FOREIGN  OBJEKT

Essential readings:

 

Intellectual and Manual Labour (1970/translated to English in 1978)

by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

 

The one, the only, the irreplaceable. Deftly blending together critical theory, Althusserian epistemic rigor, and an Engelsian account of the role of value in pre-capitalist societies, Sohn-Rethel produced a work for the ages. The "Kantian categories a priori," he tells us early in the book, issue from the commodity-form,  which permits us to conceive of "strict causality"--for Sohn-Rethel, a reductio that relates to the way commodities are exchanged abstractly--as surely as it permits us to conceive of abstract space and time. But this metaphysical entrapment did not commence with Kant, nor with capitalism: rather, its origins can be traced back to at least seventh century B.C. Ancient Greece, when the "real abstraction" of commodity-exchange (the status of value-based exchanges as simultaneously real and abstract or calculative) manifested in the philosophic works of the Milesian school, who parlayed value into the thinking of substance.  Sohn-Rethel ends the book on an aspirational note: the mobilization of workers in America, he contends, as well as the Cultural Revolution, attest to the possibility of escaping real abstraction--or, at the very least, challenging the division of intellectual and manual labour which it calcified.

 

Below is the 1978 Humanities Press version; however, note that an updated translation including supplementary material has recently been published by Brill

 

https://libcom.org/files/alfred-sohn-rethel-intellectual-and-manual-labor-a-critique-of-epistemology1.pdf

 

The Open Secret of Real Abstraction (2008)

by Alberto Toscano

 

Toscano had already been moving in important philosophical circles before he published this piece--one that he's described in hindsight as a "literature review." Literature review or no, "Open Secret" is the moment when real abstraction was dusted off for a Marxist-theoretical context that drew renewed strength from the 2007-08 financial crisis. Althusser may have, for Toscano, raised the possibility of setting Marxism upon a sounder epistemological footing. Where he erred though was in neglecting to address "the relation between thought and capitalism." It is for this reason that the notion of real abstraction put forth by Sohn-Rethel--as well as the related work of Roberto Finelli, who charts Marx's turn away from the Feuerbachian notion of "real generic essence"--remain vital. This vitality is demonstrated by its appearance in the works of both Paolo Virno and Lorenzio Cillario, who argue that process of real abstraction indexes to “the cognitive and intellectual cooperation” of the general intellect in the context of late capitalism (but differ crucially over whether this same period has been marked by the “collapse of labor qua measure”).

 

"The Open Secret Real Abstraction" was first published in the journal Rethinking Marxism, and can be downloaded for free from ResearchGate at the URL below:

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27225664_The_Open_Secret_of_Real_Abstraction

 

The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again (2020) 

by Chris O'Kane 

 

While less iconic than The Open Secret, Chris O'Kane's "The Critique of Real Abstraction" is probably the most accessible and informative genealogy of real abstraction yet published in English. Not content just to stick with Sohn-Rethel, O'Kane offers us--after a prelim covering the "incomplete" writings of Marx on abstraction--a run-down of how real abstraction came to inform the work of Adorno and Lefebre, the former of whom retained its spirit while eschewing the enumeration of "analogous properties that exchange and the categories of the understanding possess" and the latter of whom (without seemingly being aware of Sohn-Rethel) integrated it into his notion of "spatial practice" according to which the commodity-form shapes the (often fraught) space it inhabits. From the promising beginnings however the discourse surrounding real abstraction took, for O'Kane, a reifying turn. Thinkers like Moishe Postone and Helmut Reichelt and even Toscano doubtlessly succeeded in relating real abstraction in innumerable ways to the "logic and ontology of accumulation and reproduction of capital." What they failed to do, in his eyes, is to do fully affirm its subjective dimension--a subjective dimension that, for O'Kane, has more recently been explored and expanded upon in texts by Werner Bonefeld and Christian Lotz.

 

"The Critique of Real Abstraction" was first published in the collection Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction. The full text can be found at the URL below:

https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/contentgroups/economics/okaneRealAbstraction.pdf