Jundi Cui

Dialectics is the logic of estrangement. Self-relating negativity, which is at once every difference and its overcoming, is the pulse of dialectics. But what is this self-estranging sameness? For Hegel, the idealist, it is “the absolute concept.” It is more difficult to say what it is for Marx, who is supposed to be a materialist. If Marx were merely relocating self-estranging sameness from the concept to human “genus-being” (Gattungswesen), understood as a historically variable “ensemble of social relations,” this ensemble would harbour a potentiality to become that is at once enabled and disabled by the social divisions of labour and class that they have generated. This interpretation is vitiated by an ambiguity in its invocation of potentiality. If we flatten human genus-being onto historically variable social relations, there is no latency left in it which could be said to be unactualized by existing social practices. But if some aspect of genus-being is held in reserve as an unactualized potential, we risk re-substantializing it as an a-historical essence. It is this ambiguity that leads Marx’s critics to accuse him of invoking a transcendent conception of human essence despite his insistence that this essence is a function of historically variable social relations. I want to parry this criticism by suggesting that Marx’s materialism requires Hegel’s self-estranging sameness in order to dissolve the apparent dichotomy between immanence and transcendence in the potency ascribed to practice. Estrangement and de-estrangement, compulsion and freedom, are not separable moments but twin facets of the same movement. The prospect of de-estrangement emerges only by retrospecting an enabling estrangement.

Large language models are commonly judged by whether they possess minds or merely reproduce statistical regularities. This opposition leaves a prior question: can intelligence operate in a technical system that is not a subject? This article develops the concept of objectified intelligence to answer it. Discursive intelligence is an organized capacity to respond to relations of evidence, relevance, and inference whose significance is established in public practices. Training can help form a technical organization capable of sustaining the relevant selective dependence. Such an organization realizes the capacity when changes to evidential relations redirect its response while variations that preserve those relations leave the response correspondingly stable. When products of the relevant practice have helped form that organization, the capacity has acquired technical-object form. Existing evidence supports several dimensions of this attribution within bounded domains and makes the full criterion empirically testable. Objectification differs from subjectivation. A capacity is objectified when relations formed in practice are reorganized in a technical bearer that can carry them into new exercises. It takes subjective form when its exercises enter the normative history of a continuing position, so that earlier commitments constrain later activity and authorized revision changes what the position may maintain. An LLM that sustains the relevant dependence can help form discursive content without thereby becoming a subject of judgment. Under proprietary service provision, this separation takes a political-economic form. Platforms control a reusable general capacity, whereas downstream institutions particularize its exercises and answer for the judgments they authorize. The resulting control–accountability asymmetry is one capitalist organization of objectified intelligence, not an inherent consequence of objectification.

This essay argues that Marx’s distinction between concrete-in-thought and concrete-in-reality does not invoke a conceptual or empirical difference but a difference-in-act. This difference is verified in social practice rather than in thought. The actuality of practice verifies that of thought without there being a metaphysical correspondence between them. While thought can adequately represent the structure of practice, there is no similarity or resemblance between the structure of thought (what is concrete-in-thought) and that of practice (concretein- reality).What is concrete-in-reality is a practical act whose nature does not reveal itself either to those executing it or to the theoretical consciousness that takes the consciousness of practitioners as its starting point.