View this link:

http://www.roughtheory.org/content/the-abstraction-before-us/

A few weeks ago, N. Pepperell had an excellent post discussing Marx’s peculiar usage of the term “abstraction.” From what I understand of Pepperell’s post, “real abstraction” designates the process by which an historically contingent abstraction is projected/misrecognized as an a priori necessity, as something that was “always already there”—in other words, as that which came before it and produced it qua abstraction. Here is what Dr. Pepperell writes:

Marx’s first gloss on the term “material production” is “Individuals producing in Society”. He immediately qualifies that individuals are not an a priori given, but rather an historical result - the product of many past developments, but misrecognised as an originary starting point for historical development. This misrecognition - a projection of historical results back into prehistory - is itself peculiarly ahistorical at this moment in the text. All times, Marx suggests, make this kind of projection from the historical results they find ready to hand…

The focal point of the illusion of ideological “abstraction” seems to hinge upon the peculiar inversion of temporality, the switch from contingent effect to necessary cause. Anyhow, check out N. Pepperell’s post since what she has to say on the subject is much better written and has plenty of interesting quotes from Marx himself.

Also: here is another must-read on “real abstraction,” Alberto Toscano’s remarks on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude at the recent UWE conference.