ŠUM#17

Subset of Theoretical Practice

ATLAS
OF
EXPERI
MENTAL
 POLITIC
S
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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

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.
 I. TOOLS FOR NAVIGATION

This contribution is the result of a research project that has progressed

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 prescriptions to
be followed, but spatially—by which we mean that our practical goal
is to enlarge spaces of mutual intelligibility on the Left. This spatial
theme also extends more broadly to a shift from critique to
experimentation, from unearthing the conditions of possibility of what
exists to the concern of exploring new possibilities, as the proposed
perspective 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 mathematics 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.

1. 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 consistently 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
eruptive-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
within1—but expanding on this idea we want to see problems of
political 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 multilayered 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 reciprocity (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 necessitates
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.
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
community, 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
tensions 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.

2. 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 intelligibility, composition and interaction simultaneousl
y (IV). Different social worlds treat each of the three standpoints
differently: communities 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
unfurling 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 others—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 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
externalities 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
connected 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 interaction allows us to investigate and in particular
expand our conceptions of what is possible within a logical space.
Social worlds being complicated and non-classical means that political
strategy needs to expand its conceptions of intervention beyond the
tried duality of horizontal vs vertical organization.2 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.
We claim that when this triadic standpoint is applied all at once to a
real situation, one gets the experimental language of that
situation. 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 standpoint 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).

3. 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 composition-intelligibility-interaction triad that tell
us something about how situated political experiments can learn about
their own social environment—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 structure
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 finding
which objects appear as indistinguishable within it—recall the
“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 contextually
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 apparent. 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.

4. 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.3 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
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 phenomenology 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
employees 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
representation) is completely determined by its relations with other
social forms.

SLICING/SCALING

We recall that social worlds are always infinite—in fact inaccessibly

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 slicing. 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
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
experimentation 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 demonstrates
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
“differences 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 Alexandre
Grothendieck,4 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.
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 globally
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.5 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 methodologically
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).

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 structure 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
consider 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 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.6
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 redistribution, 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 household, further expanded into settlements (composed
of households) and 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 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, 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 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
“mutuality 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
socialist 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 his theory—to the point that mode D is not even
included in his theory 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 concrete
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 transcendental
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
theoreticians—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 mode D
as a means to derive the historical basis and logic of emancipatory
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 reduction” that Karatani writes about effectively takes
place. In short, the complex structure of capitalist social formations—
defined by the interdependence of modes A, B and C under the
domination of the third one—appears to us as composed of different
logics because the political 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 organizational point of view of
tektology suggests that it is through the concrete 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
composed in a mixed way, we can easily discern political movements
that have centered their struggles against forms of
communitarian segregation, 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 perpetual 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 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
“borromean 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:7
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:
First of all, note that the central object K marks the dominance of the
transcendental layer TC 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 written 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 discernible from the standpoint
of TA or TB.
Further note that the arrows from TA, TB and TC inform the central
object K, while this central structure then gets partitioned to produce
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 starting points
—TA, TB and TC—which are responsible for composing the concrete
social formation. If we reject Karatani’s subjective phenomenology,
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 of
“objective phenomenology” (I)—which starts from the following
materialist claim: objects of a world are not constituted for a
transcendental 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 sovereignty—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.

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

correspond 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 heterogeneous 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:

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
underdetermined class of all possible political processes which might
navigate this social formation and explore its structure by challenging
its consistency through situated experiments. Unlike Karatani’s mode
D, the internal consistency and form of Org is not transcendentally
guaranteed: 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 formation 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 diagram 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.

III. THE COMMUNIST STANDPOINT

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
—Wallace Stevens

It is quite striking that the definition of “the communists” in

the Manifesto of the Communist Party8 is mostly a negative
one. In the famous second section, which begins by asking “in what
relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?”,
Marx and Engels go on to state that communists “do not form a
separate party”, they “do not set up any sectarian principles of their
own”, their immediate aim “is the same as that of all other proletarian
parties” and that, in their theory, they “merely express, in general
terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle”.
Their sole positive feature seems to be a concern with the connection
between different fronts of proletarian struggle: communists “point
out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire
proletariat” and they “always and everywhere represent the interests of
the movement as a whole”.
What is particularly telling here is that communists are not singled out
in the Manifesto as those who fight in the name of a future
communist society. It is true that they also say that “the theory of the
Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: abolition of
private property”, but the stress here actually falls on the opposition
between the fight for the abolition of “property generally”—a fight
which could distinguish communists from other political actors, but
only as an abstract principle, removed from “the historical movement
going on under our very eyes”—and the fight against
“bourgeois property”—which expresses the aims of the proletarian
struggle under concrete capitalist conditions. To state that the
communist doctrine is the abolition of private property is, in fact, to
restate, within the historical conjuncture of 1848, that communists do
not have a separate and distinguishable doctrine at all.
Seen from this perspective, the “common” in communism does not
refer primarily to some positive trait of a new and desirable social
system—called “communism”—but rather to a strategic position
which, immersed in different political struggles, constantly seeks to
unearth the “common interests” between them in view of the
“formation of the proletariat into a class”. We could say communists
are those who treat the common parts of different struggles as sites at
which these processes could be “stitched together” into something
larger, a global standpoint. And this, in fact, allows us to propose an
inverse reading of Marx and Engels’ initial question regarding the
relation between communists and the proletariat as a whole: one can
only stand in relation to “the proletariat as a whole” by first actively
weaving together the common parts of its scattered existence.
Between the time of the Manifesto and the present, however, the
world has changed dramatically—and with it the scope and form of
the challenges faced by communists everywhere. Capitalism has not
only become an increasingly complex and multifaceted social system,
proving itself capable of integrating the most intense social conflicts
and economic crises into its functioning, but the sheer scale of this
social machinery has produced irreversible consequences at the
planetary level, taking us into a new geological age called the
Anthropocene (VIII). At the same time, many of the social tendencies
associated with industrialization and the expansion of capitalist social
form, which previously seemed to progressively imprint similar traits
on the proletariat around the globe, have shown their limits, and gave
way to hybrid organizational forms where great social heterogeneity
coexists with the most advanced forms of capital valorization (XVI).
The fractured spaces of peripheral or “underdeveloped” capitalist
nations no longer represent the accidental or transitional phase of
capitalism towards more “developed” forms, but rather anticipate
crucial traits of the general form that “crisis capitalism” seems to
acquire.
If the communists of the past could trust that the reproduction and
expansion of capitalist social forms also required that a certain
experience of exploitation be equally universalized—and, with it, a
shared social experience of discontent in the working class
everywhere—it now seems that capital can adapt to an increasingly
fractured social space, leaving us with no unified or converging
historical tendencies to rely upon. It is a rather paradoxical
predicament: the planetary expansion of capitalism has encompassed
all of us and—for that very reason—made it clearer than ever
how incommensurate our different experiences of this global
subsumption really are.
The twentieth century, trapped in between the time of
the Manifesto and ours, had to come to terms with these structural
transformations. It is a century that offered us so much in terms of
tools, strategies, theories and examples of both victorious and failed
political experiments, all of which respond, in some way or another, to
the “uneven and combined” propagation of these shifting social
conditions. The very heterogeneity of these accumulated results attests
to the paradoxical feature of contemporary capitalism we pointed out
before: not only has the 20th century witnessed how political
organizations tend to differentiate and distinguish themselves through
repetitive cycles of splits, divergences and dissolutions, but it has also
become increasingly clear that different traditions of leftist thinking
have consolidated into partially autonomous strands, dividing relevant
historical sequences, political ideas and strategies into distinct and
sometimes highly conflicting forms of political practice and discourse.
One might conclude from this correlation between our historical
moment and the current state of the Left that emancipatory struggles
today are simply caught up in the general dynamic of late capitalist
societies, but a more generous—and useful—approach is also
possible. After all, if it weren’t for the radical pluralization of political
discourses and practices, could we ever have learned just how
complex our social world has truly become? (XIII) Has it not
been through the increasing complexity of the proletarian struggle
and the ensuing difficulty to recognize its common ground that we
have acquired our current means to name and think our dire
predicament? (XVI) Before we ever come to trust the “sociological”
diagnoses of our supposed impotence—so eager to interpret this
plurality in terms of some “postmodern” dispersion, of our supposed
fascination with “identity politics” etc.—we must ask where did
sociologists find the conceptual tools to make these assessments and
to maintain their expectations that politics could offer something else.
More often than not, the answer to this question will intercept the
history of some previous political process (XV).
What does seem to be missing from political life today, if we remain
committed to the communist point of view presented in
the Manifesto, is rather the concrete and strategic means to
construct common parts and resources from these different fronts
of struggle.
If one were to consider this challenge in the abstract—as a problem
for thinkers and writers, who should take into consideration the wealth
of diverse political experiences when talking about politics—then it
might seem like the academic setting would already be well suited to
deal with this problem. But the organizational infrastructure which
guarantees the production and circulation of academic courses,
teaching positions, books and articles is quite separate from the
political processes that are written about and analysed, and very little
in this system actually contributes to the effective connection between
these collective endeavours. And here we face the other side of our
paradox: never before has it been so easy to find information about all
sorts of leftist political movements and ideas, but the very abundance
of this content has revealed just how incapable we are of filtering
through this material in order to inform our political practice and
stitch together different ongoing political processes.
From a communist perspective, the task of “representing the interests
of the proletariat as a whole” cannot be confused with that of an
encyclopaedic representation of different struggles and ideas, removed
from actual political life and cast into academic debates. But neither
can it be treated as a simple matter of refining the current tools of
Marxism in order to better grasp the underlying social tendencies and
structural opportunities of contemporary capitalism. In the time of
Marx and Engels, the “critique of political economy” was just starting
to show itself as a powerful analytic tool: not only was
Marx’s Capital conditioned by the collective political experience of
workers and political militants, it also taught later generations, in
Europe as elsewhere, a new way to see the capitalist world. Marx’s
work showed itself to be so politically valuable because it helped us to
look beyond the immediate surface of different conjunctures and
recognize common forms of exploitation—and through this, common
forms of struggle, new ways of evaluating our successes and our
defeats. It simultaneously organized a rich political experience, shed
new light on our social world and pointed towards long-term
tendencies that could facilitate the development of a communist
strategy.
It is interesting to consider that, as the life-world of developed
countries began to disintegrate in the 1970s and the contemporary
conditions of crisis capitalism expanded from the periphery towards
the center, the Marxist framework also dissolved into two separate and
quite antagonistic fields. On the one hand, concrete political strategy
crept further and further away from historically established forms of
struggle, such as trade unions and communist parties, while on the
other, the tools for abstract analysis of the capitalist world seemed to
rely more and more on philosophical debates rather than “scientific”
economic analyses. Even though this predicament suggests a very
extreme polarization between the concrete dispersion of political
forms and the excessively abstract and effortless description of what
these have in common, we should nevertheless avoid, once more,
reducing it to some ideological deviation or cooptation. People will
organize themselves and think through their predicaments with
whatever tools they have at their disposal (VI). If Marxism is
powerful—and it is—then not only should it have the means
to understand how it became outdated, but it should also trust
that its claims to truth will be rediscovered as many
times as necessary, within all sorts of political processes.
In this sense, rather than concern ourselves with convincing others of
the contemporary relevance of Marxism, we should rather work
towards helping autonomous and heterogeneous political movements
to repeat today what Marxism was previously able to accomplish in
another historical juncture: to actively explore the social world, to
learn about its structure by confronting it in whatever ways we can,
synthesizing the different and sometimes conflicting results of these
experiments into a common political resource (V). A communist
strategy, in this sense, doesn’t require a theory of what is to be done,
or of how this should be accomplished—not even a precise theory of
what the current world is really like. Rather, what we require are the
concrete organizational means to make political processes
appear to one another (I, IV).
A “communist phenomenology” is therefore not primarily directed at
our individual sensibility, at educating how we see and think: it should
rather focus on understanding what sorts of collective mechanisms
and organizational processes could help us shift our perspective away
from how politics appears to us—which inevitably distorts the space
of actual struggles, leading us to mostly recognize the political value
of processes that relate to our own particular situations—towards the
way these processes might interact, compose and intensify one
another. In other words, to shift our perspective towards how politics
appears in the interior of a communist world.
Evidently, this does not mean that political victory is reducible to a
mere shift in perspective—no matter how materially grounded this
shift might be—but that this addition to our militant “tool kit” could
actually help us tell victories and failures apart—as well as useless
failures and useful ones. As it was already implicit in
the Communist Manifesto, a “communist world”—the standpoint
of the movement “as a whole”— is not what comes after capitalism,
but rather our own real and present conjuncture, illuminated by the
common part of infinite struggles.

IV. TEKTOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL

TRINITARIANISM: COMPOSITION,
INTERACTION, INTELLIGIBILITY
In this section we will explore a current of materialist thought that is
linked to Marxism and has, for a long time, remained invisible even
though it offers a common thread that can connect a series of theories
and philosophical positions that are seemingly very different from
each other. Tektology, the ambitious project of a “universal science
of organizations”, proposed by the Soviet thinker Alexander
Bogdanov in the early 20th century, remained until very recently
buried under the history and political conflicts of the October
Revolution: reduced to a caricature by Lenin in his Materialism
and Empirio-criticism. Bogdanov’s philosophical approach was
gradually pushed to the margins after the revolution, as the
philosopher himself also lost the significant political and theoretical
role that he had previously played as a Bolshevik. When his ideas
were finally rediscovered in the 1970s, Bogdanov was celebrated as
one of the forerunners of cybernetics and complex systems theory—
since tektology anticipated the ideas of system and environment,
feedback loops and dynamic stability—but the political valence of his
project, as well as the intrinsic connection between his political
engagement and his ideas, remained obscure for a long time.
In recent decades, however, a new interest in tektology has emerged,
this time fueled by issues that touch upon the core of Bogdanov’s
project. The emergence of the climate crisis as an unavoidable and
pressing issue on the current political agenda, for example, forces us
to formulate a new connection between science and politics, highlights
the interpenetration between the social and the natural and pushing us
to expand the field of political consideration both synchronously, to
include the entire planet and its species, and diachronically, taking
into account the consequences of policy decisions for future
generations. It was in search of “theories for the Anthropocene” that
McKenzie Wark took up Bogdanov and his project, suggesting in her
brilliant Molecular Red an innovative dialogue between his ideas
and the philosophy of Donna Haraway, and with it a new way of
updating Marxism under contemporary conditions.9 On the other
hand, the challenges of thinking about the strategic composition of
different political fronts that are heterogeneous among themselves,
issues that the fragmentation of the social world poses to left-wing
politics (III, XVI), also led to the recognition that tektology could
serve as the basis for a different approach to the political practice,
which considers individual political organizations as part of a
heterogeneous ecosystem.10

1. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND TEKTOLOGY

To understand what Bogdanov means by tektology, we must first

consider the problems that motivated it. In his Essays in
Tektology: A Universal Science of Organization, Bogdanov
contrasts the history of the means of organization—access to the
word, the mobilizing power of ideas, commands and social norms—
and the history of the relations of production of each social
formation.11 Following the Marxist precept that “it is the social being
that determines [the forms] of consciousness”, Bogdanov reconstructs
what he calls an “organizational metaphor” that traverses different
areas of life and knowledge while giving minimal form to their
content. For example, in the feudal society of lords and serfs, the logic
of command and obedience worked as a flexible and general scheme,
whereas the scientific development was still constrained by the
Aristotelian idea of a first, extra-mundane cause, capable of setting
nature in motion. In turn, European modernity, with its new
organization of production and society, introduced a new metaphor for
the self-moving system, for machinery, and an idea of nature as a
space without an exterior. And again, a particular form of coordination
and social organization, which had emerged between the 15th and
16th centuries at the intersection of engineering, mechanical science
and technical production, began to serve as a general scheme for
thought in general.
Accused of ignoring the primacy of the economic base in a social
formation, overvaluing culture, and thereby relativizing the
fundamental pillars of Marxism, Bogdanov sought, in fact, to adopt a
point of view prior to the division between social “structure” and
“superstructure” (II). For him, the organizational point of view
allowed us to look for the underlying common
ground between production—the sphere of conflicts between
productive forces and production relations—and the other spheres of
life—culture, law and forms of consciousness. And if we think about
it, this is a problem that historical materialism necessarily needs to
deal with: if social being determines consciousness, it is because both
share something in common, a transitive medium which allows
changes in the field of material reproduction to affect the ways of
thinking at a given time.
One of the main impediments to the formulation of this question in
other Marxist currents is linked to the way in which labour is often
taken as a primitive, indecomposable concept: usually, the productive
sphere is understood as the explaining criterion for all others because
it is the sphere of concrete effort, of work, and also of human
subsistence—all other areas of social life could cease to exist and we
would still exist through the sphere of work and consumption, on
which our survival depends. And since, under capitalism, the
productive and reproductive system of humanity starts to be mediated
by complex economic forms, constrained by the logic of commodity
exchange, it is in this domain that we must look for the causes and
nodal points of intervention in a social system. In short, labour usually
appears in historical materialism as a material foundation of
sociability, without which the entire social structure would collapse.
But what Bogdanov proposes is not to disregard the central role of the
productive sphere in capitalism and place it alongside the others—he
was the author of the Soviet Union’s main manual of Marxist political
economy in the 1920s and this proposal would be utterly inconsistent
with his other works. What he proposes instead is
to decompose the concept of labour and understand it as a
composite of even more fundamental operations: “The concept of
organization is hidden in the term production.” This small conceptual
modification, which opens the “black box” of the work’s concept, has
radical consequences for materialism.
The first consequence, as we’ve already anticipated, is that this allows
us to seek an answer to the problem of what the productive sphere
could have in common with other social spheres—a similar form for
organizing completely heterogeneous contents, for example—without
preventing us from admitting that in certain social formations, such as
in capitalism, the general social organization is structured in such a
way that the material reproduction of life through labour has a special
role within this complex. Another important consequence is that this
decomposition of the concept of labour dilutes a category that usually
distinguishes humanity from everything else into a more general
category: if we say, on the one hand, that both an ecosystem and a
productive process are organized; on the other, we do not say that
plants and animals “work” in the same sense that human beings work.
In other words, the organizational point of view preserves
the specific difference in organizational forms and undoes
the human exceptionalism that the category of labour carries
with it when it is considered the foundation or basis of Marxist
analysis (VIII).
In his reconstruction of the history of the relationship between social
forms and forms of consciousness, Bogdanov highlights the way in
which the main techniques of social coordination of a given epoch are
exported as general models for other areas of life. He rightly calls
these models “metaphors” because, in the movement they make out of
the space where they were invented, thereby allowing the “transfer of
methods” between different areas, these forms lose their referents and
appear as general schemes without a suitable area of application—that
is, they acquire a strictly metaphorical use. For example, the metaphor
of the machine, used by Descartes to describe the functioning of not
only certain objects but people and animals as well, was not born as a
concept of natural philosophy: it first appeared in physics,
mathematical practice and engineering, and only then did it become a
scheme of thought—a method of analysis and intervention—capable
of offering new ways of organizing vast areas of human experience.
There is therefore a process of metaphorization and generalization—
and, as Bogdanov emphasizes, in many cases this is a beneficial
process that allows us to increase our ability to recognize the world
and deal with it; but this metaphorical translation can also become
saturated and end up imposing a limited, insufficient form, which is
no longer suitable for certain phenomena or contents.
It is through this reconstruction of the relationship between social
forms and their hegemonic organizational metaphors that Bogdanov
arrived at the reason why the proletarian struggle in the 20th century
would demand a new science or a new general approach to political
thinking. For him, the technical division of labour, an essential
condition for the expansion of the capitalist economy, implied the
potential for such a radical specialization process of practices and
forms of labour, such a large heterogeneity of methods and materials
—necessary both from the point of view of extracting surplus value in
production and in the expansion of knowledge in the most diverse
areas—that this specialization and complexity would progressively
become an impediment in the political struggle of the working class.
As forms of work become specialized, creating equally specialized
and fragmented forms of consciousness and life-worlds, labour as
such would no longer be able to offer a transversal image of what
these practices and ways of life have in common, becoming a
saturated and ineffective metaphor in the unification of proletarian
political struggles (III).
By not taking labour as a primitive term, Bogdanov’s organizational
point of view was able to anticipate the possibility that forms of work
could become so different from each other that the scheme of the work
process, described by Marx at the beginning of Capital, could
eventually find its saturation as a general model of transit between
forms of thought. But if labour ceased to be a foundational category,
what could replace it? For Bogdanov, this is where tektology gains its
relevance.

2. THE PRINCIPLES OF TEKTOLOGY

Bogdanov calls “tektology”—from the Greek “tekton”, construction—
the theoretical perspective that starts from the hypothesis that the basis
of the commonality between nature, society and ideas is that they are
all organized. The universe, life, the inorganic world, as well as the
social world and human representations: in all these domains it is
possible to ask about their forms of organization, explore their
relationships, differences and similarities. He writes: “[There] does
not exist, and [there] could not exist, another point of view on life and
the universe other than the organizational perspective.”
It is important to note, however, that for tektology, it is not a matter of
critically saying that behind the mundane differences there is “the
organization”—which would be a metaphysical proposal—but rather
showing that the organizational perspective is the one that is the most
able to abstract from secondary characteristics, from what does not
contribute to the specific aspects of the phenomena being analyzed,
while preserving the particular differences that really define its proper
form. Therefore, tektology is defined neither by a form, a method or a
specific object. Instead, it proposes a determinate point of
view capable of shedding new light on any object or form,
comparing them from the perspective of their organizations. This is a
central point, and crucial in understanding what Bogdanov meant by
a universal science: universality here does not concern a common
positive content, a concept that captures a positive property present in
all cases and objects (I.3). For tektology, saying that “everything is
organizational” is trivial and doesn’t mean much. Universality is
rather the possibility of adopting a point of view from which all
differences relevant to the phenomena at stake can be preserved and
taken into account—“universal” is any perspective that
preserves as many particularities as possible, and not the
one that imposes a specific particularity on everything else.
From an ontological point of view, Bogdanov’s theory of organization
starts from two rather unique premises. First, Bogdanov argues that
“complete disorganization is a meaningless concept—in fact, it is the
same as non-being”; that is nothing is completely
unorganized, and, in a way, even the concept of “nothing” is
organized, it has connections and some structure, whereas pure
disorganization, the complete absence of connections, would be the
same as nonexistence. In other words, the distinction between
“organized” and “disorganized”, in an absolute sense, would have
ontological precedence over the philosophical distinction between
“being” and “non-being”: if there were something totally unorganized,
totally unconnected, that thing could not have physical reality, it could
not be known or imagined by us—it is because of its total
disorganization that it would be considered non-existent. And if this
distinction demarcates the field of tektology, excluding the possibility
of total disorganization, it is the second crucial conceptual marker, the
relation between activity and resistance, which determines not
only the type of organizations that exists within that field, but also the
essential corollary that there always exists multiple
organizations.
Due to the first principle of tektology, we know that organizations are
always a composite or a mixture: partially organized, partially
disorganized. Bogdanov addresses this dynamic in terms of
organizations that act and those that resist: whether we analyze the
relationship between the whole organization and its parts, consider the
interaction between different organizations, “the elements of an
organization or any complex studied from an organizational point of
view are reduced to activities and resistances”.
Here we can already begin to understand why the “labour point of
view” does not completely coincide with the organizational one—and
also why Lenin accused Bogdanov of idealism and claimed that he
abdicated from assigning a real and stable basis for knowledge. In
tektology, resistance and activity are concepts related to a given
situation: from the point of view of a given system A, we can say
that external forces B resist its actions, hinder its maintenance or
expansion; but from the opposite point of view, which takes external
environment B as a system and organization A as an alien black box,
it is organization A that resists the actions of the environment.
Through this concern with the relativity of actions, Bogdanov was
careful to prevent tektology from generalizing laws and patterns that
actually vary when we change the perspective from which we define
what is active and what is passive in a given interaction. Now, since
the point of view of labour—in the specifically political meaning of a
human activity directed towards an end, which takes nature as a means
to be transformed—already assumes that the human component is the
active and nature the passive element, it could not be accepted as a
primitive concept of tektology, since from the point of view of an
evolving ecosystem, for example, human labour might be better
understood as a resistance against the active reproduction of other
forms of life.
Tektology, therefore, treats “organization” not as a determinate
concept, but as a point of view and emphasizes the relativity
between activity and resistance, since, depending on which
perspective we adopt, what is active and what resists the activity
changes. Furthermore, the “universal science of organizations” also
proposes a mereological theory—an understanding of the possible
relationships between organizational parts and wholes—which is
extremely sophisticated and even counterintuitive, as it extends the
relativity of activity/resistance to structure itself:
The concept of “elements” in organizational science is completely
relative and conditional: it is simply the [concept] of parts into which,
considering a problem under investigation, it is necessary to
decompose an object; these parts can be as small or as big as needed,
they can be sub-dividable or not; there are no intrinsic limits to the
analysis here.
At first glance, this may appear to be a negative and underdetermined
definition—“there are no intrinsic limits”—but this is perhaps the
most complex and consequential principle in all of tektology. A
contextual concept of the parts and the whole implies that, depending
on the specific logic of interaction at stake, the same system can be
divided into different notions of locality and totality (I). The crucial
point is that this change of what counts as the “atom” of a system—its
relevant logical unit, below which two parts are indiscernible from
each other—is not essentially theoretical, it does not concern
exclusively our particular criteria of analysis but is also dependent
on the intrinsic properties of the organizations being
analyzed. The interaction between theory and a theorized system
appears here as a particular case of interaction between any two
organizations. The difference between parts and wholes in the two
organizations is defined in the context of their interaction, whether
both are “material” systems or one is a material system and the other
its idealized representation.
For example, in the act of chopping trees to make firewood, the
relevant parts of both the worker, the axe and the chunk of wood being
cut are determined by the interaction in question. Of course, we can
talk about the worker’s DNA, but such a microscopic part makes no
difference, as such, to the interaction between systems, even if it
makes a difference for us. The “effective parts” of the worker, from
the point of view of the situation (I) of what acts and what
resists this action, would perhaps be the members of the body, such as
arms, legs or torso. Likewise, the atomic structure of the wood, and
perhaps even the type of tree, makes less difference to the woodcutter
concerned with the shape and size of the blocks he needs to cut, a
factor that determines the number of pieces that he will produce. What
counts as the parts and as the whole in each organization at stake
depends on the situated interaction and it is quite possible that
theoretical analysis is one of the interacting organizations, but the
principle of mereological relativity is preserved independently of this,
as it is rather a feature of how relevant differences appear to
the interacting organizations.
That is why, as we have already stated, as soon as the possibility of
total disorganization is barred, tektology not only thinks every
organization as a mixture—partially organized and disorganized—but
also thinks every situation as being composed of multiple
organizations: even if only one system existed, the different possible
interactions between its whole and its parts would already be enough
for us to be forced to consider it as a multiple.
Another way to understand this principle is to say that tektology is a
perspective that is sensitive to organizational scales (XII, XIII):
the differentiation between parts and wholes does not only happen in
temporal terms, as in an individuation process that establishes a
distinction between the interior and the exterior of a system, but might
also establish different operating logics at different scales of the same
system, depending on the resolution at play in a given interaction.
The “mereological” relativity that Bogdanov talks about allows us to
treat the variability of relevant entities in a context as a function of
the distance between us and the object, as in a “zooming”
movement that allows us to speak of a planet as an irregular object, as
a sphere or even as a dimensionless dot, depending on the point of
view we adopt and the interacting systems relevant to the analysis in
question. Returning to the example of our woodcutter, from the point
of view of the interaction between the act of chopping firewood and
the forest’s ecosystem—which makes up a larger organizational
domain—it doesn’t make that much of a difference that the man has
arms and legs or that wood is large enough to be broken into a given
number of pieces: what counts for the ecosystem is the number
of men chopping firewood, each of them considered an
indecomposable unit, the speed of depredation etc.
We can say that these different resolutions vary according to our
interest and the theoretical framework we are in, but this is secondary:
there is really something arbitrary in the choice between focusing on
the woodcutter’s work or on its impact on the environment, but which
“difference will make a difference” in each of these points of view is
not something we can decide. It is rather something that is determined
in the actual interaction between the different systems under scrutiny,
and that would remain operative for the organizations at stake even if
we weren’t there to theorize about it.

3. COMPOSITION, INTERACTION, INTELLIGIBILITY:

THREE EXAMPLES

Consider three different collective organizations. The first is a study

group reading Marx’s Capital: it is made up of white college
students, mostly men, who meet weekly in a vacant room at their
university campus. The second is a political collective composed
mostly of black women who organize artistic interventions on the
periphery of a large Brazilian city. The third is the Central Bank of
Brazil, an autonomous federal organization responsible for
establishing the national monetary policy. Let us now ask
ourselves what each of these organizations sees (XII)—not
what their members think and perceive or what theories support their
practices, but what resistances from the environment and from
within these organizations make a difference to their existence.
The study group, for example, is composed of people who travel and
read a lot, who know many things and places from all over the world,
and who, as “Marxologists”, theorize the systemic dynamics of
capitalism, with its financial flows and forms of direct and indirect
domination. But very little makes an effective difference for the group
as such: almost no effort is needed to guarantee access to their
meeting space and—with the exception of policy changes that affect
their access to public university space—there are very few
government actions or economic fluctuations that could lead to
changes in the group’s functioning. Even though in the field of
theory these students have a representation of the social system in
which they are inserted, almost nothing of this system appears to
the study group, that is, there is almost nothing that actually resists
their activity and demands reference to these Marxist categories of
systemic domination that they are constantly debating. The existence
of the study group depends almost exclusively on the particular
affinities shared by its members—an internal personal quarrel is
perhaps more likely to ruin everything for them than an authoritarian
government.
Let us compare this situation with the case of the collective of feminist
artists, for whom maintaining a place for meetings and managing their
free time for organizing activities and artistic interventions is
extremely costly. After all, to get together, they need to assess how
much money they can invest in renting a space, balance the time of
meetings with work fatigue and family demands, and deal with an
extremely racialized social space. Even the political theory of this
collective were less elaborate than that of the small Capital study
group, this organization would still be much more sensitive to some
aspects of the social structure they are both embedded in: just consider
the potential threat that the presence of a police car at the street corner
of one of their interventions would mean to this collective—it would
make a difference even if nothing terrible were to happen—while for
the organization of revolutionary students, perhaps only the noise of a
siren disrupting their conversation would actually matter.
Let us now compare both of these organizations with the National
Central Bank. Both the study group and the collective of artists
perceive signs of extremely localized environments: their “higher”
political ambitions, which situate these organizations in a broader
social space, exist almost exclusively in the “heads” of the
participants, as representational systems, ethical directives—if we
“zoom out”, both organizations become indistinct and actually
become indistinguishable from most organizations that compose civil
society (I.4). In the case of the Central Bank, on the other hand,
fluctuations in foreign exchange, wars in other faraway countries,
national unemployment rates and even the way a president phrases
something in a media appearance can all make a difference, forcing
the Bank to react to these situations in this or that way, even if none of
the economists and members of the institution have a good theory of
how their social world works. This is not to say that the Bank sees
everything, on the contrary: while these more “global” differences
affect the institution, personal, racial and gender relations—more
present in the other organizations we considered—can be “smoothed
out” by the Bank’s hierarchical structure and by the excessive
presence of white men of the same social class, whose material
reproduction is so assured that hardly any disturbance in their lives
could threaten the Bank’s existence.
These examples are simple, but nothing stops us from extending our
analysis to more complex organizations and asking how the world
appears to indigenous tribes, social movements, companies and
international organizations with headquarters across the globe. Or,
inversely, we could ask what sort of organizational ecology would be
necessary for climate change to effectively appear—after all, to
become sensible to something, an appropriate “organ” needs to exist
or be constructed.
What we really want to demonstrate with these initial examples is
rather how the composition of an organization affects its modes
of interaction with the environment and, through the resistances
that ensue, what can become intelligible to it (I.2). In this way,
tektology proposes a tight knot between social composition, political
strategy and epistemic power.

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 context.
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
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 conception
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
vehicles requires addressing each of the terms in the triad
composition-interaction-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. 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 difficulty 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
interaction 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.12 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
movement from a standpoint external to that movement’s struggle are
generally 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 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, presumes 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 homogeneity 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 dominance, 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.13 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.
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
organizing 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”, “reformist” 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 organizational 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
investigations 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 intervention. 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 standpoint” (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
heterogeneous landscape. In our formal jargon, every “mapping” from
a global perspective into a local context presupposes a “lifting” of that
context, which allows us to think about the conditions for the
coherence 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 speaking, 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 struggle 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
interacting 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.14 By viewing the passage 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 maintaining
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
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.15 Embarking on such shared infrastructure projects would
already produce effects in the organizational space without the
requirement that different movements 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.16 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 neutrality.
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).

VI. THE DISCIPLINE OF POLITICS

An important aspect of this project is that it is motivated by a different
approach to phenomenology and politics. In this section, we try to knit
together the phenomenology of politics from the standpoint of the
theory of the discipline. This theory condenses many important
theoretical tools that Alain Badiou developed throughout his long
encounter with various philosophical and political milieus from the
mid-1960s to mid-1980s when he wrote his magnum opus Being
and Event. Through this vast terrain, Badiou has expressed
seemingly different commitments: from logic and epistemology of
science in the late 1960s to politics during the 1970s to ontology and
mathematics in the 1980s, which has continued to this time. However,
a close reading of his major works during this period reveals, we
think, an internal thread of thought that runs between them, which we
have named discipline. In other words, discipline is the framework
within which we can reconstruct Badiou’s main ideas as part of
continuous work (during the said period), that not only reveals the
internal coherence of his overall thought over the course of time
within which he showed different and seemingly unrelated
commitments, but also gives us a powerful tool to understand key
concepts in his philosophy, such as the procedures of truths, ontology,
phenomenology and his commitment to axiomatic thinking.

1. ALAIN BADIOU AND THE THEORY OF DISCIPLINES

The main motivation for the theory of discipline resides in Badiou’s

desire to answer the following question: if there are forms of human
inquiries that we can call thinking, what are the conditions in which
these forms can acquire maximality? What are the conditions in
which the solutions to particular impasses might appear as
a restriction on the space of what we can actually think and
conceive? We think this is the motivation that has led Badiou
throughout his career, as a logician, as a political thinker, as a militant
and as a philosopher. In other words, Badiou’s encounter with various
subject matters has always been from the point of view of examining
whether the subject matter in question struggles with any internal or
external commitments that suture them to avowed or un-avowed
presuppositions. Badiou’s category of truth should be placed within
such a context. For Badiou, truth is that point where a subject matter,
which we call a discipline, is pushed beyond its own point of impasse.
This impasse, on closer examination, is always caused by the subject
matter being sutured to explicit or implicit presuppositions.
Badiou’s answer to this is very simple: de-suture from opinion. How
do we know that thought is able to de-suture from opinion? Because
mathematics exists! Mathematics is the singular form of thought that
has been able to rupture with doxa. So, the effective, historical,
independent existence of mathematics provides a paradigm for the
possibility of being able to de-suture from opinion. This constitutes
Badiou’s philosophical program for our time: a return to classicism,
and in particular to Plato, and the essence of this return is to re-
establish mathematics as the paradigm of thinking for philosophy. In
effect, in Badiou’s estimation, we are still living in the Romantic era,
in the era of the poets, inaugurated by Hegel. The mark of this era is
precisely the banishment of mathematics as the paradigm for thinking
and its replacement with the poem. Under the reign of the poets, we
are no longer eternal, but mortals bound to finitude. The gravest
consequence of the banishment of mathematics is the banishment of
the category of infinite as the basis of our thinking.
For Badiou, thinking maximally is possible only if first and foremost
we are committed to the infinite. In that sense, all forms of genuine
thinking occur with this commitment in place, even if philosophy may
operate differently and under the dominance of the finite, as it does
today. Discipline is our way of formalizing the thinking that
distinguishes itself by such a commitment. In our view, a discipline,
that is, a space within which pure thinking becomes actual, the
commitment to the infinite happens in three concomitant and
compossible dimensions.
First is the dimension that determines the space of thinking with no
reference to its exterior. There is the inside of the discipline but there
is no outside. Hence, the discipline is not defined by what is exterior
to it, because the discipline does not recognize its exterior as
something that exists. We called this dimension of the discipline
its interiority. A discipline is defined by an interiority that does not
have exteriority, or in Lacan’s language, the Other of the discipline
is extimate.
Second, a discipline does not begin according to a principle or ground.
While disciplines do not recognize anything external to themselves,
they are able to recognize each other. Hence, they carve out a space of
operations for themselves. Such a space is not created at the expense
of other disciplines, but is born anew by the discipline itself. We think
this takes place when thought operates in an axiomatic register.
Axioms are precisely the presuppositions that are avowed. They are
generalities, not generalizations. In that sense, while they are
independent of each other, and one does not provide a ground for the
other, together they create a space for thinking that is groundless and
principle free. We call this dimension of the discipline
its beginning. According to this dimension, all disciplines are
axiomatic forms of thinking. Axioms have emerged in order to make
possible thinking in its interiority.
Third, disciplines progress. They advance when they are challenged
by impasses they can formulate in their internal language. Disciplines
are historical sites, which means they are evental. As per Gödel, the
“real” of any sufficiently complex axiomatic system is that it is
possible to build statements (known as Gödel statements) that are
undecidable within that system. Mathematics teaches us that it is
around these points (the undecidable statements) that a revolution in a
discipline usually takes place. A great example of this is the famous
Continuum Hypothesis. We call the tendency in disciplines to push
beyond their points of undecidability and towards the maximality of
thinking the novelty of disciplines. These three dimensions of
disciplines, their beginning, interiority and novelty, are concomitant
and compossible, and the condition of their possibility is the
commitment to the infinite.
Disciplinary thinking is akin to dialectical thinking in that both carve
out a space for thinking as an interiority. Dialectical thinking is also
only concerned with the interiority of the One, with unfolding
discontinuities within a coherent logical space. But for the discipline,
there is no One other than the closure of a space of operations that is
circumscribed by its axioms—it is not dependent on some initial
ground or fundamental derivation of its logic. Disciplinary thinking is
also akin to dialectics in the dimension of novelty. Dialectics is never
the result of supplementation from outside. However, unlike
dialectical thinking, novelty is not the result of the sublation of two to
one. It always begins with the One of the discipline and splits this into
what the discipline discerns and in-discerns about itself. It is precisely
within the category of novelty and the orientation towards what is
possible that the discipline manifests its character as a wholly
subjective process without an object. Within the theory of discipline,
the subjective is an index to the dimension of novelty.
The dimension of beginning is where discipline is most different from
dialectics. Thinking the beginning presents an inherent discontinuity
because this thinking must perform an irremediable break from the
sovereignty of doxa, one that is more akin to producing
creative hypotheses and critical interventions. Axiomatic
thinking is the only mode of thinking proper to this violent
discontinuity; it is the only mode of thought that makes its own
presuppositions explicit—rather than the presuppositions of the doxa.
The axiomatic set theory provides a way of thinking the dialectic of
universal and particular through generalities rather than
generalization.17 The relation between the particular and the universal
has usually been thought through generalization: the particular was
thinkable by being categorized under the universal. In contrast,
axiomatic thinking approaches a situation through a set of generalities
(axioms) whose deductive power allows us to show what makes a
situation thinkable. If the particular is unthinkable according to the
system of sentences drawn from given axioms, then we add a new
axiom which is consistent with the others so that this particular
becomes thinkable. Moreover, by relying on ideas rather than ideals,
we can experiment with the formal system directly, even in advance of
the demands of the real; the real of the formal system is its own
consistency. This form of deductive reasoning is impossible under the
regime of generalization, since generalizations are related to one
another (and ultimately derived from a super-genre), whereas
generalities are independent of one another. On the other hand, the
dialectic is generally ambivalent to what it begins with, and is
therefore susceptible to generalization and requires a fixed foundation.
As a result, dialectical thinking appears as a region or restriction of
disciplinary thinking.
A formal system is part of every discipline. But since the discipline is
a homogeneous region of thought, every part of this region can think
its other parts. The best example of this is mathematics. A region of
mathematics, say geometry, can be the object of formalization for
another part, such as algebra, according to which the latter part can
think (i.e. formalize) the former part. But by no means does this
permanently fixate one part as the object and the other part as the
subject since geometry can equally formalize algebra. In model
theoretical language parts of a discipline can act as both a formal
system and the model for a formal system. The disciplinary practice
gains huge insights about its parts, and ultimately the discipline as a
whole, by being able to think a part through another part of the
discipline. This means that through disciplinary theories “about” a
discipline, the discipline produces more of its own. This becomes
clearer when a discipline is compared to a discourse. Discourses, for
example, the philosophy of science, have disciplines, such as science,
as their subject but do not produce, nor claim to produce, disciplinary
theories themselves. In all their forms, discourses attempt to find from
outside of a given discipline the unifying principle according to which
the discipline can be defined and organized. Discourses, in that sense,
are transcendental to the disciplines they study. In contrast, the
assertions that a discipline produces about itself are part of the
discipline itself. Discipline is immanence. It embeds what it thinks.
Disciplines are also highly experimental. What constitutes the so-
called “objects” of a disciplinary practice are elements of the model
that satisfies the propositions of a formal system. But recall that what
is now a model for a formal system could later be a formal system in
its own right. In this sense, a discipline does not distinguish between
subject and object. The experimentality of disciplines also stems from
this character. The set of propositions that constitute a formal system
always refers to a set. That is, the sentences within that system always
seek interpretations within sets of objects of different kinds. The fact
that sentences of a formal system require interpretation implies that
those sentences are not universally valid or invalid in the same way
that logical sentences are. This means that in the last instance, those
sentences are axiomatic in nature; they are produced according to
decisions that are not based on some prior self-evident principles.
However, the opposite of this is also true: every axiomatic system
requires a structure for its interpretation. This points to an
extraordinary experimental vocation of formalism, and in that sense
the material structures, from machines to laboratories, are thoroughly
formal. The experimental nature of disciplines is due to their
axiomatic nature. Axioms are responsible for the rigorous
experimental protocol of formal systems.
The axiomatic nature of disciplines makes them evental. There are
conditions under which formal systems contained in a discipline clash
with each other and with the discipline’s founding axioms. This is a
mathematical certainty. It is under those circumstances that a
discipline is subjectivized. It thinks its own foundation and through
this, under certain conditions, it expands those foundations to open up
new territories for its thinking. For this subjectivation, a substantial
part of the body of a discipline (from theories to models and
practitioners, to pens and papers, to signs and syntagmas) must be
activated towards the new possibilities that lie around the discipline’s
evental site—what points towards a new existence that was not there.
If enough of the discipline’s body is activated in this way, then the
discipline can redefine itself to expand its territory and to absorb the
new possibilities into its domain. The discipline thus expands. But
prior to this, from a logical standpoint, the condition for this
subjectivation is precisely the practice within a discipline by which
parts of a discipline appear and are interpreted by other parts of a
discipline. That is, prior to any subjectivation, and as its logical
condition, there is an objective phenomenology that is in effect, and
which constitutes “the life” of a discipline.
 2. SYLVAIN LAZARUS AND POLITICAL THINKING

Mathematics and science are prime instances of disciplines. But in our

view, Sylvain Lazarus was the first serious political theoretician that
thought of politics in a register tremendously close to what we have
termed here a discipline. His ideas have also greatly influenced
Badiou and, we believe, it greatly motivated him to consider politics
as one of the four procedures of truth.
In Anthropology of the Name, Lazarus presents politics as an
engagement without an object (e.g. State, revolution, class); it is
(purely) subjective and (purely) thought. Lazarus captures this
interiority of politics in two propositions that are tightly concomitant
and compossible: “People think” and “Thought is a relation of the
real”. Together, these two propositions circumscribe a space for
politics as pure immanence, designating a space of subjectivization
with no object. The statement “People think” designates that politics is
of the order of thought; there is thinking that is carried out by people.
Unlike political science according to which only the sociologist
thinks, or classical political theory where only the party thinks,
politics postulates that people carry out the thinking. The term
“people” has such a minimum determination that, in fact, this
statement effectively means that “there is thinking”.
The second statement, “Thought is a relation of the real”, designates
the non-objective aspect of politics. Thought is a relation “of” and not
“to the real”, because a relation “to the real” would make the real into
an object for thought, and politics has no object. In this manner,
Lazarus emphasizes that the order of thought (“People think”) exists
in the real. It is of further interest to note the curious title of Lazarus’
book. Lazarus chose “anthropology” over (for example) “science” due
to the investigative aspect of anthropology, which according to
Lazarus is not bound to an external object. Sciences are objective
because they relate to something that is not interior to their thinking.
Therefore, the choice of anthropology as against science emphasizes
the non-objective nature of the theory that demonstrates politics as
interiority. But what about the other part of the title: what does “the
name” nominate? Why not “anthropology of politics”? The latter title
would suggest that politics is the name of something that is under
investigation. However, according to Lazarus, politics is an
unnameable name, because true politics is singular, and something
that is singular and interior is unnameable. Something cannot name
itself from within itself. Naming politics would require an outside to
politics that speaks about politics. Naming also indicates a more
general field of discourse that uses the name for circulation and
conceptual exchange, assignation and polysemy, which result in a de-
singularization of the name and which are properties that are
disavowed by this theory of politics. This theory speaks to politics
from inside the thinking of politics, from where politics itself is
unnameable. Hence, “of the name” simply designates the topic—
politics in its interiority—as an unnameable name. The other primitive
term, “thinking”, deals with the conception of consciousness; it is not
“consciousness of”, it is not a thinking about “objects”.
Consequently, “People think” does not lead to an antagonistic politics
(in which the consciousness of antagonism is the condition of partisan
politics, as was the case for Lenin). This statement is not a normative
conception of people’s thought. Lazarus’s conception of politics
rejects the terms of the party and the State; party does not have the
monopoly on thought. The statement that “politics is thought” means
that since the “place” for thinking is people, politics only occurs
among people. Secondly, politics as thought is not a thought of a
particular object. Thinking is accessible to anyone, whether in the
framework of politics at a distance from the State (politics in
interiority) or in the space of the state (politics in exteriority). This
statement legitimizes politics in interiority and in exteriority. But the
interiority of politics means that it does not begin with an antagonism.
Lazarus refers to the capacity of politics to begin from itself, from its
own “singularity”. The politics of interiority focuses on the
qualification of adversaries and not a division of the real into friends
and enemies. That which is “possible” as a result of the very structure
of the interiority of politics, which is stated axiomatically as “People
think”. This statement dictates the very method of engagement as an
unprescribed inquiry. The inquiry’s status as unprescribed, not
informed by predetermined notions allows the attentive engagement
with thinking that takes place among people. This structural grammar
equals the word “possible” in Lazarus’s system. “Subjective” in this
sense is not understood as the cogito, but as a process through which
a discipline is capable of producing novelty from within its own
conditions of being/thinking. This, in my view, captures Lazarus’s
requirement for politics to be thought through the categories, concepts
and notions that it creates itself; stated axiomatically, “politics is
thinking”. But who thinks politics? Politics itself thinks its own proper
content. In this sense, “Politics thinks” and “People think” are
equivalent statements.

3. EXPERIMENTAL POLITICS AS A POLITICAL

DISCIPLINE

Our project of political phenomenology is informed by the same

approach. As covered in other sections (I, II), our formalization
leverages a powerful set of conceptual tools which we believe have
allowed us to construct a grammar for political thinking which invites
us to consider it as an autonomous discipline. First, our project
distinguishes politics as an interiority and holds that, similar to
mathematics, politics can be the model for its own
formalization (V). In that sense, it tries to theorize political practice
from within the practice of politics itself. The key to this theorization
is Alexander Bogdanov’s concept of the organizational point of
view (IV). We use Bogdanov’s concept to establish a general
framework for an emancipatory political thinking in which the
distinction between political economy and political action can be
treated as a matter of specifying the types and structures of the
organizations at stake—in other words, it becomes a matter
of restrictions of a framework that was conceived to allow for
maximality.
To this overarching approach, we added Kojin Karatani’s
“transcendental” theory of the historical formation of social modes
(II). That is, we redescribed, from the organizational point of view,
the different transcendental logics proposed by Karatani, where
different articulations compose specific social formations.
Looking at this from the model-theoretic perspective, once we have
established a homogeneity between concrete political processes and
this more general social space—abstractly described by Karatani’s
“modes of intercourse”—we have the means to study, without
overdetermining their actual form, how political experiments can
serve as miniatures for the social universes they are embedded in (V).
This allows us to advance in the understanding of politics as a form of
thought, as an experimental practice that manages to extract new
information about what is politically possible in social reality.
In the dimension of beginning, we can name three axioms that inform
Bogdanov’s theory of organization (IV), which are not empirically
derived, nor are they critical assessments, but attempts at occupying
the most general point of view possible:
 Axiom of organization: everything that exists has some
level of organization. There is no such a thing as absolute
disorganization. Anything that is absolutely disorganized will
not be known.
 Axiom of multiplicity of organizations: there is more
than one organization. There is not just one organization. At the
very minimum, organization differentiates what is part from
what is whole, which are different organizations.
 Axiom of relativity of action: activity and resistance are
relative. If an organization is divisible into parts and wholes,
that means each of these is already organized. In their
interaction the relation can be shifted such that what was active
and what was resistant are reversed. This applies to internal
mereology, two or more organizations, and to organizations and
their environment.
In the dimension of novelty, we recognize the discipline of politics—
which is composed of the reflexive modeling of social reality through
political experiments—as a process that explores “evental sites” in
real social situations (I).
It is worth mentioning that Badiou’s concept of a site is expanded in
our project, through our account of complex, multilayered
transcendentals, and functions as an index to what is implicated by a
given social world’s material consistency but remains “below a
resolution” that would allow it to appear therein. Given our
commitment to Karatani’s theory of articulated modes, our
correspondent theory of sites is also further complexified, and we can
admit the possibility that there might be partial sites formed in one
layer, but not in others, as well as global sites that only exist at the
level of the complex construction itself.
By borrowing from the discipline of science, we also enriched the
concept of the generic procedure with a new consideration of the idea
of political experiments (V, XII). Politics becomes here the
experimentation with socially existents that are below that certain
resolution, and, as experiments, these interventions and collective
inventions are required to connect these experiences one to another if
they are to compose the thinking of politics as a discipline.
By embedding the problem of connection between experiments into
our view of the communist hypothesis, an interesting new approach to
the “socialist transition” problem emerges, as it becomes possible to
distinguish between political interventions in a capitalist world and a
communist world in which some capitalist enterprises still exist in
terms of the size and scale of the network of connections between
organizational experiments.
In continuation with Badiou and Lazarus, we do seek to affirm the
autonomy of political thinking; but, unlike them, we claim that this
very affirmation belongs to the interior of the political realm and
constitutes the basic task of a communist strategy (III). Curiously, by
immersing the point of view of this abstract affirmation back into
political practice, we are suddenly less dependent on always treating
political processes as locally situated—as if this was their distinctive
marker from idealist or philosophical discourse—and can venture
treating politics as a discipline that includes problems of social
coordination, political economy and global strategies.

VII. ON POLITICAL FETISHISM

As it is the case with economic phenomena (XI), political phenomena
also are not directly given to us. There are in the world only “political
effects”—and as is the case with commodities, in order to make the
logic of power relations intelligible, we must understand how political
entities appear to one another (I). There is an important difference,
however. If the economic realm is oriented by the relations between
commodities according to which we can map relations between
persons (that is, the exchangers of commodities), in political relations
it is the relations between persons themselves that an objective
phenomenology must take into consideration (as well as the relations
between persons and things in the relations between persons). This
creates a problem for the definition of fetishism. If economic fetishism
is characterized by the “the way relations between commodities
appear for us” instead of “the way relations between commodities
appear to themselves”, what happens when persons are the entities
whose relations are being analyzed?
For Marx, fetishism names a double process involving
the personification of objects and the naturalization of social
attributes. In simple terms, it is by the naturalization of social
attributes that objects can appear as persons—that is, imbued with
autonomy, will, desire etc. Marx attributes the personification of
commodities to the “mysterious character of the commodity-form”,
which consists simply in the fact that “the commodity reflects the
social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics
of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of
these things”.18 It is because a social relation is “naturalized” (i.e.
appears as a natural property) that the object of the relation can be
personified (i.e. appears as having human-like attributes). This process
is not simply a misperception. Commodities do in fact embody a
whole economic system in their objective values, but they do so only
in the actual exchange relations we bring them to. From this private
standpoint they really have value—one cannot demystify anything,
only choose to proceed with the exchange or not in a given situation—
but only because there is a network of relations connecting the values
of the whole world of commodities. It is the excision of the
commodity out of the network of its relations in the act of potential
exchange that produces the fetishistic effect.
This is because fetishism as such only exists within the interplay of a
three-level structure. First, there is the level in which commodities
relate to each other (and how they appear to each other). In this case,
there is no fetishism, it is just the way things are composed in the
more or less accidental reality of their interactions in a plane that takes
the perspective of these interactions themselves (IV). It is this realm
of commodities that, to the exchangers of commodities in the second
level, appears to function because commodities have some “sensible
supersensible” property intrinsic to them (thus erasing the network of
relations of the first level that enabled the naturalization of social
properties). This is what characterizes fetishism “in itself”, so to
speak, and involves the first shift from the perspective of the
commodity to the perspective of the exchanger of commodities. But
the exchangers, however, cannot see this perspective as fetishistic—if
it is fetishistic in itself, it is not “for itself”. The perspective that
enables us to understand fetishism as fetishism operates on the third
level, it involves a second shift of perspective that can grasp the
relation between the first two levels—between the objective and the
subjective phenomenology, we could say. It is this third perspective
that can properly give way to a “critique” and was, in fact, assumed by
Marx himself in the description of fetishism. It is not a purely external
standpoint, however, but the product of a shift from the perspective of
subjects to the perspective of objects. It was by taking the network of
commodity interactions as the object of his analysis that Marx was
able to make these relations appear as relations of domination and
provide a critique of their naturalization.
The notion of political fetishism produces a short circuit on this
schema, since objects are not necessarily mediating the process. What
must take place is that people themselves must be excised from the
realm of relations which gives them something equivalent to “value”
in order to appear to one another as having this value-like property.
When put into political terms, this value-like property is precisely
what we understand as power. Power is a paradoxical phenomenon.
If understood socially as the effective production of obedience
(“power over”), one cannot understand what enabled the relation of
power in the first place (i.e. how one can have power as an attribute
previous to the relation); if understood individually as the capacity one
has of producing effects (“power to”), one cannot explain how a
person’s power could be dependent on others (i.e. how one’s power is
never really theirs, how the attribute of power is itself relational).
Power is then always the result of a composite action that is attributed
to one of the actors involved, but this attribution is never conscious of
itself. The mystery of power is precisely how this attribution can be
autonomized into an attribute of powerfulness (XVII).
The parallel is far from arbitrary. Money, Marx interestingly claims in
the Grundrisse, is the expression of the “social connection”, of the
“reciprocal and all-sided dependence” of individuals, who carry their
“social power, as well as [their] bond with society, in [their]
pocket”.19 Kojin Karatani also puts power in a prominent position in
his analysis, showing how each of his modes of exchange works by
means of a different power. He defines power as “the ability to
compel others to obey through given communal norms”, and the
difference between forms of power proper to each mode of exchange
is based on the distinction between their “communal norms”. The
norms of Mode A are based on the laws of community, of mode B on
the laws of the State (i.e. the laws between communities or within
societies including multiple communities) and of mode C on
international law (the law regulating commercial relations between
States) (II). These norms do not themselves create power; rather, they
work because of an already existing form of power.20
When it comes to political power proper, the possibility of coercion is
key, since the two other forms are defined by its absence. The power
of the gift in mode A is marked by the absence of coercion joined with
a necessity to reciprocate. Coercion is only linked to power in mode
B, but power cannot be reduced to it. The power of the State is not
only based on its capacity to exercise violence but also in the actual
obedience against which that violence is threatened (X). Commercial
relations between States, however, are not based on the direct threat of
violence and have to rely on a third form of power, which Karatani
calls the power of money.
Money is the universal equivalent that enables the exchange of
commodities between States which has the interesting effect of taking
the form of a relationship between commodities themselves—what
Karatani calls the “social contract between commodities”. Money is a
power not because it is made so by the authority of the State but
because of the very relation between commodities (XI). The
movement is interesting because it shifts what is a collective relation
between States into an individualized relation between commodities
(slicing it in a new way), one that has the outcome of understanding
the relationship between commodities as analogous to the one
constituting the sovereign in Hobbes’ social contract. Like in the
social contract, Karatani emphasizes the volitive dimension of
commodity exchange, which always takes place by means of “mutual
consent”, and describes money as having a “right” against other
commodities and their owners due to its immediate permutability.
Karatani emphasizes the volitive dimension of mode B when he
claims that although the State was enabled by a revolution in the
technologies of warfare and political control, political rule can never
rely on sheer force alone, and that if the ruler wants to mobilize large
groups of people to work, “what is needed is a voluntary sense of
diligence”, something that commonly took a religious form. This is
crucial, for it explains a paradoxical aspect of the mode of exchange
B. As Karatani defines it, mode B results from the possibility of non-
reciprocal relations between communities, namely plunder. But in
order for a relation of plunder to be sustainable and reproduce in time,
it must turn into a reciprocal relation in which the rulers get what they
want in exchange for protection, infrastructure, public works etc. that
somehow benefit the ruled (X). This is why the establishment of the
State can be understood as a “kind of exchange in that the ruled are
granted peace and order in return for their obedience”. On the one
hand, then, we have the historical domination of a community over
another that must assume a form of exchange (protection for
obedience) in order to be politically sustainable; on the other, the
subjection to this exchange can be put in terms of a voluntary pact
between the individuals involved.
As Karatani notes, these are the two possible origins of
commonwealths presented in Hobbes’ Leviathan;21 however, as the
analysis shows, they are not simply two “types” of origins, but rather
two forms of apprehending the same origin (between communities or
between individuals, focused on coercive plunder or focused on
voluntary subjection, historical or logical). As he puts it: “To explicate
the state by starting from the individual is similar to trying to explicate
the commodity exchange by beginning with exchanges between
individuals: it amounts to projecting onto the past a view that became
seemingly self-evident only in modern society.”22 But as it is the case
with commodity exchange, this is not simply a misperception, it
reveals the fetishistic structure of power relations.
This is directly connected to the impossibility that monarchy—in this
case, a basic form of State—could arise spontaneously from a single
community: “A community grounded in the principle of reciprocity is
capable of resolving whatever contradictions arise within it through
the gift and redistribution. […] A sovereign possessing absolute
authority could never be born from this kind of situation.” In order for
something like a king to arise, it is necessary that he “originally comes
from the outside—in other words, that the sovereign arrives as a
conqueror”.23 This entails two things: on the one hand, a new king is
established in a community by means of domination and plunder, but
on the other, the king’s own power—the one he now has over his new
and his old subjects—is also constituted in the process. The king’s
conquest is a demonstration of his power, one that only exists by the
collective attribution of his capacity to conquer again. It is true, as
Marx once said, that “one man is king only because other men stand in
the relation of subjects to him”, whereas they “imagine that they are
subjects because he is king”.24 What is not true is that this is simply a
product of imagination and not the fetishistic effect of turning the
relation of domination into an attribute of power.25
What is also at play here is the double process of personification and
naturalization. The king’s power is separated from the actual relation
of domination—one that has to take into account the possible
resistances and demands of the new subjects, which also have the
“power” to make the domination non-sustainable—and is taken as the
king’s “socio-natural property”; simultaneously, what is a relation
between communities reappears as a relation between individuals who
are represented as ideal—or, better put, juridical—persons, who
willingly enter the relation of exchange between protection and
obedience based on the inequality of power between the ruler and the
ruled. This is the basic form of political fetishism, and it shows how
power can be excised from the relations constituting it and appear to
the individuals involved in the relations of power as an inherent
property of these persons.

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
centrality 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
combinations 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.

1. 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
intercourse 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 socialization through exchange, broadly construed. On the
other hand, such a broadening of the concept of exchange leads to a
novel way of picturing the social, one in which “relation[s] between
man and nature necessarily take place by way of a certain kind of
social relation between people”.26 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
metabolism (Stoffwechsel) in Marx is a device to understand the
inflection of economic forms (Formwechsel) into matter.27
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 reframes social
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.”28 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.29
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.

2. SEEING NATURE THROUGH MODES OF

INTERCOURSE

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

reciprocity towards nature, where magic serves as an example of a
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, reciprocal
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 its demand for
the other part to reciprocate, be it in gift giving or warfare, implies
precisely an oscillation that keeps the possibility of forming a
permanent hierarchy between the parts at bay.30 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. Scott31 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
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
monumental infrastructural enterprises developed in societies in which
mode B prevails.
We should note that such a framework works as a sort of low-
resolution 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 recomposing
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 irrelevant and
the mediation is carried out through equivalence. It is from 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 magnitude.
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”.32 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 natural” 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
priceable 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 network of causes and consequences, it appears rather as different
materials 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 uncontrollable natural forces, such as the water cycle, can
all be integrated into social relations of production as long as they
make a priceable difference that can be legible by any of the circuits
of value production we have mentioned in the previous sections:
industrial, usurer or merchant capital (XI).

3. 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
precipitated through mode B.33 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.34 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 natural
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
difference between the water mill and the coal-powered factory cannot
be 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 valorization, 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 consequences 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 powering 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
particular look into fossil fuels from a very narrow perspective of
mode C, but hopefully it is helpful in clarifying the way exchange
values determine use values, that is, the way the intelligibility of
matter as such is framed through value.

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON MODES, NATURE AND

ITS FIGURES

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

focusing on its material and formal aspects, hinting at some of the
consequences 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.
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
intervention 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 possibility of dwelling. In consequence, this position in
particular falls into 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.35
The planet, in a way, is the culmination of Earth’s ruthless
disenchantment 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 enterprises. 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 disappears 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 interfacing with
multiple actors under the name of Gaia. The question that remains is
to what extent it can mediate between the necessary objectification of
resource planning and reciprocity.
Crucially, just as much as these discourses on ecology have latched
into themselves certain hypotheses and normative presuppositions 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
asking the question of political organization: how do we compose
political experiments that make ecology visible not only as a separate
discipline 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 current predicament might connect to one another (V).
 IX. DUMONT IN MELANESIA

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

differently when related to the whole they compose.36 In fact,
according 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 dominant conceptual value.37 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.
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.38 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
distinction (two beings in relation: mother and child). These two
relations—unity and distinction—taken together constitute the
hierarchical relationship. 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-remission, 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 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 generating 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-
remission. 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 biological 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.39 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 ceremonial 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, since for a woman to be able to bear children, there
must be an activation 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 intercourse
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 sexual
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.40 The mother is now in the position of
producing 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 differences that make a difference in the social space.
Child-birth seen in a heteromeric relationship h: Z→ Z

X. LESSONS FROM MONGOLIAN LOGISTICS

1. THE LOGISTICAL STATE

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 Toscano41

The State is concerned with spaces—territories and bodies are

organized within a space, or rather, a space of spaces. For Lefebvre,
the state has three logical operations to carry out control over space:
homogenization, hierarchization and fragmentation42.
Homogenization and fragmentation occur as functions of the state’s
role as the regulator 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
immanent to the domain of TB itself.

1. 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, 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.
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
logistical—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 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 dominant, 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 developed 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
themselves, 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.”43
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.
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.”44
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 complex
system of allegiances or loyalties. The qirultai was the place where
these allegiances were shown (by attendance) and loyalties 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.

2. 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):
Fig. A

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.
The logistical structure of B+C is what enabled the “Mongol
exchange”45 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.
Fig. B

Fig. B 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 capacity 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
decimal 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 meticulous 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 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
redistribution of pillaged goods and later tributes. Additionally, the
accounting 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 obliterating
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.

3. 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 demonstrates 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
strategy, putting defenders in a terrible position. The Mongolian
armies were also logistically independent, relying on methods that
were cultivated 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
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 entitlement, 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
conservative 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
coordinated, 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
distribution. The kinds of problems that emerge in the field of Mode B
will also confront any economy based on free association, even in
non-traditional 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 presents 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 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 experiments
(V).

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
compatible 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).
 1. 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”46: 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 relations, 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 transitive 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
‘cigarette-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 respective 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.
Note that it is this implicative structure of equivalence, captured here
in diagrammatic form, that functions in our account as the substitute
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 disregarding other aspects of it (IV). This is not so much an
alternative conception 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 ranging 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
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
transcendental. 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
accessible 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 individual 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
measuring 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.
Note that, in our current formalism, we do not yet have an extrinsic
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 exchangeable, then some common restriction to both A and
B still preserves maximal exchangeability. As we have seen, the
possibility of determining commodity atoms based on the
homogeneity of homomeric commodities brings us closer to this. If
we have commodity A as our equivalent 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 order47 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.
 2. 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 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, commodity 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 chemical 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 bargaining 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 commodities
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
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 gluing
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 certain
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
statements 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 boundaries of what can be inferred. For now, we omit
the details for the reader to investigate further (XVIII).

3. 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 analysis.
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 commodity-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
quantitative predicate for commodities can be defined, as in
“commodity A is worth ten dollars”. Such a universal equivalent is
what we call the 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 context 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 capital48—
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 capital
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:

Merchant capital, on the other hand, does not only require an

intermediate purchase of a commodity, but also the reindexing of this
commodity 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 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.

4. LABOR-COMMODITY, PRODUCTION AND

ABSTRACTION

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

construction, we do have the means to define labor-power in terms of

a tensor ⊗, which allows us to make sense of the + operator in the

morphisms alone. First of all, we must introduce an operator, called

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

joint composition C1 ⊗ C2 takes us to C3, for example. In categorical

separate operations from C1 and C2 to C3) we want to define how a

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
product, or (2) introduced into the commodity space through an
appropriate layer-conforming operation in TA and TB—what is called
a fictive commodity. 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 consumable,
(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 reproduction
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 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
commodities it needs to reproduce this capacity come from the set of
simple consumables and are therefore exchanged for money outside
the production 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 distinction,
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 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 necessarily
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

probing 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
reconstruction 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
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 transformations 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 commodity-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 distinguish
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 restriction ‘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.

XII. REAL ABSTRACTION AND THE GIVEN

We shall explore an interesting juncture to be thought in the
crossroads of Marx’s and Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy that can
contribute 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).
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
predicament that arises from the comparison, is that if the project of
the Subset of Theoretical Practice (XVIII) intends to tackle political
experimentation 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
individual 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 necessarily 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
philosophy. If Sellars was already interested in a transcendental
materialist 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 abstraction 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).

1. 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
concept 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.
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 transmission
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 determined 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.49
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
correctly 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 object has,
it does not depend on the epistemic status of any other cognitive state.
[…] It is epistemically efficacious, that is, it can transmit
positive epistemic status to other cognitive states of ours.50
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 categorial 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.51
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 conceptualizing 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).52
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 themselves. They require the workings of the concept.
On the other hand, the idea of real abstraction as proposed within
Marxist thought eschews traditional divisions between the mental 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"53—which
amounts to a "veritable expropriation of abstract thought"54.

2. 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 consciousness 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 consciousness.
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-temporal 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.55
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
sensible 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 temporally
separated from the act of use, in the sense that during an 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, differently 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
abstractionist 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 deployment 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
subject) being located in commodity-exchange. As Anselm Jappe
presents it:
[…] the origin of the forms of consciousness (and knowledge) 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 application of the principle that it is not consciousness
that determines being, but the social being that determines
consciousness.56
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
thinking corresponds to something that remains what it is while
varying its sensible character either temporally or spatially. He
proposes a question: 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-
physical 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.57
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 subject 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 transcendental subject.
From the Sellarsian point of view, this creates a possible difficulty for
Sohn-Rethel’s account, which has to do with the form of transmission
of the real abstraction to the mind, in keeping with the dictum “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 transcendental
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.
3. “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.58
Let us make our predicament more explicit.
A) 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.
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.
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
understanding 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 compatible
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
behavior59. Patterns are not necessarily rules, but constraints that
obtain in physical and social processes. Acknowledging the pattern
turns it into rule-obeying behavior, 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 indications 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 circumscribed and measured by
work. [...] The operational scheme, constituted by the ball, by its
trajectory, by the agents as pitcher and catcher, establishes a very
elementary 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 objectified in figures such as commodities,
capital and so on.60
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 necessarily 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 movement 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 specific
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’.

4. INTUITIVE AND CONCEPTUAL LABOR

In our presentation we exposed the following problem:

A) 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 justificatory 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 between
the sensible contents (the non-problematic givenness of experience)
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.61
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 necessary 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.
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.
5. “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 weaknesses 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 construction 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.62
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
disambiguate internally between causal and justificatory chains
without thereby yielding to a form of conceptual idealism that
eschews material determinations of thought. The answer is located in
the activities of social being that nevertheless
presupposes natural being capable of conceptually 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 conceptual 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
question 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 α-particle in a
cloud chamber. Observation reports need only be reliable responses,
whatever vocabulary is used. Sellars believes that there is a special
vocabulary 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 characterizing our experience rather
than the world.63
If this project at large is waging on regionalization and the coming up
with localized frameworks wherein to think different real and
imaginary 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
problems into communist ones by expanding the worlds the
organizations inhabit through the experimental test-and-run process of
the expansion 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.64
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
regionalized account pursued here: the synchronic simultaneity of
different seeings acquired through the concrete engagement with the
organizational experiments that constitute our political 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
struggle. 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 constituted 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 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 accountable 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”.65 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 navigate 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.

1. 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”66, that is, it is a kind of orientation that
depends on knowing one’s desire (where must we go) and on
recognizing relevant markers (signs that distinguish relevant
differences in our navigation) 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-material elements,
namely projections and imaginary elaborations (concepts, 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 we want. In
this way, by serving as an interposition between the material 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
distinguishable, 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 hope67.
It is precisely at this point, when we deal with multiple dimensions,
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.

2. 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
specificity of its localization that may not be generalized. As Reed
says, “the value of this ‘situational insistence’ is that it preserves
contextual particularity and sees in this framework ways to build
better, more robust accounts of reality”.68
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-reductionist 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 inhomogeneous
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
understood 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), different 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-encompassing totality accounting for all
points of view. Consequently, we arrive at an idea of totality that is
equivocal (instead of a reductionist one).
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
uniqueness 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
coalescing 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
intentionality 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 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 specific.
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
conditions 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).

3. APPLIED TRANSCENDENTAL NAVIGATION

From this presentation of Reed’s thought we have seen that she

outlines two separate conditions necessary for navigating between
different 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 differentiating 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
scales are ranges of intelligibility relating to different sizes (for
example, we could speak of a ‘scale’ pertaining to atoms and a scale
pertaining 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 concern 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 summarized as a) a
situational insistence (the determination of ‘partial objectivities’) 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.”69 This is not, we argue, very far from Karatani’s own effort
to expand on Marxist analysis of commodity exchange through
comparison 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 hierarchized 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 navigating 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
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 domination 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 specificity
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 consequence 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 incommensurable?
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
cannot 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 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
perspective/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-encompassing 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.

4. UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS

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

framework 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 ‘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
different 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 continuity between what the subjects involved in organizing
see in order to address internal problems and what the organization
seeks to represent 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 internal 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:
 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 adaptation 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 subject.
When we account for its specificity (and it’s two-sided nature) we are
forced to ask another question:
 A political organization is composed through the organization 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):
 To further understand this problem it is necessary to
comprehend 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 organization 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).

XIV. CASE STUDY: INTERNAL DISSENT IN A

POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

All that time, he said smiling, when they thought they

were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it.
—Rachel Cusk

It must be said, however, that the problems we have discussed in the

previous section (XIII) are not purely abstract. They are problems
observed in one organization that some of us are part of,
the Instituto de Outros Estudos (Institute of Other Studies,
IOS).70 IOS is a Brazilian research institute organized by students
(from undergraduate to post-docs) that is dedicated to understanding
and helping students dealing with psychic and material academic
distress and with the increasing exclusion from the academic
community. This means that from the very beginning, we were trying
to build an environment where people could try and live out their
desire for a life in research at a moment when precariousness
increased dramatically in the support system offered by universities.
At the time of its inception this could be phrased in terms of two
additional goals: a) focusing on helping to construct conditions for
supplementing the income of students (affording them the time and
resources to continue with their research), and b) fostering an
environment where affective bonds would make people carry out their
research collectively.
In order to accomplish this, the Institute was structured into three
branches (also thought of as different “floors”): “academic support”,
“teaching” and “research”. “Academic support” functions as a link
between precarious academics who have services to sell (like revision,
translation, tutoring and therapy) and academics in distress. The main
goal here is to act as an intermediary where people who come to IOS
seeking help are encouraged to eventually offer their own services
through the platform. The “teaching” branch is a platform for
academics to offer online classes based on their research and academic
experience. The idea is that in the midst of the development of their
research, academics can transform what they have studied into a short-
course format that allows them to fund part of their research. Finally,
the “research” branch (which has not yet been fully developed) is
supposed to be a place where people can collectively develop their
research and where some sort of knowledge concerning “academic
precarity” can be produced (possibly even seeking outside funding). It
must be noted that what is offered through IOS is not thought of as a
high-end service, but one where trust is borne out of sharing the same
type of social burden.
Map of the three main branches of IOS and their organizational structure.

One of the main problems we faced right from the start, as one can
deduce, was how to link these three layers. Even though we were
pretty confident in the division of the institute into three main
branches, we were unsure how they would connect. Evidently, we had
some “philosophical” ideas about how these three layers should be
connected. In a sense, we thought people would enact a sort
of bildungsroman where they would “progress” from the
outermost part of the institute (coming to the institute seeking help) to
the innermost part (having your research affected by the problem of
“academic distress” to the point of becoming intellectually engaged
with this problem). This made a lot of sense before things started, but
we quickly found out that producing any sort of internal consistency
was in fact much harder than we had thought.
Two other supporting branches were created in order to maintain and
help link the three main branches: the “marketing” and “financial”
divisions, neither of which had any previously set goals aside from
their supporting role. The former was to act on behalf of the main
branches in order to to produce a link between what was produced
inside IOS and its outside. In a sense, we could say that the
“marketing” division was to be concerned with expressing a culture
and a sense of belonging that we hoped would attract people to the
institute (either as people working inside the organization or seeking
our services). The “financial” division, on the other hand, was tasked
with trying to figure out what to do with the money that entered the
institute and what was the best way to divide what was earned and to
think where exceeding revenue should be directed at. (Should we put
more money in marketing campaigns? Should we buy computers and
cameras so we could make them available for people who would offer
classes?) If the “marketing” division sought to link what was produced
inside the institute to its outside, it is not too far off to say that the
“financial” division would be the link through which outside money
would flow to the inside.

Map of the main and supporting branches of IOS, their organizational structure and the flow
of income (in bold).

These practical functions do not exhaust what these supporting

branches ended up becoming. Retrospectively we can say one of the
main functions they performed was to provide an image of how the
institute viewed itself and its effect in reality. Even though we failed
to notice at the time, this twofold linking structure explains a lot of the
issues we have faced in the past two years, since the different images
produced by marketing and financial divisions of what the institute
should be never really managed to harmonize. It is fair to say that they
produced two different objects of desire (cultural and material
support) that could not be sought simultaneously—something we
learned only by trying to attain both of them.
This becomes clearer if we keep in mind how the institute actually
developed. Very early on we thought that the kinds of social bonds we
found to be generally missing in university life would be better
constructed in the “academic support” branch. Not only was that
sector concerned with providing support for students in distress
through services offered by other students in distress, but it was also
the branch that had in its structure the largest zone of contact with the
outside of the institute. Neither the service seeker nor the service
provider had to be involved in the institute, provided both of them
registered their demands or their skills in our database. All that was
needed was some sense of being part of a community of those
excluded from the academic community. The only people inside the
institute in this branch were people who linked the demands with the
people who could attend to those issues. Because people were arriving
(on both sides) at the institute on account of a shared problem, we
hoped that solidarity would be the driving force of this transaction
(instead of ordinary values of worth) and possibly even become a
stepping stone for further involvement with the institute. Even though
we imagined the “teaching” and “research” branches would also instill
solidarity (maybe even stronger solidarity since people would be in
closer contact), we have always known that they wouldn’t be able to
affect as many people outside the institute.

Diagram of the institute from the point of view of the sense of community.

Our expectations in regards to money flow, however, were quite the

reverse. As discussed above, one of the institute’s goals was to help
turn undervalued (and often invisible) student experience into a form
of material support for the students themselves. In this sense, the
institute would work as a platform that would aid not only in
connecting service seekers and providers but also in transforming this
experience into something that could be sold as a service. Aside from
this, we also needed to account for the labour that would produce this
mediation. We figured that the money necessary to pay the people
involved in the institute and any other expenses would come mostly
through the “financial” and “teaching” branches. Even though a small
percentage of “academic support” would be reverted back to the
institute, we wanted to keep that tax at a minimum. In the production
of online courses, we established a larger tax because more people
from the institute would be involved with the production of the
classes. This and the expectation that each course would bring a
higher gross revenue than the services offered in the “academic
support” branch made it plausible that courses would be one of the
main forms of bringing revenue to the institute. We also thought that
the “research” branch could be an even larger source of income
through grants, though that path has not yet materialized. Even if we
never fully managed to get consistent revenue through online classes,
we did catch a glimpse of how much it would take to achieve a
stability that allowed those involved in the institute to have a
reasonable income evenly split between all involved.

Diagram of the institute from the point of view of the courses and services offered through
the institute.

What this short description shows us is how the two actually working
branches had different goals. The “academic support” group was
mainly concerned with creating a sense of solidarity that would
engage more people in the institute (expanding it from the outside in),
while the “teaching” sector immediately focused on attracting more
students to increase revenue (which in turn would allow the institute
to expand from the inside out). The means of achieving these different
goals, as we found out in practice, were not the same. After some
inspiring success in the first courses offered (exceeding our
expectations), those involved in the “teaching” branch took it upon
themselves to be the main source of income that would allow the
institute to survive the first moment of its history when its foundations
were not as steady. They saw themselves as developing some sort of
“war time economy” that would later be reshaped when enough
ground was gained.
This was seen as an important first step because no one in the institute
received any direct income for their work from the institute. Each
person involved directly in the organization of the institute held a
“coordinating position” in the branches where they worked. These
positions had two functions. Firstly, they were forms of differentiating
those inside the institute from those outside (and also making those
inside the institute understand who to talk to depending on the issues
faced). We did not, however, maintain strict boundaries. One of the
main goals of the institute (as hard as this is in practice) was to be
open to anyone. This means that there were infinite coordination
spots and that people were working in more than one branch.
Secondly, those occupying the coordinating positions were also seen
as those that would be able to produce an organizational culture out of
the community of those excluded from the academic community.
However, as mentioned, these were not salaried positions. This is why
we introduced taxes for the services offered through the institute.
Since there wasn’t any regular cash flow, any kind of income was
dependent on the selling of those services (through the “academic
support” or the “teaching” branches). Thus, the work done to link
service requesters and service providers and produce the courses was
seen as a temporary form of paying people indirectly for the
organization of the institute. This, however, was not enough to
accommodate all those involved. There were still a few people at the
institute who were not able to get this indirect income.
Diagram of the institute from the point of view of the coordinating positions.

Through the “financial” branch they devised a plan to develop an

internal basic income that would allow everyone to be involved in the
institute without making anyone feel guilty for the time
spent working for the institute. Since everyone involved in the
institute was in a precarious position, it was not always easy to find
the time to work for free. To do this it was necessary to have a certain
amount of revenue per class offered through the institute’s online
platform. The problem they faced, however, was not very easy. How
would they be able to maintain (and increase) the number of students?
They were in the middle of a salto mortale with no guarantee of
being able to sell what they had to offer in the market. What would be
necessary to make this happen? This was especially difficult since the
teaching branch had constructed a relatively new online platform and
had no past trust to support them.
It was at this moment that they turned to the “marketing” branch.
They imagined that a well-conceived marketing campaign could
attract a steady stream of students to the platform. We can see how
things were starting to deviate from some of our collective goals.
More and more, they were looking at people who were seeking the
online courses not as potential companions in a common struggle but
as customers that could finance the institute. What appeared to the
“teaching” branch as a relevant object of desire was creating an
internal basic income. It is not far off to say that those involved in the
“teaching” and “financial” branches were looking at things through
the logic of commodity exchange. Of course this was something that
was brought about through a desire to produce material support for
those involved in the institute so they could eventually expand the
scope of the institute.
This did not work. The courses we offered were attracting less and
less people (in relation to what was needed) and frustration soon set
in. This frustration began to create communication lapses between the
“teaching” branch and the “marketing” branch which caused
inevitable tensions between the two sectors. From the “teaching”
branch’s point of view the “marketing” sector was simply not creative
enough. If there were less students this was a result of inefficient
marketing. The “marketing” branch, on the other hand, did not receive
clear (and meaningful) signals on what they were supposed to do. The
demands were senseless (and too blunt, thought of only in terms of
money), which created difficulties in directing how they needed to act.
After some lackluster launches in the institute’s online platform, the
“teaching” branch was on a break and the plans for an internal basic
income were put on hold. What had gone wrong? How could this
problem be solved? Those involved in the “teaching” sector sketched
some possible answers, but before we get to them, we need to
understand the miscommunication between the “teaching” and
“marketing” branches.
It may seem as if the “marketing” branch was disconnected from what
was happening at the institute. But that might just be an effect of
looking at things through the money point of view. When we look at
what that sector was doing, we can see that they were actively trying
to produce a discourse about the problem of precarity in the
contemporary university as a way to ground solidarity with those
outside the institute. Those in the “marketing” sector were involved in
making podcasts and magazines, organizing discussions on YouTube,
elaborating educational material on social media that touched on the
struggles of university students all over Brazil. Instead of growing the
institute from the inside, those in that branch were trying to expand it
from the outside by looking to attract others who shared the same
burdens as those at the institute.
When we look at what “marketing” was doing from this angle, we can
see how the demands from the “teaching” branch appeared as
senseless. There was no concern for constructing solidarity between
those involved in the platform of online classes and the students that
would attend. There was, of course, empathy from an individual point
of view, but institutionally it is not unfair to say that questions of
money were prioritized over questions of solidarity. Not that solidarity
was lacking, but it was pointed in another direction (for strategic
concerns). It makes sense that there was a miscommunication because
both sectors were looking for different things. It is not surprising that
the “teaching” branch has recently been considering how it can create
this solidarity and help foreground a culture which creates a sense for
people to be involved with the institute as students.

Complete diagram of the three main points of view in the institute.

This story has a bittersweet ending. As mentioned above, we are

currently at an impasse as to what directions we must take. It has,
however, given us a lesson on some of the problems of navigating
through different incommensurate perspectives (XII, XIII). The
difficulties we have faced at the institute are not simply due to a lack
of internal organization. What happened was that the internal
organization (and the labour division it produced) ended up
composing different points of view with different objects in sight
(IV). It is not a problem that people inside an organization are
concerned with different things; this becomes a problem if the
different points of view available for those inside the organization end
up creating an organizational point of view that is irreconcilably split.
This is what happened at our institute, where it was possible to
explore reality in terms of both solidarity bonds and financial bonds.
This is not a bug but a feature, since the very problem we were trying
to face had this double nature (II). The problem arises, however,
because no proper mediations were institutionally put in place that
allowed information to circle between these different points of view.
We did not find this out until very recently, when it became clear that
different parts inside the organization were looking at (and seeking)
different things. It was only at that moment that we could begin to
understand that all problems are not of the same nature and cannot be
represented through the same lenses. If this has paralyzed some parts
of the organization, it gives us insight into some aspects of organizing
that we were not aware initially (V). Bittersweet indeed.

XV. CASE STUDY: THE MODES OF EXCHANGE

IN JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper

sprout, We've been talkin’ ’bout Jackson Ever since the
fire went out. I'm goin’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess
around, Yeah, I'm goin’ to Jackson, Look out Jackson
town.
—Johnny Cash

Jackson is the state capital of Mississippi, USA, and its most

populated city. It owes its name to Andrew Jackson, who is
considered by many the worst president in the history of the United
States. Not only was he an enthusiast of slavery, but he was also
responsible for one of the most terrible ethnical cleansing processes
ever perpetrated in the country, the forceful removal of thousands of
native Americans—mostly Cherokees—from the South. Behind this
decision, motivating it, we find his economic interests in the
indigenous land, his disgust for the abolitionist movement and his
affinity with the white supremacy ideology of the land owners.
Situated in the so-called Black Belt of the South, Jackson is today one
of the poorest cities in the USA, with 175 thousand inhabitants, and
one of the highest percentages of Black citizens (almost 80%)—
second only to Detroit.

Who could imagine, then, that Jackson would be a good place to start
a socialist experience, based on radical democracy and cooperative
organization? How could this city, with its decadent landscape, high
poverty rates and racial and political conflicts serve as a site for
political experimentation? For Kali Akuno, these extent of these
problems actually contribute to an answer:
The weak and relatively sparse concentration of capital in Mississippi
creates a degree of “breathing room” on the margins and within the
cracks of the capitalist system that a project like ours can maneuver
and experiment within in the quest to build a viable anti-capitalist
alternative.71
For Akuno, Jackson is somehow at the limits of capitalism. But not
only of capitalism—it is also at the edge of the American State,
insofar as it represents a “weak link” in the bipartisan electoral
system:
One reason why Mississippi is a weak link is because its Democratic
Party is not particularly strong. The national party leadership takes the
Black vote for granted and is reluctant to invest adequate resources
because of the Republican Party’s firm grip on the overwhelming
majority of white voters in the state.72
A poorly developed commercial structure—or a “paternalistic
capitalism” in which race speaks louder than money73—and an absent
Federal government turn Jackson into a sort of blind spot both to
the mute constraints of Capital and the power of the State (II). And we
could say that it was in the shadow of this blind spot, at this point of
indifference or of a weaker link, that the activists of the New Afrika
People’s Organization (NAPO) and the Malcom X
Grassroots Movement (MXGM) managed to construct,
consolidate and expand towards the electoral arena such a radical
project, a project that has at its core a certain idea of Nation, a nation
for the new afrikans in the interior of the United States of America.
It was with this radical proposal that Chokwe Lumumba was elected
in 2013. His election as Mayor was a triumph of political organization
and a high point in the historical struggle of Black nationalism in the
Mississippi—but we can also approach it from the standpoint of the
relations between tradition and organization.

1. LUMUMBA
To better understand the success of Chokwe Lumumba’s campaign for
office it is crucial to consider some historical, geographical and
political factors that in 2013 turned Jackson—the right place and time
for such a radical intervention.
The first of these is the role Lumumba himself had in
the Provisional Government of the Republic of New
Afrika (RNA) in 1971. The Republic was a Black nationalist
organization that emerged in 1968 in Detroit with the purpose of
creating an independent nation for African Americans inside the
United States—more precisely in the Black Belt of the South. If it
were not for this political movement, Chokwe Lumumba would surely
still be known today by his Christian name, Edwin Finley Taliaferro—
the change of name happened when he joined the RNA. Lumumba
came to Jackson in March 1971 with the explicit task of acquiring a
piece of land to establish a community there, the El Hajj Malik. At
the time, the congress had approved the “New Communities Act”,
which invited the creation of new cities in underdeveloped parts of
Florida by making available some resources for these initiatives. “My
parents,” says Rukia Lumumba, “together with other members of the
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, recognized
the urgent need of a similar plan for Jackson,” where, despite the gains
in political representation, “the lack of control over resources,
governmental structures, laws and basic accommodations led to lower
income, a lack of local businesses, social infrastructure and the
general incapacity of black people to create laws that would protect
them from civil and State violence.”
El Hajj Malik was founded in Hinds County, near Bolton, on land
bought by the RNA. Their objective was to consolidate a self-
determining territory, capable of providing sustenance and security to
a group of 500 black men, women and children. The initiative did not
please the powerful white minority and the movement was closely
watched, since the beginning, by the FBI. In 1971, a police raid led to
gun fire between militants and the State, resulting in the judicial
persecution of 11 members of the RNA, which was then severely
weakened.
With the Republic being constantly pressured by the FBI, Lumumba
decided to return to Detroit, where he studied Law at Wayne
University. As a lawyer, he participated in a series of emblematic
cases, for example, the one involving rapper Tupac Shakur and his
aunt, the ex-Black Panther Assata Shakur, accused for the murder of a
policeman in a shootout in New Jersey in 1973. Talking about
Lumumba’s trajectory from the RNA to the city hall in Jackson,
Bashar Sankara wrote: “He never renounced the goal of Black self-
determination nor did he regret his activism from the time of the
Republic of New Afrika. Lumumba told me […] that it was only the
tactics that changed, considering the new political avenues opened to
Black militants in the South.” And, it is true, the situation has changed
considerably, as today there are at least 18 cities in the South of the
USA with a Black majority that are capable of electing their
representatives without too many obstacles. One of the routes towards
self-determination, envisioned by Lumumba in this new context, was
to run for office and use the municipal State-machine for the benefit of
a non-statal political project. Here, the State started to become a
means to oppose Capital and open the space for the return of the
dream of constructing an independent Nation, a dream that was alive
since the days of the Republic of New Afrika.

2. JACKSON-KUSH: NATION, STATE, CAPITAL … AND

NATION

Let us now propose a brief analysis of the Jackson-Kush Plan, the

basis of the radical platform that helped to elect Lumumba, using as
our guide the different modes of intercourse developed by Karatani
(II, XVII). The three modes—A, B and C—seem to appear in the
three “programmatic aims” of their plan: the construction of a popular
and sovereign power, based on direct democracy; the taking up of
positions in institutional politics; and the development of a
cooperative and solidarity-based economy.

The radical platform that led to Lumumba’s victory is organized

around the Jackson-Kush Plan which brings together “the best
practices in the promotion of participatory democracy, solidarity
economy, and sustainable development and combine them with
progressive community organizing and electoral politics”74 with the
objective of deepening “democracy in Mississippi and to build a
vibrant, people centered solidarity economy in Jackson and
throughout the state of Mississippi that empowers Black and other
oppressed peoples in the state”.75 Three central programmatic aims
directed the movement towards this goal:
 Building People’s Assemblies throughout the Kush District to
serve as instruments of “dual power” to counter the abusive
powers of the state and of capital whether regional, national or
international.
 Building an independent political force throughout the state, but
concentrated in the Kush District, which would challenge and
replace the authority of the two parties of transnational capital,
the Democrats and the Republicans, which dominated the arena
of electoral politics in the state of Mississippi.
 Building a solidarity economy in Jackson and throughout the
Kush district anchored by a network of cooperatives and
supporting institutions to strengthen worker power and
economic democracy in the state.
The relation between the MXGM and the RNA—both explicitly
defending the project of an independent nation for the new
afrikans in the interior of the USA—suggests that
the communitarian form of organization, mode A, serves here as
the starting point of the political process. Though the idea of national
sovereignty no longer has the same weight in the discourse of these
activists today, who prefer to focus on the idea of self-determination,
the idea of a community based on free association and reciprocity
remains a central concern and guiding thread. It is on top of this
communitarian basis—or this dual-power strategy—that the Jackson
militants then seek engagement with electoral politics. The municipal
power is seen as a means towards self-determination, not because it is
the legitimate or the only path towards it, but because it remains today
a blockage in the way of the Black population of Jackson, a majority
which still receives attention and resources from the State.
One of the aims of Chokwe Lumumba, as a Mayor, was to remove
this obstacle and seek a more egalitarian use of public funds. With this
in mind, he invested in infrastructural improvements that the city
needed, with a focus on improving the transportation system and
sanitary conditions. Furthermore, Lumumba improved the conditions
for local worker cooperatives to compete for government bids against
larger companies. By stimulating cooperative endeavours and the
development of a solidary economy, they aimed at promoting an
alternative structure to that of capital, grounding labour and commerce
in Jackson on cooperation rather than competition (III, V).
What we see in the Jackson-Kush Plan is therefore popular power
(mode A) mobilized to intervene at municipal power (mode B) as a
way to resist the power of Capital (mode C)—all of this in view of
reorganizing the city through a cooperative logic that could serve the
needs and desires of a self-determining community (mode A).
If the theory of a multilayered transcendental structure, proposed in
our diagram, really allows us to synthesize the different paths that
political organization might take in our struggles against
contemporary capitalism, then the radical political experiment that is
taking place in Jackson offers some interesting insights about what it
means to intervene, simultaneously, at the three layers that compose
the “Nation-State-Capital” complex (V). But to learn from them, one
must always pay close attention to the impasses and failures that
inevitably plague the process—issues that are really well documented
in the book Jackson Rising—trying to consider, above all, if this
particular political experience could come to encompass similar
movements elsewhere and if it is sustainable in its current scale.
Another important aspect concerns the question of Black nationalism.
It is crucial to note that when we describe this return to the
community, we are no longer talking about the same community
(much less the same Capital or state). As we have seen, when
Jackson’s activists aim to use the state apparatus to foster cooperation,
to build a solidarity economy as a way to self-determination, they are
trying to make something new (VI). Although ancestrality and
tradition, for instance, are two huge issues for the activists, the
alliance which is at stake here goes further than restating something
that was lost. Not just because political actors other than the Black
people are also considered—Native Americans, immigrants,
LGBTQIA+ and other minorities, for instance—but because there is a
strategic conceptual change when they talk about self-determination
rather than national sovereignty. The emphasis, now, is on
the organizational effort. Tradition, especially the radical tradition
of black people, is not forgotten at all. The memory of all past
struggles, their mistakes included, is still alive at the heart of this new
organization. However, the new community they aim to build today is
based, above all, on the collective struggle against the Nation-State-
Capital complex—probably, we would suggest, because, among other
things, they learned from past errors. It is precisely the above-
mentioned emphasis on the organizational aspect that interests us,
insofar as it could teach us something about how to be radical in the
21st century. We might say, perhaps, that a Nation seen from the
perspective of Black struggle is not the same as the Nation-
form that appears to us as individual citizens.

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.
— Linebaugh & Rediker76

1. 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
intricate 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 streets, the rider gambles his options and risks,
accepting and rejecting 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”.77 This
apparent gain in immediacy between the worker’s activity and his
earnings at the individual 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 determinant 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 common belief that at the end of the day every worker is by
himself, dashing 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, incidental 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
successful deliveries, customer satisfaction indices etc., that the
effective logical resolution of the platform emerges,78 where
profitability, 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
“service” of “connecting” their “partners” and “collaborators”—was
the (real) subsumption of ever larger contingents of this dispersed and
heterogenous gig economy of delivery work that already
existed79 (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.).80 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
control81 (e.g. the arbitrary power of the platform to temporarily or
permanently suspend the account of the courier as a means to
discipline and punish his use of the platform, with marginal conditions
for a fair defence or appeal) and of personal domination82 (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 enforce the work shifts and productivity of a
“team” of couriers and whose ties to organized crime have reportedly
been leveraged to obtain new levels of control over labour and repress
strike activity).83
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,
sensibility and visibility are established “through the mapping of
statistical correlations within large populations”.84 Above the platform
—technically 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,85 the invisible mass of labour that makes the wheels turn,
with its poor-man’s interface, which can hardly see or control but is
seen and controlled at all times.86 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”87 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 platform88 whose logical atom
of count is not each of its individual workers with 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,89 together with other
statistical variables mined by the platform’s operational domain.
We’ve also noted how the platform maximally extracts information
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.90 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,
visibility and interconnection? More and more the formation of the
20th-century wage society via the Fordist industrialization seems to
have been an exceptional period in capitalism rather than its general
tendency; instead, the current recomposition of capital seems to
happen through a process of class decomposition (III).91
The almost incommensurable asymmetry between the experience 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 interaction,
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 concerns 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 operator is class struggle; however, to talk
about class and struggle seems to assume a type of consistency and
unity that may not be so readily available 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?

2. THE SITE OF THE BRAKE AND THE COLLAPSE OF

THE PLATFORM
Memes do not call for interpretation so much as
improvisation. 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 experimental repetition.
— “Memes with Force: Lessons from the Yellow Vests” 92

In the frontline of the pandemic together with health workers,

supermarket 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 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 conditions 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 country: 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.93
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
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, where hundreds to thousands of riders could
gather at times, 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)
enacting 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 by (i) passing
from demonstrating a capacity to act to the actual action of
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)
institutional 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
algorithm 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’
dissatisfaction 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 worksite is
transformed by the blockade into a site not only of political 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 blockades94. 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
instigate 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
improvements 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, an increase in the
bonuses frequency is often amont the strikers’ demands…).
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 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 dynamics 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 inhabitants in the state of São Paulo,
couriers put the delivery services to an almost complete standstill for
six days, obliging iFood to sit to negotiate 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 platform), 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
character 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 workers95 and a vast urban territory, even if a significant
region of the city organizes 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.
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
delivery workers was perceptible in the streets and that significant
financial 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 the political
stakes of a strike is of course not restricted to the exterior 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, should be noted,
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 group who used the couriers’ recordings shared in group chats
to edit videos with both an investigative
and agitprop character96 remarked on how such “homemade”
videos helped the movement measure its own capacity for collective
action because they functioned as a thermometer 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.”97
In another video98 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 struggles
tend to be fragmented, fluid and unpredictable. Like the rush of riding
through the streets—the endless back-and-forth between speeding and
braking amid the nonstop roaring and honking, pushing the limit
between going faster and preventing life-threating accidents—courier
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, leaving 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 memories 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 consequences of defeat” which “might allow us to
mourn and work through a defeat, and ultimately to learn how to fail
better”.99
In one of the protests in São Paulo, where the union—which officially
only represents the minority of deliverers with stable wage contracts,
but is otherwise largely despised by delivery app workers—was to be
present, a hand-painted banner with the words “motoboys united
without unions” was held by some of the riders. The banner with the
phrase was reproduced in the following weeks in the nearby cities of
Guarulhos and Carapicuíba by couriers who blockaded several
McDonald’s, Burgers Kings and other restaurant chains from early
morning to late at night. The first thing to note here is that the motto is
not a plain negation, that is, not a call to fight against unions; rather,
it leverages a critical attitude towards unions to affirm the possibility
of other forms of unities among workers, i.e. subtractive unions.
Moreover, we 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 historically taken as part of
an extended apparatus of the State to mitigate and manage class
conflicts.100 Still, the form of an infinite judgement “U is not-S” in
the formulation, which by denying the finite representational space of
recognizable and existing 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 own inability to unite
autonomously (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 are
not the apps, it’s himself”, which was sometimes followed by the rant:
“Ah, motoboys are a hell of a disunited kind!”
The wildcat strikes—in which delivery sites were picketed, motorized
parades were held and users collectively logged off the platform—,
the self-organized media production and dissemination, coupled with
coordinated campaigns to damage the companies’ image; the chaotic
dynamic of Whatsapp groups and the laborious efforts to unite—both
regionally and nationally—without unions or politicians; 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 efficacy is gauged, coming into existence as a recognizable
and reproducible 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. By means of this 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 exploitation and the
organization against it can begin to be effectively thought; not in
general, but from within the world of the brake.

XVII. OPEN QUESTIONS ON TOPOI AND

COMPLEX WORLDS
Logical triplicity and an infinitude of infinities—these are the keys to
a general theory of happiness, which is the end goal of all philosophy.
—Alain Badiou

We have seen that our “objective phenomenology” approach leads us

to conceive different modes of intercourse, or modes of organization,
as logical spaces whose objects are “transcendentally structured” not
by how they appear to us, but rather by the relations they establish
amongst each other (I). We have seen that this includes the possibility
of defining points of view internal to these spaces as well as means
of slicing and synthetizing objects within them, determining what
counts as efficacious parts and wholes.
This general approach to the logic of social worlds has led us, first, to
the hypothesis that category theory, with its compositional grammar,
could serve as a natural environment to explore these intuitions and,
second, to a reconstruction of Kojin Karatani’s work on the complex
structure of social formations in terms of a multilayered
transcendental structure for social worlds (II). We notate these
layers as TA, TB and TC for kinship, state and commodity logics,
respectively, and write with superscript “TX” the one which functions
as the dominant mode in a given social formation. In the case of a
capitalist social formation, we have TC. These three transcendental
layers, plus their sums and the “borromean object” K, form the
complex structure presented in our initial diagram.
The overall consistency of our research project, however, relies on the
inner consistency of this formal construction. And this brings us to an
open problem, which we present here in the hope that you, the reader,
might help us.
As of now, we have managed to reconstruct, with remarkable
results,101 the commodity logic presented by Marx in the first volume
of Capital within the categorial structure called a topos.102 A topos
is a Cartesian closed category which has a subobject classifier—that
is, it can express, solely in terms of morphisms, a language for its
propositions. Being Cartesian closed means the topos has enough
internal expressivity so that it contains all finite limits, colimits and
exponentials; it must be large enough so that larger objects can be
consistently constructed from smaller ones and complex objects can
be broken into simple ones obeying a compositional rule. The
subobject classifier defines subobjects in terms of what can be
meaningfully distinguished from within the topos itself—in other
words, it slices objects using predicates internal to the category. As we
have shown (XI), there is a consistent treatment of the logic of value
as a category with limits for all its diagrams—through the universal
property guaranteed by the money-commodity—and a classifier with a
Heyting algebra that defines the truth-values for commodity-
valuations between them.
A Heyting algebra—commonly understood to be the natural order-
structure for logic in topoi—is an intuitionistic one: generalizing
Marx’s treatment of exchange relations, we show that the logic of
commodity value actually accepts that two commodities be (i)
absolutely exchangeable, (ii) partially so, (iii) incomparable or (iv) not
exchangeable at all. It takes, therefore, additional structure to
guarantee that for every commodity, there will always be some
amount of a money-commodity which will be equivalent to it, thus
forming a consistent exchange space.
However, our current hypothesis is that a crucial part of the
distinctiveness of each layer comes from the type of logic that is
intrinsically built into it.
Our current approach to TB, for example, suggests that its
transcendental structure is essentially classical, admitting only two
truth-values: true and false. While value relations between two
commodities can be evaluated in multiple ways—we can have a p-
degree of exchangeability between them, for example—social
contracts that establish agreement between two wills either obtain
or not. An agreement between two parties, even under violent
conditions, the subjection to a sovereign, a right guaranteed by law or
the ownership of some property (VII)—these are all “classical”
phenomena. Here, no third option exists, no intermediate level of
obligation, and no contradictory relations appear to this logical space
itself—as one cannot both own and not own something, have and not
have a right, and so on.103
On the other hand, we claim that the logic of TA is neither
intuitionistic nor classical, but rather paraconsistent. That is, the
logical space which conditions phenomena of reciprocity, in the
formation of communities, gift-exchange and kinship structures,
admits—as Levi-Strauss claimed, and anthropologists, sociologists
and psychoanalysts further confirm—a sort of “perpetually
unbalanced duality”, which, sometimes, requires us to accept situated
contradictions as true (IX). The exchange of gifts, for example,
constitutes an unstable relation, in the sense that a counter-gift is
only appropriate if it is inappropriate, that is, if it is
recognized as being “too much”—which, in turn, will yield the need
for a new gift cycle etc. The coherence between perspective shifts in
Amerindian cosmologies also implies that opposing predicates such as
“human” and “non-human'' be assignable to the same actors, while
“modern” communities, formed around affinities or some shared
attribute, still need to respond to a similar imbalance. The assumed
separation of an interior from an exterior must do away with the
markers of an “internal exteriority”—such as the different relations
that each member establishes with that common trait or the underlying
common ground that binds members of the group to those they
oppose.
In topological terms, a paraconsistent space has infinite
intersections between closed sets: between two disjunct
groups, some paradoxical common point can sometimes be
established. We believe we have found a topos-theoretic way of
modeling this logic through a sort of dual to Heyting-valued topoi
which uses the logic of closed rather than open sets, called a Brouwer
or co-Heyting algebra.104
Recall that, in terms of our categorical approach, each of these
transcendental layers is treated as a topos, which means that their
“internal logics” rely on different sub-object classifiers, with their
particular algebras: a Heyting algebra for TC, a Boolean one
for TB and a Brouwer algebra for TA.

This means that if our proposal is consistent, we should be able to not

only fully flesh out these different transcendental structures,
reconstructing the properties of recognizable social objects out of
these minimal internal operations, but we should also manage to
account for the arrows between them. For example, we should be able
to capture in this diagram the ways in which commodity logic is
translated and deformed from the standpoint of a classical space—a
crucial topic, as it pertains to the relation between commodity logic
and the logic of property alienation or the relation between
exploitation and expropriation, so often confused and mixed together.
Or the way that unpaid housework of social reproduction is structured
along sexual and familiar divisions of labour in the communitarian
layer, while not registering as such within the commodity-space,
which nevertheless relies on it for the maintenance of wage-relations.
Not only this, but we should also be able to learn more about K from
the arrows that go into it. Already at a first glance, we can anticipate
that this approach gives us a different take on the complexity of
capitalist social formations, not directly based on the analysis of an
undefined quantity of “integrated information” that structures its
quasi-sublime excess over our cognitive capacities, but rather on the
structural fact that there cannot be a single model that would fully
capture its basic structure all at once. It is true that if commodity logic
forms the dominant transcendental, the internal language of
the TC topos should be the one which captures the most information
about this social formation—but this does not imply it is capable of
slicing and recomposing everything that is relevant to its own
functioning or the capitalist world as such.
It is also important to note that this has profound influence on how we
conceptualize the different arrows coming from Org to the rest of the
diagram: rather than defining a “mode D”, like Karatani, we opted to
present the space of emancipatory organizations as one that has no
defined transcendental structure of its own (II), being rather
determined by the types of negation or exception that these
organizational experiments manage to uphold in the face of
multilayered social formations (V, XVI). The three arrows we define
from Org to TA, TB and TC are idealized decompositions of equally
multilayered political organizations—but what separates these
transformations from complex objects that are already possible in K is
that in one or more layers, we find “generic” constructions associated
to these arrows, experiments that challenge what that space is able to
predicate and account for. In other words, for our approach to
formally consist, we would also require an understanding of how to
think about each of these three functors from Org to the three
transcendentals, as well as the means to also think about their
interactions in a rich ecology of political organizations.
Already at an intuitive level, however, the benefits of this approach
can be felt here too, as this logical analysis helps to clarify why
revolutionary strategies (pA) focused on negating TA tend to adopt
paraconsistent forms—such as that of “dual power” where two
opposing political logics coexist—while those (pB) focused
on TB tend to think in classical terms—a logic shared by electoral and
insurrectionist politics, since both of them seek to establish a clear
division between before and after a victory—and those (pC) focused
on TC usually deal in intuitionistic values—and here different takes on
the correlation of forces that might push the forces of production
either in the direction of the reproduction of capitalism or towards its
negation come to mind, like the “accelerationist” strategy. These
different abstract logics of revolutionary thought are therefore built
into the separate arrows from Org to K and mixed together in
complex ways in the space of concrete political organizations.

But as of now, we are still struggling to construct an adequate

interpretation of TB as a classical topos and of TA as a paraconsistent
one—and we remain far away from being able to formally account for
the complex structure of K and connect it to our current construction
of Org.
There is a lot of interesting—and collaborative—work to be done
here.

XVIII. TRAJECTORY AND INVITATION

This is a collaborative essay: it was written by many hands, reaching
across many countries. But more than that, it is also the product of a
longer collective endeavour, which we call the Subset of
Theoretical Practice (STP). Created as the research branch of
the Circle of Study of Idea and Ideology (CSII), it continued
operating on its own after CSII was dissolved, after ten years of
militant work in Brazil and elsewhere, in 2020. One might find a
discussion of the current project’s “pre-history” and initial steps in the
text “Contribution to the Critique of Political Organization: Outline of
an Ongoing Research Project”, published by Crisis and
Critique last year.
At the end of that text, one will find the following drawing, displaying
this initial trajectory of texts, seminars and study groups, culminating
in our current project, plus our plans for further steps:
Since the establishment of this common project, our research method
has been to offer a collective platform where people can present their
personal research projects to one another, in whatever state their study
is currently in, and then try to establish connections between these
individual investigations based, first of all, on the general research
project outlined in the “Contribution to the Critique of Political
Organization” and, secondly, on previous meetings and topics
explored in the works of other members. These connections don’t
have to explicitly guide the presentations, but we recommend that
some effort be made to search for possible links between these
investigative paths, as we have meetings dedicated to recognizing and
making explicit these conceptual intersections from time to time
(titled “Research Discussions”). Now, almost a year later, if one visits
our website www.theoreticalpractice.com, this trajectory looks like a
monstrous creature with many tentacles:
By “stitching” meetings and individual paths together at those points
where they intersect or share some common theme, we hoped to
slowly uncover a certain global structure, the general features of our
own collective take on the issues that motivated our research project,
which could then increasingly serve as a compass for guiding our next
steps. This “sheaf-like” approach is particularly useful when one is
exploring an unknown conceptual space, constructing its general
properties out of local fragments. It is quite remarkable that the basic
principles and constructions presented in this essay only began to
acquire form once we tried to account for this increasingly visible set
of common parts between otherwise disparate research directions.
In the present essay, however, we opted for a different strategy: rather
than force together trivial but heterogeneous local parts into a non-
trivial but consistent global structure, we opted for a conciliatory
strategy, taking trivial but different global objects and generating a
non-trivial local object that stitches together these contradictory
spaces.105 In a vague analogy, we could say that the diagram that has
accompanied every section of this text, mapping how they fit together,
even when the global presuppositions, interests and commitments
behind each section might actually be contradictory, is one such non-
trivial conciliatory object:
We would like to thank ŠUM for giving us the space to experiment
with this construction.
And, last but not least, we would also like to invite you to join us in
continuing this investigation. Our research group meets every Monday
evening (usually 10:00 p.m. UTC) through Zoom, and one can find
links for the next online meetings—as well as the video recordings of
all previous ones—on our website: www.theoreticalpractice.com.
It is worth mentioning that one should not trust too much the initial
impression that a long and complex essay like this, with its strange
references to philosophy, anthropology, history and mathematics,
implies that the STP is primarily composed of experts in one or in all
of these different disciplines. Far from it! It is true that this research
project requires us to bring together all sorts of references and
complicated topics, and it does take quite a lot of work to understand
(some) of it, but our group is actually composed of a bunch of
amateurs who are enthusiastic about the core ideas and motivations
behind this construction, and who try to help each other out navigating
through all these themes.
So please do not feel discouraged if you are interested in our research
project but feel like you have no specialized knowledge to contribute:
having the chance to help other people catch up, to explain in plain
language what we are trying to do and to translate these ideas into
other theoretical frameworks are all precious opportunities that allow
us to put this project to the test.
On the other hand, there is a good chance that you know some of these
things better than we do. We did warn you early on that this project is
conducted by a bunch of blind people surrounding an animal they
have never seen. We hope that our mistakes, exaggerations and
wandering abouts serve as an invitation for you to join us and help us
with our open problems and blind spots. Only the company of others
could ever allow us to truly find out what is real in this endeavour.
 1
NUNES, R., Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of
Political Organization, Verso Books, 2021.
 2
NUNES, Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal.
 3
BADIOU, A., Logics of Worlds, London: Continuum Press, 2006.
 4
ARTIN, M., GROTHENDIECK, A., VERDIER, J., Théorie de topos et
cohomologie étale des schemas I, II, III, Lecture Notes in
Mathematics, 269, 270, 305, 1971.
 5
BADIOU, A., “Logic of the Site”, in: Diacritics, 33, 3—4, 2003.
 6
KARATANI, K., The Structure of World History: From Modes of
Production to Modes of Exchange, Durham: Duke University Press,
2014.
 7
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
monomorphisms x: X→ B, y: Y→ B, z: Z → B, such that B/x ≃ Y +
Z, B/y ≃ X + Z and B/z ≃ X + Y.
 8
All quotes in this section come from Marx, K. & Engels, F. Manifesto of the
Communist Party. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
 9
WARK, M., Molecular Red, London: Verso, 2015.
 10
 NUNES, R., Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of
Political Organization, Verso Books, 2021.
 11
BOGDANOV, A., Essays in Tektology: The Universal Science of
Organization, London: Intersystems Publications, 1980.
 12
OSTROM, E., Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
 13
KLEINER, D., The Telekommunist Manifesto, Amsterdam:
Colophon, 2010.
 14
The Lago Agrio case in Ecuador is a good example of juridical organ
building within a broader indigenous movement.
 15
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.
 16
ŽIŽEK, S., The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
 17
LAUTMAN, 2011.
 18
MARX, K., Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1: The
Process of Production, London: New Left Review & London, 1976.
 19
MARX, K., Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (Rough Draft), London: Penguin, 1973.
 20
KARATANI, The Structure of World History.
 21
HOBBES, T., Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a
Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, MACPHERSON, C. B.
(ed.), London: Penguin, 1985.
 22
KARATANI, K., The Structure of World History.
 23
Karatani’s claim is supported by Marshall Sahlins’ account of the
phenomenon of “stranger-kingship” across regions and cultural contexts.
See: SAHLINS, M., “The Stranger-King, or The Elementary Forms of
Political Life”, in: Indonesia and the Malay World, 36, 105, 2008;
SAHLINS, M., “Stranger-Kings in General: The Cosmologics of Power”, in:
Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, ABRAMSON, Allen &
HOLBRAAD, Martin (eds.), Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2016.
 24
MARX, K., Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1: The
Process of Production, London: New Left Review & London, 1976.
 25
Karatani also makes the parallel elsewhere, by comparing the king and
money as two forms of “sublime fetishes” enabling the network of
representation. See: KARATANI, K., “On the Eighteenth of Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte”, in: History and Repetition, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011.
 26
KARATANI, The Structure of World History.
 27
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, J. 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 Kohei
Saito’s Karl Marx’s ecosocialism: capitalism, nature, and the unfinished
critique of political economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
 28
SAITO, K., “Marx’s Ecological Notebooks”, in: Monthly Review,
2016, https://monthlyreview.org/2016....
 29
ROTH, R., “Marx on Technical Change in the Critical Edition”, in: The
European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 17, 2010;
PASQUINELLI, M., “On the Origins of Marx’s General Intellect”,
in: Radical Philosophy 2.06, 2019, https://www.radicalphilosophy.....
 30
KARATANI, The Structure of World History.
 31
SCOTT, J., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999.
 32
SAITO, K., Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism.
 33
ALTVATER, E., The Social Formation of Capitalism, Fossil
Energy, and Oil-Imperialism, Centre for Civil Society Colloquium on
the Economy, Society and Nature, 2005.
 34
MALM, A., “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the
British Cotton Industry”, in: Historical Materialism, 21, 1, 2013.
 35
CHAKRABARTY, D., “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category”,
in: Critical Inquiry, 46, 2019.
 36
DUMONT, L., “Postface: Toward a Theory of Hierarchy”, in: Homo
Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980.
 37
 HOUSEMAN, M., “The Hierarchical Relation: A Particular Ideology or a
Generic Model?”, in: Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5, 1,
2015.
 38
LIMA, T., “Uma história dos dois, do uno e do terceiro”, in: Lévi-Strauss:
leituras brasileiras, QUEIROZ, Ruben & NOBRE, Renarde (eds.), Belo
Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2008.
 39
STRATHERN, M., The Gender of the Gift: Problems with
Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990.
 40
GELL, A., “Strathernograms or the semiotics of mixed metaphors”, in: The
Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, London: The Athlon Press,
2006.
 41
TOSCANO, Alberto, “Lineaments of the Logistical State”, in: Viewpoint,
4, 2014.
 42
LEFEBVRE, Henri, “Space and the State”, in: State, Space, Word:
Selected Essays, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
 43
FAVEREAU, M., The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the
World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.
 44
Ibid.
 45
FAVEREAU, The Horde, p. 41.
 46
MARX K., Capital, 139.
 47
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.
 48
MARX K., Capital, 247.
 49
Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations, 4th
revised edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, §201
 50
Willem DEVRIES, Wilfrid Sellars, McGill-Queens University Press,
2005, p. 98.
 51
Wilfrid SELLARS, “Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process [The
Carus Lectures], The Monist 64, 1981, §44—45.
 52
 James R. O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative
Turn, Polity Press, 2007, p. 150.
 53
Slavoj ŽIŽEK, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p. 13
 54
Alberto TOSCANO, “The open Secret of Real Abstraction”, Rethinking
Marxism 20 (2), pp. 273—287, 2008, p. 280.
 55
Alfred SOHN-RETHEL, La Pensée-Marchandise, Éditions du
Croquant, 2010, p. 52. Translated by the authors.
 56
Anselm JAPPE, “Pourquoi lire Sohn-Rethel Aujourd’hui?” In: SOHN-
RETHEL, La Pensée-Marchandise, Éditions du Croquant, pp. 7—38, 2010,
p. 9.
 57
Sohn-Rethel, La pensée, p. 63.
 58
Sohn-Rethel, La Pensée, p. 87.
 59
See Wilfrid SELLARS, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,”
In: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. I, ed. by
Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, pp. 253—329, University of Minnesota
Press, 1956.
 60
José Arthur GIANOTTI, Trabalho e Reflexão. Ensaios para uma
dialética da sociabilidade, Brasiliense, 1983, p. 52. Translated by the
authors.
 61
DEVRIES, Wilfrid Sellars, p. 128.
 62
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/upl....
 63
DEVRIES, Wilfrid Sellars, p. 120.
 64
Gabriel TUPINAMBÁ, “Freeing thought from thinkers: A case
study”, Continental Thought and Theory, 1 (1), pp. 156—193, 2016,
p. 160. https://www.academia.edu/24772....
 65
Patricia REED, “The End of a World and its Pedagogies”, Making &
Breaking 2, 2021, n. p. https://makingandbreaking.org/...
 66
Patricia REED, “Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless
Perspectives”, E-flux Journal 101, 2019, n.
p. https://www.e-flux.com/journal...
 67
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 worklife 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.
 68
REED, Orientation, n. p.
 69
REED, Orientation, n. p.
 70
www.outrosestudos.com.
 71
AKUNO, K. & NANGWAYA, A. (eds.), Jackson Rising: The
Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-
Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, Jackson: Daraja Press, 2017,
p. 34.
 72
AKUNO & NANGWAYA, Jackson Rising, p. 34.
 73
Kali Akuno: “Although capitalism has thoroughly dominated social relations
in Mississippi since its inception as a colonial entity, the local practice can
best be described as a ‘contingent’ expression of that system because of its
overt dependency on paternalist white supremacy. The local capitalist and
elite classes attempt to maintain social and political control over the state, its
peoples, and its resources by tempering and distorting the profit-motive that
is central to the capitalist mode of production. This severely restricts
agricultural and industrial production, trade, and financial flows in and out of
the state. Rather than stimulating growth and maximizing profits through
increased production and trade, the local white ruling class has prioritized a
strategy of containment that deliberately seeks to fetter the Black population
by limiting its access to capital and decent wages, both of which constitute a
critical source of labor power and strength in a capitalist society. As an old
saying goes, ‘In Mississippi, money doesn’t talk as loud as race’.” (AKUNO
& NANGWAYA, Jackson Rising, pp. 377—378)
 74
AKUNO & NANGWAYA, Jackson Rising, p. 123.
 75
AKUNO & NANGWAYA, Jackson Rising, p. 124.
 76
LINEBAUGH, P. & REDIKER, M., The Many-headed Hydra:
Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic, London: Verso, 2012.
 77
JONES, P., Workers without work, London: Verso, 2021.
 78
HOEL, E., ALBANTAKIS, L., TONONI, G., “Quantifying causal
emergence shows that macro can beat micro”, in: PNAS,
2013, https://www.pnas.org/content/1....
 79
COSTHEK ABÍLIO, L., “Uberização do trabalho: subsunção real da
viração”, Blog da Boitempo, 2017, https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/....
 80
AZEVEDO, R., Teoria geral da renda em Marx: um estudo
sobre a renda básica, Online Course Syllabus,
2021, https://sites.google.com/view/....
 81
COSTHEK ABÍLIO, L., “Uberização do trabalho: subsunção real da
viração”.
 82
CARSON, R., “Fictitious Capital and the Re-emergence of Personal Forms
of Domination”, in: Continental Thought & Theory, 4, 1,
2017, https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bi....
 83
LIBERATO, L. V., “A inovadora parceria entre o iFood e as milícias”, in: Le
Monde Diplomatique Brasil, 2021, https://diplomatique.org.br/a-....
 84
MAGALHÃES, Z. A., “Platforming and perspectivism”, in: Second Law,
politics and literature international seminar: Borders of the
human, borders of democracy, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/60906....
 85
ARANTES, P., “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.
 86
KLEINER, D., Machine Learning Disabilities, online presentation,
2021, https://dmytri.surge.sh/disabilities/#/.
 87
MARX, K., Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: The
Process of Production, London: New Left Review & London, 1976.
 88
“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: Critique of
Political Economy, Vol. 1)
 89
VINICIUS, L., “Modo de espera e salário por peça nas entregas por apps”,
in: Passapalavra, 2020, https://passapalavra.info/2020....
 90
 “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 disregard with the worker” says
Nascimento, a courier involved in the strikes. https://brasil.elpais.com/bras...
 91
ENDNOTES, “Onward Barbarians”, in: Endnotes, 2020,
https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians.
 92
TORINO, P & WOHLEBEN, A., “Memes with Force: Lessons from the
Yellow Vests”, in: Mute, 2019, https://www.metamute.org/edito....
 93
GUERREIRO, I. & CORDEIRO, L., “Do passe ao breque: disputas sobre os
fluxos no espaço urbano, in: Passapalavra,
2020, https://passapalavra.info/2020....
 94
TOSCANO, A., “Logistics and Opposition”, in: Mute, 2011,
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and-opposition.
 95
https://valor.globo.com/public...
 96
The videos can be found on their channel “Treta no Trampo”
(@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.
 97
MIGUEZ, F. & GUIMARÃES, V., “App Workers Memes and Struggles in
Brazil”, in: Notes from Below, 2021,
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/app-workers-memes-and-struggles-brazil.
 98
https://www.instagram.com/p/CT....
 99
HAMZA, A. & TUPINAMBÁ, G., “On the Organization of Defeats”,
in: Crisis & Critique, 3, 1, 2016, https://crisiscritique.org/ccm...
 100
BERNARDO, J. & PEREIRA, L., Capitalismo Sindical, São Paulo:
Xamã, 2008.
 101
The complete presentation of these partial results has been compiled in the
document A Primer on Political Phenomenology, written by Tupinambá and
Yao, and available upon request at gabrieltupinamba@mac.com.
 102
GOLDBLATT, R., Topoi: The Categorial Analysis of Logic, New
York: Elsevier Science, 1984.
 103
As a side remark, note that this hypothesis would help us account for why
Alain Badiou deals exclusively with the “State of the situation” in his Being
and Event, where he hastily moves from the fact that both ontology and the
State deal in classical logic to the claim that, because of this, the State
structure would serve as a sort of “ontological” adversary in political life.
 104
 MORTENSEN, C., Inconsistent Mathematics, Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1995.
 105
LAMBERT, D. & HESPEL, B., From Contradiction to Conciliation:
A Way to “Dualize” Sheaves, arXiv: 1106.6194v2,
2011, https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.619....
Subset of Theoretical Practice
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. They can be reached
at subsetoftheoreticalpractice@gmail.com and www.theoreticalpractice.com

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META-STABILITY AND THE DIAGONAL METHODTimotej Prosen, Maks
Valenčič, Tisa Troha