Reza Negarestani: With regard to the demand to resurrect rationalist universalism—or more broadly the rationalist reconstruction of the world to appropriate the Vienna Circle as opposed to the Frankfurt School—there are at least three major objections:

(1) Universalism will flatten differences and is ultimately, another form of imposed global order whose parameters are set in advance. In response to this objection, I would say that yes this was the case with old traditions of universalism coming from European thinkers such as Kant. But concrete universalism cannot be imagined without the non-trivial or synthetic integration of local conditions. A paradigm of universalism that does not respond to local exigencies in their own context is only a disguised imperialism.

(2) The second objection might come from a communitarian perspective: surely we can build a world sealed off from the pathological systems that plague this planet. I counter this claim by saying that this supposed world is built on two presuppositions: (a) You are implicitly endorsing a metaphysical totality in which everything that is going on in this world of ours has been assimilated by a pathological system (e.g., Capitalism) but this totality is only an illusion which you have chosen to take for reality; (b) your commune in fact parasitizes on the affordances provided by our world. The alleged purity of your thoughts and actions is actually made possible by the pathologies from which you think you have diverged. Your commune is not a solution but only another anonymous contribution to the status quo.

(3) The third objection comes from the neoreactionary doctrine: the whole pursuit of universalism is misguided, for we are particular individuals so entrenched in the particularities of our experiences and ideologies that any recipe for universalism is nothing more than a fable for naive ideologues. My retort to this third objection is: ok, let us believe that universalism, hegemony-construction and consensus-building are just the logics of illusion. But surely your neoreactionary island requires a certain labor to integrate the like-minded individuals. In this process, you have assumed that doctrinal preferences trump over individual preferences, but you are sadly mistaken. For even in your neoreactionary island, you should deal with the problems of hegemony and consensus, albeit in a restricted scope. It is not that your idea of universalism is naïve—even though it really is but rather that you cannot even fathom the scope of particularities. Even in the case of people subscribing to the same agenda, we are always the creatures of our own particular experiences.

There is no such a thing as a zero-claim doctrine. If we look at the early doctrine of fascism—particularly its Italian offshoot—we realize that this is precisely how fascism took root. It began with the claim that we indeed have no claim, no recipe because all recipes are oppressive.

Now, an advocate of neoreaction might object that the institution of such islands does not require any form of unified ideology or consensus-building. Biorealism, or cybernetic circuitry of capitalism and untethered economic competition, can effectively consolidate those who have enlisted for neoractionary experimentations. But again, what is missing in such scenarios is a deeper understanding of the scope of human experiential particularities as dynamic perturbations of the system. Over time, even minor disturbances will have cumulative effects which, if not attended to in a context-sensitive manner, are guaranteed to throw the entire system into disarray. As for biorealist schemas, even if they were more than unscientific and dogmatic fantasies about nature—which they aren’t—that could consolidate and orient populations at an accelerated rate in the fashion depicted by Theodore Sturgeon in his story Microcosmic God: they will be still impinged upon by norms and personal desires of individuals. Not to mention, that the apt metaphor for natural selection is nature as a slow tinkerer rather than a great accelerator. What I would say to my neoreactionary friends is that to the extent that they do not take seriously the depths of incommensurable experiences, their island will eventually sink. For they think that in the Hobbesian game-theoretic jungle, all you need to do is to ward off enemies and make islands for those who believe in the same social experimentations. But as time passes, the Hobbes Inferno will exact its revenge upon you. Without an adequate understanding of particularities even when a common ideology or a so-called universal method of pruning is at stake, you will end up not just devouring your enemies but also eating your kin alive.

(4) The final objection comes from various fatalist doctrines, particularly, the doctrine of anti-praxis with its slogan “let it go.” First of all, I think anti-praxis attempts to present itself as a zero-claim ideology, one that has no claim, no practical norm, and no recipe for collective political action. In this sense, one can get the impression that perhaps anti-praxis is more genuine than the other tenets I listed above, in so far as it does not deceive you with lofty promises of salvation, emancipation or the great outdoors. It is what it is and stands in sharp contrast to the illusions of collective political action. However, such an impression is fundamentally credulous. There is no such a thing as a zero-claim doctrine. If we look at the early doctrine of fascism—particularly its Italian offshoot—we realize that this is precisely how fascism took root. It began with the claim that we indeed have no claim, no recipe because all recipes are oppressive.

This is not to equate anti-praxis with fascism but to simply point out that a zero-claim doctrine—one that sees all practical norms as oppressive—is rife for fascist appropriation. When the proponents of anti-praxis tell us that they have no political norm or recipe, we should look at them with utter suspicion. They are either trying in the worst case to dissimulate their ulterior motives under the rubric of ideological innocence or, in the best case, they are not conscious of their own implicit practical norms because they have already dispensed with the responsibility, authority, presuppositions, and implications involved in consuming and producing norms. Saying that we must abandon all practical norms is already a normative recipe to the extent that is predicated on the impermissibility—i.e. what we ought not do—of practical norms. In this sense, anti-praxis is just a false consciousness of its so-called lack of normativity or purported innocence.

Therefore, either anti-praxis is an implicit normative recipe or it is not. If it is, then it is not really anti-praxis, and it means that it is unaware of its own normative and/or practical assumptions. If it is not normatively practical, then it must be a theoretical position and as such it is predicated upon theoretical norms such as the knowledge of the current state of affairs, and thus beholden to epistemological norms of attaining the knowledge of the current situation. In other words, how do we know that the current state of affairs is thus-and-so? Either we have a procedure of determination that is in accordance with the public norms of doing theory, epistemology, etc, or it is the case that anti-praxis assumes we do not follow norms of theory (which are fundamentally entangled with norms of practical reasoning). In the latter case, anti-praxis is just another variation of the myth of the given and/or private access to reality. Or, maybe it is the case that anti-praxis is not even a theoretical position. In that case, it should be an aesthetic position. But if that is the case, it then has no purchase on the knowledge of the state of affairs on which it is built, nor does it have any saying as what ought to be done and what ought not, even doing nothing. We should realize that doing nothing is itself a practical norm to the extent that we can only say “do nothing” insofar as we assume we ought not do such and such things. I would say anti-praxis is more like a new age monotheistic religion that prohibitively feeds off of practical norms of other religions, all to present itself as the last religion you should embrace.

So, in a nutshell, the first concrete recipe of universalism is the realization of our world: the real world is not a division between us and them, but a trap or enigma in which we are all ensnared. Aiming towards the construction a better world, entails seeking more computational resources. To see an enemy as an enemy is the first unwise strategy. The enemy is he or she who gives us a perspective otherwise unavailable to our intuitive or so-called immediate experience of the world. The abolishment of our pathological particular traits can only start when we diagnose what these particularities are and strive to change them by global or universal conditions.