La Ética Espectral de la Sintaxis y el Exceso (Ponencia para el Coloquio sobre el libro «Memory Assemblages» por Shajara Bensusan, Abril 3 2025, Universidad de Brasilia)

La siguiente es una corta ponencia presentada en respuesta a la publicación del libro «Memory Assemblages» por Shajara Bensusan y organizado por la UnB.

I. Los restos hauntológicos en la producción-valor/uso de la producción

Quisiera invocar en un primer momento una serie de restos o sumas hauntológicas -como elemento subversivo, recapitulando aquí la formula n+1 que Bensusan al final de su libro replantea a partir de Deleuze y Guattari- dentro del marco de la producción y el valor-uso de la producción en el capitalismo a través de una veta cultural que permite visualizar el sometimiento de la raza negra. En 1890, el artista negro George W. Johnson se convierte en la primera voz negra en ser inscrita/registrada comercialmente con el sencillo fonográfico «The Coon Song», que también es el primer éxito de ventas en el amanecer de la industria discográfica en occidente (usuario: Bayard, 2018).

Este evento de inscripción/registro no es algo menor, ya que las letras de este éxito parten de que George Johnson asume implícitamente su rol como objeto de producción alienado que a su vez reproduce la ideología racial dominante en que la tez negra es un índice de no-sujeto-propiedad, evidenciado a través de una serie de injurias blancas que remiten a dos elementos de análisis presentes en Ferreira da Silva y Bensusan. El primero siendo la onto-epistemología de separación, determinación y secuencialidad que son negadas al sujeto negro como potencialmente autónomo y en donde más bien se encarna como «un cuerpo captivo, incapaz de lograr un yo transparente» (Bensusan, 2025, p. 95). Esta negación a su vez es también aparente en la recuperación de este archivo en donde, siguiendo a Bensusan, como segundo elemento se observa que «la piel negra es un significante que retiene un pasado de haber sido una propiedad» (Bensusan, Ibid, p. 93).

Tanto la no-transparencia del sujeto negro como la recuperación de una inscripción previa que sirve como índice de esta no-transparencia -que es una tachadura o borrón anterior a la subjetividad sin ser un origen- a cualquier adición-suma-inscripción posterior se ve imbricada en las dinámicas de producción de la industria discográfica como reflejo del capitalismo pre-Fordista y también como un archivo inestable -cilindros fonográficos que se desintegran con su uso y que modulan la voz del artista negro en una fantasmagoría irrecuperable como presencia- que sirven para resaltar la corriente subterránea esclavista en los orígenes del capitalismo, que citando a Bensusan nuevamente a través de Ferreira da Silva «…se argumenta que el trabajo forzado -y en últimas el trabajo no-humano de las comunidades produjeron un valor que es significativo y por lo tanto sería un ingrediente crucial en la composición del capital» (Bensusan, 2025, p. 95).

La tesis de que el trabajo forzado, el neocolonialismo y la explotación del no-sujeto negro son piedras angulares del capitalismo -expuestas como una critica a ciertas desconsideraciones etnocéntricas de Marx- es también anteriormente desarrollada por el marxista guaynés Walter Rodney, el cual analiza como el capitalismo de monopolio y por ende los monocultivos que se establecieron en África del Este a finales del Siglo XIX por compañías británicas como Unilever que extraían aceite de palma para sus productos y Cadbury que exigía la producción de cacao para exportación se implementaron como parte crucial del saqueo y subdesarrollo sistemático de África, ejerciendo un continuo esclavista a través de la explotación industrialista de la época cuya base era la mano de obra desposeída, negra (Rodney, 2018). Si recuperamos este continuo esclavista y las reverberaciones del sujeto negro barrado -como archivo desintegrado y en desintegración- que permite sucedáneas adiciones e inscripciones a nivel de producción en el capitalismo, podremos evidenciar también la permanencia de dichas dinámicas en productos de consumo culturales contemporáneos como lo son el funk bruxaria, el plugg, el jerk y el rage en donde la voz blanca adquiere un rostro a nombre de una expresión mientras que el archivo negro que sirve como plano intensivo de individuación de dicha expresión se remite a un ocultamiento mnémico. Citando la interpretación de la artista Elza Soares en la canción «A Carne»: «E esse país vai deixando todo mundo preto/e o pelo esticado/mas mesmo assim/ainda guardo o direito de algum antepassado de cor».

II. Sintaxis y justicia

Con esto en consideración, podemos empezar a revelar el elemento subversivo del principio barrado de la formula n+1, que quisiera conectar con la idea de la sintaxis desarrollada por Bensusan en su libro. Para Bensusan, el ocultamiento mnémico como ausencia, como presencia no-plena, de todas formas, se disemina en trazos e iteraciones que permiten un proceso indeterminado de retención y recuperación:

«Posiblemente entonces, hay una sintaxis, tal vez un exceso de ella, para cada archivo, para cualquier cosa que se consigne a la retención. Mientras que una línea Davidsoniana asumiría que debe haber un contenido para aquello que se retiene en una creencia, la línea Derrideana más bien concebiría una sintaxis de trazos. El contenido en sí se almacena únicamente con respecto a una operación especifica de recuperación -esto es parte de la orfandad de la memoria» (Bensusan, 2025, p. 35).

Se podría pensar entonces que la recuperación de aquello retenido a través de trazos subterráneos a determinadas narrativas de producción es lo que permite, a partir de una práctica anterior a una adjudicación indexical que enuncia algún tipo de creencia, un modelo de ético que permitiría una concepción amplía de justicia. Dicha concepción amplía de justicia sería anastrófica en tanto aún no se permite ser presente ni tampoco aspira a ser transparente a sí misma, pero que sin embargo desencadena su propia construcción a través de series temporales que no son lineales. Cito nuevamente a aquí a Bensusan:

«Tanto la verdad como la justicia responden a aquello que se retiene, y ambos están en deuda a los eventos y demandas que darán la pauta a las indagaciones y ensamblajes por venir» (Bensusan, Ibid, p. 97).

Si bien Bensusan en esta veta ética hace bien en exorcizar una mediación cognitiva Davidsoniana en donde se inscribe una expresión a un nivel de inteligibilidad determinada como creencia robusta que implica a su vez una presencia develada que hace caso omiso al ocultamiento mnémico del no-sujeto racial, se podría pensar también que la lógica subyacente a los ensamblajes de la memoria en juego que propone Bensusan no son antagónicos a lógicas o razones que permiten una trazabilidad. Más bien, se podría pensar hay una trazabilidad correspondiente a una lógica evanescente sin que se establezca una dependencia jurídica a una presencia plena, y sin que nos percatemos de ella o no, siguiendo los fantasmas persistentes de Aristóteles y Wittgenstein en tanto los ensamblajes de memoria permiten una serie de prácticas de recuperación que son anteriores a una expresión o creencia sin que estas estén desprovistas de conceptos o mediaciones en algún nivel. Dichos ensamblajes son trazados a través de una mediación pragmática, que si bien se desenvuelven bajo la producción como exceso y el trabajo abstracto (que sería un trabajo ateoleológico de recuperación-modificación y no un trabajo forzado) no renuncian a entidades como la de existentes menores (Bensusan, Ibid, p. 107), que son conjuradas a través de la latencia de un índice, es decir, de una indicación previa a una expresión. Siguiendo aquí a McDowell:

«La imagen es que la ética involucra requerimientos de la razón que están ahí sea que lo sepamos o no, y nuestros ojos se abren ante ellos con la adquisición de una “sabiduría práctica”. Entonces, la “sabiduría práctica” es un tipo de cosa adecuada que sirve como modelo para el entendimiento, la facultad que permite que podamos crear y reconocer el tipo de inteligibilidad que es un asunto de colocación en el espacio de las razones» (McDowell, 1994, p. 79).

Por lo tanto, al cerrar la brecha entre McDowell y Bensusan se podría pensar que aquella sabiduría práctica es aquella ejercida por los existentes menores que subyace la composición de una justicia y ética anastróficas. No hay obligación a acceder al juego de la presencia para que seamos escuchados o leídos, ya que los existentes menores desplegamos y nos dispersamos en un campo (más que un espacio cercado) de razones, usando pautas sintácticas en exceso que permiten su propia iteración indefinida. Para juntar una triada, traigamos ahora a colación a Derrida que expone en Voz y Fenómeno la necesidad de la ausencia, necesidad que pone en cuestión cualquier antagonismo a un posible desenvolvimiento e iteración dentro de un campo de razones en donde se busca justicia -y que aquí podría pensarse como propiamente post-Sellarsiano-:

«La ausencia es requerida radicalmente: la ausencia total del sujeto y del objeto del enunciado -la muerte del escritor y/o la desaparición de los objetos que ha podido describir- no previenen que un texto ‘signifique’ <vouloir-dire>. Al contrario, esta posibilidad da luz al significado <vouloir-dire> como tal, lo entrega a ser escuchado y ser leído» (Derrida, 2011, p. 79)

Conclusión: Exceso, viraje, evento

Para finalizar, quiero exaltar el cómo la economía de exceso de producción y el trabajo abstracto develados en el recuento sintáctico de Bensusan sería a fin de cuentas lo que permiten la lógica de adición n+1 de la que partimos, y cuyas consecuencias son el desencadenamiento de eventos como potencia de ráfaga cuyas consecuencias no pueden ser anticipadas. Siguiendo a Wittgenstein y los comentarios de Meredith Williams sobre este (Williams, 2010, p. 77-108), frente la reciente formalización de sistemas y plataformas que tienen como base definiciones ostensivas en cuyos participantes -plenamente identificables- solo responden a una serie de estímulos causales que se definen de antemano siguiendo pautas estadísticas, que encontramos en el uso y reproducción de los modelos extensos de lenguaje (LLMs) como DeepSeek, ChatGPT, etc., cabría preguntarnos y actuar sobre lo siguiente, citando a Meredith Williams:

«Más bien deberíamos ver como uno llega a ser participante de un juego de lenguaje…entonces, lo justo es que la pregunta semántica, aquello que fija el significado de una palabra (…) debe ser reemplazada por la pregunta genérica, ¿cómo llega uno a ser participante de una práctica?» (Williams, Ibid, p. 89)

Tal vez la respuesta a esta pregunta epistemológica, a una pregunta respecto a definiciones y actos pueda movilizarse políticamente a través de una ruta que quiebra el panorama de una economía restringida que se media a partir de actos y definiciones ostensivos. Nos corresponde como existentes menores, a partir del esbozo de una ruta de quiebre, recuperar aquello en retención, y trazar el ocultamiento mnémico que implica una práctica de justicia a partir de la lucha que converge en la división de trabajo cognitivo-pragmática entre existentes evanescentes y aquellos que se encargan de delimitar presencias. Por ello resalto aquí, y para cerrar, la importancia de los aditamentos que siguen la lógica del materialismo aleatorio del Althusser tardío, que Bensusan itera de la siguiente forma:

«Las adiciones pueden venir de cualquier dirección, como espectros que agitan el pasado y traen de vuelta aquello que se ha ido con niveles de intensidad que no pueden ser anticipados. Son un exceso a todo lo que hay» (Bensusan, 2025, p. 129).

Estas adiciones no anticipadas deforman una órbita supuestamente cercada, desatan una lógica de viraje que corresponde al evento o encuentro, incitando a que algo estalle en el horizonte a partir del trabajo abstracto como recuperación irrestricta e iteración indefinida. Como cita final, aquí Bensusan menciona que: «un viraje es un cambio a una órbita delimitada» (Bensusan, Ibid, 77). Nuestros puntos de evento o encuentro diseminados en el uso de las herramientas de ensamblaje de la memoria expuestas aquí nos permitirían potencialmente abolir las leyes de valor/uso que nos condenan a ser súbditos ocultos de las lógicas de producción capitalista, trazando una estallido político-estético por venir como respuesta al neomedievalismo político que se asoma.

On Lebensformen and the Normative Patterning of Cruelty (Talk for «New Applications of Sellars’ Philosophy», December 3 2024, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy)

This is another rough script -late from the oven and quote heavy- of a talk presented at the end of last year at the annual conference of the ASCP under the stream «New Applications of Sellars’ Philosophy» organized by Cathy Legg and Vincent Le. This might in time become a book [?] and is one of the mainstays of my current research. This talk is dedicated to late colleague Cássia Siquiera whose insights on the subject of lifeforming have been a big influence on what will be presented.

Introduction

In the following talk I’d like to present an initial draft and work in progress, in three moments, to what could be tentatively considered a Sellarsian-Marxist ethics which has as its goal the dissection of practices of cruelty in an intersubjective level and which for purposes further exposed here, will be considered as embedded in socially mediated patterns. This meaning that practices of cruelty that interpellate and transgress any index of alterity or otherness within a social formation are to be conscripted within minimally or given prescriptive-representationalist account of experience enacted by social agents. This proposition in turn defies any ethics built downstream from the famous remarks made by philosopher Hannah Arendt more than a half a century ago about the banality of evil in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): acts of cruelty are not merely a set of blind self-less mechanisms or are fed by irrational drives. I’d like to state the total opposite. Acts of cruelty are normative; they are grounded in mediateness.

Lebensformen

To explore this claim, we have to locate ourselves within a first moment that takes into account the fundamental concept of lebensformen or forms-of-life as developed by the later Wittgeinstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). The importance of the concept of lebensformen, although scarce throughout the aforementioned work lies in the normative status of a first level of semantic expression which lies in pragmatic involvement in an intersubjective environment or community. In our daily lives we follow orders, recognize and order items within a first level of conceptual abstraction which is not a merely causal-physiological response but constrained within the very structure of language. Here I quote some remarks by Wittgenstein were he refers to the normative aspect of lebensformen.

[Quote A]: «19. It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering Yes and No and countless other things. —– And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.»

[Quote B]: «18. (...) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.» 

I expand on this by mentioning the following: a form-of-life such as is briefly mentioned by Wittgenstein is not merely an ontological but deontological keystone and can be observed within ground-level logical framework of cultural and social practices. Downstream from this deontological purview we can tie a link with Wilfrid Sellars' proximity to the question of social norms as constrained by language through patterns. As mentioned in his 1974 paper Meaning as Functional Classification, from where I quote extensively the following:

[Quote C]: «The functioning which gives the utterances of one who has learned a language their meaning can exist merely at the level of uniformities as in the case of the fledgling speaker. Those who train him, thus his parents, think about these functionings and attempts to ensure that his verbal behavior exemplifies them.»

[Quote D]: «Only subsequently does the language learner become a full-fledged member of the linguistic community, who thinks thoughts (theoretical and practical) not only about non-linguistic items, but also about linguistic items, i.e., from the point of view of VB [note: verbal behaviorism as Sellars had explained previously], about first level thoughts.» 

And how does this relate to social norms as mediated by patterns? I quote extensively again: 

[Quote E]: «The key to the concept of a linguistic rule is its complex relation to pattern-governed linguistic behavior. The general concept of pattern governed behavior is a familiar one. Roughly it is the concept of behavior which exhibits a pattern, not because it is brought about by the intention that it exhibit this pattern, but because the propensity to emit behavior of the pattern has been selectively reinforced, and the propensity to emit behavior which does not conform to this pattern selectively extinguished.»

[Quote F]: «Trainees conform to ought-to-be's because trainers obey corresponding ought-to-do's.» 

With this in consideration, I’d like to turn to philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s definition of forms of life as something that is not merely arbitrary: 

[Quote G]: «Forms of life do not concern just any arbitrary prac­tices, but normatively imbued practices; they are part of the social-norm structure, of a normative social order with a claim to validity.» 

Patterning and Ideology 

So now that we have defined this first instance of patterns and the normative to be found in the ground of lebensformen or forms-of-life as something that is not arbitrary or blind to self-reflection, I believe it would be essential to do a rundown and quote in full of Rahel Jaeggi’s four point definition of what constitutes a form of life (or the core elements).

[Quote H]: «Forms of life present themselves as clusters of social practices or, in Lutz Wingert's formulation, as "ensembles of practices and orientations" and systems of social behavior. They include attitudes and habitualized modes of conduct with a normative character that concern the collective conduct of life, although they are neither strictly codified nor institutionally binding. This means the following: 

(1) We (should) speak of forms of life only when it is not a matter of individual or isolated practices but of clusters of practices that are inter­connected and interrelated in the one way or another. 

(2) Forms of life are collective formations, that is, "orders of human co­existence." One does not have a form of life as an individual. A form of life rests on socially shared practices, even where one participates in it and relates to it as an individual. The form of life of an individual refers to the respect in which he participates in a collective practice as an individual and through his individual actions. 

(3) As established formations with a habitual character, forms of life have a passive as well as an active element. One lives in a form of life as in a structure that is pregiven and laid out in advance, even if one simulta­ neously creates it through one's own practice. 

(4) As orders of social cooperation that rest on regular practices, forms of life are therefore always also demarcated from the possibility of disorder and are distinguished, at least from the internal perspective of their partici­pants, by a certain expectation of cooperation. Thus, not unlike the phe­nomena of custom and tradition, a certain normative pressure of expectation is associated with forms of life». 

This four point definition by Jaeggi highlights the importance of intersubjective interactions when dealing with ground-level linguistic conceptualizations, which is an issue that was implicitly dealt with in Sellars aforementioned paper and which has given way to a series of discussions, most notably in Davidson’s Three Varieties of Knowledge and McDowell’s commentary on Davidson’s observation about the formation of the normative through intersubjectivity. We first follow McDowell’s recapitulation:

[Quote I]: «Davidson argues that knowledge of the non-mental world around us (1), knowledge of the minds of others (2), and knowledge of our own minds are mutually irreducible but mutually interdependent (3)» 

Then going back to Davidson’s own essay, we can highlight his triangulation argument which is the following:

[Quote J]: «What seems basic is this: an observer (or teacher) finds (or instills) a regularity in the verbal behaviour of the informant (or learner) which he can correlate with events and objects in the environment. This much can take place without developed thought on the part of the observed, of course, but it is a necessary condition for attributing thoughts and meanings to the person observed. For until the triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world, there can be no answer to the question whether a creature, in discriminating between stimuli, is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in. Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content—that is, no content at all.»

[Quote K]: «If the two people now note each others' reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. The common cause can now determine the contents of an utterance and a thought. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate. Two, or, of course, more.» 

Now, what we can take from Davidson’s and McDowell’s disagreement is the tension between the causal and the normative which would deliver us back the Sellarsian idea of mediateness by way language and the different sorts (or sortals, which won’t be discussed here at the moment) of mediateness, a first level of conceptualization that does depend on facts and not bare or 'naked' sensibilia. I quote Davidson again:

[Quote L]: «When we look at the natural world we share with others we do not lose contact with ourselves, but rather acknowledge membership in a society of minds. If I did not know what others think I would have no thoughts of my own and so would not know what I think. If I did not know what I think, I would lack the ability to gauge the thought of others. Gauging the thoughts of others requires that I live in the same world with them, sharing many reactions to its major features, including its values. So there is no danger that in viewing the world objectively we will lose touch with ourselves. The three sorts of knowledge form a tripod: if any leg were lost, no part would stand.»

[Quote M]: «The normative and the causal properties of mental concepts are related. If we were to drop the normative aspect from psychological explanations, they would no longer serve the purposes they do. We have such a keen interest in the reasons for actions and other psychological phenomena that we are willing to settle for explanations that cannot be made to fit perfectly with the laws of physics. Physics, on the other hand has as an aim laws that are as complete and precise as we can make them; a different aim. The causal element in mental concepts helps make up for the precision they lack: it is part of the concept of an intentional action that it is caused and explained by beliefs and desires; it is part of the concept of a belief or a desire that it tends to cause and so explain actions of certain sorts.»

McDowell of course doesn’t sight right with this and puts forward his Aristotelian-Sellarsian purview of this situation, and I repeat, that the causal already contains a first level of conceptualization, albeit a primitive one that deals with entitlement which is not explicitly expressed (here Sellars’s ghost looms heavily in the background) but that by traversing the roads of discursive actualization can become objective, it can become a tractable belief by way of intersubjectivity. And I quote:

[Quote N]: «The trouble by my lights is that Davidson’s picture has no room for intuitions in the sense in which Kant is talking about intuitions by the time we get to the Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique—episodes that are themselves cases of our sensory capacities at work, as opposed to being merely caused by operations of our sensory capacities, but which are like beliefs in being actualizations of conceptual capacities and so able, consistently with the basic principles that underlie Davidson’s thinking here, to be rationally and not just causally relevant to our thinking. Davidson has no room for the availability of facts to subjects in their sensory consciousness itself.»

Now that we have considered how there are different levels of conceptualization at work with what a philosopher like Giorgio Agamben would characterize erratically as bare-life (life conceptualized as a merely biological-physiological construct) and the reason why we would rather choose the concept of form of life as it reflects on the complexity, norms, rules and patterns at play, we’d also like to go an extra mile and make an analogy with what marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has to say about the supposed distinction between being-an-individual and being-always a subject of ideology. This is an assumed distinction, because for Althusser one’s own self is already predetermined by a common conceptual ground which is ideologically charged, and in response to Jaeggi’s observations about how state institutions and apparatuses seem not to give shape forms-of-life, Althusser observes, and here I also follow philosopher J.P. Caron’s own upcoming work on this issue (as recently presented under the title of Cognitive Mapping between Althusser and Sellars), how our shared rituals, practices defined through that first-level of normativity that belong to the field of what Sellars has described as pattern-governed linguistic behavior don’t find themselves within a neutral ground. 

This meaning that forms-of-life can be and are shaped by institutions, apparatuses. They are not tabula rasa concepts put to practice. They are determined by concrete socioeconomic and historical dispositions which are put through display through that first level of conceptualization i.e. patterns that are enacted within the intersection of capitalism as the production of experience and its modulation by its corresponding jurisdictional apparatuses of enforcement. On this issue, I now quote Althusser:

[Quote O]: «It remains to show, using a few concrete examples, how this whole extraordinary (and simple) machinery functions in its actual, concrete complexity. Why 'simple'? Because the principle of the ideology effect is simple: recognition, subjection, guarantee - the whole centred on subjection. Ideology makes individuals who are always-already subjects (that is, you and me) 'go'. Why 'complex'? Because each subject (you and I) is subjected to several ideologies that are relatively independent, albeit unified under the unity of the State Ideology. For there exist, as we have seen, several Ideo­logical State Apparatuses. Hence each subject (you and I) lives in and under several ideologies at once. Their subjection-effects are 'combined' in each subject's own acts, which are inscribed in practices, regulated by rituals, and so on.»

Here, what is most valuable about Althusser’s observations is that what we have considered in that ground level of the normative, these common sensical enactments become entrapped through the processes of production within capitalism. The worker, the proletarian (a term which would need its own revision and update under our current conditions of socioeconomic oppression, be it the cognitariat or precariat) through the acts embedded in the quotidian, in the spaces of leisure nested within this routine precariously feedback on what could be named the process of production of forms-of-life. About this issue, we can quote Althusser at length again:

[Quote P]: «The proletarian, when his workday is over (the moment he has been waiting for since morning), drops everything, without further ado, when the whistle blows, and heads for the lavatories and lockers. He washes up, changes his clothes, combs his hair, and becomes another man: the one who is going to join the wife and children at home. Once he gets home, he is in a completely different world that has nothing to do with the hell of the factory and its production rhythms. At the same time, however, he finds himself caught up in another ritual, the ritual of the practices and acts (free and voluntary, of course) of familial ideology: his relations with his wife, the kids, neighbours, parents, friends - and on Sundays, still other rituals, those of his fantasies or favourite pastimes (likewise free and voluntary): the weekend in the forest of Fontainebleau or (in a few cases) his little garden in the suburbs, and sport, the telly, radio, God knows what; and then holidays, with still other rituals (fishing, camping, Tour­ism and Work, People and Culture, God knows what).»

Is there an outside to this always ideologically mediated pattern-governed linguistic behavior? On this question I quote Althusser’s final remarks of his unfinished work on ISA’s:

[Quote Q]: «When nothing is happening, the Ideological State Apparatuses have worked to perfection. When they no longer manage to function, to reproduce the relations of production in the 'consciousness' of all subjects, 'events' happen, as the phrase goes, more or less serious events, as in May, the commencement of a first dress rehearsal. With, at the end, some day or the other, after a long march, the revolution. By way ef a provisional conclusion.»

And of course, here we see premise of a revolution taking place which doesn't lead to a mere quietism in the face of the given, as is usual in the accusations given to Althusser's reading of Marx by his critics. But if we go beyond mere prescriptive functioning of the aforementioned ground-level acting by way of conceptualization, would it be enough? We have to go further and bring forth a  provocation that slowly begins to unwind cruelty within ideologically mediated patterning and norm-following.

A Provocation

We can now bring forth an open-ended speculation regarding certain evolutionary models about cognition through the ethological dynamics of predator v. prey that have to do with a counter-normative narrative that could act as an exit to our prescriptive nadir, but first I’d like to return to the problem of the production of experience. In a recent intervention by philosopher Hilan Bensusan, The Underground of Concepts, they insist on the reversal of the McDowellian/Davidsonian issue about sensibilia and experience, remarking that the only way of subversion possible about ideologically mediated patternings and norm-followings is moving beyond the concept and inhabiting the consequences of bare experience by way of Lyotard’s digressions in Economie Libidinale. Here I quote from them:

[Quote R]: «It is experience that not only challenge beliefs but also consolidate them and both this processes are account in terms of beliefs that are composed of concepts in their proper propositional environment only as deception. Concepts alone would not do the job, thinking is thoroughly situated and cannot be deprived of the productive force that comes from something that is not general, that cannot be applied, as a proposition, across the board. To understand Lyotard’s diagnosis in terms of the relevance of experience for thought is also to highlight that experience is a form of production – situated and irreucible to the propositional beliefs that it entails. Experiencing is producing something – while capital is concerned with products of thinking that display the form of beliefs that are general and disconnected from where experience took place, from where something was had in view.»

Following Bensuan's exploration of bare experience, I'd like to then turn to speculating around what I'd previously mentioned about ethology. Following Alain Berthoz’s study The Brain Sense of Movement, I’d like to select the following passages about the Toad’s “decision”, here I quote:

[Quote S]: «The classification of perceptions (for example, of prey or predator) is determined by the repertoire of possible actions (in this case, capture or flight). Hence a further illumination of my proposition, perception is simulation of action. But there is more. We capture first of all with our gaze. To study how mechanisms of gaze control anticipate targets in motion, we constructed a visual game in the laboratory like the ones at a country fair where you have to shoot at a line of ducks or pop multicolored balloons that an air current blows around at random. Despite their simplicity, these games are difficult, which is how the fairgrounds people manage to stay in business. In our experiment, the subject first has to fixate on a spot in the center of a screen on which, from top to bottom, a second spot appears that falls suddenly, like a ball. An auditory signal set off at various moments during the fall instructs the subject to catch the falling target with an ocular saccade. During the 150-odd milliseconds during which the eye remains fixated, the brain estimates the velocity of the target, which moves toward the periphery of the eye. You can do this experiment yourself by focusing on a point in front of you and holding an object in your right hand above the horizontal. Let the object fall, and then try to catch it with your gaze during its fall...»

What is opened up and not explicitly mentioned by Berthoz's controlled experiments about the physiology of brain-eye response when dealing with a predator v prey scenario is that this very scenario is usually considered to be contentless, not even able to reach the level of intuitions without concepts. But, what if we could carefully dissect this example and consider that there is already a first level abstraction of space that takes place in the eye and mind of the predator? To give shape to this speculation I find Reza Negarestani’s insights valuable, which I quote:

[Quote T]: «As the predator registers the presence of its prey, it begins to compute the possible orientation of the prey by way of the saccadic jerk. It then generates the gesture of movement: the muscles are primed and place the predator in a chasing position (or, for that matter, the prey in position of flight). This mobile deviation from the vertical gravitational pull is simultaneously registered and stabilized by the vestibular system of the inner ear, permitting the predator to form a dynamic yet stable chase line (a gesture of an embodied movement in space) to hunt the prey. This chase line, however, is not neutral, for it is the very neurophysiologically enabled abstraction that allows the predator to differentiate itself from its own prey and the surrounding space. In a sense, the escape from the conceptless exteriority of space -the undifferentiated void- requires drawing a neoconceptual abstraction of a line as a chaotic mobile unit. Wandering in space is tantamount to thinking about space (...) But more importantly, making new abstractions of movement coincides with producing new cognitive technologies for navigating space. Such cognitive technologies enable the extraction of various relationships that objects hold in space, and finally, derivate new concepts of space far more elaborate and expansive than the concept of space given to us by our senses.»

The development of cognitive technologies mentioned by Negarestani in the predator v prey scenario implies the following provocation by taking a materialist critique to its own radical means and ends: if we were to make a critique of life-forming as that which grounds the patterns and norms on which mediated intersubjectivity takes place, we would necessarily consider a revisionary ethics that does not try to block the well of irrationality stemming up from supposed cruel practices but rather a radical counter normative ethics that deviates from the origins of cognition as that which is traversed by cruelty by way of necessity. As a disclaimer, this is not a merely nihilist or pessimist picturing of cognition per se but more of a massive task that must take place if we are to reconfigure our own purview of the ethical as that which is not divided between concepts and acts, institutions and subjects, and the ontological and the deontological.

The Negative Unthought (Talk at «Marxism and the Pittsburgh School», June 12 2024, University College of London)

This is a rough script of a talk -with some additional notes- presented today at the «Marxism and the Pittsburgh School», with every idea subject to change in a formalized essay or paper soon.

I. Introduction

In Adorno’s "Negative Dialectics" one can read the following caustic assertion on the unspeakable bearings of history on thought:

“The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the Leibnizean theodicy, and the visible catastrophe of the first nature was insignificant, compared with the second, social one, which defies the human imagination by preparing a real hell out of human evil” (Adorno, 1966)

Likewise, Badiou predicts the pressing task of philosophy returning to the drawing board in the face of an oncoming dissonance in politics at the turn of the millennium:
 
“…philosophy is like the attic where, in difficult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools, and sharpens knives” (Badiou, 2001).

With these two headings in mind, I’d like to propose a stratagem that seriously takes an aforementioned return to the drawing board, a sharpening of critique reflecting on the shortcomings of contemporary thought when dealing with objective and context-sensitive contradictions i.e., with the negative, necessary to respond to the bearings of history, this meaning, to the horizon of planetary catastrophe which heeds the call to the modularity of thought and therefore, to the reformulation of political agency anew. For the drafting of this stratagem, I’d like to bring together the possibility of overlapping certain aspects of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics -without plainly appealing to a revival of critical theory- and Brandom’s expressivist account of pragmatism, most particularly one that focuses on the capabilities of alethic modal realism.

I. The Mismeasure of the Cosmopolitical

In the essay “Cosmopolitical Parties in the Post-Human Age”, philosopher Hilan Bensusan proposes a taxonomy of two strands in contemporary thought that seem to be currently in dispute: an anastrophic and a catastrophic strand, which is to say by following Bensusan, an inhumanist nihilistic strand and an ecological or perspectivist posthumanist strand, which even though each from their respective sides have the belief of being antagonistic toward each other in their own tendencies and the way they formally deal with the historical -be it the coming together of the future towards an inhumanist becoming of cognition and technology, or on the other hand, an escape from western modern (note to the reader: here the term 'modern' is used within the context of Latour's/Viveiros de Castro's dispute of the term, usually brought up when unwinding the tension and 'critique' of the modern/non-western split in epistemology and metaphysics, ref. to be added later) temporality in lieu of nihilistic catastrophe product of enlightenment winding down toward technocapitalism -, they ultimately coincide in trying to build an all-encompassing narrative that attempts to contest our current planetary predicament.

Nevertheless, another coincidence that paradoxically undermines both of these philosophical strands or parties is their positing within history and how this positing is itself problematic when taking into account their own universalist pretensions, reaching to an overarching closing point (self-note: an immanent unity of sorts) that demolishes any sort of derivé towards objectivity or by way of paraphrasing Adorno in his lectures on Negative Dialectics: “...the objective machine infernale of which consciousness would like to escape” (Adorno, 2008, p 193). This undermining suspiciously retreads a familiar ground to what Adorno himself observed in the absolutization of bare life in Bergson, the ontical-ontological distinction in Heidegger which leads ultimately to the atemporality of Being (self-note: not mentioned but at a later date adding the concrete case of how historicity is annuled in Heidegger's "Die Sprache im Gedicht"), and Hegel’s “perennial resistance to the non-identical” (Adorno) which blunders the concrete consequences of dialectics by way of subsumption into the concept, a conclusion also echoed in the opening of Marxist Istvan Mestzaros’s, “Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness” (ref. to be added later).

In other words, these cosmopolitical parties cannot escape the enclosing of monotonic logic, even though they pretend to build a model of logics that can give voice and mobilize the multiple within immanence. Why monotonic? To preliminarily ground this sanction, I’ll quote Kukkanen’s definition of monotonic reasoning as that in which “…additional information has no bearing and does not change the conclusion reached”. Which is also to say, that both Adorno and Brandom coincide in their characterization of certain strands of representationalist thought that while fleeing from monotonicity and nominalism end up relapsing when not dealing the consequences of the objectivity of the non-identical (i.e., the negative), a relapse which could be characterized through Brandom as, and I quote:

“A pernicious form of semantic representationalism -which- is semantic nominalism. This is the view that takes as its semantic paradigm the designation relation between a name and its bearer (what it is a name of), or between sign (signifier) and signified, and assimilates all varieties of the representing/represented relation to that model” (Brandom, 2011)

Or in Negative Dialectics once again, where: “…they recoil into mythos. For it is nothing less than the closed context of immanence”, and, later on, “…the micrological glance demolishes the shells of that which is helplessly compartmentalized according to the measure of its subsuming master concept and explodes its identity”.

II. Demarcations of the Negative

This critique is not new, as it conceptually follows downstream from the ideas deployed by Benjamin Noys in his book, “The Persistence of the Negative”, written -as a manifest response to- a major political, social and economic turnover in the west that still mirrors our own multi-faceted turnover. The most pressing argument, which can be applied to our failure to assume a much-needed return to the drawing board of philosophy and the pragmatics-slash-logistics of political enactment, is the admonition about an affirmationist tendency that could be characterized as the extrication or deflation of the negative, that avoids any concrete dialectical movement (something that was also denounced by Adorno in his critique of diamat: see his Lectures on Dialectics) by ineffectively sublating negation through its own instrumentalization and erasure, seen as a mere means to predominantly affirmationist ends (as reflected in the post-operaismo politics of Negri & Hardt) or, the affirmation of negation which would beat the purpose of objectivity itself.

Ultimately, be it as Bensusan describes, through the impersonal power of will that threads through anastrophe or the mapping from of ancestral metaphysics that webs onto catastrophe, there’s no counteracting to be found beyond the immutability of these politics of immanence and we end up abdicating to ostensibly re-adjusting the picture of what appears under the mark of fixity, acting upon a scenario of what is rather on how things ought to be. Now, even though it’s important to consider Noys’s insistence on the problematic disappearance of the agent/agency as that which could carry out any political disposition and where the effects of the negative could be clearly implemented, I believe that there is another solution to the problem of agency that links up to Brandom’s expressivist pragmatism, alethic modality and the tentative critique to forms of life (lebensformen).

III. Expressivism, alethic modality and forms of life

Instead of assuming the wager on agency as a response to the problem of the negative, I’d like to patch this issue by exploring one of the tenets expressed by Brandom in his anti-representationalist pragmatism, which is best exemplified through his advocacy toward subject naturalism -the concern of pragmatics and not merely semantics as seen in object naturalism- and that can serve as an antidote to the pretend universalism shown before by way of deflating any directive by way of semantics, the ahistorical asymmetry between bearer and name while implementing the normative end of intentionality. Brandom grounds this anti-representationalist pragmatism using what he calls are three metavocabularies of reason:

“…that of a syntactic metavocabulary, which enables one to talk about linguistic expressions themselves (both what Sellars calls “sign designs” and grammatical categories), and a semantic metavocabulary, which enables one to talk about what linguistic expressions refer to or what descriptive concepts let one say. A pragmatic metavocabulary enables one to talk about what one is doing in using linguistic expressions the speech acts one is performing, the pragmatic force one is investing them with or exercising, the commitments one is undertaking by making claims, the norms that govern linguistic performances, and so on”.

Therefore, this chain of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic steps that map onto each other in a circuit (see: elaborated from and explicated of, abbreviated as the LX diagram seen in BS&D) allows for a reversal of the bearer-name designation by being both at the same time expressive and normative -two sides of the same coin-, being a dialectical “motion of both concept and thing” (following Adorno) in as far experience is inferentially calibrated by way of tractable norms that root themselves on representations that are not absolutized in any way or form. As long as concepts are elaborated and explicated, we are able to find our way out of monadic immanence and I quote again:

“…the expressive role distinctive of alethic modal vocabulary is to make explicit something that is implicit already in the use of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary”. This leads to the role of modality of thought, were therefore we can arrange a series of inferences from experience, evidence and judgement that are tractably possible or not-yet-possible by discarding the apparent simplicity of mere factical-empirical descriptions of what is, or in other words, what Sellars criticized as nothing-but-isms i.e., the assimilation of all discourse to bare description. Even more so, we can extend Brandom’s model to jump to beyond its own liberal consequences by using Adorno’s following observation on the issue of the factual: “Anything that is incapable of collapsing is, at the bidding of the ideal of certainty, an analytical judgement, potentially a meaningless tautology. The only thoughts to have a chance are those that go to extremes; capable of cerebral acrobatics”. Coincidentally enough, the emphasis on expression is also very close to the one Adorno exposes about expression by way of means to where philosophy can be led to its own depths as an invitation to resist and effectively escape subsumption by stagnant systematicity or modeling that has renounced to the negative, or to any type of monotonic logic. Here I quote Adorno again, “…the effort or the resistance of thought consists precisely in refusing (…) an immediate assertion of the meaningful nature of mere existence”, this struggle, resistance and refusal in and out of the depths of thought via expression would be that missing negative-dialectical part in Brandom’s subject naturalism which I suggest be brought to the fore of expressivist pragmatism and that helps explicate alethic modality beyond its own limited framework.

Lastly and as an annex, these series of assumptions leave open an inquiry about the ideological givenness of bare-life carrying itself to its own self-contradiction: a critique of forms of life (lebensformen, see: Rahel Jaeggi -to be developed downstream from Wittgenstein + Kripkenstein-, JP Caron and Cássia Siqueira). It would be presumptuous to have our attempts of systematization and complexification of thought unmoored after not taking into account constant exhibitions of human cruelty throughout history, as these have shown that affirmationism hits a wall when faced with the urgency of expressing and acting through the abyss of cruelty that is sown onto forms of life. Contra Adorno (note: I'm taking into account on how Adorno views this relapse as something beyond reason and therefore also beyond the paradigm of the given itself - the issue here is that I'd like to develop the idea that cruelty falls back on a production and reproduction of norms, inferences and judgements i.e. cruelty is ideological) we have to construct a counter-normative pragmatics to a given normative pragmatics of cruelty, the latter which do not correspond to a paradigm of unreason, irrationality or the losing of sense, that is, dealing with the objectivity of the negative.

Additional notes 

Brandom's PV Sufficiency, VP Sufficiency and PP Sufficiency can overlap [?] with Badiou's three negations in the "Logic of Worlds", (sidenote while reading the final chapter of "The Persistence of the Negative"), this can be a rejoinder to better explicate the role of modality and its consequences in political praxis [?].