EXCERPT Pete Wolfendale’s work is a wager on the promise of abstraction: the promise of self-creation unfixing authenticity; of freedom undoing fatalism; of experimental embodiment displacing somatic chauvinism. Wolfendale wants to twist free from the dialectic of Enlightenment, in which reason and nature are entwined in an escalating spiral of domination. While there is no doubt that the ascent of cognitive abstraction from Galileo to Turing has enabled new forms of social domination (via the automation of exploitation and the intensification of surveillance), Wolfendale’s wager is that social liberation is not to be achieved by descending back into concrete immediacy but by propelling abstraction beyond domination, accentuating what is ungovernable in it so as to unmoor concretion from the fixity of identities, types, kinds, attributes, roles, and bodies. Once we understand to what extent our thinking and acting is a collaboration with the world, which we can shape as much as if not more than it shapes us, we can begin to hone them with a view to transforming ourselves and our world.…