Both realism and anti-realism agree that human perception is limiting. The realists posit that we can only experience or comprehend part of reality. The anti-realists argue that it is impossible to make a statement about what we cannot perceive and so even saying that there is stuff we cannot perceive is to make a mistake. They point out that to even posit a limit of experience is to go beyond it. A transgressive realist bridges this gap by arguing that our reality evolves with experiences we have that transgress reality and shatter our categories. Taking this viewpoint makes it possible to understand these moments better and prepare oneself for them.

One classic example of an experience that shatters our categories is death. We know it will happen and we know it will be unlike anything we’ve experienced before. Another is conscience or morality. The more one has fallen into a rational or utilitarian way of looking at the world, the more a moment of moral conviction that cannot be explained with a utilitarian calculus will strike one. It leaves only two options: letting the event shatter one’s conceptions or diminishing it and retrofitting it into them.

To be a transgressively realist thinker, you need to recognize that you will have to make leaps of faith and they may be leaps into an abyss. But there is no way of anticipating the outcome of something truly new without jumping into it.

We often find ourselves in situations that feel like we only understand them on a surface-level but for which we also cannot find the tools to engage more deeply. In these situations, it is useful to have some immediate tools to try to break out of this self-limiting understanding. When we assume that it is our concepts that limit our understanding rather than our capacity to apply them, we can consciously force ourselves into modifying those very concepts until we find something that sticks.

One approach is to spiral through interpretation. In this method, you assume that your concepts are insufficient to understand the situation on its own terms, but rather than trying to replace them wholesale, you continuously reinterpret the situation, each iteration yielding new distinctions that support a new understanding with which you can again try to interpret it.

Another approach is to take a concept and try to blow it up to cover more and more cases. This can lead to either uncover parts of the situation that were previously unnoticed or to show the limits of the blown-up concepts when it becomes genuinely unclear what entities should be considered part of it. Take the notion of “labor”. It is easy to limit the concept to remunerated activities. If you force yourself to expand it to more – labor at home, labor in getting to the workplace, labor in supporting one’s friends, labor of filing forms for a government office – you can find ways of interrogating that concept and either finding labor where you did not previously expect it or more closely understand what it is that you call labor.

Lastly, we can open up new space by trying to escape binaries. It is easy to assume that the world maps into dichotomies and hard to break out of those. One approach could be called “negating the negation”. Starting with a concept C, imagine non-C. Now try to describe non-C on its own terms – as concept D. Now imagine non-D, and compare it to the (supposedly equivalent) C.

An example of this might be thinking about scalability. We might be sorting activities into those that are scalable and those that are not. In trying to define non-scalability, we have to look for features that preclude scaling an activity. Some parts of this definition might be expense or dependence on others. Articulating them into a concept of their own right, one might find value in non-scalability in its own right (for example if one cares about activities that are fundamentally interdependent with others). Negating this concept in turn will then yield another approach to thinking about scalability and make more complex the scalable/non-scalable distinction.

It is a feature of capitalist realism (in fact, of any thoroughgoing style) to make it seem like no other way of organising or thinking the world is possible. Our very methods of thinking can be bent out of shape to make it seem like the current state is the one that always has prevailed and always will. Like physical therapy in which we consciously go through new movements to unlearn bad habits, it can be necessary to embrace a formalism of thinking to escape one’s intuitive mistakes.

References

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#HermCirc Amy Wendling, “Ruling Ideas”, chapter on labor Anna Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World” Lee Braver “Thoughts on the unthinkable” (2015) Parrhesia 24: 1-16