Ray Brassier (Keynote) - Norms, Facts, and Forms: Capital as Third Thing

Become a Member of our Channel to access the entire archives of past and present Seminars.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3y-PZgkWYaxWw4Sz_UVWWg/join

BECOME A MEMBER:
https://thenewcentre.org/membership/member/

"Recording from the Marx & Pittsburgh School Conference, organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice & The Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London.

ABSTRACT: A central tenet of the Pittsburgh School (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell) is that the difference between the normative and the factual, or justifying and describing, boils down to a difference in social practices. It is not facts that ground the normative space of reasons, but social practices. According to Richard Rorty, “a philosophical account of our practices need not take the form of descriptions of our relation to something not ourselves, but need merely describe our practices.” Because they are ours, the difference between essence and appearance does not apply to practices: they are woven together into an intricate meshwork, which we inhabit and cannot step outside. But if practices, in their irreducible plurality, can only be subjectively described and comprehended, we reinstate at the collective level the self-intimating character which is denied to individual minds. The transparency denied when it comes to mind’s self-relation, or its relation to nature, re-emerges in the claim that our relation to the world is ‘built into’ our relation to our own social practices. Rorty and Brandom reject Sellars’ suggestion that some ‘third thing’ –picturing – is required to ground the connection between the normative and the factual. But the third thing remerges not despite but because of their emphasis on the subjectivity of social practice. It is capitalism as the set of institutions, norms, conventions, and values shaping our practices. These constitute a system of social forms which are perpetuated by our collective practices but whose institution we did not collectively adjudicate. This is simply to say that human practices generate social forms that they do not intend. Such forms are opaque to the practices that generate them; they transcend the subjectivity of those engaging in the practices they shape. What is ignored in the claim that our practices do the work Sellars ascribes to picturing is the possibility that we do not always know what we are doing; or as Marx pointed out, that among our habitual everyday practices are things we do without knowing what we are doing – in Marx’s example, buying and selling commodities – and this for the simple reason that we cannot subjectively comprehend the nexus of social relations implicated in commodities and money. This is to say that the subjectivity of practices is objectively mediated by social forms that shape practices even as they are shaped by them. These forms are objective rather than intersubjective because they are not conceptual in nature; their structure and function is not intersubjectively instituted. Indeed, they shape intersubjective space without being shaped by it. It is this objective mediation of subjective practice by social form that has to be accounted for by anyone who proclaims that social practice is the bedrock upon which the epistemological edifice founders."