The Power of Abstraction and Its Antagonism : On Some Problems Common to Contemporary Neuroscience and the Theory of Cognitive Capitalism

ion is essential to both the functioning of capital and the critique of it. Marx’s point of departure in Capital, in fact, is his analysis of abstract labor as the determining foundation of the exchange-value of commodities. Labor in capitalist society, Marx explains, must be abstracted from the concrete labors of the tailor, the plumber, the machinist to be considered as labor in general, without respect to its specific application. This abstract labor once congealed in commodities is the common substance they all share, which allows for their values to be universally commensurable, and which ultimately allows money to function as a general equivalent. [. ] Marx views abstraction, however, with ambivalence. Yes, abstract labor and the system of exchange are mechanisms for extracting surplus value and maintaining capitalist control, but the concept of abstract labor [. ] is what makes it possible to think the working class. Withoutlabor [. ] is what makes it possible to think the working class. Without abstract labor there is no working class! (Hardt & Negri 2009, 127)labor there is no working class! (Hardt & Negri 2009, 127) The abstraction of capitalism is a very material process, as stressed in SohnRethel’s notion of real abstraction. Furthermore the definition of cognitive capitalism should be framed in this manner. Cognitive capitalism is not simply the domain of knowledge production or computer-based labour but, as Vercellone has explained, a whole new division of labour (that is a new different machinic bifurcation, articulation and organisation of flows of matter, energy and information). The history of capitalism is read by Vercellone (2007) in three stages: formal subsumption (manufacturing capitalism), real subsumption (industrial capitalism) and general intellect (cognitive capitalism). As such, capitalist production appears to follow movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: the industrial revolution reterritorializes the division of labour of manufacturing inside the factory, whereas cognitive capitalism deterritorializes the division of labour once more across all society. The logical chain described by Vercellone between antagonism, division of labour, machinery and the general intellect perfectly describes a general abstract machine. The evolution of the division of labour is indeed this process of abstraction. However such a power of abstraction must not be understood merely as an evil external force that belongs only to capitalism, but rather as a common potentiality of the multitude. As Negri and Hardt would have it, without abstraction there is no multitude. 3. The ontology of abstraction in Deleuze and Guattari. The problem of abstraction is central for Deleuze and Guattari too, despite emphasis throughout the last few decades on the desiring and affective side of their ontology. In their mission to sketch a materialistic ontology and materialistic logic they transformed and subsumed all the metaphysical and transcendental models of modern philosophy within the immanent notion of the abstract machine. Here the term ‘machine’ indicates the very contingent and productive process of abstraction, the connection of different and even radically different substrates and also the projection and ‘assemblage’ with the infinite and the void. The Abstract Machine is a universal concept introduced so as to ground a manifold ontology: ‘The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 254). The abstract machine marked a final rupture with the holistic tradition of abstraction, which had been inherited by German idealism, and inaugurated the abduction of the Outside by the double pincer of the Lobster-God (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 40). Despite having such a cosmological depth, the notion of abstract machine can also be used to explain the role of abstraction in the mundane paradigms of both biopower and cognitive capitalism: the abstract machine points to a power of abstraction that is able to ab-stract from its substrates and to produce the universal equivalent of capital and power (biopolitics). This is also the ability of mind: its ability to make connections, but also to sever them, to negate them or to repeat them to infinity, the ability to produce general assemblages. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion can be very useful to mediate between political economy and neurology, where the abstract machine could be intended as the ability to escape the limit of the brain and the organism, to expand towards an external memory and include the whole universe as an extension of the mind. It is interesting though how the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari has been received mainly as a celebration of infinite flows of desire. It is true that Spinoza’s infinite substance is the essential ground of this philosophy, but without abstract machines construction of any system would not be possible, hence there would be no becoming in their ontology. 4. Socialist cortex and mirror neurons. The notion of abstraction is not just a resonance between distant authors. There is indeed a common background in the contemporary history of cognitive sciences and political philosophy. Wolfe (2010) has underlined this background in an important essay on the fascinating history of the so-called ‘socialist cortex’, which captures the idea of collective brain spanning from Spinoza and Marx to Vygotski and Negri and the whole Italian operaismo. Another interesting case of the encounter between cognitive sciences and political philosophy is found in Virno’s (2004) commentary on the famous research on mirror neurons. Mirror neurons were discovered by a team from the University of Parma, consisting of Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and a number of others. They implanted electrodes in the ventral premotor cortex of the brain of few monkeys and recorded neuron activities while these monkeys were engaged in some specific actions. They discovered that: ‘a particular set of neurons, activated during the execution of [. ] hand actions, such as grasping, holding or manipulating objects, discharge also when the monkey observes similar hand actions performed by another individual’ (Gallese 2001). These neurons were firing both when the monkey was doing the action of grasping a banana and when the monkey was seeing another monkey grasping a banana: for this reason they were called mirror neurons. Other studies have since demonstrated the activity of mirror neurons in human animals (Mukamel et al. 2010), but just the discovery of this simple link in a specific area of the primate brain brings incalculable consequences for cognitive sciences and the 1 ‘The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). ’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, 587) 2 The relation between organism and abstraction, the organic and the abstract, can be located in their aesthetic model. See their response to “Abstraction and Empathy” by Worringer (1908), where primitive art, the first art of humankind, was precisely about the rise of the abstract line. philosophy of mind. Virno takes Gallese’s description of mirror neurons as the proof of a naturalistic basis of human nature and as the basis of the preindividual sphere of inter-subjectivity that is supposed to be a given before the constitution of the human identity: ‘The relation of a human animal to its own kind is assured by an original ‘intersubjectivity’ that precedes the very constitution of the individual mind. The “we” exists even before we can speak of a self-conscious “I”’ (Virno 2004, 175). In this view there is a common empathy between the individuals of the same species that is rooted before any linguistic faculty. Mirror neurons allow Virno to sketch a theory of political agency based on a collective intersubjectivity that is only afterwards crossed and cut by the ambivalence of language and the violence of negation. Virno poses here the common as a pre-given structure of human nature, as a sort of pre-individual space à la Simondon. Thereafter, in an elegant way, Virno critiques this substrate of human nature with the introduction of two other logical steps: first, the power to negate natural empathy and communality with other human beings; and, second, the power to negate this negation, to reconstitute the public sphere in a proper constituent sense. What is interesting for Virno is the fact that mirror neurons do not explain the power of negation, while the most peculiar trait of human thought is precisely the ability to negate. Language inoculates negativity into the life of the species. It enables the failure of reciprocal recognition. The linguistic animal is the species capable of not recognizing its own kind. [. ] Language is the antidote to the poison that language itself pours into the innate sociability of the mind. Aside from the being able to cancel out neural empathy, completely or partially, language can also remove this contradiction. [. ] In other words the public sphere is derived form a negation of negation. (Virno 2004, 176) Virno’s account appears to be rigorous within the tradition of Analytical Philosophy, but mirror neurons can be contextualised in a different way within the holistic logic that spans from German Idealism and Gestaltpsychologie to the more recent theor