‘BETWEEN URGENCY AND ABSTRACTION:

CULTURAL STUDIES AFTER STUART HALL’

Conference organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Wed 25th – Thurs 26th June, 2014

Separation, Fusion, Mediation:

Urgency and Abstraction in the Present Moment

Benjamin Noys (2014)

There’s something bloodless in the modern age.

Lynne Tillman, Weird Fucks

I want to offer some preliminary and speculative reflections on the problems of urgency

and abstraction in the present moment. What follows is a restricted reflection on a

transition in the way we think the relation of urgency and abstraction, although I’d argue

these modes of thinking are widespread. In particular, I want to trace the transition from

a distance between urgency and abstraction to their proximity, from separation to fusion.

Urgency is usually contrasted with abstraction. Urgency is the time of the political, of

action, of the demand, while abstraction is the time of the philosophical, of

contemplation, and of reflection. They remain separate, belong to different temporal

modes. If this is the “classical” view, to offer something of a cliché, I then want to sketch

the present moment as one of a fusion of abstraction and urgency. Under the felt

pressure of what Sohn-Rethel called “real abstraction”, the lived experience of

abstractions in crisis become more real than we’d imagined, the tendency is to claim a

1
license for urgency as a result. This is what I call the contemporary “insurrectional

imaginary”, in which the pressure of abstraction drives urgent political action.

In relation to the legacy of Stuart Hall, which is the focus of this conference, I

want to question this collapsing of abstraction and urgency into one moment. Returning

to Hall’s statement of “Marxism without guarantees”, I want to suggest that we can find

echoes of the theoretical debates into which Hall was intervening in the present moment.

While not denying the necessity to link urgency and abstraction Hall’s work suggests the

complexity and difficulty of this process. In this way we can think “cultural studies”, in

the particular inflection Hall would give to this field, as a mode of mediating urgency and

abstraction without separating them.

Separations

First I want to sketch, in a brutally reductive fashion, what we could call the “classical”

modelling of urgency and abstraction. Here there is a separation of urgency and

abstraction. In the first case of separation, we have to step back from urgency into

abstraction as the necessary condition of later urgency. In the Marxist tradition we could

think of Marx’s retreat into the British Library to write Capital after his experience of

defeat in 1850.1 The writing of Capital, the work of patient labour on abstraction,2 is the

condition for the thinking of the urgency incarnated by the Paris Commune. The failed

struggles of 1848 find their true relay in the new “proletarian” struggles of 1871.3

1
“After 1850, when the proletarian risings throughout Europe had been crushed, Marx
withdrew to London and decided to ‘begin at the beginning’ in political economy, with
which up to that time he only had an indirect and superficial acquaintance.” (Althusser,
Lenin, 97).
2
Lyotard remarks on “the perpetual postponement of finishing work on Capital, a chapter
becoming a book, a section a chapter, a paragraph a section, by a process of
cancerization of theoretical discourse”. (96)
3
Rancière queries Marx’s identification of the Commune with a proletarian assault on the
state, arguing that “the plebeian discourse Marx noted in 1871 was not the discourse of
2
 Similarly, we could recall Lenin reading Hegel after the capitulation of Social

Democracy to war fever in 1914. Again a retreat to study abstractions becomes the later

condition for urgency. Lenin’s re-reading of the Logic makes possible the “leap” into

urgent action in 1917, in contrast to the timidity (or to their mind, prudence) of his

colleagues. On the publication of the “April Theses” Bogdanov characterised them as

“the delirium of a madman” and Nadezhda Krupskaya remarked “I am afraid it looks

like Lenin has gone crazy.” (Žižek, 5)

The logic, in these cases, is anticipatory. A necessary work of and on abstraction

is required to prepare for urgent action – the moment of Kairos or fortuna. In Lenin’s

remark, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” (What

is to be Done?) Theory, a work of abstraction, is a necessarily patient act of preparation for

urgent action. Initial separation prepares a future fusion of urgency and abstraction, in

terms of an insurrection against abstraction. This ‘fusion’, however, is still one guided

and organised by the instance of reflection.4

Another modulation of this model of separation is from starting from urgency to

move to abstraction. In his preface to volume one of Capital, Althusser remarked that

intellectual specialists fail to understand Capital, while “the militants of the Workers’

Movement have understood this same Book, despite its difficulties.” (72) This is due to

the book speaking to their “everyday reality”, and so Capital becomes the “Bible” of the

movement due to its “abstraction” speaking to the urgency of the immediate conditions

of the workers. In this case urgency and abstraction appear more closely linked. That

said, the urgency of the workers’ conditions allows them access to an “apprenticeship” in

abstraction. Here we approach from the “other side”: the urgency of struggle has to find

the Commune but only one such discourse – not that of the Belleville masses, but that of
the trade-union elites.” (Intellectual, 111-12)
4
This is evident in Lenin’s reflections on the Paris Commune, in which insurrection must
not dissolve into “anarchist” forms.
3
itself reflected in the forms of abstraction that dominate it. The workers, encountering

this work of “pure theory” (74; italics in original), need “to get used to the practice of

abstraction.” (75; italics in original) Althusser’s advice was, notoriously, to ‘PUT THE

WHOLE OF PART ONE ASIDE FOR THE TIME BEING’ (79), which is to say put

aside the abstraction of the commodity-form, rendering this apprenticeship rather

problematic.

From both directions, from abstraction to urgency or from urgency to

abstraction, there is a necessary delay. It is the knowledge of abstraction, in both cases,

which equips us with the capacity to act with the correct urgency, striking at the weakest

or the strongest link with surety. Furio Jesi summarises the logic of revolution as

requiring “a correct evaluation of the times grounded in the analysis of socio-economic

conditions and the balance of forces present within them” (45). Patient work in

abstraction is not an end in itself, it is the necessary moment of delay to allow a relay to

urgent action.

This mode of thinking has come under stringent and repeated critique by Jacques

Rancière. From his Althusser’s Lesson of 1974, where Rancière insisted Althusserianism

was an essential pedagogic instruction, where “the masses can make history because the

heroes make its theory” (2012: 132), to his recent 2010 contribution to the Idea of

Communism volume, where he argues “classical” Marxism rests on the “impotence” and

“disempowerment” of the masses, which needed to be guided through abstraction (2010:

171), the argument has been consistent. A model of domination in which power

dissimilates itself requires savants with “the exalted task of bringing their science to the

blind masses.” (2011: xvi) Althusser’s turn to the immediacy of worker’s experience,

from the high theoreticism of his earlier work, merely repeats the problem as the worker

still requires a tutelary apprenticeship under the guidance of theorist or party (Rancière

2011: 57-81). What Rancière signals, and what has become widespread common sense

4
today, is the failure of this particular political, cultural, and institutional form of

transmission. The separation of urgency and abstraction seems inadequate and

problematic, incarnating a sense of superiority and theoretical self-awareness than

condemns most to ignorance.

Fusions

In the present moment the aim appears to be to fuse or integrate urgency and

abstraction, or to suppose they are already fused. Far from contrasting or separating

these two functions the claim is that the very dominance of abstraction, the penetration

of abstraction into all forms-of-life or the subsumption of all life by the abstract, licenses

or generates an immediately urgent politics that contests these abstractions on their own

grounds. Reality justifies the leftism that Althusser abhorred with, according to Rancière,

its “premature suturing of the time of research and the time of empirical politics.” (2011:

52) It is often, although not always, life that is the key anti-mediating mediator that

connects or fuses abstraction and urgency. The entry of abstraction into life, in all its

forms, results in a life that is not simply recuperated but itself becomes an abstract force

– a force that can immediately overturn the dominance of abstractions. In Negri’s

formulation: “There where the abstract subsumed life, life has subsumed the abstract.”

(78-9)

In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Thomas Pynchon expressed an early intuition of

this situation vectored, as would often be true, through the case of California. Reflecting

on his fictional city San Narcisco, Pynchon wrote: “Like many named places in California

it was less an identifiable city than a group of concepts – census tracts, special purpose

bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”

(14) The reduction of place to concepts, and notably concepts of property, consumption,

and transit, is one signature of the force of real abstractions. In fact, for a novel usually

5
discussed in terms of its more familiar narrative of postal conspiracy and epistemological

paranoia, The Crying of Lot 49 is involved with “traditional” novelistic concerns of

inheritance and property; its plot is set in motion by the execution of a will, and it

concludes with the auction of the estate. Reality, in the time of real subsumption, is, we

might say, “a group of concepts”.

The inhuman complexity of current forms of abstraction – one thinks, most

notably, of the recurrent discussions of High-Frequency Trading5 – does not, in this way

of thinking, leading to an infinite complexity of resistance. Rather the claim that

abstraction “irreparably … hollows out the core of things,” to quote Simmel on money,

results in a radical simplification. If everything is abstract, or equally abstract, then new

battle lines can be drawn or generated out of this “desert” of abstractions. The result is

that abstraction results in the urgency of an insurrectional imaginary in which resistance

can appear at every point, as abstraction dominates at every point.

This insurrectional imaginary has been best summed-up by Furio Jesi’s text on

the Spartacist uprising, written in 1969 but not published until twenty years later and only

this year in English. For Jesi “revolt” involves the suspension of historical time, unlike

revolution, which is the immersion in historical time. The insurrection of revolt is

immediate, Manichean, and anti-organisational. It erupts and we are impelled to join, we

fight with what is to hand against the monstrous adversaries that confront us – dealing

not with abstract “capitalists” but demonic “repositories of power” (71). It is this

immediacy of insurrection that is crucial to the fusion of urgency and abstraction. In the

urgent moment of insurrection the abstract is made concrete, brought down to earth in

the figure of the enemy, and the struggle resolved into battle.

Take the controversial theorisation of “the young-girl” by Tiqqun. She is the

figure of abstraction deepened to such an extent that, to use one of the most

6
controversial statements in that text: “It appears that all of the concreteness of the world

has taken refuge in the ass of the Young-Girl.” (91) In this piece of cultural analysis we

find a radical flattening in which all culture aspires or becomes “the Young-Girl,” which

is the slightly unconvincing response to accusations of misogyny or sexism. She is the

figure of “total nihilism” (91), the unbridled reign of abstraction, in which the concrete

is, finally, the sexualised element at its extreme. While this might pass for an extreme

pessimism of the caricatural “Frankfurt School,” one of the more unfortunate founding

myths of cultural studies, in fact this “hollowing” licenses the insurrectional imaginary of

the other texts.

The “ethical” aim of Tiqqun is to turn the “desert,” in which all cultural

developments tend to “the Young-Girl,” into a war through the antagonism that emerges

out of this absolute opposition. This “polarization” (Civil War, 20) requires political

activity, hence urgency is not simply given. The force of abstraction, which creates a

continuous field, requires “the Imaginary Party [a]s the Outside of the world without

Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged at the heart of a world rendered continuous.”

(Civil War, 133) The theorization of Tiqqun appeals to Carl Schmitt’s distinction of

friend/enemy as crucial to this process of politicization. Whereas Schmitt wanted to

resist the abstraction of a global communism by insisting on politics requiring a territorial

form, Tiqqun recast this to argue the enemy is abstraction, is the force of capital.

Schmitt’s vitalist polarization is reworked into the antagonism of global civil war – the

internal faultline of global capital.

The contemporary currents of communization don’t depend on this vitalist

element, but also refer to the immediacy of abstraction leading to the urgency of

insurrection (although the process of communization itself is often imagined as taking a

long time – even several hundred years). This form of what Gilles Dauvé called, critically,

5
See Toscano “Gaming,” and Wilkins and Dragos.
7
“proletarian structuralism” (2008: 93), in which the capital / labour relation structures

the forms of its possible overcoming. In this narrative the increasing dominance of real

subsumption has hollowed-out the “traditional” forms of workers’ institutions: parties,

unions, states. These were affirmative counter-poles to capital, which also supported the

capital-labour relation. Now there is no affirmation of these “alternatives,” due both to

capitalist restructuring and the resistance of workers. The new situation of real

subsumption results in class identity being regarded as an “external constraint” that has

to be overcome in the process of revolution.

A general insurrectional imaginary is the result of the global dominance of

abstraction, which is taken as solving the problems of the mediation of theory. Now it is

no longer a matter of a necessarily abstract theory capable of grasping abstraction and

guiding practice – the very pedagogic practice Jacques Rancière repeatedly and

consistently denounced. Now we are all educated in abstraction in daily life and, at the

same time, in the unliveable nature of these abstractions. The abstractions themselves

drive the urgency as we grasp their effects on our lives.

World as Will and Determination

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result

of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified, and thus merely a

commentary on the affirmation of the will to live.

Schopenhauer

I want to reflect on a particular moment from Stuart Hall’s large and complex body of

work which speaks to this question. This is his argument that we think a “Marxism

without guarantees,” which involves: “Understanding ‘determinancy’ in terms of setting

limits, the establishment of parameters, the defining of the space of operations, rather

8
than in terms of the absolute predictability of particular outcomes” (Problem, 45). While

Hall wanted to incorporate the new developments in what came to be called “post-

Marxism,” and what Ellen Meiskins Wood excoriated as the “new true socialism,” he

never went as far as abandoning the central insight of Marxism.6 For Hall we have to

rewrite or reread Marxism as insisting on “determination by the economic in the first

instance” (Problem, 45).7

At the risk of anachronism I want to reread Hall’s dual critique of economic

determinism and a post-Marxist linguistic indeterminism in light of the fusion I have

traced between urgency and abstraction. I have already suggested how some, and I stress

some, currents of communization risk or even embrace a certain economic determinism.

This is particularly explicit in the extreme anti-voluntarism of Peter Åström’s “Crisis and

Communization.” He argues that “determinacy is inexorable” (37): we are compelled into

communization by the material conditions of capital, by the march of abstraction and

subsumption. This judgement is disputed even within an addendum to the text reflecting

on the debates it occasioned. Here consciousness drops out to be replaced by the driving

force of abstraction and subsumption that forces us into communization – the

abandonment of any affirmation of worker’s identity.

I would add, however, that generally communization has not dealt in much depth

so far with questions of consciousness, ideology, and culture. Its stringent and salutary

insistence on the capital relation is necessary correction to the tendency to abandon any

reference to the economic that was at times found in work like Laclau’s, and a wider

“structure of feeling” that celebrated indeterminacy in the 1990s. That said, and here is

6
Meiskins Wood excepts Stuart Hall from her analysis on the grounds that his:
“theoretical statements are sufficiently ambiguous and his movements in a NTS direction
are so often accompanied by qualifications and disclaimers that it is not always easy to
know exactly where he stands.” (2, n.3)
7
In his 1973 text on the 1857 Introduction by Marx, Hall refers to determination in the
first and last instance. Julia Ng drew this text to my attention.
9
where cultural studies returns, these questions can simply be conjured away. There is a

tendency in communization to displace such problems into the process of revolution qua

communization. Here questions of falling back into socialism (or capitalism), the dangers

of fascism, etc. tend to be treated as “deviations” within the revolution. There is less

attention to problems of consciousness and struggle now, although with some honourable

exceptions.8

The second, symmetrical, problem is the reaction to the determinism of

abstraction by an insistence on the possibilities of will to break the hegemony of the

current moment. Will, or fanaticism, or zealotry, promise the means to cut the Gordian

knot of abstraction. In the work of Peter Hallward, on will, or the late Joel Olson, on

zealotry, the stress is on the possibilities of a line of division, a prescription, that can cut

or divide the political. Contrary to political “neutralization,” (to use Schmitt’s term)

especially by the emptying force of abstractions, the emphasis here is on a vital politics,

similar to Tiqqun, that can radicalize the present moment.

While wildly different in many ways, this insistence on an indeterminacy and

capacity of will risks symmetry with the Laclauian insistence on the always possible

fluidity of language as a site of reinscription. Hall notes that the post-Marxists replace an

unsatisfactory conception of ideology articulated around class blocks “with an unequally

unsatisfactory ‘discursive’ notion which implies total free floatingness of all ideological

elements and discourses.” (Problem, 41) Laclau, and notably Mouffe, argue for the

Schmittian possibility of drawing out a friend/enemy distinction through a populism that

inscribes a difference in language. In their work the “vitality” lies on the side of language,

we could say, but the move is not that dissimilar to a “politics of prescription”. Vitality of

the protean will or vitality of protean signifiers, results in an ever-renewed possibility of

8
See Rob Lucas, “Dreaming in Code”, for a discussion of the difficulties of the strategy
of the refusal of work in the context of precarious and flexible labour.
10
resistance that floats over the economic. It remains undetermined in either the first or

last instance.

While Hall was intervening in a different context I am suggesting the problem of

an alternative between determinism and indeterminism persists at the present moment.

Hall’s proposal was to re-engage Marxism was a determination in the first instance as an

answer to the reductions of economism and the reductions of post-Marxism. Those are

not the alternatives that confront us. In fact, in the present moment there is much

greater recognition of this determination and then an attempt to engage with whether we

are “fully” determined or can somehow escape determinism. This accounts for the stress

on fusion between urgency and abstraction and the “short-circuit” of analysis, whereas in

Hall’s modelling the distance of separation seems greater – as if the decision could be

made and then applied in a particular instance. That said, Hall’s insistence on the

mediation of this determination, that we begin from it rather than end with it, is salutary

and crucial still.

There is, however, a difficulty that emerges in Hall’s proposition. In his later

work on “New Times” the questioning of “class essentialism” coquettes with the

dissolution of the problem of class. A text like “For Allon White: Metaphors of

Transformation,” from 1993, seems to push Gramscianism into congruence with a

Foucauldian view of plural powers and resistances that float free of class. Here we have

to note the risk of mediation and complexity is that it can block any thinking of

revolution. This converges with the pop-Burkeanism that dominates much of the

contemporary humanities, in the form of invocations of historical density and

interconnectedness. Hall did not embrace this conclusion. His work is salutary in that

complexity and mediation does not entail the refusal of politics, transformation, or

revolution.

11
Conclusion

The most resonant of Hall’s text for the present moment is, no doubt, the collective

volume Policing the Crisis, from 1978.9 Hall and his co-authors explore the economic crisis

of the 1970s and the cashing out of this crisis in the project by the right to project an

image of black criminality in the form of “mugging”. What this work explores is the

articulation of class through “race”, where this is not some mere subsidiary problem but

the mode of segmentation itself. Crisis does not resolve this segmentation in any

“levelling down” process, but exacerbates this articulation and sediments it in the

hegemonic project of the ruling class to “resolve” the crisis. This point is obviously

crucial, and disputes “simplification through crisis” arguments, then and now. Louis-

George Schwartz has noted that, in our time of “full subsumption” and crisis we find a

situation of generalised hostility. Tracking this through cinema he talks of “cinema

hostis” in which “each is the enemy of each and the camera is the enemy of all.” The

tension of such a generalised hostility is, of course, its relation to the segmentation that

traces particular lines of force and power.

While the crisis Hall and his colleagues explore should obviously not be mistaken

for ours, especially in terms of the crisis at our moment in the previous forms of

“socialist” resistance, the resonance is striking. The experience of black Britons as a

fraction or element of the reserve army of labour or surplus population left them

abandoned by many of the “protections” of capitalist life and recalcitrant to the promises

of socialist organisation. This amounted to a possibility for a different form of

politicisation, particularly those made on the grounds of the refusal to work (Hall and his

co-authors are aware of the debates from Italian operaismo, debates that would be

occluded in the various “controversies” of the 1980s), and the “lumpen” politics

9
For one attempt to activate this text in our crisis moment, on the question of surplus
population, see Toscano (2014).
12
proposed by Fanon and the Black Panthers (Toscano 2014). These forms of

politicisation begin from crisis: from the crisis of the model of the proletarian and the

necessity to grasp the torsions of that identity as a limit to be overcome.

While charting these debates Hall et al. are also aware of the limits of these new

forms of politicisation. They note the tensions and problems of the claims for a political

status given to crime as a mode of resistance that could be translated into a broader

insurgent strategy. The final sentence of the book, reflecting precisely on this issue,

seems to me essential advice for our moment:

It [the difficulty of translating black “crime” into political resistance] sets up

a necessary warning about any strategy which is based simply on favouring

current modes of resistance, in the hope that, in and of themselves, by

natural evolution rather than by break and transformation, they could

become, spontaneously, another thing. (Hall et al, 1978: 397)

Here urgency and abstraction are not so much separate, with abstraction being the

condition of urgency, nor are they fused, with abstraction producing political urgency.

Rather the relation of abstraction (in the form of crisis) and urgency (in the form of

crime as a mode of survival) are interrupted by a demand for a strategy that could

operate by “break and transformation”.

We return again to Lenin, or an echo of Lenin: evolution and spontaneity versus

break and transformation. But in both cases we have the absence of the Leninist forms

of party and insurrection. The result is a double tension. First, a return to the problem of

mediation, which I’ve suggested, suggests that “full abstraction” does not easily resolve

the problem of the “cultural”, which lacks the clarity of destitution and levelled

“blankness”. This implies, if not the pedagogic in the “bad” sense indicated by Rancière,

at least the difficulty of tracing culture as the mediation of abstraction and struggle, in the

seeming massive presence of the one and the relative absence of the other. This links to

13
the second tension, which is the invocation of “break and transformation” in the absence

of the “classical” solution – the party or other form of embodied knowledge capable of

“carrying” consciousness. Obviously this is the double tension of the present moment,

the problem of what we could call “class consciousness without a party”.

14
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18