
takes us to C₃, for example. In categorical terms, this means we would
have to define our ⊗ operator in such a way that we would now have
a ‘symmetric monoidal’ category, a category in which we can define
commodity-producing arrows of the form LP ⊗ MP → C. But once this is
established, the following distinctions become possible.
I )  From the standpoint of compositional paths, every commodity
is either (1) an output of a previous commodity-producing map, a prod-
uct, or (2) introduced into the commodity space through an appropriate
layer-conforming operation in TA and TB—what is called a fictive com-
modity. Land enclosures and intellectual property rights are examples
of previous localizations of invaluable objects on TB which allows them
to be alienated through contracts and used in a productive endeavor
so that they affect the magnitude of value of the product, while unpaid
housework is an example of an activity that remains outside of the
commodity space, even though it mediates the private consumption of
commodities, due to it being localized on TA as a ‘family affair’.
II )  Every commodity is either (1) consumed as an input in the
production process of other commodities, as a productive consum-
able, (2) consumed outside the commodity production process, as
a simple consumable, that is, as the input of a process that is not
commodity-preserving—like eating—or (3) removed from commodity
space through a transcendental re-indexing that excludes it from the
commodity-world.
III )  Given a commodity C, we can consider its reproduc-
tion structure r through the set of commodities CMS such that
r: (C ⊗ CMS) → C. The map of r functions as a sort of ‘indirect’ identity
map for C. For example, a machine might require electricity and

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regular maintenance work, both priceable as commodities themselves,

in order to continue functioning.
With definitions I, II and III, we can now further discern three
different classes of productive consumables:
i )  There are commodities which are exclusively composed of
productive consumables—that is, they were previously the output of
commodity production and their reproductive consumables are part of
the same production process as they are, forming an additional cost to
the buyer of the commodity in question. These we call private means of
production, or MPP.
ii )  There are commodities which are not exclusively the output
of commodity production but whose reproduction costs are part of the
same production process which employs the commodity. Most natural
resources fall into this category: they are not exclusively the product of
commodity-composition, though transforming them into a commodity
usually requires labor while their reproduction takes place inside the
productive sphere: if one buys land for farming, one must also buy
fertilizers and water to replenish the land. These are called natural
means of production, or MPN.
iii )  There are productive consumables that are neither the
output of previous commodity production nor reproduced inside a
production process—this is the case of the labor-power, or LP: like
MPN, labor-power becomes a commodity through layer-conformance of
human laboring-capacity as a private property in TB, but the commod-
ities it needs to reproduce this capacity come from the set of simple
consumables and are therefore exchanged for money outside the pro-
duction process.
This differentiation of the labor-commodity relies solely on the
paths of production and exchange that situate a commodity within its
world and does not require that we take the capacities of humans as a
given—in fact, if any other entities could instantiate this logical distinc-
tion, they would also be seen as labor-power by capital. The difference
between the reproductive structure of commodities, however, is ‘visible’
not from the standpoint of money as a static sensor for equivalent or
nonequivalent exchanges, but rather from the standpoint of capital—
the upper morphism M → M’ in our diagram—whose internal structure
is capable of expressing not only how much value some commodity has,
but also how much value it can add to a final product. Since the means
of production are the product of previous commodity production, their
parts have prices stemming from previous productive processes, and
since their reproduction structure is also purchased by advanced
capital, the value that MP can transfer to a product as it consumes CMS
and composes its parts from parts of other commodities is constrained
by its own value. It is constant capital at best. On the other hand, since

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labor-power is not the product of commodity production, its parts are

not directly priced, and since its reproduction structure goes through
simple consumables, its value is not covariant with what happens
inside the productive sphere. The value of labor-power does not neces-
sarily correlate with the value it adds, through composition with other
commodities, to a product. It is variable capital.
If we now return to the diagram for industrial capital, we can see
that, in the composition LP ⊗ MP → C, there might be specific ways of
composing parts of labor-power and parts of the means of production
such that the output might allow previously ‘invisible’ parts of labor
to be priced in a consistent way, allowing the diagram to commute
through the addition of surplus value through composition.

One might say a capitalist production process is a laboratory for prob-

ing into new priceable parts of labor—it sees more of labor than the
labor-commodity can see of itself. The construction of the immanent
concept of labor time—though not provided here—can be derived from
the search within the productive sphere for the means to consistently
price the parts of labor.
A lot has been left out of this summary description of our recon-
struction of the logic of value, capital and labor, but let us add one final
remark which concerns the distinction between value and use value
and, more specifically, between abstract and concrete labor.
Throughout this presentation, we emphasized the idea that the
relevant structure of the commodity-world should be thought of as
those differences that can be ‘sensed’ or ‘seen’ by other objects within
this same world (I). This is a perfectly natural way to define objects
within category theory, where the identity of or difference between
objects, and the capacity to distinguish their parts or ‘sub-objects’,
relies exclusively on the possibility to distinguish the morphisms that
go into and out of these structures. But it is quite remarkable that this
new approach also affects several major dialectical dualities in the
grammar of Capital. For instance, rather than treat “value” and “use
value” as different realms, with the former being immaterial, symbolic
or removed from the world in some way, while the latter concerns the
material, corporeal “stuff” of things, we can actually relate them in

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terms of restrictions on possible morphisms (VIII). In other words, we

can actually discern (i) the material substrate of a commodity as the set
of all possible morphisms that go through it—a huge class of possible
transformations far exceeding anything that the commodity-world
could consistently ‘see’; (ii) the use-value set of possible transfor-
mations preserving the commodity-form, which allow the substrate
to remain intelligible within the space of value; and (iii) the value of
the commodity as the morphisms that not only preserve the com-
modity-form but also the value-content of its input commodities in a
consistent exchange space. The first consequence of this distinction is
that it becomes clear that use value is part of the commodity-form—it
can be seen as the space for all priceable parts of a commodity, all
its uses and transformations that will preserve its connection with
the commodity-world, as a productive or as a simple consumable. The
second consequence is that it exemplifies what ‘abstraction’ means
in our theory (XII): to abstract is not to move outside or beyond the
concrete towards some new separate realm, but rather to restrict the
concrete, to construct material structures that become indifferent to
certain differences, thus ‘forgetting’ them—we abstract into the world,
not out of it.
It is this insight that helps us define the difference between
concrete and abstract labor in a new way. Once more, we can distin-
guish between the material substrate of the labor-commodity—a class
of transformations so vast it can hardly be identified with ‘labor’ in
any meaningful sense—its concrete labor uses—the set of all possible
transformations that preserve the commodity-form—and its abstract
labor uses—those transformations which also preserve the value of the
commodities being composed. Abstract labor becomes, here, a restric-
tion ‘into’ action, labor seen from the perspective of the preservation
of value, a very material restriction which several components in the
production process intend to enforce. It is no less abstract by being
defined in this way—if you observe a productive process, nothing that
appears to you in that process would allow you to explain why people
and things are being organized the way they are. It is only from the
standpoint of value that the structure appears.

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XII. Real
Abstraction
and the Given

We shall explore an interesting juncture to be thought in the cross-

roads of Karl Marx’s and Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy that can contrib-
ute to the thinking of political experimentation with organizations.
On one hand, Sellars brings to the fore important distinctions that
help understand the relationship between rationality and the space
of concepts one is enmeshed in as a rational agent, and the material
space of causes that is the natural determination of the same agent.
But this functional distinction is not a metaphysical one. Here one can
find a use for Sellars in Marxism, namely fleshing out the problem of
the abstract determination of Capital in functional terms. This has
consequences for the thinking of the thought (VI) that is embedded in
organizational practice, in the sense that this might retrieve relevant
mediations from the specific sensitivities at play in organizations that
are not identified with ‘individual’ sensitivity, and the way these are
‘subjectivized’ by the agents that are part of the same organization (IV,
XIII).

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This section intends to contribute to this discussion by briefly

tackling one specific aspect of it, specifically the issue of a possible
relationship between real abstractions in the Marxist framework (XI)
with the Sellarsian problem of the critique of the Given. The reason
for this choice in this specific context, besides the interesting pre-
dicament that arises from the comparison, is that if the project of the
Subset of Theoretical Practice (XVIII) intends to tackle political exper-
imentation in terms of a thought which existence is predicated on the
existence of a collective, it seems this thinking, which is the thinking
of the organization, is irreducible to the thinking of the individual
agents that compose the organization.
The possible kinds of (non-presupposed, non-given) transitivity
between the sensitivity of the organization at large to conditions
detected in its proper mereological scale and the scale of the individ-
ual thinker are at stake also in determining political experiments as
experiments—in the sense of verifying the consequences of adopting
specific organizational axioms. The problem of real abstractions in
Marxist thought embodies some of the properties of such collective
‘thinking’. It emerges from the actions of a collective without being nec-
essarily intended, but it can be retroactively posed as an explanatory
category for the actions of the collective and the economic-political
consequences that ensue.
The proper ‘thinking’ of the organization has been described in
other sections of this constellation of contributions as understood in
terms of the triad composition-interaction-intelligibility (I, IV). This
can be tentatively sliced further in its ‘intelligibility’ as the sensitivity
of a social organization that is irreducible to the logic of the rational
agents composing it, but a sensitivity which have to pass through the
‘space of reasons’ (as we shall make clear) in order to yield knowledge
in the strict sense. While one may be tempted to assimilate the appeal
to a rational agent with a form of methodological individualism, this is
not the case here. The category of a rational, or cognitive, agent will
only be understood in terms of the passage from the space of causes to
the space of reasons, in itself a collective-historical picture of reason
and language use. Individual agents are here counted-as-one in the
Badiouian sense: as a hub of possible inferences and language-entry,
intralanguage, and language-exit operations. Therefore, a cognitive
agent the composition of which can be left undefined, but which
human individuals are a current example of.
One methodological assumption will be to concentrate mostly
on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s construal of real abstraction. We understand
Sohn-Rethel’s idea of a materialist account of the transcendental
subject and its categories to already be offering a point of view
more congenial to the somewhat Kantian preoccupations of Sellars’s

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philosophy. If Sellars was already interested in a transcendental mate-

rialist version of Kant, then the materialist genealogical reading of the
genesis of the categories of understanding by Sohn-Rethel might at
least offer an interesting passage between the Marxist tradition and
the Sellarsian one—one that might yield an interesting circuit between
the understanding of material practice and the emergence of idealities
in both authors.
First, we will briefly characterize Sellars’s critique of the Given,
which is followed by a preliminary answer to the question about how
the category of real abstraction can be problematized by the Sellarsian
framework. This will enable us to offer a more complete expression of
our hypothesis, which we shall follow with a presentation of two theses
on real abstraction that we can extract from Sohn-Rethel. Finally, we
shall give an answer regarding under what conditions can real abstrac-
tion be compatibilized with the Sellarsian critique of the Given, which
can in turn offer a specific image of the internal unfolding (from the
point of view of the cognitive agent) (XIII) of political experiments
predicated on the reality of the abstraction they themselves instantiate
(V, VI).

Enter the Given

The concept of “the Given” in Wilfrid Sellars’s writing is notoriously

difficult to pinpoint, not because one cannot really grasp what the con-
cept means, but because one does not know where its reference ends.
The multifariousness of the Given might always show up in a different
guise from the ones already exorcised by critique. In Sellars’s writing
two forms of the Given are usually recognized: the epistemic and the
categorial. We shall illustrate each with a passage from Sellars’s work,
which we shall follow in the end of this exposition with a third one,
extracted through the lenses of Willem DeVries.
The inconsistent triad might be the most famous way to show
the Given in action. It is proposed in Empiricism and the philosophy of
mind.

A )  S senses red sense content x entails S non inferentially

believes (knows) that x is red.
B )  The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired.
C )  The capacity to have classificatory beliefs of the form
x is F is acquired.37

37 SELLARS, Wilfrid, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, I, by
FEIGL, Herbert, & SCRIVEN, Michael (eds.), University of Minnesota Press, 1956, pp. 253–329.

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Following Sellars, sustaining A and B implies negating C; sustaining

B and C implies negating A; sustaining A and C implies negating
B. Sellars’s interpretation of the inconsistency hinges on the trans-
mission of justificatory traction between sensing and knowing, as if
sensing alone is sufficient to constitute an episode of knowledge about
the sensed content. Implicit here is the differentiation between causal
chains and justificatory chains. Justification is normative in the sense
of being liable to assessments of adequacy and correctness, while
causation is not. Knowledge is also normative in the sense of having
justified expressions. One way to understand this is to compare rules
and regularities.

This was our paradox: no course of action could be deter-

mined by a rule, because every course of action can be
brought into accord with the rule. The answer was: if every
course of action can be brought into accord with the rule,
then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so
there would be neither accord nor conflict here.38

Two interpretations of rule-following are commented by Robert

Brandom that give rise to the paradox:
Interpretation one is called regulism, and it is the idea that rules
are always explicit statements about how to do something.
Interpretation two is called regularism, and it is the idea that
rules are regularities of behavior.
The problem with regulism is that if every rule is an assertion,
every rule must be specified by a rule about how to apply the first rule,
which makes it an infinite regression in which one never applies any
rule. The problem with regularism is that regularities cannot account
for the normative character of a rule. Regularities are not right or
wrong, they just are. Rules should be able to tell how to proceed cor-
rectly while regularities are brute happenings that are neither correct
nor incorrect. Thus, a regularity, while it can be part of the expression
of a rule, cannot by itself be a rule.
A similar relationship can be observed between sensible
contents and knowledge in Sellars’s writing: the sensible content is
necessary for knowledge of facts but is not by itself sufficient for it.
This, ultimately, means being caused is not equivalent to knowing one’s
cause, which yields rejecting A. Willem DeVries expresses the Given as
trying to satisfy two conditions at the same time:

The given is epistemically independent, that is, whatever

positive epistemic status our cognitive encounter with the
38 WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 4th revised edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, §201.

2380
 ŠUM #17

object has, it does not depend on the epistemic status

of any other cognitive state. […] It is epistemically effica-
cious, that is, it can transmit positive epistemic status to
other cognitive states of ours.39

The categorial form of the Given might be exposed more clearly in the
Foundations of a Metaphysics of Pure Process (the “Carus Lectures”):

If a person is directly aware of an item which has cate-

gorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having
categorial status C. This principle is, perhaps, the most
basic form of what I have castigated as “The Myth of the
Given.” […] To reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the
idea that the categorial structure of the world—if it has a
categorial structure—imposes itself on the mind as a seal
imposes itself on melted wax.40

From these brief notes a picture begins to emerge wherein a certain

form of realism is combined with transcendental philosophy: reality
does not have propositional form, which means every attempt at con-
ceptualizing it depends upon the resources of our available language
and cognitive systems. But reality is not produced by language either.
As James O’Shea expressed,

On Sellars’ Peircean-Kantian view, we ‘attack’ nature

with rule-governed conceptual systems of reason’s own
making. We then learn by experience or by testing that
either the world as we have conceptually responded to it
in our perceptual judgments ‘conforms to’ our conceptual
representations as they stand (the Kantian Copernican
insight), or we must modify the latter in our ongoing quest
for explanatory coherence through critically controlled
conceptual change (the Peircean pragmatist insight).41

Here we are able to express our predicament more thoroughly.

Rejecting both forms of the Given yields a distinctive division of labor
between sensible contents and conceptual workings in the Sellarsian
picture. Sensible contents cannot communicate normative (as per the
epistemic given) or categorial (the categorial given) statuses by them-
selves. They require the workings of the concept.

39 DEVRIES, Willem, Wilfrid Sellars, McGill-Queens University Press, 2005, p. 98.

40 SELLARS, Wilfrid, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process”, The Monist, 64 (1), 1981, §44–45.
41 O’SHEA, James R., Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn, Polity Press, 2007, p. 150.

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On the other hand, the idea of real abstraction as proposed

within Marxist thought eschews traditional divisions between the men-
tal and the real, the abstract and the concrete, the sensible and the
conceptual, committing to a causally efficacious figure of abstraction
that “is the form of the thought previous and external to the thought”42—
which amounts to a “veritable expropriation of abstract thought”43.

Enter Real Abstraction

In “Warenform und Denkform”, Sohn-Rethel presents in a very striking

way the heresy of real abstraction:

[…] the origin of commodity abstraction is, according

to Marx’s determination, in a sphere which completely
escapes the conceptual language of metaphysical thought.
The latter relates things back to consciousness and con-
sciousness to things: there is no third option. Conversely,
the social relation from which the value-abstraction is
derived does not fit into the dichotomy of things and con-
sciousness. Within the framework of traditional concepts,
the phenomenon of the abstraction-commodity- is an
absurdity, something which, quite simply, cannot exist. It’s,
as Marx determines, a spatio-temporal process causal in
nature. However, its result is an abstraction, that is, an
effect of a conceptual nature. Between the spatio-tem-
poral world of things and the ideal world of concepts,
metaphysical thought does not tolerate any common
element—these are antinomically separated spheres.
However, according to Marx, the abstraction-commodity is
precisely constructed as belonging in both spheres; this is
precisely what makes it special.44

Sohn-Rethel refers here to the exchange-abstraction specifically as

the main object of his analysis: the very fact that in exchange, different
phenomenal elements are considered equivalent in value, their sensi-
ble configurations notwithstanding—an equivalence that encounters
its full expression in money that, in turn, can be used to generate more
value in the form of Capital.
It is worth mentioning that for Sohn-Rethel, real abstraction
emerges in exchange and that it is considered as spatially and tem-
porally separated from the act of use, in the sense that during an

42 ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p. 13.

43 TOSCANO, Alberto, “The open Secret of Real Abstraction”, Rethinking Marxism, 20 (2), pp. 273–287, 2008, p. 280.
44 SOHN-RETHEL, Alfred, La Pensée-Marchandise, Éditions du Croquant, 2010, p. 52. Translated by the authors.

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 ŠUM #17

exchange in the market, one is not able to use the products on display
beyond the try-outs that might conduce to the exchange. The picture
that emerges is that of a material practice of exchange that gives rise
to something akin to a conceptual representation that can subsume
many different particulars under the same universal. But this is, differ-
ently from the abstractionist empiricist account, not done in the mind,
but in concrete social practice.
Both Sellars and Sohn-Rethel are critical of empiricism, but their
critique originates from different standpoints. While the category of
the real abstraction evades alignment between the abstract and the
mental, the concrete and the physical that is characteristic of abstrac-
tionist empiricism—meaning that for a certain form of empiricism the
origin of conceptual abstraction comes from experience, from which
one extracts a simpler determination—empiricism is, for Sellars, to
be criticized for the foundationalist image of thought that it yields:
if the categories of thought are abstractions taken out of a layer of
experience (the “Given”), then this shall be the ground for what is
thinkable. Sellars resists this hypothesis by separating the work of
sensibility (“language-entry transitions”) from inference in the space of
reasons proper (“intra-language transitions”) and the resulting actions
(“language-exit transitions”). But this leaves an open question: how to
account for the contribution of sensible contents to conceptual deploy-
ment once the gap between sensibility and understanding (in Kantian
terms) is opened? We shall have sketched a response by the end of this
section.
Beyond simple recognition of the fact of the emergence of real
abstractions in exchange, Sohn-Rethel upholds his most polemical
thesis of the origin of the categories of traditional metaphysics and
modern epistemology (in the guise of the Kantian transcendental sub-
ject) being located in commodity-exchange. As Anselm Jappe presents
it:

[…] the origin of the forms of consciousness (and knowl-

edge) is neither empirical nor ontological, but historical.
The forms of thought, these “molds” in which particular
data are cast, do not come—this is the core of Sohn-Rethel
theory—from thought itself, but from human action. Not of
action as such, as a philosophical and abstract category,
but of the historical and concrete action of man. The
shapes of thought—hence the intellect, different from
the simple contents of consciousness - are each time the
expression of an era in the social relationships of men;
within this context, however, they have objective validity.
This perspective on the history of thought is obviously an

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application of the principle that it is not consciousness

that determines being, but the social being that deter-
mines consciousness.45

One instructive example of such a transmission between “real” and

“conceptual” abstractions in Sohn-Rethel’s terms is in the concept of
substance. For him, the category of substance in philosophical think-
ing corresponds to something that remains what it is while varying its
sensible character either temporally or spatially. He proposes a ques-
tion: where in the world did the philosophers who came up with the
idea of substance encounter such a thing? For Sohn-Rethel, a minted
coin is the value-form that became visible.
The minted currency is the form-value that has become visible.
Because here we print formally in a natural material that it is not
intended for use, but only for exchange. The authority that prints
money—whether it starts out of a private trade tycoon or a “tyrant” who
usurped royal power—guarantees weight and fine metal content, and
promises to replace coins that have suffered some wear, by others
of integral value. In other terms, the postulate of inalterability for an
unlimited period of the equivalent is here formally recognized, and it
is distinguished expressly, as a social postulate, of the empirical-phys-
ical characteristic of such or such metal. The old relation, where the
value-form of the commodity was subordinate to its natural form, is
inverted: the social value-form uses a particular and specific natural
form for its functional purposes.46
Sohn-Rethel’s work proceeds to derive the categories of subject,
substance, causality, homogeneous space and time, etc. from this
exchange abstraction. Beyond the recognition of the simple existence
of abstract patterns of behavior that might be encapsulated within
certain abstract forms yielding real abstractions (1st thesis), Sohn-
Rethel wants to sustain that the categories of the transcendental sub-
ject as proposed in Kantian philosophy have a historical genesis found
in commodity abstraction (2nd thesis). The first thesis claims, then,
that abstractions emerge from the behavior of cognitive agents—the
abstractions that can be used to explain said behavior. The second
thesis claims that the abstractions stemming from concrete social
behavior are transmitted to the mind as cognitive categories of a tran-
scendental subject.
From the Sellarsian point of view, this creates a possible diffi-
culty for Sohn-Rethel’s account, which has to do with the form of trans-
mission of the real abstraction to the mind, in keeping with the dictum

45 JAPPE, Anselm, “Pourquoi lire Sohn-Rethel Aujourd’hui?”, in: SOHN-RETHEL, La Pensée-Marchandise, Éditions du
Croquant, pp. 7–38, 2010, p. 9.
46 SOHN-RETHEL, La pensée, p. 63.

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“in the mind, but not from it”. If the Given is, as DeVries expresses
it, both epistemically independent and epistemically efficacious,
exchange-abstraction is independent in the sense of having its origin
outside of thought, while at the same time begetting by itself the tran-
scendental categories that might organize thinking. This impression
might be dispelled, though, with a more fine-grained account of the
mediations through which the exchange-abstraction gets caught in its
transformation into conceptual abstractions.

“To Determine Is to Negate while Configuring”

Sohn-Rethel discusses two forms of materialism: on one hand, the

idea, found in Engels’s and Lenin’s writings, of mind as reflecting
natural material being; on the other hand, the idea taken from George
Thomson of the social being as the origin of the categories of the
mind. The first form broadly conforms to empiricist strictures of the
mind as a mirror of nature, while the second introduces the category of
social practice as, in our own terms, a cluster concept that enables one
to relate nature and the conscious-social being in one and the same
complex.

It therefore seems to impose itself here, at least at a first

glance, a certain incompatibility between two modes of
materialist thinking: the one extracting the principles of
knowledge from a root present in our social being; the
other deriving these same principles out of knowledge of
the “outside world” by “abstraction” or “reflection”. This
apparent mismatch requires explanation, and the best
way to give it is through systematic study implications
of Thomson’s design. That is all the more promising as
Thomson’s theory confirms exactly the guiding idea of
historical materialism according to which it is the “social
being” of men who, as Marx writes in the highlighted
passage, “determines their conscience.”47

Let us make our predicament more explicit.

A )  if the real abstraction is something that happens inde-
pendently of cognition, it seems to causally constrain behavior—which
does not entail being in a justificatory relation to other contents.
B )  If the real abstraction is in a justificatory relation, i.e. has
categorical status, it cannot be something that emerges independently
of cognition simpliciter. It must already be caught in an inferential web.

47 SOHN-RETHEL, La Pensée, p. 87.

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If A is true, then real abstraction cannot do the further work

Sohn-Rethel wants it to—to be the ‘origin’ of the categories of under-
standing in the Kantian sense. If B is true, a specific division of labor
has to obtain between sensibility and cognition for it to take hold.
Our solution will try to find a juncture between thinking and
doing that would vindicate B. By doing so, we will also make B compat-
ible with A in the sense of accepting real abstractions as constraints
upon behavior in the causal sense, but with a specific set of caveats.
This is thematized in Sellarsian philosophy as the difference between
pattern-governed behavior and rule-obeying behavior .48 Patterns are
not necessarily rules, but constraints that obtain in physical and social
processes. Acknowledging the pattern turns it into rule-obeying behav-
ior, which then acquires justificatory purchase.
But how does social practice itself transmit the patterned
abstraction to thought? We just introduced the cluster concept of the
‘social being’. The possible answer seems to be in fleshing out the
internal compositions of the social being as a circuit that extracts not
only energy by means of work from nature but also abstractions (I, VIII,
XI). Brazilian philosopher José Arthur Giannotti has some precious indi-
cations related to that process, proposing the simple example of a ball
game as an operational scheme that links agents to one another and to
natural objects through activity.

[...] the object is metamorphosed, it is worked on so that

the weight property of the object, among others, can be
exercised in the right conditions. Here to determine is to
negate while configuring. The effectiveness of the game,
however, comes to effect this negation [...] As natural
objects, the soccer ball and the tennis ball are like any
two bodies reacting to the impact of forces of nature. But
a soccer ball is not the same thing as a tennis ball [...]
That is why the effective game exercises the resistance
to weight in a context in which it has already been cir-
cumscribed and measured by work. [...] The operational
scheme, constituted by the ball, by its trajectory, by the
agents as pitcher and catcher, establishes a very elemen-
tary social objectivity […] We believe that the operational
scheme exemplifies, in a very crude way, the type of
object whose plot Marx calls “contemporaneous history”,
this structure of social relations of production, constantly
nourished by the repeated actions of men and which are

48 See: SELLARS, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”.

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 ŠUM #17

objectified in figures such as commodities, capital and so

on.49

The paragraph is important in several different senses. First, it tries

to connect the localities in place in a simple ball game as already a
kind of extraction of measure—of an intelligibility (IV). Second, this
extraction of measure is done by work, by what is done, and not nec-
essarily by abstract thought (XI). This means that it happens by the
way things are practically engaged with, even unconsciously. So far, we
agree with Sohn-Rethel. Third, one must therefore not privilege only
consciously available forms of determination. The entire bodily move-
ment of players is engaged in the ball game, beyond any conscious
thematization. Patterns emerge from activity, be it conscious or not.
The theoretical making explicit of the elements of the game is an a
posteriori move. Fourth, the way the operational scheme is constituted
does not demand its theoretical explicitation even though the exercise
of philosophy/theory demands explicitation of practical abstraction
into theoretical abstraction. Herein lies the Sellarsian problem. Fifth,
Giannotti’s move of connecting the practical abstraction in general to
the commodity form proposes a particular case of connection between
different types of abstraction. This can be related to Sohn-Rethel’s
identification of the cognitive powers of abstraction to the abstraction
of the commodity form as well as to our final hypothesis of different
forms of abstraction emerging out of political experimentation.
So far Giannotti made explicit how a pattern that extracts spe-
cific determinations from objects can emerge out of ‘blind’ activity that
does not intend the extraction. The problem that remains is the one
regarding the capacity of extracting theoretical determination out of
the ball game so as to be able to say ‘because of x, y obtains’.

Intuitive and Conceptual Labor

In our presentation we exposed the following problem: if the real

abstraction is something that happens independently of cognition, it
seems to causally constrain behavior, which does not entail being in a
justificatory relation to other contents. This means that social practice
must provide the leverage point between the causal and the justifica-
tory chain.
A Sellarsian gap was left open that can now be bridged. While
being epistemically independent and efficacious at the same time
leads to lapsing into the Given, the problem was how to close the gap

49 GIANOTTI, José A., Trabalho e Reflexão. Ensaios para uma dialética da sociabilidade, Brasiliense, 1983, p. 52.
Translated by the authors.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

between the sensible contents (the non-problematic givenness of expe-

rience) and the conceptual grasp within the space of reasons.

Clearly, it is important that the relations of epistemic

dependence he is discussing be of two different types or
“dimensions”. Otherwise the charge of circularity (which
he must still work to avoid, as we shall see) would be
unanswerable. One of the “dimensions”—the bottom-up
direction—is what one would expect: observation provides
a basis from which we can, inductively, infer general
empirical truths. But in the other direction, reports or
beliefs can be construed as knowledge only if the subject
who makes them is a knower who, as knower, commands a
number of general truths and practices. Only in that case
do they occur as items in the logical space of reasons.50

The paragraph spells out the division of labor internally present in

our cluster-concept of “social activity”, sustained as a source of Sohn-
Rethel’s materialism against Engelsian materialism of reflection. One
could be entitled to question the argument for its circularity: how are
the categories extracted by a subject that already has the categories to
perform the extraction?
While a cognitive subject capable of conceptualizing is neces-
sary for the grasp of real abstraction, this does not a priori determine
which specific categories are used for this extraction. Here the vicious
circle of the question turns into a virtuous circle paving the way for the
reconciliation between the Sellarsian history of successive theoretical
frameworks and the Marxist history of the modes of production (II).
While one must have categories in order to grasp anything, one does
not need to presuppose which categories—and the historicity of these
different modes—come in as constraints, motivators and motivated
aback by the recognizing powers they enable once the muscle meets
the mind. The passage between real and conceptual abstraction is
guaranteed by social practice that already includes linguistic abilities.
This is not to say that linguistic abilities constitute such abstractions.
In Giannotti’s quote, a certain form of extraction, the “negating while
configuring”, was exemplified by a ball game: the physical diagram
drawn by the players and the ball. But the conceptual description
which constitutes full-fledged knowledge in the Sellarsian sense
is instituted by linguistic intentionality—meaning not necessarily
fully-fledged overt descriptions but intentionality as constituted by
linguistically articulated understandings.

50 DEVRIES, Wilfrid Sellars, p. 128.

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 ŠUM #17

Here we approach a limit to the explanation: it is not the social

being, but the natural being of the concept-mongering creatures we
are that explains what thought ultimately is. But the point is not to just
defer to natural history the constitutional problem of the categories
of our understanding, but to give social history its due in the process
by which successive frameworks are built (as per Sellars) that are able
to asymptotically approximate the description of mind-independent
worlds, motivated and motivating successive social forms (as per Sohn-
Rethel). This shows that through the Sellarsian problem we were able to
internally differentiate the abilities that constitute the circuit between
social being and consciousness until the threshold that holds between
social and natural being. A set of abilities must be in place that are
the result of biological history. But the categories through which we
come to know what this set of abilities is, is gained through the cluster
of historically constrained activity producing historically constrained
cognition.

“Communism Is the Theory of

How to Solve Communist Problems”

In a previous paper co-written by our collective we proposed that:

against what remains the main theoretical strategy of the

Left—that is, proposing better descriptions of our current
social reality in such a way that our theory is capable of
locating and expressing the inconsistencies and weak-
nesses of our social system in ways that conservative
depictions cannot—we want our theoretical space to be
infinitely richer than our social world, so that capitalist
social formations might appear within it as particular
solutions within the broader space of other possible
solutions to general problems of social coordination,
allocation of resources and free association. The strategy
of regionalizing or situating the parameters of our social
formation has profound effects both to theoretical con-
struction as well as to the practice of politics, since the
first sign of a broader theoretic framework is its capacity
to reformulate problems in its own terms, meaning that,
within this framework, communism becomes the theory
of how to solve communist problems, and not capitalist
ones.51

51 STP, “Contribution to the Critique of Political Organization: Outline of An Ongoing Research Project”,
Crisis and Critique, 7 (3), 2020, p. 401, https://crisiscritique.org/uploads/24-11-2020/gabriel-tupinambaet-al.pdf
https://crisiscritique.org/uploads/24-11-2020/gabriel-tupinambaet-al.pdf.

2389
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

We have proposed examining the problem of real abstraction as an

example that, if compatibilized with the Sellarsian framework, would
vindicate the hypothesis of the sensitivity of organizations (IV, V). In
other words, it would help answer the question about the sense in
which organizations ‘think’ what the individual subject does not think
(VI, XIII). We have shown that the Sellarsian framework helps disambig-
uate internally between causal and justificatory chains without thereby
yielding to a form of conceptual idealism that eschews material deter-
minations of thought. The answer is located in the activities of social
being that nevertheless presupposes natural being capable of concep-
tually grasping its own activities with historically derived categories.
In that sense, this section contributes to unveiling the position of
the cognitive subject regarding the intelligibility of the interactions the
system of which he is part is able to carry on (I, IV). While appearing in
the vocabulary of objective phenomenology is any form of relevancy to
any system, intentional or not, this appearing content must be, in the
specific case of cognitive agents, conceptualized in order to yield a
form of knowledge able to retrace and correct retroactively the concep-
tual frameworks that make these other sensitivities seen.
In this way, the specific sensitivity of the organization can be
retroactively implicated into the reasoning of its component subjects,
seen-as inferentially articulated relationships between adopted
experimental axioms and consequences (VI). The sensitivity in ques-
tion embeds the organization into a specific world (XIII), which is
filtered through the organizational sensitivity to the participants. The
constructed sensitivity of the organization is then the means through
which information is extracted from a multi-scalar world that does not
conform to the immediate scale of cognitive experience (II).
One final speculation that we would like to offer has to do not
with the diachronic succession and circuits between social forms and
conceptual categories, but with this synchronic grasp of multi-scalar
real determination. A final speculative proposal is what I call the no
privileged scale thesis (IV). It is related to a putative third form of the
Given— the synchronic scalar Given.

There is another important point to understand about

observation: there is no fixed set of characteristics of
physical objects to which observations are limited. That is,
there is no clear-cut or principled limit on the vocabulary
that can appropriately appear in observation claims. We
can form non-inferential observation beliefs about red
balls before us, but, with adequate training, we can also
make direct, non-inferential reports of the location of a
quasar or an a-particle in a cloud chamber. Observation

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 ŠUM #17

reports need only be reliable responses, whatever vocabu-

lary is used. Sellars believes that there is a special vocab-
ulary that we employ in “minimalist” observation claims,
that is, observation claims in which we risk as little as
possible without moving up (or back) a level and character-
izing our experience rather than the world.52

If this project at large is waging on regionalization and the coming up

with localized frameworks wherein to think different real and imagi-
nary social formations, the exchange-abstraction becomes only one,
albeit very important, example of abstraction that could conform to a
social reality—as mentioned in our paragraph—turning capitalist prob-
lems into communist ones by expanding the worlds the organizations
inhabit through the experimental test-and-run process of the expan-
sion of their sensitivity (III).
This is, thus, the limit of Marx’s analogy, and the starting point
of our investigation: social forms, such as the value-form, become
rational—that is, enter into relations of proportion which make certain
of its properties legible—through the very same process that renders
them actual. The very being of the social relation under investigation
is homogeneous and indistinguishable from the process through which
its properties become legible for us.53
Becoming legible for us entails recognizing the pattern, and
intervening in it entails turning it into a rule. If our cognition can be
calibrated to see in different scales and presupposing different sets
of categories, a further dimension can be added to the variably region-
alized account pursued here: the synchronic simultaneity of different
seeings acquired through the concrete engagement with the organiza-
tional experiments that constitute our political practice.

52 DEVRIES, Wilfrid Sellars, p. 120.

53 TUPINAMBÁ, Gabriel, “Freeing thought from thinkers: A case study”, Continental Thought and Theory, 1 (1),
pp. 156–193, 2016, p. 160, https://www.academia.edu/24772227/
https://www.academia.edu/24772227/.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

XIII. Navigating
Through Dimensions

But since I don’t understand myself, only segments of

myself that misunderstand each other, there’s no reason
for you to want to, no way you could even if we both
wanted it.
—John Ashbery

The question that will be raised in the following section asks what
it means to navigate between the multilayered logics that compose
capitalism as a social formation as described by Karatani (II). This
means that we are asking not only how it is possible to consider the
world through different transcendentals but also what it could mean to
switch between different logics in dealing with concrete political strug-
gle. Since it is not a matter of answering these questions practically,
we could reframe our question in this manner: would it be possible to
understand the conditions for this type of switch from the point of view
of political organizations? (XII) This is a pressing issue considering the
fact that, as it has been said, even though social objects are consti-
tuted as a mixture of TA, TB and TC (and thus might demand different
representations), different objects involved in the same political stake
might not be simultaneously visible through one single or partially

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composed logical structure. In practical terms, we might be involved in

struggles where aims or obstacles that must be represented are more
visible through differing logics that are not simultaneously account-
able for. With this, we are saying that although some instances might
be represented through partially composed structures (such as TA+TB,
TA+TC and TB+TC), there might be situations where the different objects
require accessing conflicting points of view.
In order to try to account for this problem, we will be following
Patricia Reed’s work on multi-scalar navigation. Her work is concerned
with the “making of inhabitable worlds in common, as they emerge
from, and negotiate the residual artifacts of, laminated, pluri-material
histories”.54 This in turn makes it necessary for the subjects of these
worlds in common (in contrast to the subjects in a common world) to
develop the ability to navigate (and represent) these ‘pluri-material
histories’ (III). In a sense, it seems safe to say that she tries to develop
the conditions necessary for human subjects (who, for good purposes,
are underdefined and not considered as singular individuals) to navi-
gate multiple worlds without letting go of the problem of coexistence
(that is, of a certain form of totality). For our purposes it looks as if her
generic (broader) description of human navigation on a planetary scale
may be able to give us clues as to how political organizations navigate
through the multilayered structure of capitalist social formation. In
order to do that, we shall first reconstruct her thoughts and then see if
her concepts might help us think how it is possible to contemplate the
problems we have raised here.

The Problem of Multi-Scalar Navigation

To start, it is perhaps best to take up again one of the most precious

definitions in Reed’s text: what is navigation? Navigating would be “the
ongoing mediation of intentionality with the contingency of unknown
or accidental events”55, that is, it is a kind of orientation that depends
on knowing one’s desire (where must we go) and on recognizing rele-
vant markers (signs that distinguish relevant differences in our naviga-
tion) that allow orientation (that is, localization in a given space). Due
to being precisely a kind of relation with the unknown (insofar as we do
not know all the paths beforehand), navigation will depend on non-ma-
terial elements, namely projections and imaginary elaborations (con-
cepts, we might say) of this unknown region based on the information
we have about the parts of the world we know and about what we know
54 REED, Patricia, “The End of a World and its Pedagogies”, Making & Breaking, 2, 2021, n. p.,
https://makingandbreaking.org/article/the-end-of-a-world-and-its-pedagogies/.
https://makingandbreaking.org/article/the-end-of-a-world-and-its-pedagogies/
55 REED, Patricia, “Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless
Perspectives”, E-flux Journal, 101, 2019, n. p. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/101/273343/
orientation-in-a-big-world-on-the-necessity-of-horizonless-perspectives/.

2393
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

we want. In this way, by serving as an interposition between the mate-

rial and the conceptual, as Reed puts it, navigation itself also ends up
being partially responsible for the way we represent the very territory
we intend to explore (to the extent that certain “markers” serve as
points of guidance that shape how we might perceive it).
The problem of navigation is further complicated if the kind of
territory we want to figure out is the one that mixes several scales in
the nth dimension (I, IV, XII). In those cases, we are dealing, as Reed
proposes, with a “planetary scale” (VIII). If there are so many levels,
fields and dimensions that exceed our processing capabilities, we need
to not only deal with different maps that do not always converge with
different kinds of signals that intersect but are not easily distinguisha-
ble, but also account for the fact that our desire (that is, the element of
intentionality involved in the navigation of a certain subject) is not as
consistent as we hope.56
It is precisely at this point, when we deal with multiple dimen-
sions, that certain problems can arise. Since the act of mapping
unknown regions affects how we experience the territory that will be
navigated, regardless of whether it is a voluntary gesture or not, an
undue projection of a singular point of view—extending beyond its
reach and insensitive to the specifics of some territory not relating to
the map that is made of it—can end up hindering navigation itself. The
kind of reduction that takes place can also be so violent that certain
worlds need to be erased so that a certain scale, a certain map, can
impose itself (VII). It is the simplest—and therefore most crude—way
of dealing with the complexity of a multi-scalar world. It is not an
exaggeration, therefore, to say as Reed does that there is a political
element involved in these projections, and that one could speak of a
politics of navigation.
The question that arises, therefore, is how to navigate this
plurality of dimensions without reducing the world to only one type
of dimension. Is it possible to speculate about a way of dealing with
this ‘nth dimensionality’ that does not erase the specificities of the
many dimensions participating on the planetary scale? Reed does not
exhaust this question but does provide us with a useful path for dealing
with these issues by working out two conditions that should be met for
successful navigation on a planetary scale.

56 This does not only mean that we are a single subject filled with conflicting desires, but that something which
is usually taken as a single subject (as an individual body/mind) might be the nexus of numerous subjectivation
processes (and what we consider a single individual is rather the converging point of different desires). This might be
exemplified in the rather banal case of someone having to reconcile the demands of work life and family life. It is not
so much that different desires (work values and family values) are inside the individual who must then weigh them, but
that the individual is the point where these different values (and worlds) meet and come into conflict. Not surprisingly,
what we consider our own intentionality can become muddled at this point, since it is not clear at first how to reconcile
conflicting desires (or which to prioritize at which instance). An effect of this seems to be that the art of navigation ends
up becoming an attempt at orientation between the various possible desires.

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The Conditions for Multi-Scalar Navigation

The first condition she establishes for dealing with that problem is
a kind of an imperative. It is a commitment to preserving localized
distinctions. This is an initial step because, as we have seen, the main
risk in overprojection is the (violent) reduction of multiple differences
to what can be seen through some particular point of view. The way to
combat this is through anchoring a certain perspective to the specific-
ity of its localization that may not be generalized. As Reed says, “the
value of this ‘situational insistence’ is that it preserves contextual par-
ticularity and sees in this framework ways to build better, more robust
accounts of reality”.57 This is important to avoid the risks of reductive
generalization, but it does not help us think about how to deal with the
multiplicity of dimensions since ‘partial objectivity’ does not explain
how we might navigate between regional ‘objectivities’ (IV). To move
further toward her goal, it is necessary to account for a non-reduction-
ist form of totality.
It is with this in mind that Reed draws from both the writer
Édouard Glissant and the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck to
establish a second condition. One can summarize her interest in these
thinkers with the fact that both of them seek to think of an inhomoge-
neous totality insofar as they think of particular, specific locations as
not thinkable without the totality of relations in which they are involved
(I). That is, from this idea, a thing is not an atomic, independent unit,
but always its specificity, and the relations in which it is involved that
make up a certain totality. It is in this sense that we understand Reed’s
“nested account of situatedness” where each particularity is also under-
stood through how it fits with the totality it is immersed in (IV, IX). The
point, and the development that interests us, is that the point of view
of totality varies according to the specific location one is dealing with.
Since each location has its own manner of being in relation to totality
(extracted from how it positions itself in relation to one totality), dif-
ferent views on totality arise from different points of view. However, if
we are also departing from an ‘insistence on positioning’, where each
perspective has its own ‘partial objectivity’, it is possible to infer that
each perspective also produces a partial objective representation of
totality through how it relates to it. This means that although totality
is objectively represented, its dependence on the positioning of one
representation makes it so that it is not possible to produce an all-en-
compassing totality accounting for all points of view. Consequently, we
arrive at an idea of totality that is equivocal (instead of a reductionist
one).

57 REED, Orientation, n. p.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

One effect of this form of thinking is that it understands the

relations of part and whole as a certain feedback dynamic. If the part
is a specificity, but this specificity is also understood through its
relations, then modifications in the whole end up echoing back to the
particular element, even though it preserves its specificity (as that
which retains a certain position in regard to a totality) (IV). There are
some interesting effects of this dynamic that are worth discussing. The
first is that the very distinctions between parts and general elements
end up becoming objects of investigation and demand a precise
determination of these boundaries (in order to be able to measure and
follow the feedback movements between part and whole). Being able to
differentiate between these elements also helps us keep in check any
desire to overproject the properties of some local specificity beyond
its limits.
The other point worth talking about touches on the problem of
intentionality. As mentioned above, one of the fundamental elements
of the navigation process is the navigator’s intentionality. That is, what
we see has to do with what we seek. However, when we are dealing
with multidimensionality (and we are aware of this), finding a way to
navigate numerous dimensions ends up being one of the navigator’s
desires. Things get complicated, however, if we follow the conditions
elaborated by Reed. This is because wanting to preserve the unique-
ness of specific locations without reducing them to other dimensions
is also a kind of intentionality involved in the operation of navigation
(this is why Reed treats this desire as a “first principle”). If we start
from this desire, the effect is precisely an equivocal world, for we
would have to accept that specific locations are themselves always
their distinctiveness and their position in relation to a certain totality.
When this type of desire is projected onto a totality, it can only provide
an image of a non-homogeneous totality, that is, an equivocal one, in
which all localizations are considered as also projecting an image of
totality (from their positions) without the projected totalities coalesc-
ing homogeneously.
If this is the case, then it is possible that this affects the very
commitment that was made at the beginning. Indeed, wanting to
preserve the singularity of particular locations is a desire (an inten-
tionality concerning a certain point of view) that leads to considering
equivocal worlds (instead of one common world), but this implies also
accepting that, in this equivocity, our own intentionality is considered
in another way from that of one of these many equivocal worlds that
coexist (in a non-homogeneous way). If our intentionality as the desire
from a certain point of view is considered in itself and through its
relation to a certain totality, then it is inevitable, from another point
of view, that one’s desire will be thought of differently. This implies

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that our initial intentionality, that is, our desire, is itself inconsistent
and can vary—even vary to a point that it may appear from a different
vantage point as something that goes against the initial commitment.
That means that a commitment to Reed’s first principle (which aims to
preserve the specificity of each location) may, when it appears from a
different point of view, appear as another instance of a hegemonizing
and reductionist point of view. An example of this is the manner in
which minority discourses may appear in academia. Even though
certain scholars in a privileged space (being men, white, European,
etc.) may see their tasks as simply restricting themselves to their
own points of view and letting the points of view of certain minorities
(indigenous peoples’, for example) occupy the discursive space of their
respective fields, people who actually inhabit these other points of
view may see the scholars’ action as nothing more than an attempt to
obtain more clout within their social settings.
One can see that the issues Reed brings up refer to a kind of
desire for navigation that is not simply the desire for something spe-
cific. Intentionality, the object of desire, inherent in navigating a world
composed of innumerable dimensions, turns out to be navigability
itself. This makes it unsurprising that the desire of navigability has as
its most immediate (easiest) form a desire for a simple world that is
easily navigable (instead of worlds in common, a common world). It is
also fair to say that this is the reason she departs from the two con-
ditions outlined above. It is an attempt to avoid reducing the multiple
coexisting worlds to a single world (which in practice would be the
overprojection of a local point of view).

Applied Transcendental Navigation

From this presentation of Reed’s thought we have seen that she out-
lines two separate conditions necessary for navigating between differ-
ent dimensions. This is a powerful tool that can and should be applied
to concrete problems that we might face. In this sense, as interesting
as her description is, it is equally valuable that she does not seek to
determine what kinds of dimensions exist, what the grounds for differ-
entiating them are and who the subject of these navigations is. What
interests us here is to see if the conditions she works out are of use
when we see reality through Karatani’s transcendentals (II, XVII). We
will thus try to see if they are translatable into the grammar we have
been working on in this essay.
In order to see if this works out, we must first clear one possible
misunderstanding concerning the sense of scale in expressions like
‘multi-scalar’ or ‘planetary scale’. It seems quite straightforward to
understand the ‘scalarity’ in these concepts in a spatial sense, as if

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scales are ranges of intelligibility relating to different sizes (for exam-

ple, we could speak of a ‘scale’ pertaining to atoms and a scale pertain-
ing to humans). A multi-scalar world (or a ‘planetary scale’) would thus
be understood as a world made up of various sizes. This first sense
of ‘multi-scalar’ would imply that we are describing a complex world
composed of many distinct and conflicting locales where we cannot
see from any one given place the totality that conditions each part of
this world. This is not what we understand, though, from Reed’s use of
the term. As her insistent usage of the expression ‘worlds in common’
might suggest, scalarity (and dimensionality for that matter) must con-
cern different (and non-reducible) worlds that are organized through
different autonomous logics. This is not expressed overly clearly in
her text, but it might be implied if we do not want to comprehend the
use of planetary scale in a purely spatial sense. Thus, if we feel that
it is useful to test her approach against Karatani’s scheme, it is so in
the sense that the different logics elaborated through The Structure
of World History map the non-reducible scales through which we must
navigate. The conditions for multi-scalar navigation may be summa-
rized as a ) a situational insistence (the determination of ‘partial objec-
tivities’) and b ) a comprehension of perspectives as ‘nested picture(s) of
specificity’ (which produces in turn a non-reductionist representation
of totality).
As we have seen, situational insistence is the attempt to produce
‘locatable knowledges’ that “preserves contextual particularity, and
sees in this framework ways to build better, more robust accounts of
reality.”58 This is not, we argue, very far from Karatani’s own effort to
expand on Marxist analysis of commodity exchange through compar-
ison with other types of modes of intercourse. From Reed’s point of
view, the logic of commodity (mode C), as can be seen in Marx’s Capital,
is not only a system of social relations, but also an account of a certain
dimension with its own logic of representation (XI). This logic allows us
to see a world organized through value (as a social form) which is hier-
archized in social classes. However, even if this means that the logic
of commodity exchange can be read as an objective characterization
of certain structures, it does not in any way attempt to produce a total
picture of reality as if this logic exhausted all possible forms of navi-
gating the world (II). In short, though determining its logic is capable
of making sense of certain structures we encounter, the world is not
completely reducible to commodity exchange.
The possibility of reading the logic of commodity exchange
as partial objectivity (one particular dimension) makes more sense
when we consider Karatani’s attempt to draw out two other modes of
intercourse that organize social relations. When analyzing the logic
58 REED, Orientation, n. p.

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of pooling and reciprocity (mode A) (IX), we can see that we are able
to picture social life through gift economy where relation hierarchies
are organized by honor. The logic of plunder and redistribution, on the
other hand, presents social reality as composed of relations of domina-
tion and protection where status determines where one finds oneself
(X). This distinction between modes of intercourse allows us to fulfill
Reed’s first condition because, even though these logics are all present
in social reality, they are all incommensurable with one another. We
might say that all of them are ‘correct’ even though they do not map
onto each other (there is no logic that allows these three different
logics to be reduced to a fourth and more fundamental logic).
What might we say of the second condition that we highlighted
above? If we are to speak of navigation between dimensions without
reducing them to one single (higher) dimension, we must produce an
equivocal image of totality which would allow us to see how a subject
relates to different dimensions. Reed does so through understanding
that not only does each dimension have its specificity, each specific-
ity is also defined by how it relates to a totality. She short-circuits a
homogeneous totality by insisting that each perspective has in itself
(and in a partially objective manner) a nested picture of totality. If we
try to translate this into Karatani’s terms, we see that each mode of
intercourse also envisions its own forms of collectivity. Thus, in Mode
A, the basic collective form that matters is the households, in Mode B,
we find cities and in Mode C we find markets. It is important to point
out that these forms of collectivity do not seem to be totalities. When
we look at what types of totalities Karatani ascribes to each mode,
we get a strange picture: when Mode A dominates, mini-systems are
formed; when Mode B dominates, world-empires are formed; when
Mode C dominates, a world-economy is formed (II). As his analysis
aims to show, these totalities are not all expressed simultaneously,
but correspond to different epochs of human history. This is a con-
sequence of Karatani’s idea that the history of the world is in a sense
determined and structured by the dominant mode of intercourse in a
given moment.
How is this possible if the modes of intercourse are incommen-
surable? Should each mode of intercourse not have in itself a form of
totality irregardless of it being the dominating mode? This seems to
be the case indeed when we analyze a specific moment in history. As
Karatani insists, even if capitalist society is a historical moment when
Mode C dominates other modes of intercourse, this current epoch can-
not be described simply through the logic of commodity exchange. For
Karatani, when we have a world-economy, Mode A appears as nations
and Mode B as states, which forms the nation-state-capital trinity. We
could thus say that nations are how the totality nested in Mode A is

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expressed when it is dominated by Mode C. This in turn means that

there are a host of problems seen through the lens of nationality (for
example, the numerous disputes which trigger nationalist sentiments)
(XVI). We know of course (and this is the meaning of the knot between
nation, state and capital for Karatani) that this does not mean that
the problems of nationality have nothing to do with state or market
structures. Not only are they related, it is also due to how each of these
logics organizes one another (with Mode C being the dominant figure
in contemporary history) that each mode expresses itself in a certain
manner.
With this in mind, we can agree with Reed in saying that each
logic of intercourse does have a totality which is nested in its perspec-
tive/dimension. However, now we can see more clearly that the form
of totality is not simply a kind of ‘scaling up’ of a certain point of view.
The form of totality expressed by a certain logic is an indicator of how
one logic relates to the others (I). We can see that if we take Karatani’s
logics of intercourse as the concrete dimensions through which we (as
a political subject) must navigate, the investigation of the forms of the
totality of each logic (of each dimension, in Reed’s terms) becomes the
manner in which we can probe how these different incommensurable
logics relate to one another in a given point in time. Even though each
dimension is irreducible to the others (and there is no all-encompass-
ing dimension), this type of investigation might allow us to understand
how we can go from the problems concerning one dimension to the
problems concerning other dimensions.

Unresolved Questions

This examination of Reed’s thought and its applicability to our frame-

work does not exhaust our intended issues. One of the unresolved
questions that arise and that we would like to briefly address concerns
the nature of the navigating subject. As we have mentioned in the
beginning, one of Reed’s merits was underdefining what the subject
of navigation is. We know, however, that this subject must not be too
hastily identified either with an individual human being or with any
particular kind of human (IV, XI, XII). Even if it is the case that a human
might be the subject of navigation, the conditions elaborated by Reed
do not seem to be so restricted. This is important because our main
aim is understanding how a political organization might navigate
between different sets of problems. We have not, however, sufficiently
justified the specificities that would arise from considering a political
organization as a navigating subject. This is especially important to
understand when we consider the fact that determining different
worlds is not articulated through a methodological incursion (the

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‘transcendental suspension’, as Karatani believes), but as results of

actual political struggle.
The problem is even more complicated than that since political
organizations can be seen from two different sides. Not only are
political organizations navigating subjects that sense and explore
different dimensions of the world, they are also themselves composed
of subjects that also have to navigate different dimensions when trying
to deal with the problems inside the organization. We could say that in
a sufficiently organized collectivity, different people will be working
in different sectors that deal with different problems demanding dif-
ferent ways of seeing (XIV). This division of labor and points of view is
essential for creating the body of a political organization. This means
that in a sense, the viewpoint of the organization is an outcome of
organizing the different viewpoints that are internal to it. This is not,
however, a matter of simple addition. There is in fact no necessary con-
tinuity between what the subjects involved in organizing see in order
to address internal problems and what the organization seeks to repre-
sent while acting politically (IV, XII). This means that even if a certain
organization is externally exploring problems in one dimension (for
example, the matters of economic income for some deprived group),
this does not entail that everyone inside that organization is navigating
through the same lens as the organization itself. There might be people
dealing with money flows while others are dealing with building inter-
nal trust in the organization. Even so, it is through the cooperation of
these different subjects navigating internal problems (that all demand
their own type of lens) that an organization can effectively see the
relevant dimension of reality for its goals. We could thus say that to
be a part of an organization is to participate in the conditioning of its
viewpoint. This two-sided nature of political organizations forces us to
separate the question we initially posed into three different problems.
The first question is the one we started with:
a )  Political organizations are subjects that are capable of
sensing objects from certain worlds in accordance with the manner in
which they are institutionally structured. Certain political problems,
however, end up requiring shifts in their sensing capabilities. How is
it that an organization might shift its perspective through different
worlds? We have tried to engage with this question through an adapta-
tion of Reed’s ideas on multi-scalar navigation and have seen how the
two conditions she outlines are adaptable to the framework adapted
from Karatani’s work. As we have seen, however, our answer leaves
open the specificity of the political organization as a navigating sub-
ject. When we account for its specificity (and it’s two-sided nature) we
are forced to ask another question:

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b )  A political organization is composed through the organiza-

tion of subjects that organize themselves. The organization presents
problems which require the subjects dealing with them to see certain
objects (and to avoid others) so that they can work on them. This is
usually done through a division of labor, tasks and issues internally
between those involved in the organization. It must be noted, however,
that an internal doubling of the former problem arises at this level
since different concerns require different forms of representation.
Different issues demand we deal with different objects that are seen
through different worlds. We must thus ask the first question from the
point of view of those subjects that compose a political organization.
How do subjects navigate internally through different worlds? This
question is not resolved (or even treated) here, though we might guess
that what is at stake here is the institutionality of an organization. This
leads us to the third question (which seems to link the first and second
question):
c )  To further understand this problem it is necessary to compre-
hend how different tasks (different positions inside an organization)
end up constituting different perspectives. It is also necessary to
understand how these different forms of seeing are able to relate to
each other and to the ultimate goal of a certain organization. This is
vital to our understanding because what one sees inside an organi-
zation is not necessarily of the same nature as the objects that the
organization senses. How can these different internal points of view
compose in a way that they may produce the capacity to sense what is
relevant for this organization? (XII) Through answering these questions,
we can gain a better understanding of how it is possible to navigate as
a political subject in a multilayered world (I, V, VI).

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XVI. Case Study

Braking the Platforms in the Brazilian Courier Strikes

The power of numbers was expanded by movement, as

the hydra journeyed and voyaged or was banished or
dispersed in diaspora, carried by the winds and the waves
beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Sailors, pilots,
felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of
all kinds made new and unexpected connections, which
variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient,
even miraculous.
—Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker59

The Platform Atom and the Atomized Worker

It’s common to hear among couriers heated debates delving into the
meanders of the platform’s algorithm. The gamified app—with its intri-
cate system of prizes, incentives and punishments—brings to mind the
asymmetric phenomenology between the player in the casino, guessing
transient patterns throughout the frenetic flashes of the slot machine
screen, and the house, which only has to assert a certain statistical
aggregate gain across all individual “lucky” and “losing” games. In the
59 LINEBAUGH, Peter & REDIKER, Marcus, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, London: Verso, 2012.

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streets, the rider gambles his options and risks, accepting and reject-
ing delivery offers, piercing red lights, exploiting bugs in the algorithm;
all to obtain gains above average, competing against his two-wheeled
peers. Experienced riders often brag about being able to game the app,
and complain about the rookies who have just joined the platform and
accept all delivery offers in the app, thus pushing the overall payments
down.
In contrast to the classical wage-form regulating the relation
between worker and capitalist in the Fordist workplace, the app rider
is remunerated by work piece, earning his pay ride by ride. On standby
until his phone rings with an offer: a delivery route with a stochastic
pay rate that he must wage whether to accept or reject. In contrast
with the spatiotemporal regularity of the wage, which quantifies in a
stable and known quantity the monthly gains of a typical worker, the
platform worker watches his gains fluctuate as a direct and individual
function of his own effort, though remaining largely ignorant of the
rules that determine how his gains are calculated. The porosity of
wage work—through which slack and idleness can seep in—gives way
to the discreteness of piece work and the unremunerated waiting time
between task offers. As wage becomes a wager, the worker appears as
a player working “inside a black box, […] divested of all the usual ways
to orient themselves inside the labor process”.60 This apparent gain in
immediacy between the worker’s activity and his earnings at the indi-
vidual level comes at the expense of a gain in opacity over the overall
social logic of his work and the general unbinding to other workers who
are negatively related through competition instead of being equated by
falling under the same wage class (mathematically, we can say the wage
really turns the worker into an equivalence class). In this process, work
is subjectively experienced as a form of individual entrepreneurship
where effort—a mixture of luck and personal virtue—is the main deter-
minant of success and where other riders appear only incidentally as
sharing a common condition of exploitation (III, IV)—such that they can
aid each other and conspire together—since their fellow co-workers
must also be put under suspicion given that they also share the com-
mon belief that at the end of the day every worker is by himself, dash-
ing about in the midst of the daily free-for-all.
From the perspective of the platform, on the other hand, the
individual rider—with his city route and working hour choices, inciden-
tal street accidents and occasional scams, all influenced by his own
domestic economy of incentives, debts and expenses—can only appear
as a noisy signal which it is able, up to a certain degree, to sense and
control. It is only when all the delivery microdata is aggregated into
the right macro variables, e.g. supply and demand signals, rate of
60 JONES, Phil, Workers Without Work, London: Verso, 2021.

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 ŠUM #17

successful deliveries, customer satisfaction indices etc., that one the

effective logical resolution of the platform emerges61, where profita-
bility, big data, network, market share and value exist and function. In
a city, couriers have ingeniously learned to coordinate so they could
directly interact with such macro variables: in an Whatsapp group
called “us over there”, hundreds of riders would meet outside the city
center close to highway exits in order to decrease the offer of labor in
the region thereby making the dynamic rate go up.
Although the pandemic has brought delivery services to a new
scale as people have grown accustomed to ordering all sorts of goods
from their homes, cities like São Paulo had already had an enormous
fleet of motorcycle delivery workers, known as motoboys. Below the
homogeneous and ever expanding functional space of the platform,
what the delivery platforms really operated —in their words, the “ser-
vice” of “connecting” their “partners” and “collaborators”—was the (real)
subsumption of ever larger contingents of this dispersed and heter-
ogenous gig economy of delivery work that already existed62 (from the
guy who would take a delivery gig in his neighborhood pizzeria during
the weekend to supplement his income, to the old-school courier (the
“root” motoboy) with his own contact list of reliable clients that he
personally negotiated the fees, or the small fleets of delivery “express”
companies). In a sense, platforms can be said to operate a kind of new
process of enclosure, seizing the logistical and informational means
of organizing work once possessed by delivery workers (e.g. maps and
routes, client lists etc.) while outsourcing to them the costs and risks
of acquiring and maintaining the material means of delivery work (e.g.
bikes, gas, cell phones, internet fees, repair costs etc.).63 Despite this
abstracting force, which could suggest a modernizing gain brought
about by these impersonal and bureaucratic forms, what we find here
is a concomitant increase in forms of direct and despotic algorithmic
control64 (e.g. the arbitrary power of the platform to temporarily or
permanently suspend the account of the courier as a means to disci-
pline and punish his use of the platform, with marginal conditions for
a fair defence or appeal) and of personal domination65 (e.g. the use
of fleet managers via third-party contractors, the so-called Logistic
Operators (OL), by the platform which employs “OL leaders” to directly
manage and discipline the working hours and productivity of a squad

61 HOEL, E., ALBANTAKIS, L., TONONI, G., “Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro”, in:
PNAS, 2013, https://www.pnas.org/content/110/49/19790/
https://www.pnas.org/content/110/49/19790/.
62 COSTHEK ABÍLIO, Ludmila, “Uberização do trabalho: subsunção real da viração”, Blog da Boitempo, 2017,
https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2017/02/22/uberizacao-do-trabalho-subsuncao-real-da-viracao/.
https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2017/02/22/uberizacao-do-trabalho-subsuncao-real-da-viracao/
63 AZEVEDO, Raquela, Teoria geral da renda em Marx: um estudo sobre a renda básica, online course syllabus, 2021,
https://sites.google.com/view/teoriageraldarenda/home/.
https://sites.google.com/view/teoriageraldarenda/home/
64 COSTHEK ABÍLIO, Ludmila, “Uberização do trabalho: subsunção real da viração”.
65 CARSON, Rebecca, “Fictitious Capital and the Re-emergence of Personal Forms of Domination”, in: Continental
Thought & Theory, 4, 1, 2017, https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/14503/22%20Carson%20CAPITAL.pdf
https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/14503/22%20Carson%20CAPITAL.pdf.

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of couriers and whose ties to organized crime have reportedly been

leveraged to new degrees of control over labour, during both work and
strike activity).66
This year, couriers that routinely work for Rappi Turbo, an app
service promising deliveries in under 10 minutes, at one of their supply
warehouses located in a rich neighborhood in São Paulo had their
work perimeter near the store blocked by the platform after alleged
complaints that they were crowding in front of the store and disturbing
the nearby neighbors. As they began to protest, deliveries from the
store were interrupted, and the platform responded via the app with a
targeted message: “Do not gather with other couriers in public spaces
to avoid being suspended. Keep two meters of distance from restaurant
workers, couriers and consumers.” With this almost too conspicuous
form of a threat, the platform algorithmically enforced an efficient
economic control, dispersed its workforce and actively dissolved the
formation of common workspaces or organized resistance.
We’ve seen how what counts for the platform doesn’t operate on
the same scale as that of the worker’s day-to-day experience. In fact,
the process of platforming can be defined precisely by the “production
of differences of levels or planes” where differences of agency, sensi-
bility and visibility are established “through the mapping of statistical
correlations within large populations”.67 Above the platform—techni-
cally called the Application Programming Interface (API)—we find the
abstract and closed space of the user interface and experience with
its swift functionalities and clean graphical representations; hidden
under the platform, below-the-API, the sale boulot,68 the invisible
mass of labour that makes the wheels turn, with its poor-man’s inter-
face, which can hardly see or control but is seen and controlled at all
times.69 The disorienting myopia of the worker—who can see the direct
and individual economic gains of every delivery he completes with the
“expenditure of [his own] human brain, nerves [and] muscles”70 but not
the algorithm which governs the overall logic behind his work, veils
his relation to other workers and effaces the social character of his
work—contrasts with the efficacious far-sightedness of the platform71
whose logical atom of count is not each of its individual workers with

66 LIBERATO, Leo V., “A inovadora parceria entre o iFood e as milícias”, in: Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, 2021,
https://diplomatique.org.br/a-inovadora-parceria-entre-o-ifood-e-as-milicias/.
https://diplomatique.org.br/a-inovadora-parceria-entre-o-ifood-e-as-milicias/
67 MAGALHÃES, Zé A., “Platforming and perspectivism”, in: Second Law, politics and literature international seminar:
Borders of the human, borders of democracy, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/60906587/
https://www.academia.edu/60906587/.
68 ARANTES, Paulo E., “Sale boulot: uma janela sobre o mais colossal trabalho sujo da história (uma visão no
laboratório francês do sofrimento social)”, in: Tempo Social, 23, 1, 2011.
69 KLEINER, Dmytri, Machine Learning Disabilities, online presentation, 2021, https://dmytri.surge.sh/disabilities/
https://dmytri.surge.sh/disabilities/.
70 MARX, Capital, p. 164.
71 “The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes
as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of the social labour
embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with these three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’.”
(MARX, Capital, p. 549.)

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their street knowledge of the “man on the spot”; these appear only
when bulked, as a just-in-time workforce mass that can be mobilized on
demand at any time and at any place in the city,72 together with other
statistical variables mined by the platform’s operational domain.
We’ve also noted how the platform maximally extracts infor-
mation relevant to its self-valorization yet only gives away minimal or
even negative information when interfacing with its workforce; it not
only veils but also actively destroys information that was once part
of the worker’s world so that the process of platformization of work
encompasses both the mechanisms of informing and deforming of
work—hinging on the uncanny affinity between platforms and informal
work where what is as stake is the loss of form of work. This should
be taken in a double sense: for the worker, the platform is both not
informative and not informing, that is, information and form are two
sides of the same coin. So on the one hand, we have the processes
of veiling and corruption of information: the interactions with the
platform are epistemically poor, leading to experiences of cognitive
dissonance and frustration. Take, for instance, the faceless and glitchy
experience often mentioned by app riders of talking to the chatbot
assistant in order to appeal against an arbitrary punishment by the
app.73 Information given by the app is not only minimal but chaotic,
such that inputs to it don’t translate into consistent and predictable
outputs and no cognitive mapping of platform logic by the courier is
possible; here, the bug is a feature which produces a frustrated sense
of agency. On the other hand, we have the mechanisms of loss of form,
since interactions with the platform are also minimally informing and
deforming, meaning that platformization (or uberization) can act over
social spaces that are largely heterogeneous and hybrid, reorganizing
them not by producing social homogenization, i.e. new social bonds,
but by deepening social fragmentation. Could we not see this in terms
of a corollary of commodity fetishism (VII) according to which, under
capitalist logic, the socialization of the workforce (a special case of
commodities in general) and the socialization of workers (the people
who do the actual labour) aren’t the same process (XI); that they do not
go hand in hand, but the former actually happens at the expense of the
desocialization (a.k.a. reification) of the latter, its loss of agency, visibil-
ity and interconnection? More and more the formation of the 20th-cen-
tury wage society via the Fordist industrialization seems to have been
an exceptional period in capitalism rather than its general tendency;

72 VINICIUS, Leo, “Modo de espera e salário por peça nas entregas por apps”, in: Passapalavra, 2020,
https://passapalavra.info/2020/11/135017/.
https://passapalavra.info/2020/11/135017/
73 “If I am suspended by the platform, I have no way to talk to a person from iFood, I talk to a robot. It’s a total disre-
gard with the worker” says Nascimento, a courier involved in the strikes. Translated by the authors from https://brasil.
elpais.com/brasil/2020-07-25/nossa-vida-vale-mais-do-que-levar-um-prato-de-comida-para-as-pessoas.html.
elpais.com/brasil/2020-07-25/nossa-vida-vale-mais-do-que-levar-um-prato-de-comida-para-as-pessoas.html

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instead, the current recomposition of capital seems to happen through

a process of class decomposition (III).74
The almost incommensurable asymmetry between the experi-
ence of the worker and the logic of the platform that we started with
may not come as a surprise once we stop assuming that a neutral,
single and consistent bird’s eye view of social reality exist and we take
from the starting point that the perspective of capital is not the same
as the perspective of the worker, i.e. that the conditions of interac-
tion, intelligibility and composition of capital are not the same as the
conditions of the organization of workers (I, IV). But since the gap in
perspective between the objective phenomenology of capital and that
of workers is over an antagonistic opposition, we may thus ask how
does one operate (concretely, not intellectually) such a parallax shift
towards a perspective of the worker in the midst of the informalization
of work in contemporary capitalism? The classical name for this oper-
ator is class struggle; however, to talk about class and struggle seems
to assume a type of consistency and unity that may not be so easily
at hand to us anymore: workers do not seem to exist as a class in any
clear sense nor do conflicts seem to cohere around a unified struggle
against capital. If so, one way to start answering this question may be
to investigate—repeating the Operaist gesture of a workers’ inquiry—
and ask: what form does conflict take in today’s gig?

The Site of the Brake and the Collapse of the Platform

Memes do not call for interpretation so much as improv-

isation. If they challenge us to assume a posture or
disposition, it would be less that of the scholar than the
visionary who remains on the lookout for iterable gestures,
those creative acts that harbor a new sequence of experi-
mental repetition.75

In the frontline of the pandemic together with health workers, super-

market cashiers, telemarketing workers (deemed part of the essential
services in Brazil), the delivery workers are also in the frontier of
capital’s subsumption and exploitation of informal work; these forms
once thought to be proper to peripheries of third-world countries
where the wage society hadn’t yet fully set in now seem to constitute an
inverted vanguard where central countries can anticipate themselves.
As social isolation measures took hold and unemployment continued
to rise, delivery companies saw both the demand for e-commerce, food
74 ENDNOTES, “Onward Barbarians”, in: Endnotes, 2020,
https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians/.
https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians/
75 TORINO, Paul & WOHLEBEN, Adrian, “Memes with Force: Lessons from the Yellow Vests”, in: Mute, 2019,
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%E2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests/.
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/memes-force-%E2%80%93-lessons-yellow-vests/

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delivery and office packages, and the offer of people having to get by
signing up on the platform soar. Alas, as older riders experienced their
occupation grow in size, social relevance and risk amid the new condi-
tions set by the virus and economic crisis, they also saw their earnings
plummet and their working days prolong. In this scenario, courier
protests began to pop up throughout the urban landscape of the coun-
try: noisy swarms of honking motorcycles crossed the city and delivery
bags were placed in avenues, interrupting the flow of cars. Less visibly,
delivery bags were also stacked into pyramids in front of McDonalds,
shopping malls, warehouses and dark kitchens as riders formed picket
lines and interrupted both the exit of delivery orders and the arrival of
unsuspecting or ill-intended riders. This last tactic, called by couriers
“breque”, which translates to “pushing the brake” on the delivery orders,
named the strike movement of the 1st of July, 2020, as Breque dos Apps,
around which these protests coalesced nationally for the first time.
One can’t help recalling Walter Benjamin’s image of the revolution as
an emergency brake being pulled on the train of history: here, instead
of intervening in the temporal logic of Progress—already interrupted
by the end of the world that announces itself—we find the call for the
interruption of the spatialized flows of commodities.
After flowing through the arterial ways of train tracks, maritime
routes and interstate roads, urban truck and car drivers, motorcycle
delivery workers compose the infamous last-mile of capilarized
logistical infrastructure where the global supply chains terminate. It
has been hypothesized that the strategic center of both capitalist
valorization and social conflict has shifted from the paradigm of the
factory and production to that of logistics and circulation. Indeed, the
Brazilian cycle of courier strikes during the pandemic, though more
modest in scale and impact, should be understood in the same political
sequence as the massive urban revolts triggered by the increase in
bus fares in 2013 and the national strike of truck drivers that in 2018
paralyzed the country, bringing the government to its knees, all of
which were composed of a revolting precariat that coordinated the
interruption of the circulation flows rather than production sites of
commodities.76
Since the beginning of the pandemic, courier protests have
waxed and waned, and although iFood—the biggest company operating
in the country—did make some minor yet tangible concessions to the
strikers, it did not hesitate to spend money on Super Bowl-like ads
during strike days and organize an in-person forum with hand-picked
representatives of the courier movement from all over the country to
“hear” their demands and promote a “continuous dialogue”. This last
76 GUERREIRO, Isadora & CORDEIRO, Leonardo, “Do passe ao breque: disputas sobre os fluxos no espaço urbano,
in: Passapalavra, 2020, https://passapalavra.info/2020/07/132898/
https://passapalavra.info/2020/07/132898/.

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

initiative of the company followed a recent and impressive succession

of strikes that traveled—as if an Olympic torch was being passed, as
strikers remarked—along several mid-sized cities in the state of São
Paulo and in some of them—like São José dos Campos, Jundiaí and
Paulínia—lasted for over a week, during which the delivery services of
the entire cities where practically put to a halt by pickets in malls and
main restaurant chains. These marketing and organizational efforts
from iFood to counter the movement parallel, on one hand, the courier
movement’s attempt to target the image of companies (to which their
market value is particularly sensitive) via online consumer campaigns
that involved thrashing the companies’ image with bad reviews in the
App Store and trending hashtags like #theworstcompanyintheworld;
on the other, the organization of the forum anticipated the couriers’
own attempts to consolidate an organizational network of “frontline”
riders capable of coordinating actions between large cities and on the
national level.
In the motorized parades, which at times could gather hundreds
to thousands of riders, the couriers found themselves part of a fast and
noisy collective swarm. In contrast with their solitary and scattered
lifestyle—riding on their own, zigzagging through car traffic—they
constituted a sort of modern cavalry capable of imposing their speed
and loudness on their surroundings—slowing down avenues, blocking
bridges and attracting the attention of TV stations. As such, like other
political parades, these demonstrations have the function of (i) enact-
ing a display of strength, which is a matter not of taking any effective
action but of showing a contagious capacity to mobilize and a menace
to provoke disruptive acts, and (ii) making the body of the movement
visible to society and to itself as it takes to the streets; more precisely,
the movement sees itself when it knows it has been seen as such
by others (hence the decisive importance of learning after the fact
whether the protest appeared on the news or didn’t appear anywhere;
in the latter case, one feels as if the action didn’t really take place at
all). In the beginning of the pandemic, such demonstrations provoked a
large reaction on the part of the media and the civil society, who came
to acknowledge that these invisibilized workers were also frontline
workers who made it possible for people to eat and work safely from
their homes; the media coverage of the protests and their working
conditions made “delivery app workers” into a thing in the public
discourse.
However, although the parades were certainly “noticed” by the
companies who also read the newspapers, they by themselves don’t
allow the couriers to have any clear and effective interaction with the
companies. Instead, such a line of action can advance accordingly by
(i) passing from demonstrating a capacity to act to the actual action of

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 ŠUM #17

interrupting the functioning of the city (e.g. blockades of avenues and

highways) in an expanding movement into the territory of the riot, as
was seen in the 2013 protests against the increase in bus fares or in
the truck drivers’ strike of 2018 and, often simultaneously, by (ii) institu-
tional continuations, where demonstrations have the performative role
of constituting socially recognized actors whose demands can later on
be institutionally represented by some apparatus—typically recognized
by the State (movement leaders, official unions, MPs etc.).
As the couriers picket delivery sites, which came to be known
as a brake, the everyday Kafkian frustration of dealing with the algo-
rithm through their cell phones, gives way to the tense empowerment
of seizing control of the worksite: announcing the blockade by piling
up their delivery bags at the establishments’ entrances, they must,
on the one hand, notify the restaurant or kitchen workers (who often
gladly support them) and negotiate with them so that the platform is
shut down, and, on the other, wittingly explain the on-going action to
unwary riders while they harshly bar scabs from collecting delivery
orders—often called “the hungry ones” by the strikers. A brake can thus
be used to put pressure on restaurants by forcing them to halt their
delivery platform until they give in to some demand, such as allowing
the couriers to use the bathrooms, give them access to plugs and water,
diminish the waiting times for receiving the orders etc.
When used as a strike tactic against the delivery platforms, the
sites blockaded then become a mean, an instrument to disrupt the
delocalized operations of the platform; once thought to be out of
reach (talk of a hacker who could attack the virtual platform is often
heard), the clouds are raided as work below-the-API stops. The platform
appears to incarnate in a kind of collapse of scales as its services are
disrupted and orders stop flowing; while one needs to “rise” to the
level of the platform to interact with it via its codified communication
protocols, disruptive interventions can intervene at any level as long
as it is part of the material support of the platform’s functional space.
As it endures, the braked site becomes a live organ of the movement, a
“user interface” with new interventive powers and sensors (V): the ready
food orders now getting cold on the counters, the financial losses are
snitched by restaurant workers, the store business owners’ dissatisfac-
tion is transmitted to the platform, and the platform users are angry
with the unreliable service. At some point, the representatives of the
platform are expected to come in person to negotiate; although the
riders perhaps know they will be taken for a ride by the representatives,
they also learn that their actions produce effects—they can come to
exist as workers to the platform.
As the normality of daily work routine is suspended, the work-
site is transformed by the blockade into a site not only of political

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

experience but of experimentation with the means of production

and reproduction of the struggle. The strike based on site blockades
follows a military-like logic of territorial conquest and expansion,
where strikers have to constantly make logistical assessments of their
resources (e.g. number of strikers, food and water, the balance of the
strike fund etc.) in order to coordinate motorized rounds to maintain
and establish new blockades.77 And yet, at each site, solidarity ties
grow stronger as strikers mingle together and the atmosphere changes
according to the stakes at each moment: from contentious situations
when private or public security forces and strikebreakers put the
blockade at risk, normally when demand is at its peak; the calm hours
of the afternoon when barbecues are organized, strikers rest and bore
themselves (after all, the brake of work isn’t but a work break with no
time to finish it); to late at night when spirits are still high and bodies
exhausted as strikers discuss in assemblies the next steps of their
movement. Conversely, blockaded sites risk isolation if they become
self-absorbed by their local realities and dynamics, and thus face the
challenge of expanding their zone of influence and being able to insti-
gate and compose with distal parts of the struggle (e.g. other stores,
cities, states and so on).
If the strike survives into the next day—a critical threshold that
can indeed be crossed, as riders in several cities in the state of São
Paulo have recently demonstrated—and then lasts for several days, the
means of guaranteeing the strikers’ material reproduction, such as
organizing strike funds, winning the support of the local population
and attracting media attention, becomes paramount to the persistence
of the movement, at the risk of declining either by financial stress or
isolation. At the edge of material reproduction, making ends meet and
working shifts that can reach 12 hours or more, the strikers’ stakes
are high because their pockets grow emptier every hour they’re not
working. This explains the fury with which strikers on a blockade react
when they see a strikebreaker—scabs will not only enjoy the improve-
ments achieved by strikers, but they may also earn more money
because the strike reduces the supply of labour. Not surprisingly,
before and during strikes, iFood often releases nasty delivery bonuses
for each ride in the city in order to tempt their workers to break the
strike (more obscenely, the strikers often demand a higher bonus in
their city …).
A characteristic of delivery work shared by most transportation
services is that the workspace is not confined to the interior space of a
private property, such as an office, a factory or a warehouse; as delivery
routes connect pickup sites (e.g. restaurants, dark kitchens, offices) to
77 TOSCANO, Alberto, “Logistics and Opposition”, in: Mute, 2011, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/
logistics-and-opposition/.
logistics-and-opposition/

2412
 ŠUM #17

the drop location (e.g. homes) across the urban territory, the workforce
is constituted as a dispersed and capillarized ensemble such that the
day-to-day work experience is commensurate with the multiple dynam-
ics and scales of the city. Here, strikes—the coordinated interruption
of work within a workspace—become particularly sensitive to the scale
and logic of the metropolis. Indeed, so far, only cities with less than a
million inhabitants have been able to sustain strikes for over a day. In
São José dos Campos, a city with over seven hundred thousand inhab-
itants in the state of São Paulo, couriers put the delivery services to an
almost complete standstill for six days, obliging iFood to sit to nego-
tiate for the first time and triggering a wave of strikes in the nearby
cities that together lasted over a month. There, the size of the city was
such that couriers knew each other personally (including the restaurant
owners who were dissatisfied with the rates charged to them by the
app and initially supported the movement by shutting down the plat-
form), and with a fleet of about five thousand couriers working in the
city they were able to picket the main delivery services of the city—the
four shopping malls and couple dozen chain restaurants. They relied
on about sixty active strikers who formed mobile rounds and took
turns securing the blockades throughout the day.
On the other hand, in a megalopolis like the city of São Paulo, the
sheer size and speed of urban fluxes make it very hard to establish a
durable and sufficiently vast network of couriers that can coordinate
their actions and communicate with one another; the dispersed and
sparse worksite, the occupational rotativity, the harsh and violent char-
acter of urban experience all hinder the formation of stable personal
ties and groups. This is intensified by the logic of Whatsapp groups—
the main channel couriers use to communicate, both for and against
work—which riders join as swiftly as they leave them, bonding and
breaking contacts with other colleagues as they send audio messages
between one delivery and the other (e.g. notifying each other of police
stops, complaining about work, fund-raising for colleagues in need
etc.). With such an immense fleet of over 280,000 delivery workers78
and a vast urban territory, even if a significant region of the city organ-
izes a successful strike (as has happened before in the city’s East Zone
or in Guarulhos, a city that is part of the same metropolitan region) any
stronghold faces the urge to expand spatially or intensify its degree of
political appearance in order not to be overwhelmed by the tyrannical
scale of non-strikers—an army of standby labour that responds on
demand to anywhere the platform is still operational—making money
off the movement.

78 SARAIVA, Jacilio, “Total de entregadores na Grande São Paulo tem aumento de 20%”, in: Valor, https://valor.globo.
com/publicacoes/suplementos/noticia/2020/06/09/total-de-entregadores-na-grande-sao-paulo-tem-aumento-
de-20.ghtml.
de-20.ghtml

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 Subset of Theoretical Practice

In last year’s second national strike of the Brake of the Apps

movement, both the organizers—who had spent the last month since
the first strike leafleting in the streets and placing stickers on the
delivery bags—and media reporters who were looking for spectacular
images of motorcycle swarms filling the avenues were underwhelmed
by the feeble attendance at the blockades and parades across the
country. And still, in the city of São Paulo, one remarkable thing that
the disappointed protesters acknowledged, but that otherwise went
largely unnoticed and unreported, was how few delivery bags could
be seen riding on top of motorcycles that day. Delivery workers hadn’t
taken the streets but had collectively turned off their apps to take the
day off to rest and spend time with their families—not a minor feat for
workers whose lives are constantly caught up in the rush of the streets.
The phenomenon was certainly large enough that the absence of deliv-
ery workers was perceptible in the streets and that significant finan-
cial losses for platform apps can be inferred; the “pajama strike” was
a real thing with material effects, but there were no objective means
available to measure or represent such phenomena—companies surely
made precise but private assessments of their losses, so they could act
as if nothing had happened that day. As a matter of fact, the blockade
tactic often faces a similar problem of visibility and representation: a
strike can be sustained in a mid-sized city with the invisible support of
many that log off their apps and just a handful of active strikers that
circulate from one blockaded site to another, so that from the outside
it appears quite unstriking: an unwary passer-by may not even realize
something—the doldrums of suspended flows—is going on and even a
photojournalist that knows what is happening might have a hard time
finding a newsworthy image.
The problem of the means of representing and knowing what is
politically happening in a strike is of course not restricted to the exte-
rior of the movement, i.e. to the way the movement appears to society
in social media and the news, but to the couriers themselves (XIII). In
fractured and dispersed social spaces, knowledge about what happens
is neither immediately experienced nor universally accessible, but is
dependent on the material assembling of spaces where information
can be mutually exchanged and acknowledged by the parts in order
for common knowledge to emerge (III). In the days following the call
for the first Brake of the Apps national strike—which, it’s worth noting,
wasn’t made by an official union but decided through an informal
poll in an group chat with couriers from different states—dozens of
delivery workers from all over the country, from cities that weren’t
even involved in the initial call, began to record themselves to confirm
the participation of their city. As the videos began to circulate, the
call for an event was effectively turned into a political fact. A militant

2414
 ŠUM #17

group who used the couriers’ recordings shared in group chats to edit
videos with both an investigative and agitprop character79 remarked on
how such “homemade” videos helped the movement measure its own
capacity for collective action because they functioned as a thermom-
eter of the struggle: “When the mobilization is hot, the workers record
themselves, they take it upon themselves to build the struggle. The
[worker’s] inquiry becomes a self-inquiry.”80
In another video81 that circulated in the groups during the chain
of strikes in the state of São Paulo this year, a sort of audiovisual DIY
instruction manual, couriers simulated a picket in a shopping mall and
gave “tricks and tips” on how to brake the deliveries. Given that the
blockade suddenly alters the normal functioning of the social space,
the video—a result of lessons drawn from previous brakes—provided
new strikers with a cognitive blueprint that helped them navigate the
new space breaking open and anticipated provisional solutions for
what could be done in the face of the problems that could be expected.
In the image and likeness of informal work, contemporary strug-
gles tend to be fragmented, fluid and unpredictable: like the chaotic
rush of riding through the streets suffused by the rumbling and honk-
ing of the motors, struggles can end as violently and abruptly as they
begin, and it’s often unclear which lessons can be drawn, much less
which steps to be taken next. The riders that emerge as fierce informal
leaders during the strike often quit during such ebbing periods, leav-
ing a lingering collective hangover that can be hard to recover from.
Therefore, after a cycle of struggle comes to an end the movement still
faces the challenge of representing and elaborating what happened
(XII, XIII). Whether through conversations, videos or news articles—as
long as the existence of the movement transcends the private memo-
ries of its participants—it becomes a matter of collectively inscribing
failure (even when concrete victories are achieved, there is always
the lingering sensation of a something more that could have been but
was not); that is, the task of finding the means to “organize the conse-
quences of defeat” which “might allow us to mourn and work through a
defeat, and ultimately to learn how to fail better”.82
A banner with the words “motoboys united without unions” was
first painted in a rider protest in São Paulo where the union was to be
present (the union officially represents the minority of deliverers with
stable wage contracts, but is otherwise largely despised by delivery
79 The videos can be found on their channel “Treta no Trampo” (@tretanotrampo
@tretanotrampo on Instagram). Treta can be any kind
of conflict—a fight, a difficulty, a struggle—and trampo denotes any kind of work, be it a formal occupation or an informal
side hustle.
80 MIGUEZ, Francisco & GUIMARÃES, Victor, “App Workers Memes and Struggles in Brazil”, in: Notes from Below,
2021, https://notesfrombelow.org/article/app-workers-memes-and-struggles-brazil
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/app-workers-memes-and-struggles-brazil.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTK4F1onjBX/.
81 https://www.instagram.com/p/CTK4F1onjBX/
82 HAMZA, Agon & TUPINAMBÁ, Gabriel, “On the Organization of Defeats”, in: Crisis & Critique, 3, 1, 2016,
https://crisiscritique.org/ccmarch/hamza-tupinamba.pdf.
https://crisiscritique.org/ccmarch/hamza-tupinamba.pdf

2415
 Subset of Theoretical Practice

app workers) and was then reproduced in the following weeks. Among
others, it was displayed by the striking deliverers in the nearby cities
of Guarulhos and then Carapicuíba who blockaded several McDonald’s,
Burgers Kings and other restaurant chains from early morning to late
at night. It’s worth noting that the motto is not a plain negation, that
is, not a call to fight against unions; rather, it leverages a critical atti-
tude towards unions to affirm the possibility of other forms of unities
among workers, i.e. a subtractive union. Here, one should be careful
not to easily dismiss this as some sort of bourgeois (or neoliberal)
ideological capture, but also consider the role unions and union law in
Brazil have taken as part of an extended apparatus of the State.83 Still,
the form of an infinite judgement “U is not-S” in the formulation, which
by denying the finite representational space of recognizable and exist-
ing forms of union opens up an infinite space of unionless unions, does
not fail to produce anguish. After all, perhaps worse than the official
union taking over the demonstrations from the organizing couriers, is if
the official union does not shows up and the protests fail nonetheless,
now due to the couriers’ inability to autonomously unite (the burden of
such a task is harder to bear when one considers the almost unlimited
size of the set to be unified). One militant courier often said that “the
biggest enemy of the courier is not the platform, it’s himself”, which
was sometimes followed by the rant: “Ah, motoboys are a hell of a disu-
nited kind!”
The wildcat strikes—in which delivery sites were stopped,
motorized parades were held and the users collectively logged off the
platform—and the self-organized media production and dissemination,
coupled with coordinated social media campaigns to thrash the compa-
nies’ image; the chaotic dynamic of Whatsapp groups and the laborious
efforts to unite—both regionally and nationally—without unions or pol-
iticians; the management of strike funds and the emergence of small
delivery cooperatives, but also the day-to-day mutual aid for those in
need; under the platform, and against the backdrop of the fractured,
conflictual and entropic terrain of a world of work without workers, the
couriers have begun to tactically explore and painstakingly construct
the organizational space of their common struggle (VI). As was the case
with the enraged riders who one day decided to pile up their delivery
bags, what starts as an unnamed gesture of refusal or, more precisely,
of affirmation of a refusal circulates and spreads as its political effi-
cacy is gauged, coming into existence as a recognizable and reproduc-
ible social practice. The iteration of the tactic produces political sites:
spaces where political recomposition occurs and from where new ways
(I)—unavailable during the atomized normality of the working hours—to
collectively exist and probe capital can be drawn out. By means of this
83 BERNARDO, João & PEREIRA, Luciano, Capitalismo Sindical, São Paulo: Xamã, 2008.

2416
 ŠUM #17

perturb-and-measure procedure, the resistance offered by the social

objects one interacts with (e.g. platform capital, police, other workers
etc.) allows for political consequences to be gauged, so that exploita-
tion and the organization against it can begin to be effectively thought;
not in general, but from within the world of the brake.

The Subset of Theoretical Practice is an open and independent research group dedicated to the development of new
approaches to Leftist political thinking, in which political economic analysis and challenges of political organization
can be treated under a common theoretical framework. Departing from this initial proposition, they investigate several
threads of enquiry, connecting Marxist political economy, theory of political organization, different concrete case
studies and new philosophical and formal tools at They can be reached at [email protected]
and www.theoreticalpractice.com
www.theoreticalpractice.com.

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