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Brassier - Prometheanism and Real Abstraction (Chapter from Speculative Aesthetics)
A key Brassier essay linking accelerationism to real abstraction, helping separate Promethean argument from caricatured speed politics.
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Core idea
These pages matter because they state the Promethean and left-accelerationist branch in its most coherent public form. Accelerationism here is not raw intensification but a dispute about modernity, abstraction, planning, and what to do with the future.
Reader introductions and polemical essays do the sorting. They separate Promethean argument from both anti-modern localism and the darker Landian or reactionary trajectories that later came to dominate public shorthand.
That matters because without this cluster the section collapses into public caricature. These pages preserve the internal claims of the branch that most explicitly tried to reclaim abstraction for emancipatory politics.
How to read this text
Read first for how the page defines the future, abstraction, or planning before following the argument's immediate polemical targets.
Track where Prometheanism is contrasted with either folk politics, anti-modern retreat, or fatalist acceleration. That contrast is the page's conceptual hinge.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Ray Brassier Prometheanism and Real Abstraction There are lot of materials here to try and synthesize; I’ll just try to talk about a couple of things, and to pick out what I take to be the decisive factors in Nick’s, James’s and Alex’s presentations. First of all, Nick’s distinction between epistemic and political accelerationism is absolutely crucial.
Definition · paragraph 5
This is basically to ratify the realization of abstraction as a kind of research programme. Unless Marxism reasserts its commitment to Prometheanism, and to the transformative power of conceptual rationality, the result will be a politics of fear masquerading as a politics of emancipation. It is quite striking to observe the extent to which the contemporary Left is paralysed by fear of the future.
Definition · paragraph 6
conceptualization. A Promethean constructivism will engineer new domains of experience, and it is these new domains that will need to be mapped by a reconfigured aesthetics. 1. See e.g. A. Toscano, ‘The Culture of Abstraction’, Theory, Culture and Society 25:4 (2008), 57–75; ‘The Open Secret of Real Abstraction’, Rethinking Marxism 20:2 (2008), 273–87.
Stakes · paragraph 1
Making this distinction allows us to understand the core issue of acceleration and to frame the problems of accelerationism correctly. The problem of acceleration has both an epistemic and a political aspect, and it’s tied to this issue of abstraction: to the epistemic status of abstraction on the one hand, and to the political valences of abstraction on the other.
Stakes · paragraph 3
The critical task is to produce cognitive maps of capitalist reality which will provide traction on the real abstractions dominating every aspect of contemporary existence. This is certainly valuable, but it does not seem to be tied to any kind of political practice. Mapping for the purposes of critique alone is not going to help you overcome capitalism.
Appears in sections
Accelerationism Branches and Debates Primary section
Left, right, unconditional, and popularized accelerationisms sorted into a cleaner research map.