Suhail Malik: By way of general introduction, let’s start with the develop-ment of your thinking and ideas through nihilism. In Nihil Unbound, you advocated a (perhaps modernist) project, maybe best exemplified by science, in which the rational understanding of the world undoes all conventional accounts for it (from the mythic to structured or individualized beliefs to most philosophical structures insofar as they do not take seriously enough the discoveries and horizons opened up by the sciences).1 As I see it, you argue that the rational revisions of understanding, the cosmos (philosophi-cally and scientifi(philosophi-cally apprehended), the self, and the conditions of thought do not depend on or lead to anything predetermined. Or, to put it otherwise, they depend on and assume nothing as their condition other than the itera-tion of raitera-tional thought in a material world. The absence of any positive term as a condition or result of this process—the absenting of a transcendental condition or determination of rational enquiry, its nothing—marks rational thought as a productive nihilism: nihil unbound, as the title of your book has it. One way to capture this nihilistic condition for thought, its termless-ness, is your image of the death of the sun, which, thanks to scientific pre-diction, we know will happen in about five billion years. You ask the ques-tion Lyotard does of how thinking addresses its own extra-terrestriality as a rational injunction—and perhaps organizes its own departure from the solar system in a politics of survival2—but, beyond that, solar burnout captures a kind of ultimate nothing for thinking as we have understood it so far, and of its (terrestrial) conditions. So—and here is an audacious move—solar burnout becomes a positive figure for how rational thought in a way assumes nothing as its condition. If this is right, clearly thought cannot be predicated on human interests or have the human as its term, even if it is the human who thinks rationally (perhaps not exclusively, but as at least one such spe-cies-actor). This is the antihumanism and non-correlationism of your work.
My initial questions are twofold. The first concerns the drama of nihilism: solar burnout if not universal termination is a grand and
Conversation conducted by e-mail in September and October 2013.
1 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
2 Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go Without a Body,” in The Inhuman: Reflection on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
catastrophic vista from which to think the base conditions for rational thought and its development. Your more recent work revolving around the work of the mid-twentieth century American analytic philoso-pher Wilfrid Sellars seems by comparison relatively modest. The aspects of Sellars’s work you are interested in are his theorizations of how ideas are revised by a rational agent by the relation between what he calls the “manifest image”—approximately how the world appears and makes sense to a general rational consciousness—and the “scientific image”—the world as it is known in the terms of theoretical science.
Other than explaining your turn to Sellars, the question—which I think is not just about rhetorical strategies but is close to core shifts in your approach—is: Why this “modesty” of returning to an encultured human actor as the basis of your inquiries now? At first blush, it seems a regression or stepping down from the scales and ambition of your earlier work in two regards: first, it concerns only intricacies of processes of rational thinking and concept generation rather than literally stellar conditions for thinking the future of thought; the scope seems much reduced. Second, given your earlier advocacy of a trenchantly antihumanist or non-correlational condi-tion and term for racondi-tional thought, the “concept-monger” (to take up your citation of Robert Brandom) involved here seems indelibly human. And this is very far from a now established perception of your interests. In either instance, the emphasis now seems more constructive than nihilistic, more anthropological than cosmological. (I think they are no less nihilistic but it may need some explanation to make it clear why so.)
Brassier: At the heart of Nihil Unbound (NU) is an argument defending the necessary link between rationality and nihilism, such that, as you put it, rational thought must assume nothing (what the book calls “being-nothing”) as its productive condition.
But the subsequent move toward Sellars, who was all too summarily dealt with in NU, is a direct continuation rather than a detour or a regression from this agenda. I realize it may look like a step backward—a retreat from the impasse of extinction—but in fact it’s a case of what the French call reculer pour mieux sautez, that is, stepping back in order to leap farther. In this particular context, it means reconsidering my overly hasty dismissal of Sellars’s defense of the manifest image in order to think through what it might mean to unbind thinking from its terrestrial condition.
I’ve come to understand why Sellars insisted on the indispensability of the manifest image and its role in the process of conceptual revision that fuels cogni-tive discovery. There’s nothing sacrosanct about the contents of the manifest image (except perhaps for the category of “personhood,” which is not species-specific for Sellars: persons need not be human). What is crucial is its normative infrastructure, by virtue of which it constitutes what Sellars called “the space of reasons.” This normative infrastructure is spelled out in Sellars’s inferentialist theory of meaning,
which has been vastly amplified by Brandom. The basic idea is simple: if you believe or mean something, you also ought to believe or mean everything that follows from it. Inferentialism ties together semantic and epistemic holism. Semantic holism is the idea that the meaning of any individual claim is defined by its relations to other claims: not just the claims it implies, but those that imply it in turn. These relations are inferential: what something means is a function of what you can infer from it, and what implies it in turn. But this means that to be committed to the meaning of any single claim is also to be committed to the meaning of all those other claims with which it is inferentially bound. This has an epistemic consequence: any individual belief is defined by its inferential relations to all the other beliefs presupposed by or implied by it. So if you believe one thing, you also ought to believe everything that follows from that one thing—regardless of whether or not you are explicitly aware of it (which, clearly, most of the time we are not).
This notion of “discursive commitment” is central to inferentialism: the meanings of our claims regularly outstrip what we currently intend or are aware of. This is because the implications of our claims regularly outstrip what we are cur-rently aware of. To be rational is to keep track of those entailments and thereby to track what we become committed to when we commit ourselves to a belief or claim.
“Deontic scorekeeping” is the name Brandom gives to the practice whereby we keep track of these discursive commitments. We as rational beings strive to keep track of what we ought to say, think, or do, just as a good chess player strives to keep track of what will follow from all the possible moves that might be made given a specific configuration of pieces on the board. In other words, what we mean when we think or speak is determined by all the things we also ought to think or say in its wake.
This inferentialist account of meaning and belief turns out to be a valuable resource for me because it defends the autonomy of rationality without violating the constraints of naturalism (or, if one prefers, “materialism”). The “normativity”
invoked in this inferentialist theory of meaning and thought must be distinguished from the sense in which we refer to as “socio-cultural norms.” Rational normativity is distinct from social normativity even if it is invariably socially instituted. This is something Hegel understood and it’s the reason why Hegel can be a rationalist (indeed, an absolute rationalist) while insisting that rationality is always socially and historically embodied. Sellars is Hegelian to the extent that, for him too, the practice of giving and asking for reasons is socially instituted. But institution is not constitution: to say that reason is socially instituted is not to say that it is socially constituted; that is the kind of historicist relativism that both Hegel and Sellars were attempting to avoid, not least because it founders in incoherence. Reason is a practice, but not all practices are equivalent. To claim that they are is to lapse into the kind of vulgar pragmatism which subordinates all practices to a single standard of utility, whether social or biological. Inferentialism insists that the ends governing the practice of giving and asking for reasons cannot be reduced to those of other social practices, even if they are bound up with them in complicated ways.
216 Concept Concept 217
This is one way in which inferentialism has allowed me to substantiate the distinction I made in NU between the ends of thought and the ends of life. This is also why it would be a mistake to view my current focus on the inferentialist link between conceptual function and linguistic practice as symptomatic of a drop from the cosmological register to the anthropological register. The “modesty” of my apparent stepping back from thought’s cosmic condition and returning to an account that roots thinking in the activities of encultured human agents is strategic.
It’s necessary in order both to ground the normative valence I accord to thinking, and to explain what thinking is and why it ought to be deterritorialized. Unless I can give an account of the “ought” in a statement like “thinking ought to be freed from its terrestrial condition,” its status as an imperative is null. More generally, one has to give an account of the normativity of truth in order to break out of the paradox of nihilism: if nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters doesn’t matter. Therefore mattering can’t be adjudicated by thinking; it can only be determined by living. Having destituted reason and truth, nihilism crowns feeling and instinct in their stead. Living holds sway over thinking.
Equally, the Laruellean account of thought which I sought to repurpose in NU proved unsuited to the task of liberating thinking from living because it relegated the need for justification to the transcendent realm of philosophy that it claims to suspend. From the standpoint of what Laruelle calls “radical imma-nence,” rational normativity is just another philosopheme among others. The move from Laruelle to Sellars is the move from the absolute suspension of justi-fication to the justified suspension of the absolute. For my purposes, Laruelle’s
“non-standard philosophy” remains too static, too formalist a procedure; its
“realism of the last instance” reifies conceptual structures and reduces inferential necessity to authoritarian whim—that of “the philosophical decision.” But unless one can give an immanent, materialist account of the status of rational normativity, one cannot but regress from the cosmological to the anthropological. Inferentialism provides an account wherein thinking that thinking makes no difference does make a difference in and for thinking itself. It matters whether or not anything matters;
determining whether or not nihilism is true makes a difference for thinking and this makes a difference in reality: not because thinking is magically keyed in to the fabric of reality, but because thinking is an activity performed by language-using animals, an activity that makes a difference because it is embedded in material reality. Because concepts are functions, they are relayed by the activities of lan-guage-using animals, but this does not mean that the properties of conceptual function are to be identified with properties or capacities exclusive to the human animal. Humans may be the only concept-mongers on Earth, but this is not to say they are the only possible concept-mongers. Ultimately, the inferentialist account of conceptual practice ties into a metaphysics of processes wherein conceptual function may be realized by very different kinds of physical processes. Sellars’s vision entails a transcendental functionalism wherein thinking is a process among
other processes, but one whose peculiar involution generates a cognitive gateway onto those other processes.
Let’s clarify and situate your broad ambition a little more. Two interrelated aspects are worth highlighting here, even at risk of repetition. The first is forward-looking, the second is backward-looking. Prospectively, what is the “farther” horizon you want to “leap” toward, that the turn to infer-entialism will help you secure? Retrospectively, accepting the divergence between the interests and claims of reason and those of life—reason trans-forms life because it is other to it—it seems that rational thought is for you more fundamentally yet the “engine” for its own extension beyond human determination, in two senses: first, you avow the extension of reason qua inferentialism outside of the human into material and practical processes in general; second, it is rational thought qua philosophy that generates an adequate account of this extension and its possibility. Philosophy is then not just a belated self-reflection on the conditions of thought and reality but at once a practice effected through language. This nuanced global distinc-tion leads to the quesdistinc-tion of what other recursive inferentialist pattern for-mations there can be.
Certainly, making inferences through a recursive pattern formation is a central conceit of capitalist markets as pricing mechanisms constituted through the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Here, all prices in a market are
“true” reflections of the market as a whole insofar as it is transparent to itself;
price changes arise only as a consequence of nonsymmetrical information before returning to “rationally determined” equilibrium precisely through recursive operations of trading for maximal gains. This may not quite be an inferentialism as per the philosophical lineage you are drawing on, but it seems to observe the same functionalist account. If so, today’s capitalist markets, drawing on these basic premises and also the automation of their practical implementation, would seem to constitute—you may prefer “insti-tute”—a kind of rational agency, and at speeds and capacities that far exceed human limits. At least, that’s what’s declared by those who advocate for cap-ital markets as generating “accurate” prices. Equally, writers, artists, and filmmakers have “embodied” capitalist markets or recursive information network systems as fantastical, spectral figures, proposing a personifica-tion of a kind of nonhuman inferentialist funcpersonifica-tioning: William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy is one influential example here.
If these or other extensions or generalizations of inferentialism qua recursive patterning process have validity qua reasoning for you, how do you locate inferentialism qua philosophy as a practice in relation to other inferentialist/patterning operations? Sub-question: What is its privilege, if any, and what can you say about this privilege compared with the one
RAY BRASSIER IN CONVERSATION WITH SUHAIL MALIK REASON IS INCONSOLABLE
philosophy had in the high Enlightenment as the rational discipline (given that philosophy then also covered what are now distinguished as sciences and now does not)?
First of all, I’d like to obviate a misunderstanding: I wouldn’t say that I “avow the extension of reason qua inferentialism outside of the human into material and prac-tical processes in general.” While it’s true to say that reason is incarnated in mate-rial and practical processes, this is not to say that these processes are themselves
“rational” or that inferential patterns are realized by all sorts of material and practical processes in general. On the contrary: I want to uphold the crucial (Kantian) dis-tinction between rule-governed conceptual practices, which I take to be constitutive of rationality, and which are exceedingly rare and metaphysically exceptional, and pattern-governed processes, which are ubiquitous and metaphysically unremarkable.
In other words, I want to maintain the exceptional status of reason and insist on the “unnatural” nature of our rational capacity without lapsing into a metaphysical dualism of the mental and physical (of the sort recently rehabilitated by philoso-phers like David Chalmers)3 but also without attributing to it a supernatural origin.
The distinction between rule-obeying activity and pattern-governed behavior dis-qualifies the claim that markets think or dynamic systems reason. Rule-following is pattern-governed but not every pattern incarnates a rule.
So, not everything thinks: rationality is a metaphysical exception. But it’s the exception constituted by the rule that discriminates the exception from the rule. So the “farther horizon” toward which rationality propels itself is one that reason must construct: it is not pre-given and it is fundamentally incompatible with the brand of metaphysical eschatology for which the ultimate horizon is the re conciliation of mind and matter or reason and nature. Reason is inconsolable and non-concilia-tory. Rational inquiry is propelled by cognitive interests that are generated anew by breaking with past modes of understanding. In this regard, reason is the “restless-ness of the negative.” It progresses by refusing the lure of reconciliation—even and especially the lure of being reconciled to the irreconcilable. The farther horizon toward which it progresses is the universal understood as determinate negation of parochial, context-specific modes of understanding.
What this progression ultimately implies is a transformation of reason’s rela-tion to time. Why? Because the critique of intellectual intuirela-tion, which is the ratio-nalist variant of the myth of the given, requires that we acknowledge the discursive structure of rationality: concepts are linguistically instantiated functions. But to say that reason is discursive is also to say that reasoning takes time: just as there is no nondiscursive rationality, there is no timeless reason. It is because reason takes time that it constitutes a “self-correcting enterprise” in which even our most cherished categories may have to be revised or abandoned. Among these are the temporal
3 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
categories of past, present, and future. My wager is that our understanding of the articulation of past, present, and future—and hence of the structure of time—will eventually be transformed in the light of cognitive discovery. This is where I think reason harbors the possibility of a cognitive solution to the problem of nihilism, which, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is simply the problem of what to do with time. Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer a transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate horizon of reconciliation or redemption ensuring a payoff for this investment? Reason promises to transform our relation to time such
categories of past, present, and future. My wager is that our understanding of the articulation of past, present, and future—and hence of the structure of time—will eventually be transformed in the light of cognitive discovery. This is where I think reason harbors the possibility of a cognitive solution to the problem of nihilism, which, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is simply the problem of what to do with time. Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer a transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate horizon of reconciliation or redemption ensuring a payoff for this investment? Reason promises to transform our relation to time such