Reason is inconsolable and non-conciliatory

Ray Brassier interviewed by Suhail Malik

SM: By way of general introduction, let’s start with the development of your thinking and ideas
through nihilism. In Nihil Unbound, you advocated a (perhaps modernist) project, maybe best
exemplified by science, in which the rational understanding of the world undoes all conventional
accounts for it (from the mythic to structured or individualized beliefs to most philosophical
structures insofar as they do not take the discoveries and horizons opened up by the sciences
seriously enough).1 As I see it, you argue that the rational revisions of understanding, the cosmos
(philosophically and scientifically apprehended), the self, and the conditions of thought do not
depend or lead to on anything predetermined. Or, to put it otherwise, they depend and assume
nothing as their condition other than the iteration of rational thought in a material world. The
absence of any positive term as a condition or result of this process — the absenting of a
transcendental condition or determination of rational enquiry, its nothing — marks rational
thought as a productive nihilism: nihil unbound, as the title of your book has it. One way to
capture this nihilistic condition for thought, its termlessness, is your image of the death of the sun
which, thanks to scientific prediction, we know will happen in about 5 billion years. You ask the
question Lyotard does of how thinking addresses its own extra-terrestriality as a rational
injunction — and perhaps organizes its own departure from the solar system in a politics of
survival2 — but, beyond that, solar burnout captures a kind of ultimate nothing for thinking as we
have understood it so far, and of its (terrestrial) conditions. So — and here is an audacious move
— solar burnout becomes a positive figure for how rational thought in a way assumes nothing as
its condition. If this is right, clearly thought cannot be predicated on human interests or have the
human as its term, even if it is the human who thinks rationally (perhaps not exclusively, but as at
least one such species-actor). This is the anti-humanism and non-correlationism of your work.
After this brief overview my initial questions are twofold. The first concerns the drama of
nihilism: solar burnout if not universal termination is a grand and catastrophic vista from which to
think the base conditions for rational thought and its development. Your more recent work
revolving around the work of the mid-twentieth century American analytic philosopher Wilfrid
Sellars seems by comparison relatively modest. The aspects of Sellars’s work you are interested
in are his theorizations of how ideas are revised by a rational agent by the relation between what
he calls the ‘manifest image’ — approximately how the world appears and makes sense to a
general rational consciousness — and the ‘scientific image’ — the world as it is known in the

1
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
2
Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go Without a Body,” in The Inhuman: Reflection on Time, trans,
Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1992).

Brassier – interview 1
terms of theoretical science. Other than explaining why the turn to Sellars, the question — which I
think is not just about rhetorical strategies but is close to core shifts in your approach — is: why
this ‘modesty’ of returning to an encultured human actor as the basis of your enquiries now? At
first blush, it seems a regression or stepping down from the scales and ambition of your earlier
work in two regards: first, it concerns only intricacies of processes of rational thinking and
concept generation rather than literally stellar conditions for thinking the future of thought: the
scope seems much reduced. Second, given your earlier advocacy of a trenchantly anti-humanist
or non-correlational condition and term for rational thought, the ‘concept-monger’ (to take up your
citation of Robert Brandom) involved here seems indelibly human. And this is very far from a now
established perception of your interests. In either instance, the emphasis now seems more
constructive than nihilistic, more anthropological than cosmological. (I think they are no less
nihilistic but it may need some explanation to make it clear why so.)

RB: At the heart of Nihil Unbound (NU) is an argument defending the necessary link between rationality
and nihilism, such that, as you put it, rational thought must assume nothing (i.e., what the book calls
‘being-nothing’) as its productive condition. But the subsequent move towards Sellars, who was all too
summarily dealt with in NU, is a direct continuation rather than a detour or a regression from this agenda.
I realize it may look like a step backwards—a retreat from the impasse of extinction—but in fact it’s a case
of what the French call reculer pour mieux sautez, i.e. stepping back so as to leap farther. In this
particular context, this means reconsidering my overly hasty dismissal of Sellars’ defence of the manifest
image in order to think through what it might mean to unbind thinking from its terrestrial condition.
I’ve come to understand why Sellars insisted on the indispensability of the manifest image and its
role in the process of conceptual revision that fuels cognitive discovery. There’s nothing sacrosanct about
the contents of the manifest image (except perhaps for the category of ‘personhood’, which is not
species-specific for Sellars: persons need not be human). What is crucial is its normative infrastructure,
by virtue of which it constitutes what Sellars called ‘the space of reasons’. This normative infrastructure is
spelled out in Sellars’ inferentialist theory of meaning, which has been vastly amplified by Robert
Brandom. The basic idea is simple: If you believe or mean something, you also ought to believe or mean
everything that follows from it. Inferentialism ties together semantic and epistemic holism. Semantic
holism is the idea that the meaning of any individual claim is defined by its relations to other claims: not
just the claims it implies, but those that imply it in turn. These relations are inferential: thus what
something means is a function of what you can infer from it, and what implies it in turn. But this means
that to be committed to the meaning of any single claim is also to be committed to the meaning of all
those other claims with which it is inferentially bound. This has an epistemic consequence: any individual
belief is defined by its inferential relations to all the other beliefs presupposed by or implied by it. So if you
believe one thing, you also ought to believe everything that follows from that one thing—regardless of
whether or not you are explicitly aware of it (clearly we aren’t most of the time).

Brassier – interview 2
 This notion of “discursive commitment” is central to inferentialism: the meanings of our claims
regularly outstrip what we currently intend or are aware of. This is because the implications of our claims
regularly outstrip what we are currently aware of. To be rational is to keep track of those entailments and
thereby to track what we become committed to when we commit ourselves to a belief or claim. “Deontic
scorekeeping” is the name Brandom gives to the practice whereby we keep track of these discursive
commitments. We as rational beings strive to keep track of what we ought to say, think, or do, just as a
good chess player strives to keep track of what will follow from all the possible moves that might be made
given a specific configuration of pieces on the board. In other words, what we mean when we think or
speak is determined by all the things we also ought to think or say in its wake.
This inferentialist account of meaning and belief turns out to be a valuable resource for me
because it defends the autonomy of rationality without violating the constraints of naturalism (or, if one
prefers, ‘materialism’). The ‘normativity’ invoked in this inferentialist theory of meaning and thought must
be distinguished from the sense in which we refer to ‘socio-cultural norms’. Rational normativity is distinct
from social normativity even if it is invariably socially instituted. This is something Hegel understood and
it’s the reason why Hegel can be a rationalist (indeed, an absolute rationalist) while insisting that
rationality is always socially and historically embodied. Sellars is Hegelian to the extent that, for him too,
the practice of giving and asking for reasons is socially instituted. But institution is not constitution: to say
that reason is socially instituted is not to say that it is socially constituted: that is the kind of historicist
relativism that both Hegel and Sellars were concerned to avoid, not least because it founders in
incoherence. Reason is a practice, but not all practices are equivalent. To claim that they are is to lapse
into the kind of vulgar pragmatism which subordinates all practices to a single standard of utility, whether
social or biological. Inferentialism insists that the ends governing the practice of giving and asking for
reasons cannot be reduced to those of other social practices, even if they are bound up with them in
complicated ways.
This is one way in which inferentialism has allowed me to substantiate the distinction I made in
NU between the ends of thought and the ends of life. This is also why it would be a mistake to view my
current focus on the inferentialist link between conceptual function and linguistic practice as symptomatic
of a drop from the cosmological register to the anthropological register. The ‘modesty’ of my apparent
stepping-back from thought’s cosmic condition and returning to an account that roots thinking in the
activities of encultured human agents is strategic. It’s necessary in order to ground the normative valence
I accord to thinking and to explain what thinking is and why it ought to be deterritorialized. Unless I can
give an account of the ‘ought’ in a statement like ‘thinking ought to be freed from its terrestrial condition’,
its status as an imperative is null. More generally, one has to give an account of the normativity of truth in
order to break out of the paradox of nihilism: if nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing
matters doesn’t matter. Therefore mattering can’t be adjudicated by thinking; it can only be determined by
living. Having destituted reason and truth, nihilism crowns feeling and instinct in their stead. Living holds
sway over thinking.

Brassier – interview 3
 Equally, the Laruellean account of thought which I sought to repurpose in NU proved unsuited to
the task of liberating thinking from living because it relegated the need for justification to the transcendent
realm of philosophy which it claims to suspend. From the standpoint of what Laruelle calls ‘radical
immanence’, rational normativity is just another philosopheme among others. The move from Laruelle to
Sellars is the move from the absolute suspension of justification to the justified suspension of the
absolute. For my purposes, Laruelle’s ‘non-standard philosophy’ remains too static, too formalist a
procedure; its ‘realism of the last instance’ reifies conceptual structures and reduces inferential necessity
to authoritarian whim: that of ‘the philosophical decision’. But unless one can give an immanent,
materialist account of the status of rational normativity, one cannot but regress from the cosmological to
the anthropological. Inferentialism provides an account wherein thinking that thinking makes no difference
does make a difference in and for thinking itself. It matters whether or not anything matters; determining
whether or not nihilism is true makes a difference for thinking and this makes a difference in reality: not
because thinking is magically keyed in to the fabric of reality, but because thinking is an activity performed
by language-using animals; an activity that makes a difference because it is embedded in material reality.
Because concepts are functions, they are relayed by the activities of language-using animals, but this
does not mean that the proprieties of conceptual function are to be identified with properties or capacities
exclusive to the human animal. Humans may be the only concept-mongers on earth, but this is not to say
they are the only possible concept-mongers. Ultimately, the inferentialist account of conceptual practice
ties into a metaphysics of processes wherein conceptual function may be realized by very different kinds
of physical processes. Sellars’ vision entails a transcendental functionalism wherein thinking is a process
among other processes, but one whose peculiar involution generates a cognitive gateway onto those
other processes.

Let’s clarify and situate your broad ambition a little more. Two interrelated aspects are worth
highlighting here, even at risk of repetition. The first is forward looking, the second is backward
looking. First, what is the “farther” horizon you want to “leap” towards, that the turn to
inferentialism will help you secure? Accepting the divergence between the interests and claims of
reason and those of life — reason transforms life because it is other to it — it seems that rational
thought is for you more fundamentally yet the “engine” for its own extension beyond human
determination, in two senses: first, you avow the extension of reason qua inferentialism outside of
the human into material and practical processes in general; second, it is rational thought qua
philosophy that generates an adequate account of this extension and its possibility. Philosophy is
then not just a belated self-reflection on the conditions of thought and reality but at once a
practice effected through language. This nuanced global distinction leads to the question of what
other recursive inferentialist pattern formations there can be.
Certainly, making inferences through a recursive pattern formation is a central conceit of
capitalist markets as pricing mechanisms constituted through the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Brassier – interview 4
Here, all prices in a market are ‘true’ reflections of the market as a whole insofar as it is
transparent to itself; price changes arise only as a consequence of non-symmetrical information
before returning to “rationally determined” equilibrium precisely through recursive operations of
trading for maximal gains. This may not quite be an inferentilalism as per the philosophical
lineage you are drawing on but it seems to observe the same functionalist account. If so, today’s
capitalist markets, drawing on these basic premises and also the automation of their practical
implementation, would seem to constitute — you may prefer “institute” — a kind of rational
agency, and at speeds and capacities that far exceed human limits. At least, that’s what’s declared
by those who advocate for capital markets as generating “accurate” prices. Equally, writers,
artists, and filmmakers have “embodied” capitalist markets or recursive information network
systems as fantastical, spectral figures, proposing a personification of a kind of non-human
inferentialist functioning: William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy is one influential example here.
If these or other extensions or generalizations of inferentialism qua recursive patterning
process have validity qua reasoning for you, how do you locate inferentialism qua philosophy as
a practice in relation to other inferentialist/patterning operations? Sub-question: What is its
privilege, if any, and what of this privilege against the one philosophy had in the high
Enlightenment as the rational discipline (given that philosophy then also covered what are now
distinguished as sciences and now does not)?

First of all, I’d like to obviate a misunderstanding: I wouldn’t say that I “avow the extension of reason qua
inferentialism outside of the human into material and practical processes in general”. While it’s true to say
that reason is incarnated in material and practical processes, this is not to say that these processes are
themselves “rational” or that inferential patterns are realized by all sorts of material and practical
processes in general. On the contrary: I want to uphold the crucial (Kantian) distinction between rule-
governed conceptual practices, which I take to be constitutive of rationality, and which are exceedingly
rare and metaphysically exceptional, and pattern-governed processes, which are ubiquitous and
metaphysically unremarkable. In other words, I want to maintain the exceptional status of reason and
insist on the ‘un-natural’ nature of our rational capacity without lapsing into a metaphysical dualism of
mental and physical (of the sort recently rehabilitated by philosophers like David Chalmers), 3 but also
without attributing to it a supernatural origin. The distinction between rule-obeying activity and pattern-
governed behaviour disqualifies the claim that markets think or dynamic systems reason. Rule-following is
pattern-governed but not every pattern incarnates a rule.
So, not everything thinks: rationality is a metaphysical exception. But it’s the exception
constituted by the rule that discriminates the exception from the rule. So the “farther horizon” towards
which rationality propels itself is one that reason must construct: it is not pre-given and it is fundamentally
incompatible with the brand of metaphysical eschatology for which the ultimate horizon is the

3
The Conscious Mind (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Brassier – interview 5
reconciliation of mind and matter or reason and nature. Reason is inconsolable and non-conciliatory.
Rational enquiry is propelled by cognitive interests that are generated anew by breaking with past modes
of understanding. In this regard, reason is the “restlessness of the negative”. It progresses by refusing the
lure of reconciliation—even and especially the lure of being reconciled to the irreconcilable. The farther
horizon towards which it progresses is the universal understood as determinate negation of parochial,
context-specific modes of understanding.
What this progression ultimately implies is a transformation of reason’s relation to time. Why?
Because the critique of intellectual intuition, which is the rationalist variant of the myth of the given,
requires that we acknowledge the discursive structure of rationality: concepts are linguistically instantiated
functions. But to say that reason is discursive is also to say that reasoning takes time: just as there is no
non-discursive rationality, there is no timeless reason. It is because reason takes time that it constitutes a
“self-correcting enterprise” in which even our most cherished categories may have to be revised or
abandoned. Among these are the temporal categories of past, present, and future. My wager is that our
understanding of the articulation of past, present, and future, and hence of the structure of time, will
eventually be transformed in the light of cognitive discovery. This is where I think reason harbours the
possibility of a cognitive solution to the problem of nihilism, which, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is simply the
problem of what to do with time. Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer a
transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate horizon of reconciliation or redemption
ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Reason promises to transform our relation to time such that the
purposelessness of becoming would become intelligible as the enabling condition of action. In Platonic
terms, this would be to grasp the intelligible form of formlessness, which is time as such. This would be
the rationalist alternative to Nietzsche’s irrationalist solution, which is simply to affirm, rather than
understand, the senselessness of becoming (“eternal recurrence” as amor fati).
It’s an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To opt for the latter is to
extend the Prometheanism of reason to becoming itself. Prometheanism, in the words of Alberto Toscano,
is the articulation of action and knowledge in the perspective of totality. 4 It is the attempt to eradicate the
discrepancy between what is humanly made and what is non-humanly given—--not by rendering the
world amenable to human whim or by merely satisfying our pathological needs, but by remaking
ourselves and our world in conformity with the demands of reason. In metaphysical terms, this requires
reinscribing the transcendence of time into the immanence of space. To grasp the form of formlessness
would be to transform the structure of fate understood as the way in which things happen to us. The gain
in intelligibility is practically transformative once one realizes, with Sellars, that thinking is a kind of doing,
or as he puts it, that “inferring is an act”. Thinking is not a preliminary to doing, but a kind of doing whose
potencies we have yet to understand. The point at which thinking and doing coincide is the point at which
idealism and materialism fuse.

4
“The Prejudice Against Prometheus,” Stir, Summer 2011 [stirtoaction.com/the-prejudice-against-
prometheus/?]

Brassier – interview 6
 Pete Wolfendale has suggested it’s time to rehabilitate logocentrism, a sentiment with which I
heartily concur. Everything is ultimately accessible to reason, but reason is not accessible to everything.
The Kantian resonances of inferentialism may chafe against contemporary neo-materialism, but among
its clear advantages over the latter is ruling out the suggestion that corporations are persons. The
personification of complex systems, whether corporations or markets, is among the most unfortunate
consequences of the pseudo-materialist tendency to elide the distinction between rational agency and
complex behaviour. The result is neo-animism: the indiscriminate attribution of agency to anything and
everything (speed-bumps, traffic cones, pencil sharpeners, etc). This is theoretically and politically
disastrous. Among the duties of philosophy is reminding theorists that hard-won distinctions like the one
between action and behaviour cannot be dissolved by fiat. But this is not to say that philosophy can
reclaim its former privileges, such as claiming to be the rational discipline. The secession of the special
sciences cannot be overturned. Philosophers—and metaphysicians in particular—-should be more
humble before the astonishing achievements of the empirical sciences. But philosophers need not abase
themselves before natural scientists or social scientists. Philosophy retains two indispensable tasks:
scrutinizing the conceptual logic underpinning theoretical discourses and identifying the most fundamental
categories presupposed by those discourses. This is a modest remit with far-reaching consequences. It’s
preferable to grandiose trumpetings of the return of metaphysics, which often means the regression to
pre-Critical dogmatism.

Accepting that rational thought de-prioritizes human life as its privileged agent (a historical
privilege attributable in fact to various evolutionary contingencies and in myth to human self-
regard) seems to subscribe to an anti-humanism. Yet, that the human is one rational agent in the
universe amongst others (a condition familiar from science-fiction) would be a trans-humanism.
And if rational thought extends the human as its historical agent in terms other than those
(primarily biological-symbolic terms) established to date, this corresponds to a post-humanism.
Would you identify any one of these as of greater importance to you than the others? Or do you
advocate these multiple yet cogent de-anthropologising effects and consequences of rational
thought (amongst others) equally and simultaneously? Where and how do you situate your work
and ambitions in relation to the spectrum of anti-humanism, post-humanism, and trans-
humanism?

My primary commitment is to a rationalistic naturalism, so there are elements in your characterization of

each that I would endorse, viz., that humans are not necessarily the privileged bearers of rationality
(antihumanism); that humans may not be the only rational agents (transhumanism); that rationality may
extend itself through post-biotic systems (posthumanism). Others may quibble with these definitions, but
what I endorse in your version of these positions is the emphasis on rationality, which is precisely what
some advocates of these stances are concerned to minimize or deny. The matter is complicated because

Brassier – interview 7
there is a disavowed humanism in anti-, post-, and trans-humanism, and there is a necessary
inhumanism implicit in humanism. It’s the latter I’m particularly interested in. So I don’t think one can
simply pit the non-human against the human, or plump for one over against the other.
In order to clarify my own position on these issues, I need to explain what I think rationalistic
naturalism entails. I think it has four basic consequences. First, there can be no such thing as an extra-
territorial or a-rational critique of reason, since critique is a normative term whose ultimate warrant derives
from reason itself. This remains the case even if one accepts, with Hegel, that the structure of human
reason is always historically bounded. Second, reason is our sole means of cognitive access to nature.
There is no other way of knowing what nature is (certainly not intuition, pace Bergson and others). Third,
Kant’s critique of dogmatic rationalism, which I accept, rules out the possibility of an a priori or
metaphysical science of nature. This means empirical science is the privileged source for our
understanding of nature, as well as for demarcating the natural from the supernatural. But after Darwin, it
becomes increasingly implausible to maintain the Aristotelian thesis that a kind of proto-rationality is
already encoded in nature. From a Darwinian perspective, rational purposefulness is an artifact of
purposeless processes. Yet reason is purposeful and is honed to track purposes. This engenders the
following dichotomy: on the one hand, there are naturalists who think reason is natural because nature is
reasonable—a repository of essences and final causes, as Aristotle maintained; on the other hand, there
are rationalists who think reason must be un-natural because nature is unreasonable. They see an
absolute disjunction between reason and nature. I reject both forks of this dilemma, which leads me to my
fourth consequence: reason is unnatural but not supernatural. It is unnatural because rational
purposiveness cannot be reduced to natural process: every rule is incarnated in a pattern, but not every
pattern incarnates a rule. Yet reason is not supernatural because rules (i.e. concepts) must be realized in
patterns: they can do nothing independently of their material realization. In other words, concepts are
functions, but functions must be materially realized in order to do anything—and I use “material” in the
broadest possible sense here, to encompass the microphysical, neurobiological, and sociohistorical
domains.
Part of philosophy’s remit is then to excavate the infrastructure of rationality as contingently
instantiated in the cognitive capacities of the human organism. Since homo sapiens is the only concept-
monger we know of on this planet, it is the bearer of rational capacity and deserves to be privileged, albeit
only insofar as it exercises this capacity. From this point of view, rationalist anthropocentrism is
indissociable from logocentrism understood as reason’s self-interestedness. In other words, reason is
self-interested because it is the source and legislator of every interest. Without it, nothing is of any interest
whatsoever. Reason is non-anthropological precisely insofar as sapience is the defining attribute of
humanity.

Does non-anthropological reason then necessarily require its cosmological determination as you
have it in NU? To explain this last question a little more: if rational thought is a non-

Brassier – interview 8
anthropological functionalist pattern formation by inference, there are in principle many
determinations of the non-anthropological in addition to the cosmological one. Why then privilege
the cosmic dimension of reason as the direct consequence or horizon of its ex-human
generalization? In doing so, do you not flatten or obviate the proliferation of inferentialist
processes exposed in principal by the “step back” from the cosmic as condition of rational
thought to Sellarsian persons? Doesn’t Sellars’s functionalist account of reason instead offer a
complexification of generalised reason?

Non-anthropological reason requires its cosmological determination if the “cosmological” is understood as

the piercing of the terrestrial horizon by the universal construed as intelligible—but inhuman—exteriority,
rather than some spurious absolute alterity. This is what physics, biology, and cosmology jointly
encourage philosophy to elucidate. But it doesn’t if “cosmological” is understood in its limited regional
sense as a specific empirical discourse about the physical universe—a discourse which deserves no
special epistemic privileging by philosophy. To follow up on my previous response, then, it is then a
cosmological rationalism that affirms the inhuman core of human cognitive capacity, i.e. sapience as the
gateway onto non-human reality, while those varieties of posthumanism whose leveling of the difference
between the human and the non-human is predicated on dissolving the distinction between sapience and
sentience end up promoting an unbridled anthropomorphism. They generalize certain properties of
human subjective experience and attribute them to everything. The result is what Pete Wolfendale has
called “introspective metaphysics”: a metaphysics that believes it can feel its way into the ultimate nature
of reality because it claims that what is going on in us is also going on everywhere outside us. 5 This may
well be realism, but it’s a wildly indiscriminate realism that is incapable of explaining the difference
between appearance and reality because it has abolished the distinction between knowing and feeling.
Rationalist anthropocentrism, through which reason reveals a radically unfamiliar universe, strikes
me as far less parochial than a-rational anthropomorphism, whose absolutization of human subjectivity
encourages us to believe everything is really just like us. And since I’m a rationalist—although of the
Kantian rather than metaphysical variety—I believe enlightened anthropocentrism marks a decisive
cognitive advance over anthropomorphism, whose rehabilitation leads to a kind of post-modern animism.
It is somewhat disconcerting to see animism proclaimed as a theoretical advance: I’m afraid I can only
see in it a lamentable regression to pre-modern superstition. It’s the result of privileging feeling as a
source of insight into non-human reality. But if using feeling to move beyond anthropocentrism yields only
untrammeled anthropomorphism, then it’s hardly preferable to correlationism.

You are associated for better or worse with “Speculative Realism,” the one tenuously common
point of the various thinkers and projects gathered under that umbrella term being precisely an
interest in overcoming the limitations of what Quentin Meillassoux has called correlationism: that
5
Pete Wolfendale ‘The Noumenon’s New Clothes’ in Speculations: a Journal of Speculative Realism, Vol.
III, 2012, p.365.

Brassier – interview 9
thinking always assumes and re-instantiates the thinking subject so the real outside of thought
cannot be thought as such. Can you clarify whether for you the affirmation of rational thought is
necessarily non-correlational?
To explain this question a little more: the problem captured with a striking reductive power
by the term correlationism is not only how thought thinks the non-human in its exteriority to
human apprehension but, more precisely, how thinking as such - by any subject or person of
thought such as a post-biotic or alien rational agent - can think outside of itself (the real) without
supposing that the exterior to thinking is thought. You are clear that inferentialism as the
functionalist account of rational thought permits the first-mentioned extraction of rational thought
from the human as its historically privileged subject, and it also seems that Sellars’s secular
account of transcendental reason is itself a “realist” account of rational thought (it is an
exceptional kind of pattern formation amongst others in a material-semantic dimension). But does
it then follow that even such a de-anthropologized thought is non-correlational? Put simply, even
if it is not a human subject that thinks the real but an abstractly determined “person”, if that
generalized rational thinking no less apprehends what it thinks in terms of its thinking, even in
what you identify as “an immanent, materialist account of the status of rational normativity”, it is
nonetheless a (perhaps ex-anthropic) correlationism. Putting the question another way: if it is to
be non-correlational — and here, the conditional if is to be stressed — how does inferentialism
abdicate the thinking person it constitutes with regard to what it thinks? Or, in yet other terms,
how do you situate the realism rather than materialism (qua non-anthropic cosmology) of rational
thought qua inferentialism?

It’s important to distinguish the good and the bad senses of “correlationism”. Correlationism as an
epistemic doctrine is perfectly unobjectionable and indeed undeniable. It simply means that we can’t know
objects without concepts. This sound epistemic doctrine only becomes objectionable if it’s conflated with a
contentious skeptical claim, viz., that we can never really know whether or not objects truly correspond to
the concepts through which we know them. The latter is rooted in a fallacy commonly known as “Stove’s
Gem,” which I’ve discussed elsewhere.6 The inferentialism I endorse is a kind of naturalized Kantianism
and it is correlationist in the first, epistemic sense, but not in the second, skeptical sense.
I share Meillassoux’s antipathy to the skeptical version of correlationism, but I think he’s wrong to
think it follows ineluctably from the first, epistemic or Kantian sense of correlation. Indeed, the suggestion
that we can only refute skepticism by dispensing with epistemic correlation, understood as the synthesis
of concepts and intuitions, seems to me untenable, since it assumes that either reason or sensibility can
separately intuit the real, the former being the rationalist variant of the myth of the given, the latter its
empiricist version. So I don’t think Meillassoux’s appeal to “dianoetic intuition” successfully avoids the

6
‘Concepts and Objects’ in The Speculative Turn, edited by L. Bryant, G. Harman, and N. Srnicek,
Melbourne: re-press 2010.

Brassier – interview 10
difficulties associated with what Kant called “dogmatic rationalism”. 7 Once correlationism is understood as
a strictly epistemic doctrine, it can be seen to be the condition for realism—not just empirical realism,
which is the corollary of Kant’s transcendental idealism, but transcendental realism, which asserts the
mind-independent existence of theoretical entities (this obviously requires a lot of unpacking, but I don’t
have the space to do it here).
I find the idea of a “non-correlational realism” incoherent because the issue of realism is tied to
that of explanatory justification, which involves epistemic correlation. The point is to know what we mean
when we qualify something as “real” and to be able to adjudicate questions about something’s “reality” on
rational, as opposed to dogmatic, grounds. Shorn of this rational constraint, the banner of “realism” by
itself becomes strictly meaningless. In fact, the relations between “realism”, “materialism”, and “idealism”
are of considerable dialectical complexity so I think it’s a mistake to brandish any one of them in isolation
from the others. They derive whatever philosophical sense they possess from their contrastive
interdependence. Just as the assertion of an unqualified or indiscriminate “realism” is uninformative, the
proclamation of “materialism” has also become meaningless, a genuflection to academic orthodoxy often
licensing positions that are indistinguishable from the most objectionable theses of “idealism”
(subjectivism, spiritualism, pan-psychism, vitalism, the identity of thought and being, etc.). In this context, I
think the term “idealism” merits strategic resuscitation as a way of re-asserting the autonomy of the
conceptual and combating the virulent anti-rationalism of certain contemporary strains of “realism” and
“materialism”. “Idealism” as a claim about the autonomy of the conceptual need not entail a “realism of the
Idea” in Iain Hamilton Grant’s sense, although the two are closely linked. 8 I think what divides Grant and I
is a divergence over the ontological status of concepts as well as the conceptual status of “nature”. But
we both proclaim the necessity of articulating eidos and hyle, idealism and materialism. As I understand it,
this means upholding the primacy of reason together with the a-rationality of the real. I’m not sure whether
this makes me a materialist idealist or idealist materialist, but in any case, oxymorons are dialectically
instructive.

Let’s return then to the distinction between rational norms, as you’ve further elucidated them
here, and socio-cultural norms - partly in order to disambiguate the two and clear up confusions
arising from the common term ‘norm’, but also to understand better if one informs the other and,
if so, how.
The question here is a short one but its reasoning requires a fairly lengthy elaboration.
From your earlier responses, we can take rational thought to be a bio-semantic or bio-social
contingency particular on this planet (so far) to the human: rational thought need never have

7
See Meillassoux’s contribution to ‘Speculative Realism’ in Collapse Vol. III (Falmouth: Urbanomic 2007)
p. 433.
8
Cf. Iain Hamilton Grant Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London and New York: Continuum,
2006). See also Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, Sean Watson, Idealism: The History of a
Philosophy (Durham: Acumen 2011)

Brassier – interview 11
happened but it has, as a historical and conceptual fact qua homo sapiens sapiens, and you
propose, against a recent tendency to deprioritize human agency and specificity, that we need not
be unduly modest about this human privilege with regard to reason nor unduly understate its
capacity and effects. Granting this exceptionality, rational enquiry renews cognitive interests by,
as you say, “breaking away from past modes of understanding”. That renewal– the work of
reason, if you will – can be further specified:
- it is universalizing qua negation of particularized instances of understanding (perhaps
including its own bio-semantic ontic particularity of human instantiation?);
- it is not eternal since it emerges in cosmological time and history and also because it is a
temporal ‘self-correcting enterprise’ in discourse (reason is a contingent fact in the
cosmological dimension and there is no intellectual intuition);
- yet reason is cosmological in that it is how human intelligibility – which is for you defining of
humanity – is pierced by nonhuman non-terrestrial reality;
- rationalism is the commitment to the inferential adumbrations of any claim or proposition. Any
discursive or cognitive interest has to be committed to its consequences, and consistently so
(in your own case, the espousal of a materialist rationalism requires you to abjure Kantian
reason as itself a myth of the given, hence the turn to Sellars).
This last determination of reason – meaning here only rational thought and certainly not an
autonomous realm of ideas - is how and why reason is normative. It is then clear why such norms
ought not to be confused with socio-cultural norms insofar as the latter are historically (which is
to say, parochially and particularly) derived rather than rationally constituted (that is,
universalizing and inferentially rigorous). To return to the terms of your earlier formulation:
though rational normativity takes place discursively in time – instituted in language, with all the
historical contingency that supposes - it is not constituted by given language or socio-historical
norms (let us call such norms ‘cultures’). Rather, rational thought’s inferentialist injunction is, if
anything, directed against the necessarily residual commitments of cultural norms. (Which is not
to say that rational thought is necessarily cast itself against this or that cultural given, only that its
avowal of the same takes place on another basis than that of culture: that of its epistemo-
semantic holism. For rational thought, culture must align with reason.)
Now, if this outline of the distinction between cultural and rational norms stands then does
it not however follow that reason qua rational thought is a — if not the — cogent ‘engine’ of
counter-normative cultural transformation (qua socio-historical norms)? The reasoning is this:
though rational thought in principle negates the particularity of any culture or historical fact in its
universalizing tendency, rational thought nonetheless takes place in time and discursively. As
such, it is always occasioned in fact at a particular time and in a particular language, however
formalized that language may be (such a formalization could be understood precisely as a rational
undertaking in the continuing negation of the historical particularities and parochialism of our

Brassier – interview 12
languages as given cultures, but even this formalization is in fact specific and parochial: it has to
be learnt). In other words, rational thought is in principle distinct to culture but is in fact
instantiated in the languages we have, perhaps modifying them along the way. Manifest in and
through a parochial language, predicated on a bio-semantic contingency, rational thought is
historically located or, again and in short, it is in fact cultural. In its negation of the parochialism
of culture and language its inferentialist imperatives even generate a cultural history. (Certainly,
this was the avowed task of the Enlightenment as a historic-philosophical endeavor.) And even if
rational thought were to confirm a particularity of a given culture (a philosophy or scientific
endeavor, say, but maybe also a law or a mode of production), it would only do so on the basis of
its universalising inferentialism, redetermining that particularity in other terms than the cultural
ones in which it had been temporarily manifest to that point. (The relevance of Hegel’s dialectic of
the Idea that you mention above is pressing here as, from another angle, are Edmund Husserl’s
writings on the foundation of European science — but let’s leave this aside for now since I think it
is clear enough that the inferential account is distinct from these in having the advantage of not
proposing a horizon to the rational endeavor.)
More generally, we can assume that rational thought negates socio-historical givens —
particulars and norms — but it does so as itself a socio-historical fact. In any case a negation of
socio-cultural norms, reason is a counter-normative functional process of rule following with
respect to cultures insofar as the latter are merely given – including those cultures in which
rational thought takes place discursively and historically. In fact, since it is contingently
occasioned in bio-semantic particularity, rational thought is at origin culturally given. It is not just
that rational thought is articulated and instantiated in socio-historical norms but is not
subordinated to them; rather, and moreover, reason countermands culture and, in doing so, it
proposes new cultural facts (less parochial discourses, unfolding in time) and so renews culture.
Without this cultural manifestation of thought observing rational norms, there could be only
intellectual intuition or a non-discursive, atemporal reason — a meta- or ex-cultural reason —and
so no inferentialism at all (as per Plato).
If the argument has traction for you, the primary question here is: even while observing
the difference between rational and socio-historical norms in principle, does not their con-
founding in fact realize rational norms as new cultural norms via a process that from any given
culture can only be seen as a counter-normative violation? Accepting the distinction in principle
and prescriptive conditions between reason and culture, is it then not untenable to hold on to
their distinction in fact and descriptive differentiation? Does the inferentialist account of rational
thought not then have to accept that the consistent adumbrations of any statement are somewhat
shaped by socio-historical particularities (that is, limited in time and language)?

Brassier – interview 13
This is a very difficult question. The claim that, as you put it, “rational thought is a —if not the — cogent
‘engine’ of counter-normative cultural transformation (qua socio-historical norms)” is a good distillation of
the project of radical Enlightenment—with the proviso that the factual “is” be changed to a normative
“should be”, since, understood as a factual claim, this formulation is obviously refutable. It’s the claim that
rationality should be the engine of counter-normative cultural transformation that I’m committed to, not
that it is or has been. And I’m committed to it precisely insofar as I’m interested in re-activating the project
of Enlightenment in its radical, Promethean form. But then the problem is precisely the one you’ve
pinpointed: having conceded that, as a matter of fact, rational norms are always socially instituted, can I
really insist that they have to be distinguished in principle without relapsing into an objectionable dualism
of rational form and socio-historical content? This would be another version of the traditional distinction
between logical form and semantic content, which is precisely something that inferentialism calls into
question.
Inferentialism starts from the primacy of material inference—such as from “It is raining” to “The
streets are wet”—and maintains that semantic content is individuated by the rules governing such
material inferences. These rules are constitutive of the meaning of linguistic expressions; they are not just
something derived from or applied to pre-existing semantic units. Moreover, purely logical or “formal”
inference is merely the rendering explicit, or explicitation, of relations of discursive commitment,
entitlement, and incompatibility that are already implicit in everyday perception, reasoning, and action. So
logic, in Brandom’s words, is merely “the organ of semantic self-consciousness”. 9 This is to say that
discursive rationality—the game of giving and asking for reasons—is more basic than logic, which
presupposes it. But this also implies that what we mean is indissociable from what we do, i.e. from our
everyday practical purposes. Since these practical purposes are embedded in a social context, this
means that our rationality, understood as our ability to give and ask for reasons for what we do and say,
cannot simply be abstracted from the social practices in which this ability is embedded. This is to say that
discursive rationality cannot be dissociated from practical, which is to say, social rationality. In this regard,
inferentialism relays the old Marxian saw according to which conceptual contradictions reflect practical
contradictions. If the task of philosophy is to render explicit the conceptual norms implicit in discursive
practice, and to identify contradictions at the level of theoretical discourse, then it is also bound to expose
the contradictions, or rather incompatibilities, between theoretical norms and practical norms, as well as
the incompatibilities pitting various practical norms against each other. Because rationality is indissociably
conceptual and social, theoretical rationality is inseparable from practical rationality in the broadest sense,
which encompasses every variety of human practice, whether material or intellectual. In this regard, what
you call the “counter-normative” thrust of philosophical rationality is its latent revolutionary calling.
Philosophy does not (indeed, cannot) hold socio-cultural norms accountable to some allegedly
superior tribunal of pure reason. What it does do is hold socio-cultural norms accountable to their own
implicit criteria of rationality by rendering explicit both their conceptual inconsistencies and their practical
9
Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) p.10

Brassier – interview 14
incompatibilities. In doing so, it exerts the minimum degree of discursive pressure required to initiate the
process of revising and ultimately transforming both social and cultural practices. I’m not suggesting that
such discursive pressure is tantamount to political pressure, or that rational critique is a sufficient
condition of revolutionary transformation. But I do want to suggest that it is a necessary condition and that
cognitive, political, and artistic revolutions can be understood as propelled by the obligation to achieve the
rational supersession of incompatibilities between saying and doing, or between implicit norms and
explicit practices. This is the rational motor of universalization and thus construed, it does not imply any
hypostasis of the universal. It’s an immanent and eminently Hegelian conception of universalization as a
process that is implicit in every human society, no matter what its state of “development”, and in every
variety of human practice, no matter how parochial.
Inferentialism is Hegelian insofar as it conceives of the universal as the self-supersession of
particularity. In Badiouian terms, I think this is how truth-procedures reconfigure the state of the situation
—but the difference is that from an inferentialist-Hegelian viewpoint, there are immanent cognitive criteria
governing the inception of the truth-procedure which brings about the situation’s generic extension (truth’s
subtraction from knowledge is still governed by extant knowledge: knowledge supersedes itself by
recognizing its own limitations). That the sociality of human reason can compel us to overcome the
shortfall between our practical ideals and our practical achievements, whether in science, politics, or art,
is the basic wager of Enlightenment.

Inferential reasoning and the maximal prosecution of a proposition’s consequences that it

requires have so far been understood as a linguistic practice. That is faithful to Sellars’s
philosophy extended by Brandom, but also a constraint imposed by these very determinations. To
explore how far the argument can be taken in terms of broader cultural practices, can the modality
or medium of inferentialist reason also be extended to non-linguistic practices? What if anything
would this change in the Sellarsian account of inferentialist practices? In an interview with Mattin
on the political and philosophical resources of post-music noise you propose that
if noise harbours any radical political potential [determined per rational norms], then it
needs to be elaborated via a process of interrogation, which would involve working
through questions such as: What is experience, given that capitalism commodifies
sensations, affects, and concepts? What is abstraction, given that capitalism renders the
intangible determining while dissolving everything we held to be concrete? What
freedoms are we invoking when we proclaim noise’s “freedom” from the alleged
constrictions of musical genre?10

10
“Metal Machine Theory: An Electronic Email Conversation”
[www.mattin.org/essays/METAL_MACHINE_THEORY_3.html].

Brassier – interview 15
The content and direction of such interrogations are in line with your broad avowals of Marxism
as the politics of a rational collective organizations necessary to challenge neo-liberalism as the
currently prevalent configuration of capitalist domination. But the question that remains here is
whether such interrogations need to be overtly philosophical or linguistic inferential
consequences alloyed to noise but not themselves noise as a material practice distinct to
language, or whether such ‘interrogations’ and ‘deontological scorekeeping’ can be undertaken
through a cultural/nonlinguistic material organization such as noise (qua genre) itself. That is, can
the non-linguistic material practice draw up inferences and address the questions you propose in
its own logic and medium rather than in the converted and displacing terms of linguistic
inference?
The task here is distinct to the inferentialism characteristic of a certain modernism in
which a particular artistic or cultural genre follows its formal or material logic to the end: the
interrogations that you propose a particular genre or medium need to make are not determined or
limited to its specific conditions and limitations but according to horizons external to it
(experience in conditions of capitalist abstraction, the content of emancipation, etc.).
To be clear: the question here is not about noise itself as a genre of cultural production —
the same argument and demands can presumably be extended to other practices of material-
cultural organization — but about the kinds of ‘work’ that can be done by cultural practices: either
as being in relation to (and therefore not immediately) the kind of rationalism you advocate or,
instead, as being at once such a rationalist practice but undertaken in and as non-linguistic quasi-
communication.

I think the answer to your question is yes, non-linguistic practices can draw-up inferences and address
the sorts of questions cited above in their own medium and independently of language. Although the
inferentialist premium on discursive practices privileges the game of giving and asking for reasons, this
game is not only or exclusively realized in specifically linguistic discourse. The category of discursive
practice is broader than that of linguistic practice. This is to say that reasoning understood as the
unfolding of discursive commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities, is not confined to the medium of
explicitly self-conscious theoretical discourse, which unfolds in and through language. Not every rational
discursive practice operates in this specifically linguistic medium. Artists think and some artists think as
rigorously as any theoretician, albeit in and through a non-linguistic medium.
Where noise is concerned, an artist like Mattin is engaged in thinking through the implications of
the commitment to the ideal of “free improvisation”. In the course of working out these implications, he
has discovered an incompatibility between what is implied by the norm of free improvisation and the
conventions governing its actual practice. So he has undertaken a series of experiments designed to test
the limits of what is allowable within those conventions and in doing so he seeks to expose the latent
contradiction between the norm and the practice. I see Mattin as someone engaged in an eminently

Brassier – interview 16
rational cognitive practice, in which self-consciously linguistic theorizing is just one element deployed
alongside other, non-linguistic elements: sonic, gestural, verbal, visual, etc. His performances frequently
bring all these elements into play. And the fact that the rational reconstruction of the complex of
assertions implicit in these performances is often retrospective in no way compromises their discursive
rigor: the rationality of a discursive practice is always retrospectively constructed. This is what it means to
say that thinking takes time: the rationality implicit in a discursive practice—where “rationality” is
understood as the intersubjective elaboration of discursive commitments, entitlements, and
incompatibilities—is never immediately accessible to its participants at any single stage of its unfolding.
Moreover, Mattin’s work is characterized by its self-consciousness (I mean this in the sense of cognitive
awareness) about the status of artistic practice in late capitalist society and in this regard, it explicitly
addresses issues such as the nature of abstraction and the content of emancipation. Thus he is doing
more than merely testing the conditions and limitations of a specific artistic medium—“noise” and/or “free-
improvisation”—he is exposing the ways in which specific artistic practices are implicated in broader
social and discursive contexts. And the “philosophical” tenor of his interrogation of his chosen medium
has been generated in and through his practical engagement with it: it is not an extraneous imposition. In
interrogating the limitations of a specific artistic practice, he has been compelled to investigate whether
and how these limitations may be conditioned by the nexus of other practices in which it is enveloped.
Thus the engagement with universality follows from unpacking the logic of a specific practice.

Brassier – interview 17