This is an interview with Daniel Sacilotto. Daniel Sacilotto teaches in Critical Studies at The California Institute of the Arts, and in Arts and Design at California State University San Bernardino. His research focuses on the relation between realism and utopianism in contemporary European philosophy and postcolonial Latin America. He is the author of Universality and Utopia: the 20th Century Peruvian Socialist Indigenista Tradition (2023, Anthem Press), and Structure and Thought: Toward a Theory of Representational Cognition (2024, Northwestern Press). He is currently finishing a third monograph titled The Flight of Ariel: Universality and Transcultural Synthesis in the New World, which examines the evolution of universalist imaginaries in Latin American philosophy in the twentieth century and up to the present.

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DIFFRACTIONS: It is fascinating to observe how contemporary philosophers position themselves with respect to systematicity as a vehicle of theoretical thought. Could you briefly discuss your background and explain why, despite your considerable debt to analytic philosophy, you chose to write a systematic treatise rather than a series of discrete interventions? What motivated this choice?

DANIEL SACILOTTO: My philosophical upbringing was largely shaped by the rift between the analytic and continental traditions. I began my studies in Peru at a continental-based school and completed my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, which was almost entirely analytical in approach. I decided to pursue my graduate studies in Comparative Literature because it allowed me to engage with philosophy on a broader terrain with other domains of theory and cultural production, and I was never interested in specialization. I agree with Badiou that philosophy’s most distinctive trait is to construct a systematic conceptual framework apt for thinking about the plausible composition of divergent processes (“truth-procedures,” in his terminology): science, politics, art, love… This is also to agree with Hegel that philosophy is “its time raised to the level of thought,” and with Sellars in that philosophy’s function is to interrogate how things “in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.” Philosophy is neither the handmaiden of science nor the sister of poetry or politics; it cannot be ‘sutured’ to any of its external conditions. It is rather a metatheoretical discourse that forges concepts to think jointly of different domains of experience, discourse, theory, and practice.

Although I have enormous respect for analytic philosophy, I also believe its incestuous insularity and irrelevance beyond its own academic reproduction are largely due to a futile attempt to model itself on the sciences, forgetting the systematic core of the philosophical vocation. As a result, I find it mostly useful for providing formal-methodological tools to clarify problems and, ultimately, to construct the kind of grand narrative that the great names of philosophy define: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Badiou, Sellars.

My project in Structure and Thought is not quite fully ‘systematic’ in that it remains circumscribed to fundamental ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues. But it draws openly from both analytic and continental traditions, particularly weaving relations among structuralist, materialist, and realist approaches in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy, examining how these traditions rekindle and recast longstanding problems concerning the relations between rationalism and empiricism, and between realism and idealism. It is a broadly Kantian project, very much inspired by Ray Brassier’s own attempts to bring together materialism and naturalism by drawing diagonals between both traditions. My current project extends to political philosophy and ethics, focusing on the universalist tradition of Latin American thought in which the methodological demands for realism and utopianism are seen not as contradictory but as complementary. In this regard, my thinking is characterized by an attempt to think about how representation is not the opposite but the condition for creation.

DIFF: You advance that thought does not have guaranteed access to the ‘real’, and that the ‘real’ is not reducible to a correlate of thought. In what precise way does your account of representational cognition avoid the “myth of the given” while still allowing for the progressive “mapping of the modal structure of the world”? How do you avoid replacing one foundationalism (sensory givenness, a priori categories) with another?

DS: The Myth of the Given, as formulated by Sellars, can be understood broadly as a critique of different forms of epistemological foundationalism. In its classical, empiricist iteration, it is encapsulated in the thesis that sensory experience causally leads to the formation of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge, i.e., it can be traced back to Aristotelian ‘abstractionism’ and, in the modern period, to Locke’s account of the derivation of ideas from sensory impressions. In its rationalist variant, the myth can be expressed in the theory that innate ideas or apodictic truths serve as the foundation of all other knowledge, and so that knowledge concerning the external world and objects of sensation depends upon a kind of a priori knowledge accessible to pure thought, either through introspection or inference. Even Kant and Hegel, Sellars argues, succumb to different versions of the Given, though he is not exactly clear about the reasons why he thinks so.

My own work begins by diagnosing the limitations in the germinal German Idealist project that led it to skeptical or ‘correlationist’ and idealist conclusions, following Sellars in pursuing a variation of the ‘historicizing of the transcendental’ alongside naturalist and realist lines. Rejecting foundationalism implies rejecting empiricist abstractionism and rationalist innatism, but also distinct forms of attempts to identify a non-categorially determinate foundation for thought in Life, lived experience, history, or whatever else. This is why I think the Sellarsian critique of the Given is not only resonant with the critique of empiricism or foundationalism, but also with (1) the critique of “correlationism” advanced by Quentin Meillassoux and other “speculative realists”; (2) the critique of dogmatic metaphysics initiated by Kant, and radicalized in the 20^th Century by Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Laruelle, and others.

In my account, the categorical and formal structure of the real is progressively excavated in the self-revising process of theoretical inquiry. This involves understanding how, even though our experimental methods, concepts, and mathematized theories change, these changes are not arbitrary but are oriented by the norm of representational correctness, through which we produce ever more robust and precise models of a reality that is not itself wholly discursive or subjective. The methodological, semantic, and formal structural invariants identified across theoretical changes are not givens, precisely because they are not known in advance but are discovered a posteriori by reconstructing retroactively a series of theoretical changes in which structural preservation is revealed diachronically.

With regard to the formal structures described by modern science, Jay F. Rosenberg shows how the convergence of theories toward an ‘ideal limit’ of enquiry can therefore be reconstructed by a procedure that he names counterpart modelling, through which we identify not only the convergence of measurements, but also the capacity to model a predecessor theory within the axioms-principles of the new one, i.e. constructing virtual extensions of former theories within new ones, through the addition of certain counter-theoretical assumptions.

Most structural realist accounts focus on this preservation of mathematical structure to derive their criterion for epistemic realism, but I go one step further. We are not only to understand the preservation of formal-mathematical structure but also how concepts and categories carry over semantic structure across theories and vocabularies, which themselves transform our observational, non-inferential capacities and thus our capacities to coordinate ourselves ostensively with the world, experientially and experimentally.

According to Sellars, philosophy’s role with regard to the ontological descriptive task of science is to project categories adequate not only to the current scientific image but also to anticipate a plausible integrative framework that resolves inherent contradictions and answers to its own historical problems, e.g. the problem of universals, the articulation of reasons and causes, mind and world, etc. In this regard, Johanna Seibt has done some fine work in showing how categorial projection is tightly bound to procedures of analogical modeling, through which philosophy not only responds to scientific ideas but also identifies and resolves inherent tensions within its own ontological frameworks. Crucially, this procedure reveals how the construction of new categories in theories through the association of different but overlapping ‘descriptors’ answers to problem ecologies native to a theoretical domain, and is thus not arbitrary but constrained by logical and empirical explanatory demands.

In short: there is often a tendency to overemphasize discontinuity between theories and languages, while eliding how theoretical change involves continuities at the level of observational, inferential, and formal structure that render theories comparable rather than ‘incommensurable,’ and enable us to gauge their progressive approximation toward an ideal limit of discourse or representational ‘image’ of nature and ourselves within it. This is what I call Natural Reason, which realizes the representational abilities of sapient beings.

DIFF: You identify a fundamental ambiguity in Gilles Deleuze’s ontology regarding whether the virtual preexists the encounter or is constituted within material becoming. How does your proposed tinkering of a Sellarsian framework resolve this tension without either lapsing into Platonism (a transcendent domain of the virtual) or eliminativism (dissolving the virtual entirely into the actual)?

DS: The ambiguity you refer to appears in Deleuze’s early transcendental empiricist project, as elaborated in the second and third chapters of Difference and Repetition. It is concentrated in the account of what he named “the encounter,” corresponding to the first syntheses of time (the passive syntheses of habit) carried by larval subjects, and to the constitution of what Deleuze names the sentiendum, the “real that is the object of sensation.” It is the encounter with the sentiendum, Deleuze tells us, which initiates the ‘serial violence’ of the faculties culminating in the production of virtual Ideas, or the cogitandum. The encounter therefore supposes not the pre-existence of the virtual realm of the problematic or Ideas, but the being of the virtual field of ‘free-floating singularities’ comprising the “intensive spatium.”

Here Deleuze is sketching something like a schematic outline of a transcendental deduction, which would, however, lead to a genetic rather than representational account of the relationship between the subjective faculties, sensibility, and thinking. It is at this point that Deleuze’s undercutting of the transcendental analytic in his empiricism, however, finds an awkward methodological limit, in my estimation. The subject’s synthetic activity is at once said to be ‘triggered’ by the encounter with the sentiendum, since it is, after all, the object of a passive synthesis. Nevertheless, as the object of sensation, the sentiendum is said to be produced by the subject’s synthetic activity itself. The encounter thereby ontologically precedes and at the same time conditions the formation of virtual Ideas.

More deeply still, Deleuze finds himself in the same explanatory waters as Kant did: trying to explain how the syntheses of apprehension in the sensible are preconditioned by an obscure ‘synopsis’ without which the sensory manifold would not even yield a basic representational field. Analogously, for transcendental empiricism, the production of the field of pre-individual singularities or intensive spatium which initiates the “informational exchange” between intensive series, and the emergence of the subject within this field, supposes the mysterious agency of what he names ‘the dark precursor.’

Now, I agree with Deleuze that morphogenesis must be understood as a process of informational exchange between structures, and follow his lead in endorsing a kind of structural realism that is also a modal realism capable of explaining tendential processes of material becoming. But I don’t think this procedure can be mortgaged to a disseminated subjectivity that ‘contracts’ intensive series, since this risks not only vitalism but a strange kind of transcendental panpsychism. With Sellars and against empiricism, I agree with the reclassification of noumena as scientific objects, but also reject the nominalist metaphysics of pure process, precisely because I am a modal realist.

My own position is therefore closer to Platonism, since I endorse the reality of structure, in proximity with structural realist approaches, and am particularly attracted to the pattern metaphysics elaborated by Daniel Dennett and developed by John Worrall, James Ladyman, Don Ross, and Steven French, among others. Unlike these thinkers, I believe it is necessary to develop an epistemological framework that can distinguish between physical and mathematical structure, lest we conflate structural realism with Pythagorean mathematical idealism. And this is where I again draw on the post-Sellarsian tradition, particularly the work of Jay F. Rosenberg and Johanna Seibt, as well as that of Lorenz Puntel, to conceive of a representational account that shows the possible correspondence yet difference between experiential structures and the material world.

The core issue, for me, is to make epistemologically explicit the way the sensory, linguistic, formal, and ontological dimensions of experience can be distinguished yet coordinated. The convergent realist approach derived from Peirce and elaborated by both Sellars and Rosenberg allows me to develop a methodological basis for scientific realism that does not devolve into eliminativism, i.e. in which the methodological dualism of reasons and causes is rendered compatible and even necessary for understanding ontological univocity in a materialist register, and in which thinking progressively produces more comprehensive theoretical models of the world of which it is part.

Naturalist materialism endorses univocity without relapsing to eliminativism, insofar as (1) the very concepts of explanation, description, and representation provide the condition of intelligibility to understand naturalism or materialism as a theoretical position to begin with, which does not entail that concepts have an ontological status; (2) the concept of matter is not merely sedentary, in a readily available base vocabulary derived from existing physics or otherwise; it is also subject to categorial projections and expansions that change our very understanding of causality, mechanism, objectivity, and this is an ongoing enterprise that ultimately leaves open the ultimate categories for ontological theorization.

DIFF: Wilfrid Sellars is well-known for schematizing or formulating the “manifest image” (including normativity and sensory qualities) into the “scientific image” without reduction. Does the dynamic systems framework proposed by Johanna Seibt successfully achieve this integration? Specifically, how do the higher modes of becoming (imagination, discursive thought) relate causally or constitutionally to the lower modes without violating the autonomy of normative reasons?

DS: There are two ‘integration’ problems at work here, but they are not exactly the same. The first concerns the relation between the manifest and scientific images, which express different accounts of “man in the world,” and which crucially turn on the status of discursive cognition. The manifest image thus corresponds to the framework of persons in which intentional attitudes and normative statuses are attributed and established; the scientific image corresponds to the mechanistic framework of modern physics, which describes man as a mechanistic system composed of microphysical constituents bound causally, and in which norms and intentionality are not natural kinds. For Sellars, thoughts are causally reducible but not logically reducible, insofar as one can identify thought procedures with neurophysiological states and, eventually, in a process ontology, describe the higher-order normativity of thought from lower-level processes.

The second integration problem concerns what Sellars called the “sensorium-body problem,” which is as interesting and perhaps more difficult than the mind-body problem. Here we are dealing with the other side of the manifest image, which concerns sensory episodes. In the “myth of Jones,” these are originally modeled analogically on the properties of physical objects we ordinarily describe in the third person, just like thoughts are modeled on utterances made in overt speech. It is interesting that, for Sellars, this presents a greater challenge for materialist reductionism than the case of thoughts and their normativity. The issue here concerns the purported homogeneity of sensory qualities, which cannot be reduced to constituent particles and their relations. Here we require the introduction of a new class of entities, sensa, that can only be accounted for by the process idiom he envisages.

In both cases, a future process ontology and successor state of the scientific image is supposed to provide a solution to both problems: a ‘stereoscopic’ image of man beyond the ‘particulate image’ that will amplify our concepts of nature and causation beyond the dominant mechanistic-linear paradigm, making way for a theoretical framework in which sensory and normative states can be accommodated, and their relation explained. His projective metaphysics, however, remained notoriously programmatic, and most Sellarsians agree that his motivations for a process idiom are questionable.

With regard to Seibt’s purported development of this process metaphysics, I don’t believe that DST, or any other theory for that matter, has successfully explained the continuity of sensing and thinking in ontological terms. Which is why, in the book, I remain openly agnostic about endorsing any metaphysics attached to DST, as with any other metaphysical framework, despite my sympathies for ontic structural realism. I have an inherent suspicion of emergentist strategies, since the introduction of surreptitious ‘constituent’ elements or dynamics that are somehow irreducible to their parts yet causally derived from them does not truly explain the functional integration between the two in her account.

With Seibt, the category of dynamics serves as a successor category to Sellars’ own pure process, which crucially shares the categorial determinants of being subjectless, actual, dynamic, and continuous particulars (this is a vulgar simplification but will have to do for now). Both adopt an emergentist line with regard to sensory episodes; Seibt interprets sensa as irreducible ‘modes of occurrence’ (another term for processes) or emergent dynamics, within self-maintaining, complex systems, enjoying what she names an emerging configuring constraining architecture (ECC). These are architectures characteristic of sentient and sapient systems in the biological and psychological orders, which exhibit self-maintenance and representational abilities of the sort associated with higher-order normativity. Her account thereby proposes a revisionary, expansive notion of normativity that develops in a gradient from ‘low-grade’ exhibited by simple functional systems, all the way up to the distributed and collective dynamics of discursive-social cognitive systems.

It’s a neat story, but I find the reliance on emergence and the arbitrary extension of normativity unconvincing, since they obviate the problem by ad hoc postulation and trivialization, respectively. In Structure and Thought, I conceive of sensory simulation as the functional integration of discrete localizing functions within a global workspace, in continuity with some strands of NCC approaches and with evolutionary and perceptual psychology that make no overt appeals to emergent dynamics. Nevertheless, I don’t think we have yet explained the nature of sensory consciousness satisfactorily, let alone its integration with discursive cognition in sapient representational systems. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the current confusion in debates concerning AI and consciousness largely stems from eliding the scaffolding and difference between sensory and discursive-inferential cognition, sentience, and sapience.

DIFF: At the end of Structure and Thought you posit that “Man survives as nothing but a nomadic abstraction” once thinking is distinguished from its organic support. This echoes anti-humanist themes in Althusser and Foucault. Yet your account still places enormous weight on specifically human discursive practices (deontic scorekeeping, linguistic behavior). In your view, if thinking can be realized in other material mediums (e.g., artificial intelligence), would such systems automatically participate in the space of reasons? Or are there features of human sociality, e.g., mutual recognition, vulnerability to normative sanction – that are not replicable in non-organic substrates?

DS: By definition, if thinking necessarily involves the functional capacity to engage in patterns of reasoning to describe and understand the world by adopting doxastic attitudes and normative states, then any sapient-intelligent system necessarily participates in the space of reasons. I think this is the broadly ‘Sellarsian’ basis of Brassier’s rejoinder to eliminativist positions à la Churchland, and I strongly agree: representation is itself a normative concept, and without appeal to meta-empirical norms one cannot even explain the intelligibility of eliminativism as a coherent position, or any position for that matter. Which means that representational-normative nihilism is pragmatically contradictory; in this sense, there is a hard logical-methodological irreducibility of the manifest image.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that any such representational systems, organic or artificial, necessarily share the same medium or are capable of reasoning with one another. There are material constraints to the instantiation of the social protocol of reasoning, and the question of whether there are any non-replicable elements of human sociality in inorganic or non-human mediums is, I think, a strictly empirical question contingent on what specific bodies can do. Of course, one can define thinking more or less broadly, but in my broadly Kantian conception, the inextricability between inferential-discursive cognition and sapient intelligence is plainly analytic in nature.

I don’t think any of the aspects of sociality you mention are necessarily or functionally wed to the human as a biological species, though there might, again, be mechanistic material constraints on the functional replicability of sociality in other substrates. We are very far from understanding the limits of our engineering capabilities, let alone the limits of what nature as a whole is able to produce. I think we must resist at once the Charybdis of overextending the empirical justification available to conclude the reproducibility of thought in inorganic materials, as well as the Scylla of postulating in a reactionary manner a tendentious ‘transcendental’ impossibility to the prospects of such replication. Such posthumanist extravagance and humanist piety are rampant in our time, and I think it’s welcome to exert epistemic moderation. If artificial sapience implies artificial sentience, and the latter involves the reproducibility of sensory consciousness, or something analogous to the kind of multimodal integrational experience associated with perceptual experience and embodied cognition, then, needless to say, we are quite far from the mark.

DIFF: Further, in Structure and Thought, you propose a materialist theory of representational cognition. Could you explain the core of this constructive response to the post-Kantian “critique of representation” for an audience of artists and designers? Could you reflect on how aesthetics, art, and design intersect with your focus?

DS: In a broad sense, representation is often associated with both a correspondence theory of truth and a qualitative conception of the relation between mental states and the world as resemblance; i.e., an idea or representation is true if and only if it shares qualities or properties with what it represents. Critiques of representation usually voice suspicion against (1) the possibility of defining a criterion of correspondence between mind and world alongside correlationist lines (Nietzsche, Husserl), and (2) the criterion that thinking ought to be defined in the model of perceptual resemblances, the better to defend a creative or revolutionary model of thought (Deleuze, Badiou). The former account is already explicit in Kant’s own representational account as part of his so-called transcendental skepticism: there is no means of ‘stepping outside ourselves’ to verify whether our experience of things corresponds to the way the world ‘really’ is. The latter is also legible in the immediate German Idealist responses that attempt to salvage the absolute from the clutches of representation, while falling into idealism.

In the domain of artistic production the critique of representationalism bears close resonances to this philosophical problematic, which after all speaks to the vertigo before the abyss of ungrounding that modernity unleashes as historical process: the assault against iconoclasm and broadly ‘semantic’ notions of artistic practice that conceive of the task of art as replicating reality, the better to liberate its creative potentials, while also questioning the purported impartiality of the observer who simply purports to reproduce reality. Anti-representationalism would thereby mean that the aim of art is neither to produce a semblance of reality as a copy in relation to an original model nor to obey readily available practical imperatives. Or something like that.

But the modern concept of representation, in fact, functions as an alternative to figurative and iconoclastic conceptions of the relation between mind and world, based on notions of resemblance: the relation between the representing and the represented is not that between two items that share qualitative properties at the metaphysical-substantive level. It is a question of structural isomorphy, in the sense established by Descartes at the dawn of both modern rationalism and modern science: algebraic formulae, for instance, represent geometrical figures not by sharing ‘qualitative’ properties, but by positing a global mapping between two divergent systems. The correspondence relation does not suppose that the models of the world are like the world they model, i.e., that discursive structures correspond to spatial forms in the physical world without resembling each other.

This basic conception is extended in the Kantian account of space and time as forms of sensible intuition, whose intrinsic structure is expressed by the axioms of Euclidean geometry and by the ‘anticipations’ of the linear ordering in arithmetical succession, respectively. For Sellars, to naturalize and historicize the transcendental account of subjectivity provided by Kant entails not only that we must eschew the ahistorical scholastic categorial framework of the understanding, and that our conceptual frameworks and categories change as part of the self-revising enterprise of theoretical inquiry.

Moreover, the formal structure of the world of intuition is also progressively excavated, as our geometrical and mechanistic frameworks themselves change. Nevertheless, as I mentioned above, we are able to determine that across conceptual changes, and across formal changes, certain semantic and mathematical structures remain, and so the changes are not arbitrary or absolute, i.e. the observational, inferential role of concepts and theories largely overlap, as do the formulae and measurement systems. And we can determine that, as the structure is preserved, the divergences decrease as our theories and models converge toward an ideal limit of inquiry.

In my own account, this realist and dynamic vision integrates Sellars’ account of representation as map-making in ‘orientation systems’ as inherent to the dynamics of what Luciano Floridi, James Ladyman, and Don Ross name localization: the way that a system navigates and extracts data from its environment, progressively embedding ostensive indexes that label and name items within extensional data-sets into higher-order models that are modally or ‘intensionally’ rich, all the way up to ‘higher-order’ theories that have a top-down nomological-deductive structure.

In short, this means that sensation and languages are protocols that enhance the map-making capabilities discernible in non-living systems (e.g., the way a smart missile tracks the spatio-temporal location of a moving object in three-dimensional space) and are subsequently extended in theoretical and systematic cognition. As sapient beings evolve culturally, representational capabilities develop into meta-theoretical tools that assess, globally, the very epistemic conditions of success that guide the change of conceptual frameworks and the norms of representational success, which anchor theories on an observational-ostensive basis. This is precisely the account of Natural Reason that I develop in the last chapters of my book.

How does this change the anti-representationalist conception of artistic production? First of all, it entails that one cannot simply elide conceptual mediation, as Hegel understood, when thinking about the aesthetic or artistic practice. For the moment one attempts to cognize the immediacy of aesthetic experience without the interference of conceptual subsumptions, one invariably summons the action of the universal, however empty, e.g., the indexicals here, now, this. Put bluntly: the structure of sensory experience is no more transparent to us than the structure of the external world is, and the vocabulary we use to describe our experience is also theoretically mediated and revisable.

We must construct the conceptual and formal resources to understand the structure of the non-conceptual world, and, with this, the aesthetic, including the concepts of production; neither ‘bracketing’ the natural attitude nor ‘attunement’ to the pre-theoretical bases of experience provides shortcuts to the task of carving nature at the joints. Nor does appealing to the primary productivity or creative-revolutionary dimension of art elide the irreducibility of mediation and of understanding how art responds to the world it models and interprets. This means that all artistic production, as all forms of experience, supposes the representation of ourselves and the world within it. One does not subvert representation as such, but specific representational regimes, so that even non-semantic art supposes the representational interface linking the artist to their working environment, materials, objects, and methods.

DIFF: In your book, you do not address the unconscious – understood broadly as a placeholder for various “hidden organizing social forces”, whether psychoanalytic, Marxist, or genealogical. One might think that the existence of such forces, and their penetration into or fundamentality for social norms, poses serious difficulties for the construction of a theory of natural reason. Why did you decide to set these questions aside?

DS: I do not believe the unconscious poses serious difficulties for the account of Natural Reason that I provide, or at least I have not been given an argument that shows why this would be the case. I decided to set this question aside because it raised a series of methodological issues that, while highly relevant, were also overly broad for the project at hand. My upcoming research seeks to carve a path into this terrain; however, some provisional ideas have already been sketched out.

The most interesting question, in my estimation, concerns the way in which norms are internalized and begin to function mechanistically as causes, without the overt mediation of deliberative metacognition. In Structure and Thought, I briefly touch on this dimension when I speak of incorporation, extending the Heideggerian account of circumspection by describing the internalization of rules or overt discursive knowledge into practical know-how. If the unconscious is “structured like a language,” and if language is inherently normative, then the repetitive force of trauma that inscribes the real of the symptom in the body is something like the subtraction of force from the will, that is to say, its recalcitrance to reason. In an analogous way, the impersonal dynamics of productive forces and labor, while supervenient on the doxastic attitudes of individuals and groups, acquire a certain automation that appears to short-circuit the capacity for ‘rational intervention.’

Much of what accelerationist thinkers describe as the runaway of ‘machinic intelligence’ from human agency under capitalism is about the coordination of these two levels of unconscious activity; the subpersonal vector of desire as it begins to function autonomously as a causal drive dislodged from the interests of the individual, and the suprapersonal vector of collective activity as it begins to function autonomously as productive force dislodged from the ends of social utility.

The historical threshold against the human, as described in Land’s account of technocapitalist intelligence, is rooted in charting modernity along a vector of cognitive escape velocity that progressively subtracts thinking and action, theory and practice, from rational capture and thus conscious control. And this occurs despite our rational powers for representing the world and intervening upon it also becoming enhanced through the development of techno-scientific means. This seeming contradiction between the progression of science and technology and the accruing sense of alienation and compression of our decision-space is evident, yet it’s far from clear we have the means to comprehend it or act upon it.

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REFERENCES

Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil unbound: Enlightenment and extinction. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)

Ladyman, J., & Ross, D. (2007). Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. Oxford University Press. 

Land, N. (2017). A quick-and-dirty introduction to accelerationism. Nick Land Writings

Rosenberg, J. F. (1980). One world and our knowledge of it: The problematic of realism in post-Kantian perspective. D. Reidel.

Seibt, J. (2016). How to naturalize sensory consciousness and intentionality within a process monism with normativity gradient: A reading of Sellars. In J. R. O’Shea (Ed.), Sellars and his legacy . Oxford University Press.

Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1, 253–329.

Sellars, W. (1997). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Harvard University Press.