Looping Nature

The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of ideology by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’ Dialectic of Nature. Both text are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and life. What I want to propose here is that these texts can enrich our understand of a Marxist notion of ideology if read through recent philosophical thinking on new technological developments (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach will allow for a properly materialist footing of a critique of ideology — namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concern with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter.