Debate should be a site of engineering in which we adhere by shared norms of communication to experiment with concrete political visions—you should reject explanations of metaphysical totalities that can’t account for the reverberating effects of individual experiments. Communication and rationality are inevitable—trying to subvert them fizzles out at best and is proto-fascist bad faith at worst—only proactively engineering political visions within the constraints of the world we live in can prevent extinction.

As long as, we are not willing to recognize education in the aforementioned sense as the scaffolding upon which any political movement should be built we are doomed to live in the status quo. Short of an unconditional prioritization of education, all we ever can hope for are quick fixes accompanied with phases of socio-political overexcitement which soon fizzle out, leading us to a position which was worse than before. Politics without education as its premise can never maintain its long-term traction. It effectively exempts itself from the concerns of the next generations. But what is a politics without the potential concerns for next generations—whoever or whatever they might be—if not an extension of our egotism and selfishness here and now? While I consider myself a leftist, I nevertheless think that my frustration with the left is precisely the issue of education. Look at something like left accelerationism: where is the acknowledgment of education or developmental psychology i.e. nurturing as the unconditional factor? Where is your logistical-financial and organizational plan for education? If you lack these then no matter how much you insist on egalitarian ends, you are not going to attain them. However, being the hopeless leftist that I am, I believe that left, has “in principle” more chance to concretely address the issue of education than the right.

I believe in something like a universalist paradigm of education or equality of minds. Here, the appellation universal does not mean a pre-conceived global paradigm that can be indiscriminately imposed upon everyone. Education is all about context sensitivity, fulfilling local exigencies. But at the same time, I think there are deep cognitive frameworks which are common to us all and can be augmented under a universal or global framework. I think Kant was onto something important. His hierarchies of faculties as elaborated under the rubric of transcendental psychology—i.e. the necessary conditions for the possibility for having a mind—are not merely a trivial or arbitrary list of faculties. They were as much a necessary list of abilities as they were an example of an epistemological inquiry into the specific modes of cognition required for critical and objective thinking. For example, what he calls sensibility, reproductive and productive imagination, understanding and reason are actually necessary “classes” or “types” for being a minded subject. If we believe in the equality of all minds then we ought to also believe in complex recipes that can universally augment such necessary classes, regardless of whether we belong to different geographic locations, ethnicities, or even species.

Fabio Gironi: The delicate question of universalism was indeed my next target. Those who grew up intellectually in the leftist academic environment of the late twentieth century were taught, more or less explicitly, that “universalism” is something of a taboo term. Indeed, you just mentioned the left’s penchant for intersubjectivity without objectivity—that is to say for a celebration of irreducible particularities, local practices, identities and so on—which renounces global and universalist ambitions. Now, I think that this anti-totalizing intellectual season (a former teacher of mine once told me how, sometime in the mid-80s, he witnessed a heckler shout “you totalizing bastard!” during a public talk by Fredric Jameson—this peculiar “insult” always makes me chuckle) was a necessary step, contextually justified by a certain post-World War II socio-political environment. However, it has now become unreflective doxa, leading to a counterproductive knee-jerk reaction against a whole constellation of ideas and concepts—many of which you are explicitly committed to. Universalism is one of those and (neo)rationalism is another, and the two are obviously related.

This stance of yours has occasionally led you to a collision course with, let’s say, more “orthodox” leftists, since all too often universalism is equated with authoritarianism, while neo-rationalism is confused with dogmatism and blinkered logicism (just like any talk of “norms” is taken to be an implicit call for normalization—may Foucault save us all!). As if “rationalism” in general was always necessarily guided by an ambition of comprehensive and total control: a reactionary intellectual orientation for the preservation of good societal order, the adversary of the philosophical and political projects prioritizing the bottom-up affective development of vectors of individual freedom. What are the methods and goals of the universalist rationalism?

Reza Negarestani: Calling yourself a rationalist universalist is even worse, it is doubly taboo. It is akin to identifying yourself as an agent of some totalitarian nightmare straight out a postmodern parody where you actually take pride in having a poor sense of humour, being cretinous and shamelessly insensitive. The corresponding image would be not O’Brien from 1984 but a villain from a Donald Barthelme’s story who just wants to liquidate people using absurdist methods for the sheer experimental joy of it. So, the question, as you brought it up, is: how did we come to have such a cultural perception about reason or universalism? Can we ever step outside of this culture? If the answer is positive, what can we accomplish by doing so? And correspondingly, if we continue to remain in this culture what do we lose or risk? The answer to these questions is obviously not straightforward. It requires not just a historical analysis of economic and social conditions using adequately objective diagnostic tools, but also a system of thought for imagining and concretely building an alternative world, one that does not begin with the year zero but is built in continuity with the existing one which we currently inhabit. Both, of course, require the adoption, refinement and development of our concepts of reason and universality as the first step.

As you mentioned, given the historical contamination of these concepts, there is an immense work to be done not just to gain the trust of people but also to repair or discard their negative aspects in theory and practice. Let me begin with universalism. I see universalism as a necessary, concrete and global labour of collectivization. It is very much in tandem with the idea of concrete self-consciousness or collective self-determination as a matter of practical achievement built simultaneously on inter-subjectivity and objectivity, particularities and universalities which are a priori. Even in our particularities and differences, we always begin with abstract or formal universalities, things like being concept-users, private thoughts which are modelled on a public language, deep cognitive faculties and categories which even in their specificity have universal logical structures. So, in a sense, we already live in a universalist state, albeit an abstract one. We are experiencing, thinking and acting individuals to the extent that we are socially constituted through and through. Kant and Hegel—despite their shortcomings in appreciating the true consequences of the sociality of mind—make this point quite clear: we could not have experience—through which it is possible to develop a conception of ourselves in the world—in the first place, if we did not have some shared repertoire of universal and necessary conditions. Speaking of experience as something originally particular or individual is hardly anything more than a symptom of a purely solipsistically perspectival view that is irreconcilable with the reality represented by cognitive science, logic, computation, mathematics, and even evolutionary biology.

However, there is nothing in this abstract universality that safeguards it from pathologies of individuation and particularism precisely because the real social conditions in which it is embedded can in fact be pathological as it is the case. So, universalism in its genuine form is the concrete and critical expression of universalities at the level of real social conditions. And its aim is the maximization of the capacities to think and act, to entertain and actualize possibilities beyond the confines of the existing world in which we live—a world that purports to be a completed totality. To achieve this aim, to build a new world in which the possibility of disenthralled thinking and action coincides with possibilities of a world in which the individual and social problems and pathologies are resolved, however, is impossible without first responding systematically and rationally to the constrains of the world in which we already live. In this sense, I would say universalism is at its core concerned with world-building or more precisely world-engineering to the extent that our premise, resource and space of labour is always this world and not some imaginary world or an afterlife heaven. The possible world cannot be one that is sealed off from this world, a universe or a commune that exists parallel to our world. The former is merely a fantasy, the latter is not only phantasmic but also parasitic upon the pathologies the real world without even realizing it.

To sum up, the path to concrete universalism always begins from particularities of our experience of the world which are constituted by abstract universalities. So, in a sense, the trajectory of universalism should always begin from local conditions of thinking and action, rather than a purported universal condition under which we can all be integrated and unified. But this trajectory does not end with the local, it must pass through stages and encompass the global conditions of thinking and action. Remaining in the ambit the local is actually what suffers from a delusive idealism, not universalism. Why? Because this localism abides by the myth of a closed system in which jobs can get done effectively and perfectly. But a closed system is simply an idealized state, to mistake an idealized model with the messy reality is a hallmark of credulity. Not to mention, the microlocalist setup is destined to be afflicted with what I call theoretical-practical Habsburg syndrome, i.e., you end up breeding thoughts and actions which are increasingly less optimal to address your initial ambitions and problems. In other words, the logarithmic curve of thinking and acting which were supposed to optimally solve your local problems suddenly drops after a sufficient time, precisely because you run out of computational or cognitive resources, the majority of them you have chosen to call enemies. Without interaction with the environment, your system becomes ever more fragile and soon a premature death knocks at your door.

Fabio Gironi: So what are the main obstacles and resistances posed to universalism by its detractors, and how can they be countered?

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.

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.

Fabio Gironi: Let us move deeper into a more explicit political register. Some of your comments above regarding universalism and its detractors remind me of the “first law” of what the late Mark Fisher infamously called the “Vampire Castle,” i.e. the priestly, resentment-ridden left-wing intelligentsia. As he put it: “the first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour”. Similarly, your polemic against communitarianism and particularism, and against an understanding of the “local” as terminal horizon rather than as synthetic step for the piecemeal construction of a global framework seems in broad agreement with those political-economic stances that in recent years have been assimilated under the banner of accelerationism (as most concretely expounded in Srnicek’s and Williams’ Inventing the Future). I know that you were a friend of Fisher, and that you know Srnicek and Williams well, but can you offer me a clear description of your political stance, in relation to this broad orthodoxy-breaking and future-oriented trend in leftist thinking? Do you have any prescriptive stance regarding political action?

Reza Negarestani: I’m afraid that my political stance—or rather my philosophical view concerning what ought to be done in the arena of politics—oscillates between deep pessimism regarding our methods and optimism about future possibilities. Yet, insofar as any possibility can only be actualized by adequate and malleable methods and tools, and to the extent that our methods, ways of systematization, intervention with socio-economic reality and so on are either quite rudimentary or disoriented with regard to the realization of consequential political changes, I think I am more comfortable to identify myself as a rational pessimist. I reject passive pessimism in the sense that as long as possibilities can be imagined, we have to actively gamble and push beyond any vestige of resignation. Without imagining possibilities and piecewise attempts at actualizing them, there is in fact no good justification for surviving as a species. As Seneca has pointed out, in complete absence of such a struggle, we must perhaps devise the most cunning and artful contrivance for bringing our death about. In that case, even the slogan “let it go,” once inflated, is nothing but a disingenuous pessimism that attempts to fabricate a semblance of profundity. In reality, it is the very exemplification of human conservatism and an adolescent disgruntlement which secretly hopes for a miraculous change even when it tries to seem detached from such concerns. After all, romantic fatalism is the shallowest form passive optimism, rather than genuine pessimism.

Other than the question of methods and tools, another reason for my doubt is what I mentioned in my answer to your previous question and which you brought up through Mark. It is the enigma of the particular. It is enigmatic precisely because the particular as a real condition can shapeshift and come in different guises, play different even contradictory roles in the domains of both the individual and the collective, the local and the universal piecewise integration and mobilization of localities. Mark was one of the best critics of the Hobbesian myth of the state as that which guards the human from their complete transformation into wolves, as that without which humanity is inconceivable. In a sense, Mark was far more radical than Hobbes in that he fathomed the depth of the enigma of the particular. The particular can be pernicious or even illusory through and through. The absolutization of the particular, the individuals—whether in the name of the victim, the sufferer or in the name of individual choices and preferences—completely misses the fact that the conditions of individuation can themselves be pathological. The overemphasis on the particular or the local, accordingly, can very well the blind perpetuation of the conditions of exploitation and misery. But particulars can also be positively non-trivial and implicitly collective perspectives: by making these perspectives explicit, we can shed light onto the problems of the individual and the collective. However, one thing is certain—as Mark would have agreed—the depth of particularities is inexhaustible. So much that, as I argued earlier, even those who dismiss the universalist labour have to deal with its drastic implication within their neo-reactionary floating islands. Absent a diagnosis of different kind of particularities, and short of analysing them with regard to the mechanisms responsible for generating and distinguishing such causal factors or mechanisms at different levels of socio-economic reality, we are all—and I mean everyone—on the same Hobbesian Raft of the Medusa. We will eventually betray ourselves and eat one another, irrespective of whether we think we should strive for a future universalist collective project, we should denounce such endeavours, or we should do nothing and just let it go.

Given the endless series of particularities, of individuals, and of localities, as well as their protean nature, I think that—given our current tools, modes of thinking and action, methods, etc.—we have at this point a very slim, if any at all, chance to do anything that leads us beyond the nightmare of this auto-cannibalistic raft. While I wholeheartedly support the paradigms raised by people like Patricia Reed, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams which are focused on consensus-building, hegemony-construction and the critical integration of particularities of the human condition, I think as a philosopher I should take side with the Socratic method of the courage of truth with regard to the political action. And as such, I believe the prospects are now very dim, shockingly so. This claim should not incite the cheer of the right-inclined, resignatory, neo-reactionary, and conservative thinkers. If anything, it should lead them to confront the prospects of their own reality as well in terms of a pure terror, insofar as this dim prospect is not exclusive to the emancipatory politics to which we have subscribed but also includes their recipes or the lack thereof.

This brings me to the main question you raised regarding my political stance. I think this question is predicated on the assumption that we can define our political position by rummaging through and resorting to the concretely instantiated political paradigms which have already been realized and then choose one that fits our methodological and ideal ambitions. I really fail to see such an exemplification that I can hold to or define as my political position. One should engage a great feat of self-deception to see contemporary political paradigms as adequate to respond the existing tribulations and problems. Sure, I am a leftist who believes in the reality of the class struggle, but this is not really a political position, only a consciousness of the socio-economic reality. I take seriously Marx and Engels’s thesis that communism “is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. Communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” This is what I would call—again following Mark—the possibility of actualizing that which is possible but from our perspective, here and now, seem impossible. For me the task of politics in conjunction with the support of philosophy and technoscience is to not only show—in theory and in collective imagination—that the reality of our world is neither inevitable nor a completed totality, but also manages to concretely build a new world from whose perspective our reality will be exposed as the illusion of the inexorable and finality. But then again, even this, is not a clear-cut political position. It is merely a philosophical thesis on the possibility of a different world and the range of political actions that can fully actualize it.

Fabio Gironi: You merge this rational pessimism with the “engineering approach” for the construction of a better world, as you explained before. To some, this paradigm of political action will sound like you are vouching for a dispassionate and formalist approach to politics, and a government of experts—a “technocracy,” something that in recent times has become anathema in most public discussion (but that, the critic might enjoy pointing out, has been proven to be a failure at least since Plato’s political misadventure in Syracuse)—or even for a nefarious kind of “social engineering.” I suspect that in large part this depends precisely on am equivocation about the very concept of “engineering.” In our folk understanding “engineers,” broadly conceived, are often considered too naive to deal with the intricacies of politics, a domain fraught with normative considerations.

But if I am not mistaken, your expert engineer is as much a technically-minded problem-solver as it is a creative conceptual builder: a figure that applies his or her intelligence to the resolution of problems by means of more than the unilateral application of simple formulas or pre-packaged precepts. Indeed, it seems to me that this is where many contemporary ideas converge. Srnicek’s and Willams’ proposal to “move beyond folk politics and create a new hegemony” and their insistence on the practical/political concept of “repurposing.” Ben Singleton’s reflection on cunning reason (metis) as employed for the strategic and piecemeal construction of freedom from constraints. And of course, your own “speculative inquiry into the future of intelligence,” or functional reconceptualization of intelligence as an emancipatory tool of self- and collective improvement—as well as for practical action upon the world—where conception and transformation are two sides of the same coin. Is it then correct to say the concept of “engineering” (rather different from its “folk” equivalent) is at the core of both your philosophical and political thinking?

Reza Negarestani: Among computer scientists, there is this joke: when computer scientists go into a room full of political theorists, philosophers, cultural critics and linguists, they say to each other, “get rid of all of them and replace them with engineers.” Well, perhaps this joke is a bit too much but it has a grain of truth. Neither philosophers nor political theorists are able to design proper methods adequate to actualize possibilities, imagined or not. We need politically and philosophically informed engineers and designers. Engineers are indeed not mindless technicians, they are people who have one foot in the domain of thinking and one in the realm of an external reality or worldly affairs. They do not see action as a form of hubristic mastery to the extent that they know whatever we do at any level of reality—be it natural, social or cultural—will meet the resistance of that reality. To use a Sellarsian metaphor, reality in the broadest possible sense is not a block of wax ready to be imprinted. Engineers truly know that. They also never see reality in any sense as a flat universe, they see it as vast and deeply multi-scaled structure. In order to concretely intervene at any level of reality we must not only have a multi-level view of the reality but also know which methods, models or tools should be implemented, and at which level. To cut at the joints without splintering the bones is a description of what engineers—as Plato’s good butchers—do.

There are at least two other important tasks which are deeply entangled with the discipline and philosophy of engineering. One is the labour of modelling and the other, the design of approximation techniques. Michael Weisberg has recently written a wonderful book on models and modelling, a topic which in the past was not being taken seriously but was central to engineering. Weisberg elaborates why all our encounters with reality involve one or another kind of model, for example, descriptive, explanatory and predictive models. Even what we call empirical data are not ready-made, they are products of model projection, which means data can be distorted or even false data may be derived if the model is inadequate, too small or too big, misapplied to a target system or applied to a wrong sector of reality. The thing about models is that they are packed with all sorts of implicit and explicit theoretical, mathematical, logical and computational assumptions. Such assumptions encompass not just the model’s description but also the core of the model i.e. the structure and its interpretive factors or construals which include information about the scope, assignment, and fidelity criteria of the model itself. The latter criteria pertain to the exact information which specify the model’s representational, dynamic and resolution constraints for a given level or scale. Without proper attention to such details and the assumptions underlying them, all data and facts can be fundamentally distorted or erroneous. The whole myth of raw or pure data is perpetuated by people who have no clue about how data is mined—irrespective of what kind of data we are talking about. The other task, the design of approximation techniques, is even trickier. Mark Wilson sums up the nature of the approximation techniques in his new book, Physics Avoidance. Engineers—like Ben Singleton’s designers as embodiments of metis or cunning intelligence—are adept at trickery, hacking the system and reality. They know that it is not the best solution to modify a given target system by intervening with lower levels or fine-grained scales (like for example, the atomic scale-length of a metal beam). Intervention at such bottom levels is rife for what Wilson calls computational hazards, due to extreme fine-grained details of lower levels, any attempt at modification and intervention will either fail or become sub-optimal. Not to mention that we often lack any solid grasp of lower level mechanisms, sometimes we don’t even have any indication as what these fine-grained scales are, we can only postulate them. So what engineers do is first they model scales or levels pertaining to the structure of the target system or the phenomenon in question. Such modelling always involves a controlled amount of simplification and/or idealization which can at a later time be revised or equipped with more details. Then, they think of how to carefully bridge lower levels to upper levels where the structure is less fine-grained and more accessible and more hospitable to intervention and modification. These bridges—which are essentially mixed-level in that they contain information regarding middle scales between the bottom and the top—are called approximation techniques. These are procedures by which engineers circumvent the messy problems of physics without forgetting about them. Such techniques allow engineers to modify a given system optimally without always the need to deal with all sorts of details which make intervention fundamentally impractical from an applied perspective, from the computational cost standpoint, etc.

Here, however, a problem arises that André Carus, in his critique of Wilson’s work, has elaborated with the utmost lucidity. What is this problem? It is the idea that engineering conceived this way would be anti-Enlightenment in the sense that all we can ever do is to reform our local concepts and descriptive pragmatic resources in a piecemeal manner, without hoping to achieve unification. We can no longer have ambitious concepts that can be applied across the board—those global concepts treasured by philosophers such as the Copernican imperative, reason, freedom, etc. Our situation is similar to that of a child who plays in the tub and is in command of a rubber duck. But, of course, the picture of reality is more like that a river where torrential flows, undertows, and chaotic behaviours take hold of the rubber duck. In order to make sure this rubber duck sails in the river, we can no longer adopt a global concept of sail or navigation. We should have atlases of local theory façades which are responsive to such turbulent quandaries. And of course, to conform to such a picture of reality, we can only develop local concepts and heuristic norms which are informational packages that reflect varying and non-unifiable perspectives such as the concept of hardness—as for example applied to a metal beam—which fundamentally varies across different scale-lengths of the metal structure.

While I have a sympathy for such view, I believe Carus is right. Our encounters with reality are not merely such heuristic or pragmatic devices. Engineers always have a main solution—a global concept—in mind. Then they try to bring various real-time scenarios under it such that neither the global concept nor local pragmatic concepts are mutually exclusive but are rather mutually positively constraining and self-reinforcing. Engineering, in this sense, is about the commensuration of the local and the global, the ideal and the messy, the strategic and the tactical. Engineering, therefore, incorporates two senses of the Enlightenment’s rational reconstruction of the world or—to use Carnap’s later term—explication. One in the sense of realism and one in the sense of idealism, naturalism and constructivism. To reengineer and recognize reality, one can neither adopt a universal concept or paradigm nor just local and perspectival concepts. Both the overarching paradigm and local malleable solution are needed.

Now, as you asked, how do we adapt this engineering paradigm to politics? My friend Ray (Brassier) cautioned me regarding this unconditional espousal of engineering as a political method. I fully agree with him. Politics fundamentally differs from engineering from the perspective of norms of political action. The philosophically and politically informed engineering as a political method is predicated on the hard labour of politics which, to a great degree, consists of diagnosing our current situation and then deciding how should we move forward, the work necessary for arriving the global concept. However, I do disagree with the idea that unlike the realm of politics where “what ought to be done” is a matter of antagonism and consensus-building, engineering is centred on a pre-established conventional norm (i.e., this is what the system should do, or this is the agreed upon norm by which the system should behave). Even in engineering, we know that the system can have multiple diverging trajectories of evolution. There is no pre-established norm or consensus as what the system is and how it should behave. For engineers, there is no pre-established function of a given system since such functions do change over time and in accordance with local contexts. Modelling a system is as daunting a task for engineers as it is for political theorists and activists to diagnose pathologies of society, and to find a way to eliminate them. Reality is not a given totality: sometimes you should approach it as a black box that can only be unveiled by systematically playing or intervening with it. Other times, you should do the hard work of modelling under epistemological constraints. All in all, the task is to integrate global concepts with contrasting local concepts.

So yes, in response to your question I take the paradigm of engineering as a profoundly composite—epistemological and practical—way of thinking about the world. And this also leads me to finally answer the question you posed earlier regarding what can be the concrete way of getting political ambitions done. Our first step in a concrete political project should be focused on diagnosing the precise causal mechanism responsible for the pathologies of individuation, to detect the levels at which such mechanism are entrenched, and then proceed to develop tools to intervene at those exact levels—like an engineer. If you don’t have the adequate tools to intervene at that level, then devise approximation techniques, resolve the problem at a different level. And, again like an engineer, attempt to lay out the logic(s) of existing worlds at different scales. Make new tools to construct new worlds from the detritus of the old one. The new different world is not a miracle or a religious afterlife, it is a world engineered from what is available to us. To recapitulate, we need to first understand the plural logics of this world almost like the multi-level ontologies of information science to even think what ought to be done and decide exactly what methods or tools at what level should be exercised.