[Due to space constraints, the foregoing essay was published in two instalments. Part I can be found here.—Ed.]
2. A Desperate Marxist’s Attempt
We need but a moment of reflection to realize that the problematic of real abstraction in Marxism is the tortuous issue of the transposition of the language of normativity onto that of modality—the normatively articulated order and difference of the abstract—into the causally-modally articulated order and difference of the concrete. Put more succinctly, the logic of real abstraction is that of a reifying cosmization, namely “[…] the process through which nomos and cosmos appear to be co-extensive.”1 Here, the ontological order and difference, in the sense of causal uniformities, nomological-modal relations, ontological forms, or self-individuating particulars or processes imbued with their own conditions of possibilities, migrates from its conceptual-inferential role in a language game or a practice to the center stage of the cosmic drama. The upshot takes shape in self-sustaining objectual or processual worldly objects and events imbued with a structured particular–monadic reference, constituted differences or denotable order in the world. I shall call this thesis ontological preformationism—or a modally regimented referentialism—where there is a minimal semblance of modal-nomological relationality and causal uniformity. This view is shared by Kantians and Sellarsians alike. Contra cosmization, the process of historicization defines the ingenious transposition of the ontological order and difference onto social-historical categories. As Sohn-Rethel enunciates it in the following statement: “[The] origin of the forms of consciousness (and of knowledge) is neither empirical nor ontological, but historical.”2 That is to say, the absolute generality and exhaustiveness of any transcategorial, transcendental constitution is a social-historical institution (as neo-Hegelians would put it). This implies a “social origin of pure reason”—viz., instantiation of the pure concepts of reason always occurs in the “abstract physicality of the act of exchange” which is a trans-individual, comportmental, behavioral, and praxeological investment and transaction embodied in a set of shared human attunements. Hence the celebrated—and cerebrated—“[…] conceptual basis of cognition is logically and historically conditioned by the basic formation of the social synthesis of its epoch.”3 Acts of exchange and the emergent real abstraction are to be understood in terms of the structure of social-historical practices of a community, the same way a signpost is to be understood as something more than a mere piece of wood by being caught up in social practices, institutions, customs and uses rather than a “hocus-pocus which can be performed only by souls” as the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations would ironically demur.4 Hence, any abstraction from the concrete or from the modal-nomological realm of law to the conceptual space of reasons is to be traced back to the historical phylogenetic unfoldings of the structural conditions of sociality or Sohn-Rethel’s “social synthesis” rather than to the coruscating potency of mental events or to the ontological indices of intelligibilities. This is a version of a conceptual role semantics, an expressivist attempt at detranscendentalization of any categorial realism in general or mental-empirical abstraction in particular, for which categories are defined inferentially and functionally.
Secondly, one of Sohn-Rethel’s principal claims is that there is a “true identity”5 or a structural isomorphy between the social synthesis—“the network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole”6—and those alleged quasi-transcendental constitutive elements of mind and thought. Therefore, the coruscating potency of mental events gets its intracranial sparkle of abstraction, order, difference, and normativity from the sociality of acts of exchange: “the physicality of the act of exchange transmits itself in the form of the conversion of the real abstraction into thought abstraction.”7
The claim above is two-tiered: it pertains to the transmission of material indices and of abstractive/intelligible indices to the mind. It is complemented by J.-P. Caron’s observation that it is done “[…] 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 qua intelligibilities.”8
The first form of transmission can be construed as isomorphic friction with the world or the world having a grip on the “social synthesis” by extrication through work of material indices. In developing this narrative, we sometimes slip into transposing the character of the cosmos into quasi-normative terms by literalization of a reifying cosmization—where the postulate of the congruence between nomos and cosmos goes too far. For example, John Haugeland speaks of the “normative authority of objects,” or “objects ‘talk[ing] back’” or “the phenomena as gaining the power to resist by ‘locking arms’ against [our] skills.”9 In the same vein, John McDowell asserts that “[…] experience mediates an authority that objects themselves have over empirical thought.”10
These seemingly innocuous cosmizing proclamations, if taken literally, would evidence a corpus delicti of the myth of the Given—because here the space of reasons, justifications, or warrants is extended more widely than the conceptual sphere, as the objects are given normative authority and justificatory entitlement over our epistemic commitments. On more charitable readings, these statements simply assert that for our natural embeddedness to be in a rational yet adjustable harmony with the worldly presences or for the brute facts to have a grip on us, we have to assume that the conceptual has no exteriority, no outer boundary; that “the conceptual is unbounded; there is nothing outside it.”11 This is the thesis of conceptual realism: “the claim that the way the world objectively is, in itself, is conceptually articulated.”12 Hence, literalization of a reifying transmigration of the normative or the conceptual inevitably leads to a pathologizing and apocryphal normativization of the world—viz., a cosmic normativism. An exculpatory interpretation of these claims is guaranteed if we understand them the same way we understand Wittgenstein’s signpost. The dissipation and metaphysical resection of cosmic normativism with respect to the frictional input from the world is demystified as long as we relocate extralinguistic worldly inputs and objects into a social practice. The concrete, immersive, and normative contact with objects and events is elucidated in the following passage:
When it begins to rain, this can make it a bad idea to choose the zoo over the museum today; it can make it appropriate to take an umbrella and inappropriate to test-drive those new $400 shoes; it can make it time to harvest the grapes; it can officially signal the end of a baseball game; it can make it time to move the fire into the cave, and so forth. Again, the material features of rain constrain what sorts of world-involving normative practices can be developed in relation to it, and once these are developed, rain has concrete normative significance from inside these practices. The rain need not ‘tell us’ anything or ‘hold us’ to anything. We are the ones who institute, maintain, and practice the norms of vinification, baseball, fashion, and so forth. But we cannot do this except as embodied beings who engage with rain and its absence; within such engagements, rain has specific normative meanings and consequences.13
In the same vein, the alleged transmission of abstractive/intelligible indices from social practices to the mind is not the transmission of metaphysical exotica imposed from some non-conceptual exteriority. Rather, such transmission implies the enculturation of normative attitudes and rule-governed stances in the situatedness of subjects within communally ratified canons of correctness or incorrectness. Neither the normative nor the material indices are transmitted to the mind but are facultatively incorporated with a normative significance within a given practice—a thoroughgoing social pragmatic functionalism about both material and intelligible indices is the way to avoid the myth of the Given. Hence to claim that real abstraction has the power to “lock arms” with our thoughts, for example, is not to assume that an abstraction as an extra-linguistic categorial form is having a grip on our minds. If we uncharitably interpret Sohn-Rethel`s conception of real abstraction as an ontological form having a normative register existing or subsisting beyond the conceptual-practical-social sphere, then the worst-case scenario would be the claim that his conception, literally and unapologetically, is on a par with the Haugelandian/McDowellian cosmic normativism or with the Sellarsian claim that categorial and causally articulated objects and modally regimented properties exist in their preconceptual innocence and have a grip on our practices and minds.
2.1 Pan-relationalism as an imperialist antibifurcationism14
What is the solution then, for a post-Sellarsian Marxist who cannot do without both horns of the dilemma? Some version of ontological preformationism or categorial realism and a social pragmatic functionalism, or conceptual role semantics? The overall argumentative strategy, I think, is to re-interpret both the realm of law and the space of reasons in a way to guarantee a via media or a wedding of ontological preformationism with conceptual role semantics.
Firstly, if we cannot do away with a characterization of both spaces as ordered-cum-differentiated ensembles, then one of the strategies to delegitimize the worry about cosmic normativism is to start with a reconceptualization of the conceptual, since “intelligibility is [always] a matter of conceptual articulation: to be intelligible is to be in specifically conceptual shape,”15 and in a way that reads the conceptual as unbounded because it is the boundlessness and extensiveness of a redefined conceptual that promises to save us from the primordial indeterminateness of a structural nihilism. This is to say that a reshaping of the conceptual and a refashioning of its boundary should serve a dual function: evasion of cosmic normativism and circumvention of structural nihilism.
As construed by Robert Brandom, Hegel’s non-psychological conception of the conceptual has the performative significance of that dual function. This conception of conceptuality or conceptual content basically has two theses: a negative thesis and a positive one. The former is a claim about the in-principle inexhaustibility of conceptual contentfulness by any finite set of linguistic concepts deployed by concept-using faculties in general or by thinking in particular—hence it is a non-psychological conception of the conceptual “because [on this account] having conceptual content […] does not require anyone to think or believe anything.”16 The single most significant impetus behind this negative characterization of conceptual contentfulness is the assumption that modal realism (the positive thesis, see below) with its modal-relational rhapsodies—the claim that the world was and is lawful before there were any concept-users and agential knowers— requires a non-linguistic conception: that modal-relational bits of reality are not sententially articulated or structured. Hence there is no language of nature, as it is the enthymematic premise of the metaphoric “book of nature” that underwrites the twin excesses of linguistic idealism and semantic representationalism. Both of these latter positions have to assume that there is a linguistic structuration of reality in order for them to materialize, as only a sentential reality can have the coruscating potency of a semantics from which our representations or languages derive their contentfulness. But there is definitely “no such thing as the world’s own language, there are only the languages that we language users invent for our various purposes.”17
Therefore, there is a fundamental distinction between modal realism of a Hegelian-Brandomian kind and modal realism of analytic metaphysics: only the latter is predicated on a modal semantics in which language-like or sentence-like bits of reality are semantically transmitted to languages and representations.
The positive thesis, in turn, characterizes conceptual contentfulness in terms of “modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion,” in the sense that the occurrence of one item (in both spaces) necessitates the occurrence of another item, or excludes it. As Brandom puts it: ”conceptual contentfulness [as modally robust relations of necessitation and impossibility] in this sense characterizes not only the process of thinking on the subjective side of the intentional nexus, but also what is thought about, on the objective side.”18
But if conceptual realism is the thesis that the world is in conceptual shape, and the conceptual is defined in terms of non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal relations of exclusion and inclusion, then it is conceptual realism that entails a modal realism: ”For objective properties, and so the facts concerning which objects exhibit which properties, also stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence”19 Correspondingly, if preformationism in the realm of law as a univocal ontology ex hypothesi assumes that there is some one basic pattern of relations or a common determinate structure that pervades the universe throughout, then the non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal-relational rhapsodies of modal realism entailed by conceptual realism satisfy a sufficient characterization of those basic patterns of relations or structures of the dimension of givenness which is not in dispute, as well as all the other cognate notions of uniformity, form, real patterns, and the like. In the same vein and in the space of reasons, non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal-relational rhapsodies also hold between states of a person, social roles, evidential or inferential authorities, epistemic or justificatory responsibilities, and all the other cognate registers of normative, semantic, and epistemic significance. However, this accords two flavors of modality to each side of the intentional nexus, and each modal hemisphere is distinguished by the distinctive kind of modality that articulates it.
Conceptual content shows up in two different forms, which are distinguished by the modality of the relations of incompatibility and consequence. Determinate objective states of affairs are conceptually contentful in standing to one another in alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessitation. Determinate subjective thoughts express the same conceptual contents by standing to one another in deontic modal relations of normative preclusion and consequential commitment.20
This framework leads to a “bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism”21 in the sense that, in the articulation of conceptual contentfulness:
(1) there are two modes of modality, necessity or “iffyness” that articulate modal-relational rhapsodies: deontic and alethic, or relations of “becausation” and “causation”
(2) there are two shapes or forms in which the content or the relations can take: subjective and objective
(3) reality or the world is already in thinkable or graspable shape—viz., the conceptual realism
In this overall account, non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal relations of exclusion and inclusion are given pride of place by their ability to relate empirical properties and events in a “causation” relation, as well as the inferential “becausation” reason-relations between actants within the logical space of reasons. The upshot is a sweeping pan-relationalism that ultimately privileges relations over relata—the non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal rhapsodic instantiation of conceptual contentfulness of both causal and rational hemispheres. Relations, specifically modal ones, become incantatory devices that blur all possible distinctions in the way “experience” performed the same antibifurcationist job for Dewey.22
[…] philosophers as diverse as Davidson and Derrida, Putnam and Latour, Brandom and Foucault, are in the main, and despite occasional backsliding, pan-relationalists. Thinking of things as being what they are by virtue of their relations to other things—in the tradition of Leibniz’s monads mirroring the universe and Whitehead’s actual entities as a nexus of prehensions—is their way of shaking off the influence of the metaphysical dualisms which we have inherited from the Greeks: the distinctions between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the various world-pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions by the picture of a flux of continually changing relations, relations whose terms are themselves dissoluble into a nexus of further relations.23
To adumbrate a forme fruste of this modal pan-relationalism even further, the modal-relational rhapsodies of both sides of the intentional nexus as items of a genuinely conceptual yet of a non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic character should be made compatible with a conceptual-functional role framework. Thus, we can formally and logically reconstruct modal reason-relations of becausation and modal relations of causation as equifinal and equiformal modal-relational classes—viz., both conjuncts of a pan-relation of the intentional nexus have the same modal-relational structure which defines their form and both serve the same unifunctional role within the scheme of a pan-relationalism. Namely, to wit as follows: There is one-to-one bijective imputation (or trans-categorial functional identity relations) from concept c of i in ordo cognoscendi and object o of i in ordo essendi if and only if all the roles f assigned to an equiformal c can be assigned to an equiformal o and vice versa, in an occasion-sensitive manner within a given conceptual realist system:
f(c i) = o i & f(o i) = c i
or
f i =df f(ci) ? f(o i)
Hence the modal-relational equiformity between modally specified concepts and modally quantified objects guarantees an equivalent relation between them and can be regarded as an equivalence class, insofar as they have the same functional role:
f i : c i = o i (c, o ? f i)
Less formally, there is an equivalence relation (relations of symmetry, reflexivity, and transitivity) between the functions assigned to c and o because both are reconstructed within the bounds of pan-relationalism. 24
This equiformal and equifinal transfiguration of items between the two modal hemispheres gives us much-needed leeway to explore evermore innovative and unprecedented patterns, de novo relations, and a “chain of nested mediations”25 which, for our current purposes, includes the nested mediations and modal relations between acts of exchange and real abstraction.
‘Against Depth’ says that if we are pan-relationalists we shall see everything on, so to speak, a single horizontal plane. We shall not search for the sublime either high above, or deep beneath, this plane. We shall instead move things about, rearrange them so as to highlight their relations to other things, in the hope of finding ever more useful, and therefore ever more beautiful, patterns.26
To put it more comprehensively, in this pan-relationalist divarication, one elides all infelicitous contradistinctive indices that have bedeviled philosophy since its inception: Quinean languages and theories or analytic-synthetic distinctions; Sellarsian meanings and beliefs; Fregean senses and references or concepts and objects; Davidsonian scheme and content; Aristotelian form and content as well as Platonic abstracts and concretes; Carnapian division of labor between semantics and epistemology, Kantian appearance-reality or philosophy or empirical science differentiation; Hegelian finding-making and immanence-transcendence separation, scientific discovery and invention polarization.27 In a slogan: the modal pan-relationalist begets a thoroughgoing antibifurcationism. As Quine makes this clear:
My present suggestion is that it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement. Taken collectively, science has its double dependence upon language and experience; but this duality is not significantly traceable into the statements of science taken one by one.28
The final flourish of this pan-relationalist story is that it ultimately deprives any dualisms of their sham existence and, for our purposes, real abstraction becomes unproblematic—its problematization is the metaphysical vestige of a bifurcationist or dualistic metaphysics of concrete and abstract. Pan-relationalism commences in medias res of an encapsulation of classes of modal relations that make no distinction between the aforementioned contradistinctive indices. A post-Sellarsian Marxist who is a pan-relationalist should try to overcome, for instance, the binary opposition between action (or acts of exchange that may or may not involve interior intentions) and behavior (the overtly social and normatively mastered intimations of action which involves reifications of norms or abstractions). Instead, the premise should be a chain of nested mediations governed by non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal-relational rhapsodies that involve not only ontological forms but also linguistic dances, conceptual moves, praxiological transformations, and the corporeal registers a philosophy of praxis that focuses on the conditions of human subsistence.
[there is a] chain of nested mediations from awareness to awareness-as, from awareness-as to conceptual role, from conceptual role to linguistic practice, and from linguistic practice to a world of practical involvements. What is exposed through this chain of mediations is the way in which the content of any single state of awareness is bound up with a context of significance that includes a whole practical life-world29
Pan-relationalism, then, becomes this infinitely developing totality conciliated by a series of nested mediations which emphasizes the arbitrariness of the choice of a bright boundary line between causes the space of reasons, without falling prey to either linguistic idealism or the myth of the Given.
Pan-relationalists live on a darkling two-dimensional plane, where there is neither certitude, nor peace, nor a comforting distinction between a fixed ordo essendi and a transitory historical ordo cognoscendi. The pan-relationalist view squashes these two orders into one , by refusing to admit that we can come between language and its object.30
Conclusion
We want to argue that this “darkling plane” is ultimately what Sohn-Rethel is getting at when claiming that the abstraction of exchange is not thought but possesses the form of thought, as the act of exchange is a non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal-relational form emanating from a non-psychological conception of the conceptual. In addition, form in the realm of law corresponds to a genuinely post-Sellarsian Marxist’s transcategorial Ariadne’s thread that permeates the very crux of an already conceptual reality—modally conceptual in a resolutely non-psychological and non-linguistic sense. Form in the space of reasons gets incorporated into a universal social pragmatic functionalism and a conceptual role semantics in which it is interpreted as having an expressive functional role rather than a descriptive scientific one. In this vein, a post-Sellarsian Marxism is tantamount to a declaration of an expressivism which prioritizes the functional role of intermediaries such as real abstraction in the global nexus and the systemic plexus of a philosophy of praxis.
Dorit Bar-On characterizes the central idea of expressivism in the following manner:
‘Expressivism’ designates a family of philosophical views. Very roughly, these views maintain that claims in the relevant area of discourse are ‘in the business’ of giving expression to sentiments, commitments, or other non-cognitive (or non-representational) mental states or attitudes, rather than describing or reporting a range of facts.31
A heretical contention: Post-Sellarsian Marxism is expressivism. As a philosophy of praxis, it is in the business of uncovering or making explicit the non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic modal-relational rhapsodies extant within the chain of nested mediations that involve real abstractions, and with an injunction to, perhaps, change them—because the point of unearthing meanings or conceptual contentfulness in this pan-relationalist drama is not solely to understand them but “the task is to change them.”32
The previous claim also leads to transformative insights about the status of Marxism as a science. Traditionally construed, science is a descriptive and explanatory project, but we have learned much from Sellars so as not to relegate the non-descriptive, non-explanatory, and non-representational expressions of non-natural non-scientific projects to second-class citizenship.
[O]nce the tautology ‘The world is described by descriptive concepts’ is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to second-class citizenship in discourse are not inferior, just different.33
Notes: