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 [?].
