The Open Secret of Real Abstraction

Abstract This article revisits the Marxist debate on 'real abstraction' in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Roberto Finelli to thinking on the specific status of abstraction, in terms of both the methodology of Marxism and the logic and ontology of capitalism. These foundational debates are then contrasted with attempts by Paolo Virno and Lorenzo Cillario to think the contemporary figures of abstraction in terms of its politicization, on the one hand, and its operational role in the labor process, on the other. Keywords: AbstractionCognitive CapitalismCommodity ExchangeIntellectOntology Notes 1Deleuze and Guattari are led in this respect to define contemporary capitalism through the category of the axiomatic (see Toscano Citation2006). 2A similar paradox is investigated in Postone's account of 'abstract domination', according to which "Marx's theory of capital is a theory of the nature of the history of modern society. It treats history as being socially constituted and, yet, as possessing a quasi-autonomous developmental logic" (Postone Citation1993, 31). 3"The work of my whole intellectual life until my 90th birthday was necessary in order to clarify and explain a semi-intuition that I had in 1921 during my university studies in Heidelberg: the discovery of the transcendental subject in the commodity-form, a guiding principle of historical materialism. I could obtain a satisfying explanation of this principle only as the result of ever-renewed 'attacks', which took the name of Exposés" (in Adorno and Sohn-Rethel Citation2000, 183). In 1936, Adorno himself hailed Sohn-Rethel's insight in the following terms: "your letter has meant the greatest intellectual upheaval that I have experienced in the philosophical field since my first encounter with Benjamin" (46). Alas, the rest of their correspondence testifies to Adorno's failure, in the context of Horkheimer's hostility to Sohn-Rethel, to be faithful to this upheaval. 4Despite his critique of Sohn-Rethel, Postone can be seen to share a similar problem—for instance, when he states: "The problem of knowledge now becomes a question of the relation between forms of social mediation and forms of thought" (Postone Citation1993, 77). 5The "apparatus of categories presupposed, implied by the scientific procedure (that, of course, of the Newtonian science of nature), the network of notions by means of which it seizes nature, is already present in the social effectivity, already at work in the act of commodity exchange … The exchange of commodities implies a double abstraction: the abstraction from the changeable character of the commodity during the act of exchange and the abstraction from the concrete, empirical, sensual, particular character of the commodity (in the act of exchange, the distinct, particular qualitative determination of a commodity is not taken into account; a commodity is reduced to an abstract entity which—irrespective of its particular nature, of its "use value"—possesses 'the same value' as another commodity for which it is being exchanged)" (Žižek 1994, 301). 6Bearing witness to his unremitting attention to the idée fixe of real abstraction, Sohn-Rethel had already entitled his Paris Exposé of 1937, spurred by his discussions with Walter Benjamin, "On the Critical Liquidation of Apriorism" (Adorno and Sohn-Rethel Citation2000, 50).