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Brassier - Wandering Abstraction
"Wandering Abstraction" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Only the conjunctions of abstract-concrete and universal-particular are ruled out as contradictory. But even this is controversial since Marx speaks of ‘concrete abstractions’, while Alain Badiou has popularised the notion of a ‘universal singularity’.
Definition · paragraph 3
But even this is controversial since Marx speaks of ‘concrete abstractions’, while Alain Badiou has popularised the notion of a ‘universal singularity’. Moreover, many philosophers follow Hegel in defining the ‘concrete’ as that which is relationally embedded, in contradistinction to the ‘abstract’, which is isolated or one-sided.
Definition · paragraph 15
Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, London: Athlone, pp.239-40. Wandering Abstraction | Mute http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction 15 of 57 6/8/2016 2:02 AM
Stakes · paragraph 14
I am also drawing on two as yet unpublished texts: Nick Srnicek, ‘Accelerationism: Epistemic, Economic, Political’ (2013) and Alex Williams, ‘The Politics of Abstraction’ (2013). Wandering Abstraction | Mute http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction 14 of 57 6/8/2016 2:02 AM
History · paragraph 49
40 I give a more detailed account of the ontological consequences of Sellars’ metalinguistic nominalism in ‘Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism: Sellars’ Critical Ontology’ in Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and its Implications, edited by Bana Bashour and Hans Muller, London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Wandering Abstraction | Mute http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction 49 of 57 6/8/2016 2:02 AM
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.