ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the role of abstraction in relation to task-dance practices. It considers Yvonne Rainer’s No-Manifesto in juxtaposition to the role of negation in Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of autonomous art and to the notion of abstract labour in Karl Marx’s mature work. At least two separate discourses of abstraction are distinguishable in Marx’s mature work. The first one is to be found in the Introduction to the Grundrisse: Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, written around 1857–8 but not published until 1939, where the terms “abstract” and “concrete” are contrasted in order to make an epistemological claim about the capacity of abstractions to grasp the real by reproducing the concrete in thought as the totality of determinations. The discourse of abstraction in Marx’s mature work is related to the social ontology of capitalist societies, in which the abstraction of social relations becomes real.
