“Solidarity Is a Force Stronger Than Gravity”: Money, Aesthetics, and the Abstractness of Care

In this essay, Scott Ferguson re-imagines Western modernity’s exhausted dialectical opposition between money and aesthetics by rethinking the social character and value of abstraction in general. Ferguson challenges previous critical theorists, who focus on abstraction’s central role in ordering modern life but judge abstraction and, with it, money to essentially alienate ecosocial relations from materiality. Such presumptions have impaired critical aesthetics as well as capacities to envision radical social and ecological transformation. Instead, Ferguson takes his cue from labor organizer Sara Nelson’s adage: “Solidarity is a force stronger than gravity.” Nelson’s apothegm suggests that collective action is irreducible to the physics of flight. Political organization, that is, partakes of remote and hence abstract orchestrations in ways that at once subtend and exceed the physics of gravity. Abstractness, therefore, conditions not only the distribution of power across political economy and aesthetics, Ferguson contends, but also the difficulties and possibilities of care.