ABSTRACT
Within the Marxist critical tradition, abstraction has figured as a reversible concept, designating two apparently contrary tendencies: dematerialisation and concretisation. Thus, for Adorno, ‘the extreme abstraction’ represented by Hegel’s thought consists in ‘its ideal of presentation, the negation of presentation’, while for Luka´cs abstraction is a principle of reification, meaning concretisation. This essay begins by outlining the implications of this reversibility of abstraction, using Marx, Adorno, and Luka´cs, as well as the recent work of Vivek Chibber, whose Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital helps clarify some of the contemporary misuses of the term ‘abstraction’. The second half of the article turns to the question of the possibility of a thought without abstraction. The key figure for this discussion is the theoretician of new media Vile´m Flusser, whose book Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines an account of technical images that, I argue, enables us to think both the reversibility of abstraction and the possibility of a thought that is not subject to abstraction.
