I took part in this round table at the weekend. http://www.formcontent.org/projects/theory-and-practice-re-imagining-grammar-filmic-co/

Hosted at no.w.here in Bethnal Gn, it aimed to situate the theoretical context of FormContent’s exhibition project The Filmic Conventions around problems and issues of language in relation to moving image artwork. As well as the screened video/film works, we used texts by Badiou, Metz, Noel Carroll and Gregory Currie as a starting point for discussion.

It went well. I got the chance to watch a lot of video work, some of it in fast-forward, I accidentally went to a Super 8 workshop by mistake, and then I think we had an interesting discussion.  Sorry to everyone if I was speaking too fast. It was a cold day and I was constantly drinking coffee to try and keep warm. When I saw Jean-Luc Nancy give  a lecture last year, he was drinking red wine from an Evian bottle, which I think I may do next time instead, or brandy from a Thermos. There’s something very cool about making your fix socially acceptable but then just bathetically bringing it back down to the dirty earth of a cheap vessel again. Anyway, I’m going to write up some of my thoughts that emerged around a vague idea of the necessity of alienality as a productive counter to the assumed critical subject position implied by contemporary reworkings of modernist strategies of self-reflexivity. I’ll put them up here.

In the meantime, I was reminded, for some reason, of some lines from a J.H.Prynne poem:

He wanders in-

ertly, with a shrewd

unattending absence,

his being on a thin

stalk: he twists

from reluctance to

keep to the one plane

when his name comes

in sound, to him.

To wander in-

ertly

is still, I think, my favourite poetic line-break as adverbial conversion ever, but, even more so, it’s just the ‘ertly’ that I prefer.

The way one feels could be likened to an opening
or a slamming
or a breathing hard
all of them,
all of them
have seen inside my mouth
have grown and flown south

one day I’ll be my own Leadbelly
and I will grow a baby
oh he will move so swiftly
to hold me completely

all of them
all of them have pushed into the air
all of them
all of them will bathe with me
when we are safe
in the salty caves.

A triumph of song, of poetry. A triumph, in the precise sense of the Greek thriambos from which it derives: a hymn to Dionysus. Dionysus was of course the God of drunkenness, madness, and revelry. Nietzsche insisted that this Dionysian spirit is nowhere better exemplified than in music, in the revelry of the chorus that begs us to sing, to lend our voice, to participate, and of course, to dance. It begs us to expose ourselves, but not alone, rather to expose ourselves together, and insodoing, to stand naked together.

In his analysis of the figure of dance in Nietzsche, Badiou insists upon the essential nudity of the dancer: “Of [the dancing] body, one will necessarily say…that it is naked. Obviously, it matters little if it is empirically so. The body of dance is essentially naked…Dance, as a metaphor for thought, presents thought to us as devoid of relation to anything other than itself, in the nudity of its emergence. Dance is a thinking without relation, the thinking that relates nothing, that puts nothing in relation.” [Handbook of Inaesthetics, p 66] One might assume that such a figure that stands naked, without relation to anything but itself, is therefore incapable of holding anything in common, or constituting any sort of togetherness. And yet we all know that no one can dance alone. Even when dancing alone, one cannot be alone, because there is no one there: the dancing body does not strictly relate even to itself, the self of the dancer, but only to the nudity of the dance, to the pure, meaningless, contentless exposition of the dance itself.

In the dance, the dancing body only relates to itself insofar as it is itself nothing, a pure nothing embodied in the ephemeral flailing and contorting of the flesh, no matter how disciplined these movements. The monstrosity, and monstrous beauty of dance rests in the possibility of a rigorously disciplined and coordinated, choreographed, movement that itself signifies nothing, that is not disciplined in the name of some higher authority, but precisely for no reason, taking the exposition of its own exuberant and restless extraneity as its essence and purpose. An essential inessentiality, and purposive impurposiveness.

No one can dance alone, because no one can dance: dance can only begin when there is no longer anyone to resist the somatic seizure of dancing, to oppose some meaningful posture to the imposture (the deceptive, the placeless, the positionless; impostor, without posturing) of movements resolutely bereft of meaning. In dancing together, with others, we share in this nudity, this exposure of the nothing we are, and we stand naked together in the face of the Nothing, Nihil, abandon and extinction. Yet even without anyone to share in this exposure, we nonetheless cannot dance alone, because in dancing what is exposed, what stands naked, is no-one, the no one that can never be anyone (das Man) and can never belong to anyone, can never properly be anyone. In dancing together, we share in this being-no-one, we are no-one-together.

It is the same with song: in song, the voice no longer says anything, it is only the exposure of the nudity of the voice, a voice that says nothing and can say nothing, because it is a voice that speaks for no one, the voice of no one. It is a voice that gives no meaning, no content, and says nothing, not in the negative sense of not speaking or saying nothing of value, but in the positive sense of saying nothing itself, putting nothing itself into words (even if this forces words themselves to come apart at the seams). In song, even the most explicitly narrative song, the act of singing itself amounts to the exposure of the nudity of the voice, such that the meaning of the words and the story they tell is only a vehicle for the exuberant voicing of meaninglessness, the utterly inessentiality of the voicing itself, which might as well not happen. Even if we pretend there is some necessity to saying these words, there can be no necessity in singing them, other than to revel in the madness that they might be voiced at all.

In song, the voice is no longer an instrument of the one who speaks, and thereby imparts some meaningful discursive content. The singing voice is that of no one, it is the voice and voicing of no one, it is the always potentially humiliating exposure of the no-one and nothing that I am. In singing and dancing, I always risk humiliating myself, because I must confront and very well may recoil from the meaningless and inessential nothing that is my identity, even as I refuse and cover it. And in singing and dancing together, we refuse to allow one another to stand so humiliated alone, without also encouraging cowardly recoil into prideful posturing. Here we find and rejoin the chorus, the revelry of the chorus, the spirit of Dionysus.

It is fitting that Mountain Man voice their hymn in such a choral style, with the bare and naked voices of the singers unaccompanied, unsupported, calling out and echoing in the dark night of silence. One can easily imagine, beginning from this song, the utter silence that is so barely abated by the flickering candle of the choral voice. The silence is so starkly present it seems to threaten extinguishing the song at every moment.

The choral theme is only affirmed in the lyrical content which insists on the refrain: all of them. All of them, who? “Have seen inside my mouth”; “will bathe with me” – first, all of those who have seen me so exposed, in the voice as issuing from “inside my mouth”, from the raw pink flesh which recedes into ever darker depths, depths which have no bottom, in which one will never find an original and reassuring source. Inside my mouth, one does not find the source of the voice in the sense of the one who speaks, but only the pure no-one of the nude flesh whose articulate groaning has been so disciplined into song. And yet they, “all of them”, are not obscene voyeurs in whose gaze I stand humiliated, laid bare in the quivering nudity of my insides. They “will bathe with me”, they will share in my nudity, “when we are safe/in the salty caves”, together in the darkness of being-no-one, of being our very nudity.

The difficult first lines must be read in this light: “The way one feels could be likened to an opening/or a slamming/or a breathing hard”. An opening, or a slamming: an exposure, or a desperate covering up, closing off, blocking out. A singing, an opening and exposing of oneself in song, that could just as easily be extinguished in silence, the silence of shutting up, slamming one’s mouth shut out of embarrassment. “Or a breathing hard”, the difficult breath, the pained exhalation that could as easily become song as despondent sigh. “The way one feels” – who is this one, this impersonal one from which we begin and begin to slide into something more personal, more intimate and desperate? It could be anyone, perhaps. This could mean “the way one is feeling, the way one happens to feel”, but also, with a bit more interpretative risk, perhaps “the way in which one feels, can feel, is capable of feeling anything, that by which feeling is possible”. It is this very precariousness of exposure that is the very condition of possibility for feeling anything, and in whose dialectic the composition of emotion is constantly drawn and redrawn.

It is from this condition that the personal voice of the singer then begins to confront “all of them”, and exposure before them. Yet this confrontation is not limited to the precarious shift between being exposed to others and sharing in this exposure with them. “All of them…have grown and flown south”; “all of them have pushed into the air”. The first mention of departure follows the anticipated humiliation of exposure, as perhaps a flight from the frightful spectacle of the denuded singer. Yet in the final verse, the theme is repeated just before exposure becomes shared. The bridge between these two repetitions is the second verse: “one day I’ll be my own Leadbelly/and I will grow a baby/oh he will move so swiftly/to hold me completely”. Leadbelly was of course the infamous outlaw folk singer whose inspiration is palpable even without explicit citation. If Leadbelly does serves as an inspiration, and as an example of inspiration more generally, then the music of Mountain Man is marked by a certain inheritance, a certain familiarity. Leadbelly stands in for a tradition from which Mountain Man’s music is born, a new offspring. Yet the narrative voice here wants to become this figure of inspiration, and wants to give birth to a child of its own.

Perhaps it is to hasty to say ‘a child of its own’, for the next lines betray an inverted relation: it is not the child that belongs with and to the family or tradition from which it is born, but rather, it is the child that ‘holds completely’ that which bears it forth. This holding, embracing, ‘enowning’ of the inspiration is accomplished in a “move so swiftly”, which might be the means by which the holding is accomplished (he will move swiftly, and in this movement, I will be held), or simply a haste in taking hold (he will be swift in taking hold of me). Either way, we have here a clear sense in which this embrace is tied to swiftness, which undoubtedly resonates with the lyrics about taking flight. Specifically, it becomes clear how, in having pushed into the air, they thereby become capable of embracing me in my exposure. Taking flight can only signify a radical departure and abandonment in which that ground from which one originated cannot be carried along, lest swiftness be encumbered by the burden of tradition.

There is far more in these dense lines then can be unpacked here. Yet we should be attentive to the sense in which, within this song, the singers aim to reconfigure their relation to tradition, the tradition of folk music which has plainly borne them. They want to embrace this tradition, and to embrace the nudity and exposure that is at its heart, specifically at the heart of singing, voicing, and especially voicing anonymously, words that are ‘traditional’ belonging to no one, even the moment they are first conceived intended only to be sung by innumerable voices and to become lost amongst them, to become completely embraced by the voices they inspire to sing, to expose themselves in song. The tradition of folk music is one of a shared anonymity, it is a tradition of anonymity, of being-no-one in song, together in song, in sharing song. And it is a tradition of giving oneself over entirely to the embrace of an inheritor that can never know you, but will nonetheless embrace you in this totally nullified and denuded being.

Dionysus is the god who comes, the god who is coming and is to come. A hymn to Dionysus is a song for those who are coming, those to whom you will be lost, to whom you will be no-one, in hopes that they might not forget this exposure, that they perhaps will embrace this nudity in which, together, we are no-one.

Subject and Appearance: On Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds

Event held at Bolivar Hall Friday 20th November 2009

Speakers: Bruno Bosteels & Kristin Ross (Theory of the Subject) Alberto Toscano & Ali Alizadeh (Logics of Worlds)

Chair: Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne

Introduction (Peter Hallward): Badiou’s philosophy concerns changing the logic of the world, topologically constituted by the space of placements or l’esplace in Badiouan terminology, ‘not in order to change the bourgeoisie, but to change the bourgeois world’. Therefore he is concerned with the political project of the proletariat. There are two dominant structures to his thought:

i. The Logic of Place (splace), which is a logic of historical topology.
ii. History as aspect of the dialectic, in which history takes secondary status to politics.

The theory of a militant subject is not a science of history, in which history is mere appearance. The emphasis is on political needs over and above what seems historically or teleologically feasible.

[...] it is always in the interest of the powerful that history is mistaken for politics….Science of history? Marxism is the discourse with which the proletariat sustains itself as subject. We must never let go of this idea. [p44 Theory of the Subject]

Bruno Bosteels: On The Role of History – What is Badiou’s relation to Marx? Badiou’s relation to Marx lies in the concept of inexistence (the impossible), potential and actualization. Here Borsteels made reference to Marx’s 1843 Letter to Ruge and the relationship of the dream to change in history:

“The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.”

So, the image of the dream and its realization of the new is the conscious actualization of a potential world – whereas the dream itself eludes the grip of the world – an acutalization made manifest in practice (see Lukács, Benjamin and Lenin). Therefore the rupture, gap or dream is the fictive extension of the situation, which appears in philosophy in one of the following forms:

i. Spectrality without presence or non-actual radical potentiality (Heidegger/Derrida)
ii. Real Virtuality or virtual-actual, the actualization of latent potential (Deleuze/Benjamin)
iii. Actual Impossibility (Badiou/Zizek)

The actual impossibility of Badiou’s metapolitics is the art of the impossible, and consequently, not a science. The structural impossibility of the transgression of the forbidden could be characterized as a deadlock between the impossible and its actualization. Therefore, impossibility must must be forced into the open of the event. This forcing requires a subjective intervention; the doing of an intervening subject which is only retroactively readable as such. Impossibility or inexistence gives minimal anchorage that prevents political adventurism. The evental site (or splace) – which Deleuze states crosses immanence and transcendence diagonally – is the weakest link in the chain. This is exactly the same as Althusser calls overdetermination, combining Freud and Mao, as a way of thinking about the multiple forces active at once in any political situation, without falling into an over-simple idea of these forces being simply contradictory.

["...the representation of dream thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial things ... [For Althusser] overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole.” - Brewster]

The evental site itself has no matheme and constitutes a movable concept in Badiou’s thought. It is the site where history is inscribed (i.e. the hidden abode of the factory), cut loose from history? Is it more worldly or more transcendent? Does it constitute truth within a given world? Inexistence is derived from Theory of the Subject’s lesson from the Commune, the event that gives existence to the inexistent. Bosteels questions whether inexistence is too structural in Logics of Worlds (Section 3), where the logic of not-all-ness in conceived of as anti-frontier (an excess of the multiple that limits the world?). In Theory of the Subject immigrants figure as inexistence with regard to proper totality (i.e. the national multiple); they are the internally excluded. Therefore there is an inherent limit to any given totality in the figure of the not-all which lends existence to the non-exsitence; much like Žižek’s ‘perverse supplement’. Badiou criticizes any gesture designed ‘to give equal rights’ as feeble – it is not adequate to merely give papers to the ’sans papiers’. Conversely, multi-national unity is an excess immanent to the Whole, a transformation from feeble positive potential into negative potential, in which a historical subjective break exceeds the axioms of possibility. The event is not prescribed by given possibilities, but the possibility of possibilities. Under such conditions the Real equals the impossible, here such conditions inaugurate the advent of the Real whereby the subject introduces a minimal gap; the force of which may be impossible to limit. Here we return to Marx’s original dream.

Kristin Ross: Badiou’s Pantheon – Discussion of Badiou’s pantheon of poets. Mallarmé is a purified poet or poet’s poet and the protagonist is Badiou’s thought. He renders more pure the thought of the masses, a negative being which annunciates being at the point at which it vanishes. Mallarmé’s syntactical complexity (i.e. the hypertactical dimension or military organization) is a machine to produce thought, capable of invoking the an event in its absence or vacancy. He is therefore a retroactive thinker of the event post-Commune (along with Edgar Allan Poe, Verne and Rimbaud). However, Ross asks if Badiou’s argument can only be made through high-modernist texts? Suggests that the warding off that modernist aesthetics effectuates has the consequence of gendering as feminine everything that is devalued. By considering everything else to be an inferior understanding lends his argument misogynistic overtones.

Ross also offers the a critique of Badiou’s reading of the Commune, derived from Julien Gracq’s Lettrines, asking if it is anti-communard – whereas Marx was considerably more tolerant of the Commune’s leaders. Does Badiou agree with the passage? Does the desire to be led come from the people? Is the event being used to lend gravitas to the philosopher? Does Badiou still believe that intellectuals should still lead the workers? [Bosteels jokes, 'if only the masses were still asking us to lead them']

Alberto Toscano: Logic and Appearance – Badiou opposes democratic imperialism with dialectical materialism. This requires the concept of a world and asks what the idea of a world might mean. Capitalism within Badiou is both a worldless system and at other times a one-world system. Logics of Worlds is a somewhat polemical gesture against French Heideggerianism. He also casts Negri as his nemesis, describing this hegemonic ideological fluid of democractic imperialism which is only made up of ‘bodies and language’. Badiou states that beyond bodies and language there are also truths (dialectical oppositions). The dialectic materialism of appearance and being is a polemic against the vague categories of ‘Life’ and ‘Spirit’, setting Badiou against vital potentiality. Therefore Badiou’s philosophy is a natural philosophy, which begins with a rational choice with regards to intelligibility, utilising mathematics as the testing ground for reason. Badiou’s thought is plastic and equivocal about consistency and inconsistency. The inconsistency of the inexistent Whole of the universe is posed as a both logical and ontological universe, a multiple of multiples. See Russell’s paradox.

If there is the multiple of multiples there must therefore be a chimera (reflexive multiple/non-reflexive multiple?) a non-reflexive inconsistency, which precludes any Whole. This is an argument against the totality, the fact that everything belongs to the Whole is an obstacle to the Whole (a torsion). This shifts in Logics of Worlds in which Badiou perhaps resurrects structural analysis, in which there is a displacement of the non-totality of the site that breaks the laws of being. He links ontological impossibility (the chimerical) with the temporal (structural consistency). The concept of worlds as a closed totality shifts into the reflexive entity of the site. There is also a shift in notions of consistency and inconsistency, subjectivization and the truth procedure or body. And whereas stiuations are bi-facial in Being & Event, in which situations are structured presentations consisting of a double multiplicity of inconsistent/consistent, in Logics of Worlds this is side-lined in favour of individuated elements in being (a fully individuated domain without consistency). Therefore Badiou’s political examples are corrrelated to elements within being itself (i.e. things without virtuality). Is this a claim of access!? Materialism of the Real/actual in Logics of Worlds changes in the schema of that which inexists/exists. There is more emphasis on figures of unity in Logics of Worlds than in Theory of the Subject.

With regards to metapolitics, in Logics of Worlds there is a modification in category of state to world. Representation/State disappears whereas it is central to Being and Event. This presents a problem from political economy and the dialectic, as both the concept of State/Representation and World make any concept of Capital difficult. Particularly, since Capital cannot be regionalized in a world nor is it a world/global totality.

Ali Alidzedah: Hegel – Begins by alluding to Badiou’s ’strange reading’ of Hegel and highlights difficulties with the mathematical formalization of philosophy. However, such a formalization lends it authority over phenomenology, hermeneutics and Hegel himself. Formal mathematization sutures –– in the Lacanian sense –– Badiou’s thought to the chain of discourse (lack and its structure). Here the suture stands for anyone that says ‘I’. There is no subject of science for Badiou, not even through the placeholder of lack. Instead, everything is signified or given a mark, such as Ø of Frege. For Badiou the subject belongs to ideology not science, the closed field which governs philosophy (or the psychosis of no subject). Theory of the Subject is the exception in Badiou’s work, operating without science and it is here where Hegel comes to the fore. Badiou achieves minimal relationality using Zermelo-Fränkel axioms and in later works, such as Logic of Worlds, mathematics thinks for him. Otherwise philosophy is sutured to politics through Maoism and Hegel’s logic fills the place of science in Theory of the Subject – so Mao → Lenin → Marx → Hegel’s Logic of Science forms the underlying structure of the subject. For Badiou, there is no subject thinking the logic/psychoses of Hegel or mathematics.

Alidzedah queries whether Badiou is seeking justification for what he already politically knows. For instance, subjective forcing is already present in his Maoism and this causes him to go find what he wants in the mathematics of Cohen. Does this inscribe Maoism into mathematical discourse? Also, in Badiou there is no discourse with Hegel, he is only seeking to clear the terrain of philosophy. For him, Hegel decoratively affirms his own thesis, allowing him to borrow dialectical reflection in a detemporalized way. Alidzedah goes as far to ask if Badiou wants negation or subtraction at all, instead favouring affirmation and perhaps even vitalism?

There is also the political danger that destruction will simply bring about the Same, by reproducing the possible. By abolishing the present will we abolish the memory of the Same and simply restore it? Alidzedah suggest that Badiou might also be too greedy in wanting to talk about too much and perhaps even abdicates the responsibility of thinking.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before the panel discussion at the end, but Nina Power at Infinite Thought has posted a further article: Is Badiou a Modernist?

[I gave this paper at the Film-Philosophy Conference in July 2009, this is the unedited final transcript (I did read out most of it, even though I tried to improvise - or at least tried to pretend to improvise!) - Plus, it includes almost entirely earlier section on hope from the blog - here, I've confessed it all!]

Godard’s La chinoise and the apprenticeship of hopefulness (without hope)

Godard’s La chinoise, made in 1967, concerns a small group of student-militants, Maoists, who, having a bourgeois flat at their disposal over the summer, read, discuss and perform Marxist theory in order to be able to put it into practice: an attempt that, at least in the confines of the plot of the film, fails. This is a most banal outline of the plot, the simplest that one can abstract from the plethora of images, colours, dialogues, texts, sounds, ideas and more that dominate and complicate the plot of the film. In a way the plot is both primary and secondary: the film has a clear narrative, it leads to a dénouement, and so the plot structures the film. But the plot is secondary to the atmosphere of the film, the spirit of the film, which is constituted by what Rancière calls the “represented matter” of the film: Marxism, or Maoism, as “a catalogue of images, a panoply of objects, a repertoire of phrases, a programme of action: courses, recitations, slogans, gymnastic exercises”. As Rancière says, “Godard is not filming “Marxists” […] he is making cinema with marxism [Il fait du cinéma avec le marxisme]”.

Like most of Godard’s films, La chinoise is a didactic film, its main aim is to teach both the characters, who are being “educated” in Marxism-leninism, and the audience, who is supposed to engage critically with the “represented matter” of the film (and not just enjoy its aesthetics). It is a film “in the course of being made” as the inter-titles keep reminding us. How do we understand this? First, it draws our attention to when the film was made: it was made in 1967, and placed itself very much in the situation at the time. It was a critical engagement with what was happening at the moment in France, which as everyone knows, culminated in the movement of May 68. It is thus a film in the course of writing itself, in its time.

The inter-title also points to the fact that despite having a “completed version”, the film is incomplete: it is in the course of completion. It needs an audience, an audience that is called to listen, see, read, feel with the characters, all the while distancing itself as a critic, so as to not get too taken by their enunciations, in order to keep in view the contradictions that lead to the dénouement. However, as the audience, we must also place ourselves within the discourse, if we are to grasp at all the essence of the argument. For the plot is an argument, a critique of the student movement, an exposition of the inherent problem of the dialectic of theory and practice, a questioning of the naïve call for authenticity in Mao’s On Practice (or in a different reading, it could be a critique of the dogmatic deviation (from Mao), i.e., taking words and phrases from Marxist theorists, torn out of context, and repeating them blindly, dogmatically); it is moreover, a criticism, constructive, of the rush in which the characters find themselves, their unchecked, onanistic, indeed, dogmatic optimism (for it is not merely an “optimism of the will” here, but a naïve and dangerous optimism of ‘knowing’ that one is on the right path, a ‘knowledge’ that brooks no questioning).

All the same, the attempt at an Althusserian “autocritique” is not absent; it is simply not accomplished well. Within the closed confines of the bourgeois flat where they find themselves, the outside enters only in flashing images, in memories that cut through occasionally to show that there is indeed a world outside. However, this flash of the outside world is evanescent, even uncritiqued until the end of the film (where we suddenly and uncomfortably enter it). The slogan on the wall enjoins us to confront vague ideas with clear images, but this confrontation is something the audience must try to accomplish, it is not something that the characters can do very well: the onanism of their ideas confined within phrases thrown at each other, all the while never leaving the stark primary colours of their flat, necessitates their remaining vague. Outside the flat, the “reality”, the “unclear images” that they must confront is more impure, more complex, than the pure colours, the apparent clear simplicity (but really, vagueness) of ideas that the confines of the flat allow.

Clarity is afforded near the end of the film in the dialogue in the train between Francis Jeanson and Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), the first proper scene that takes place outside the flat. But this clarity is only for us, the audience. It illuminates to us what has gone before, and is thus a retrospective clarity. It puts into perspective all that we experienced and thought in the flat. It gives us a chance to dissolve the boundaries of the pure colours of the flat, confronting it with the impure reality of the situation. If up to this point we were overwhelmed by the plethora of ideas thrown at us in the flat, we get a chance to suddenly confront the impurity of the situation – a situation which would not allow for a simple unmediated application of ideas, which for all their analysis remain painfully insufficient when it comes to the actual situation. This is what Véronique refuses to see, and what drives the plot to its tragic dénouement. The plot is tragic in a very basic sense: the dénouement is a necessary outcome of the very explicit tragic development of the plot. We even have a prediction: the words of Francis Jeanson in the train: “The way you’re going you won’t last a week, as I see it. I think you’re heading to a dead end”. Which gets us to the other clarity afforded to us, this time an anticipatory one. But this anticipation is not limited to the plot of the film, to what actually passes in the film. The anticipation is the fictional logical unfolding of the characters future, of which we are afforded but a glimpse in the last part of the film. The anticipatory clarity illuminates the necessity of “apprenticeship” and of patience. For us, the audience, it is a question of “knowing that suffering produces patience, and patience produces enduring fidelity, and enduring fidelity produces hope, and hope does not disappoint” (Badiou quoting St. Paul).

The characters are thrown into the outside world, where they must confront the quotidian in all its impurity, and enter their apprenticeship of life, the adventure of learning through practice. Guillaume Mesiter, the actor (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud), starts on his “theatrical vocation and his years of apprenticeship and his voyages on the route of a true socialist theatre”. This, I would argue is an apprenticeship of hope.

The tragedy, if we follow Badiou’s categorization in Theory of the Subject, is not Sophoclean but Aeschylean. It is not what Badiou calls “a reversal of restoration”, a return to a “framework of regulations” that is in question here (though such a reading is equally valid, and there are enough signs in the film that point to a Sophoclean end). But in a stronger reading (one that I prefer!) it can be seen as gesturing towards a “reversal of exile”, a reversal that is an “advent”, a “division beyond the law”, “the direction of which is the contradictory advent of justice by the courage of the new”. It is not simply a return to order, though there is a partial return – which is the immediate failure that the characters suffer; there is also the opening up of a possibility of a recomposition of a new order, the advent of hope.

We said that the plot concluded in a failure. But what is it to fail? This is the question which prefaces Badiou’s little book on the communist hypothesis. The answer we get is that of a doubling, a division of the concept of defeat, where the immediate “negative” part of a defeat (death, imprisonment, loss of force; in the film, an apparent “return to order”) is opposed to the “positive” aspect of the defeat: the re-thinking of tactics/strategy, change of models of action, invention of new forms of organisation. As Badiou phrases it, “the misfortune of failure changes into the combative excellence of a knowledge”. This explanation is not far from what Mao gives us in his On Practice, where defeats equal experience, and it is only through repeated failures that one can gain a correct knowledge of the situation. The film’s last act enacts this double aspect of defeat.

Véronique’s problem, in sum, was the problem of gaining knowledge, which is also the pivotal question of the film, the maoist one of the “relation between knowing and doing”. The film begins with positing “the principal problem of socialist strategy”, which is that of “creating the objective and subjective conditions which would make mass revolutionary action possible”. In the course of discussions in the flat, a question is posed (and reiterated): “where do correct ideas come from?” – the maoist/marxist answer is given: “they come from practice, which is class struggle”. In the conversation with Francis Jeanson, this is the problem Véronique struggles with: “if I ever want to acquire knowledge, it is necessary that I pass first through practice […] If I want to know the theory and methods of revolution, then I am obliged to participate, practically, in a revolution”. With the “knowledge” that all knowledge must come from practice, she was impatient, too impatient in fact, to get this knowledge. In the lack of a revolution she could participate in, she was ready to “invent a revolution” – an effort that necessarily led to a tragic dénouement.

But – and here the motif of the meta-plot of the film comes into play – this tragic dénouement is not the end, it is but a beginning. It is indeed the end of a beginning, end of a failed temporal sequence, but more profoundly it is, as Véronique says in the last phrase of the film: “only the first timid step of a long march”: a step that ends a disastrous beginning, but more importantly looks forward with hopefulness.

This hopefulness is of necessity abstract. There is no concrete telos that this hope points to; it is not hope of a “reward”. It is, as Badiou says, “a simple imperative of continuation, a principle of tenacity, of obstinacy”, or in Paolo Freire’s words, it is a hope “rooted in men’s incompletion, from where they move out in constant search”.

Hope is not bound to a telos. Hope is often understood as something that aims at a concrete telos: A hopes for x; if A gets x, the hope is fulfilled; if not, it is thwarted. As if hope could be reduced to an economy of goods. How useful could such an understanding be? Would it not be better to understand hope only in an abstract sense? Hope, understood not as hope for a telos, but as hopefulness.

Abstract hope points not to a reward, but to a future, a future that is not-yet. In the present, this hope is only hopeful perseverance. This hope cannot be reduced to desire – though the two are intertwined. The definition must be circular. Hope is hopefulness. It is hopeful patience, but not a passive patience: hope is a struggle for continuation in hopefulness. Simple passivity can only allow for an absence of hope, a giving up. As Freire says, “as long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait”. Hope is the imperative: do not give up!

However, hope is not dogmatic optimism, where we are secure in our possibly misguided, and necessarily naïve, “knowledge” that we are on the right path, a “knowledge” that brooks no questioning. Such dogmatic optimism cannot allow for an opening up of a universe of hope – it will necessarily limit it within the contours of its limited (but exalted) knowledge. Hope, which is not naïve optimism, will allow subjectively for a creative unfolding of a world of possibilities.

Hope is the essence of the subject, it “pertains to endurance, perseverance, to patience; it is the subjectivity proper to the continuation of the subjective process” – the subject continues in hope, and the perseverance of the subject is guided by a hope which gestures towards a world of possibility. Hope is an apprenticeship.

It is helpful to compare this concept of hopefulness to the closely related Badiouian concept of courage. Courage, in Logics of Worlds is one of the four subjective modalities, or affects (others being terror, anxiety and justice) that indicate the incorporation of a human-being into a subjective truth process.

[I was playing with the idea of fitting a character of the film with each of these four affects. Véronique-Terror (“desire for a great point, a decisive discontinuity which will institute the new world in a single blow”); Henri- anxiety (“the retreat before the obscurities of discontinuities, the desire for a continuity”); Guillaume-courage (“the acceptance of plurality of points, of the fact that discontinuities are at once inexorable and multiform” – i.e, his search for a “true socialist theatre”); and justice-Francis Jeanson, playing himself (“to affirm the equivalence of what is continuous and negotiated, and of what is discontinuous and violent”)]

But we can go back even further and look at the concept of courage in Theory of the Subject, where courage is “the divisible process of [the subject’s] intrinsic existence” and can be compared to “fortitudo (fortitude of strength of mind)” distinguishing it from mere “audacia (audacity or boldness)”. The subject, moves from mere audacity to a patient insistence that accompanies its incorporation into a truth process, the holding on to the point that as been seized: “the subject as courage, turns the radical absence of any security into its force”. This courage is also hope, which is the principle of the apprenticeship that the characters enter into. This apprenticeship comes in the form of a subtraction from the tragic dénouement of a return to order, the reign of the law, and gestures towards the opening up of a process whose guiding norm is hopefulness.

Two dialogues, made in the course of the fictional interviews with the characters in the flat may give us some sense of what this gesture may be. Véronique declares: “It is because everything is not clear that I continue to study, study to understand, then to transform, but to understand first”. And Guillaume, the actor, the one who, at the end of the film, is explicitly placed under the sign of an apprenticeship, declares: “Are not the words I pronounce, so awkwardly and blindly, part of a great unknown play, continuing through me […] its direction/sense incomplete, searching in me and with me all the actors and all the decors in its great naked discourse.”

These “vague ideas” articulated in the confines of the flat, are now confronted with “clear images” that confusedly whelm the new apprentices of life, apprentices in hopefulness. We are not yet presented with any resolution to the dialectic – only with an anticipation, the anticipation of an opening.

We said in the very beginning that this was a didactic film. Framed as an attempt to answer a question (“how is mass revolutionary activity possible in the present”); its form (the plot) and its matter (marxism) all tried in various ways to answer this question. No satisfactory conclusion was reached (except that “this is just a first step”). Nothing happened. No revolution was on the horizon. Everything went back to order – arguably, there was no opening here of any possibility or of hope. But, in the last act, we are presented with the “apprenticeship” of the actor, searching for a true socialist theatre, in ruins that have “theatre year zero” painted on them. The didactic nature of the film itself became ambiguous, retrospectively: the film “in the course of being made”, became also a film “in search” of its conclusion.

The film ends with a reflection on theatre, and the commencement of an apprenticeship, in search, not only of a new politics, but also of a new aesthetics.

by Nathan Coombs

Nowadays it is hard to find many examples of academic leftism crossing paths with real left wing politics. One could even argue that the former might have a negative effect on the latter – the UK is, after all, home to one of the strongest left wing publishing empires and conference circuits in the world, and yet its organised, political left is drearily weak by all continental comparisons.

There was something a bit edgy, then, about the recent workshop on the philosophy of Alain Badiou  taking place in the Venezuelan Embassy’s Bolivar Hall on 20th November. One half expected to be spending the day staring at an enormous portrait of Hugo Chavez hung at the back of the hall during the proceedings. Thankfully, the large hall was graced by a more tasteful/less piece of generic modern art and there was not a trace of Chavez propaganda in sight.

As one of the world’s most famous ‘post-Maoists’ any event on Alain Badiou has the virtue/misfortune of attracting the followers of the Maoist sect the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. They were the only left wing political group who showed up to pamphlet the event. Unlike at the ‘Idea of Communism’ conference held at Birkbeck earlier in the year though they kept a low profile and abstained from grand standing and speech making. Shoehorning a bunch of arts students and academics into their demand to follow the vanguard to glorious victory – from across the Atlantic – has hopefully since struck them as a bit silly. This time they seemed happy just to take their seat in admiring the last remaining vestiges of depoliticised Maoism like everyone else.

As for the event, did it live up to expectations? That would depend on what expectations the one might bring to the proceedings. For those out of the know, Badiou has recently shot to academic stardom on account of his elaborate mathematised metaphysics, which he presents as an alternative to Hegel’s dialectic. He also had a minor-hit with a book on Sarkozy, and was the subject of notorious hand wringing commentaries in the French press for his rejection of the “predicate Jew” as given meaning through the Holocaust.

In a more general sense, Badiou is a timely hit because of his commitment to political universalism, faithfulness to the events of May 1968 and his unwavering loyalty to communism as the only truly politically emancipatory idea of our time. It also doesn’t hurt that his philosophy is fiendishly clever and complex – bordering on insane genius.

The specific focus of the well-attended workshop (perhaps 100 people attended) was two books of Badiou’s recently translated into English: Theory of the Subject (from 1982) and Logics of Worlds (2005). They mark a strong change in register between one another. Theory of the Subject is an absurdly impenetrable book; but also a revolutionary one in intent and tone. In this book Badiou rails against unionism, the exclusion of immigrants, and sets up a theory of deviation – against ‘leftist adventurism’ (anarchism) to the left, and ’structuralism’ (unionism) on the right. In Logics of Worlds, however, there are traces of Badiou’s political commitments, but by and large it is a totally abstract piece of Platonistic metaphysics.

There were interesting presentations from translators of both works, Bruno Bosteels and Alberto Toscano – and if you are interested in metaphysics the workshop would no doubt have been greatly enjoyable in this regard (as it was for me). Yet the last panel on Badiou and politics showed its limitations.

Alberto Toscano took a stoic interpretation – what Badiou is useful for is keeping the flame alive and waiting for the radical left to regain its strength. Nina Power highlighted the fact that Badiou’s philosophical concerns of late reflect much of the philosophical and political maelstrom of the pre-Marxist 1840s. One audience member (probably RCP USA) noted that Badiou’s writing off of the “tragedy” of the 20th century and seeming demand that we return to the 1840s was not very helpful. I was surprised to find myself agreeing with him!

As the daylong conference closed everyone could feel satisfied. It was a rare event where all could claim to be a communist and talk about communism as if it were patently obvious that it was the only politics worth discussing. On the whole this must be a good thing. But still, as the hundred or so shuffled out the door (after some much appreciated free drinks) you couldn’t help wonder with the minuteness of the left, where, between Badiou workshops and ‘Idea of Communism’ conferences, all these people disappear to?

Old revolutionary boredom got it in there first, which, I guess, saves me the trouble of writing up some thoughts on the Kristin Ross talk, ‘Democracy for Sale’. What I am going to do is suggest a couple of things as regards to the question at the end of the piece concerning Ross’s insistence on the “importance of ‘democracy’ as a label”.

The gist of the talk then, was an assertion of the need to reclaim democracy as a term of the left, of a signifier of a genuine emancipatory politics as opposed to the rather meaningless tag that it has become today. So, first up, problems with democracy as term: arguably, its current use as empty signifier is caught in the double bind of being validated only with a (usually prefixed term) such as representative, direct, or parliamentary. What democracy signifies then, is a mode of governance, but the actual content and structural action of this mode are governed by the qualifier that the comes before the term democracy, the signifier before the empty signifier, which is itself, empty, without the attachment of the empty signifier of ‘democracy’.

Why ‘democracy’ as label is important is that in spite of the contemporary emptiness of the term – it affords the recognition of a democratic immanence within democracy – of a democratic spirit understood by Ross in the original sense. In eschewing the recent calls for new names in order to orientate the project towards the reclaiming of existing terms, Ross provides accessibility and makes the project relatable. At the conference on Badiou (words to come) Ross questioned Badiou qua philosopher, for dealing in a philosophy that she thought had passed, a philosophy of abstracts rather than ideals: of words over practice. I think this indicates the real nature of the project, it exists for Ross, not in the abstract, but must be grounded in terms relevant to the real world: to be understandable to the people in order to achieve the desired efficacy.

The suggestion of this came in the example of the Irish no vote. When an audience member asked why she had picked this example, as opposed to the more direct democratic moments of the Greek riots, the response was that it caused “panic” in the European elites. That in discovering a democratic moment within an oligarchal democratic system, the obvious immanence of the project of reclamation is revealed. While Ross was happy to acknowledge the Greek riots as a democratic moment, she chose not to make it the focus of the talk – and of the wider project – precisely because of its (radically) oppositional status. Whether this is a positive thing is debatable as it accedes to the hegemonic drive that contrasts such moments (of direct action) as oppositional, as other, and as a threat to the existing order. But in doing so, both gives them validity and shapes the conception of the whole in relation to them.

I think it’s unreasonable to think that the whiny tone of the Humanities will ever change, and while Badiou’s attempt to reverse critique may be a bit of an overstatement, it is worth repeating.   Moses Boudourides, discussing the need to prevent ideas and people from being knotted together, quotes Alain Badiou from the “Philosophy in the Present: Badiou & Zizek” (Polity, 2009, pp. 80-84):

It seems to me that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical. Very often, one equates philosophy with critique. So that philosophical commitment would ultimately amount to saying what is evil, what is suffering, of saying what’s not acceptable, or what is false. The task of philosophy would be primarily negative: to entertain doubt, the critical spirit , and so on and so forth. I THINK THIS THEME MUST BE ABSOLUTELY OVERTURNED. THE ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHICAL INTERVENTION IS REALLY AFFIRMATION. … a point on which I agree with Deleuze. When Deleuze says that philosophy is in its essence the construction of concepts, he is right to put forward this creative and affirmative dimension, and to mistrust any critical or negative reduction of philosophy. … Glucksmann’s fundamental thesis … is that it is not possible to unify consciences around a positive vision of the Good. One can only unify consciences in the critique of Evil: this is the pivotal thesis of his entire intellectual itinerary. This negative position defines a philosophical intervention of an entirely specific sort: THE PHILOSOPHER IS A KIND OF A PHYSICIAN. He diagnoses evil, suffering, and, if need be, he suggests remedies in order to return to the normal state of affairs. … For my part, I think it is important to defend a wholly other conception of philosophical intervention. It is not for nothing that the first great philosophical idea was Plato’s idea of the Good. Plato had understood perfectly well that at a given moment it is the element of inhuman affirmation which is decisive, that it is this element which carries a radical choice. (The previous letter capitalization was mine, not in the book.)

For the Society for Social and Political Philosopy’s meetings to be held in conjunction with:

SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010.

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers@sspp.us

i’ve never been a math person. i was the idiot in class who asked, “what are we ever going to use this for?” and thought i was being funny. logic was kind of cool and i like the whole, “if…, then…, therefore…” type stuff and once when we were doing graphs the teacher said that height could never be negative, and i said, “yea, we’d be upside down.” and he said, “whoa, man. that’s deep,” in that mocking, stoner voice, which made me laugh – ’cause it was true. but nope, i am not – and never was – a math person.

but lately, i’ve been reading alain badiou and, as i mentioned before, he likes math. i mean, looooves math. i can’t even get into it because i still don’t understand it. tonight, i picked up those sparks notes quick reference guides. basic math and geometry. it was pretty appalling how little i knew.

i’m curious to know how math fits into our everyday lives. since starting the book, i’ve noticed a change in my photography, the way i see things in a frame.

fig.1

In my last post I drew attention to the Collapse journal and its role in disseminating the so-called Speculative Realist ‘movement’. The proposed sixth issue promises much to those working on progressive ecocritical and ecophilosophical projects without necessarily cementing the journal’s relationship to Graham Harman et al. Having recently spoken with editor Robin Mackay about the new volume, I can confirm that it is still in preparation, but an announcement will be made soon and advance orders will be possible at that time. Arriving in December, “late contributors and general perfectionism have held up publication…” Perhaps more interestingly, Mackay expressed concern over the journal’s affiliation with the latest philosophical trend, stating that “it’s not really centred on ‘SR/OOO’, indeed I’d be happy to distance Collapse from this apparent new orthodoxy!”

Following Collapse V’s inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus’ deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will pose the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy’s task to escape the planetary horizon, to abjure ‘everything that makes us scurry about blindly on the desolate surface of the earth’ (Badiou)?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a direct line of correspondence between the spherical shape of the Earth as a planetary model for the horizon of thinking and the nature of transcendental idealism, so as to establish and determine the boundaries in which human thinking should and may occur – the spherical shape of the Earth as an unequivocal model for ‘the limits of all possible geography’. However, if Kant grants the Earth a direct determinative sovereignty in regard to thought, Nietzsche subverts the gravitational horizon of the Earth so as to bring about the possibility of the Great Politics and ‘Overman as the meaning of earth’. Thus Zarathustra begins his journey by exhorting to the people of the city, ‘Be faithful to the Earth’. Yet as his journey is prolonged, Zarathustra’s faith for the Earth turns into a longing for the ‘fresh air’, his will to remain faithful to the Earth is only nurtured by a ‘weightless affirmation’ of it. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks the earth as depth, inflecting Nietzsche’s weightless affirmation toward a profound, productive earth with a geological history: an earth turned inside-out, whose destiny is determined by its churning depths rather than by its surface inhabitants.

It is this enigmatic passage between the Earth as a geographical determination and the possibility of a weightless identification of the Earth that conditions Deleuze and Guattari’s discovery of a new ground for Geophilosophy – a philosophy that grasps thinking in relation to territory and earth.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as ‘an’ (or ‘the’) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract ‘world’ that is the condition for a ‘whole’ of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions present us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth – these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will bring together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of ‘planetary thought’.

You don’t have to but it’s suggested that you read this first:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1116/1224258920419.html

In the place of any particularly insightful investigations of the reasons, interests and mistakes that have led to the economic downturn in Ireland, not to mention a sense of history and reality regarding economic booms in general (surprise surprise, they don’t last forever), the Irish media is a flurry with articles and opinion columns looking for meaning in what is apparently a new topsy-turvy world. A new series the in the Irish Times inviting young people with ‘bright ideas’ to voice their opinions started today with Cameron Stewart founder of clothing company Ark. He’s founded this ethically run company on the basis that every time you wear the brand you’re encouraged to perform acts of kindness to help spread the love and give people hope. These range from simple acts such as giving up your seat on a bus or buying a stranger a coffee to painting an orphanage or helping the homeless. The message coming from Stewart’s article seems to say that while the recession is no doubt a negative thing it has in fact helped us to see things a bit clearer, to have less faith in material things as a way of making us happy and to appreciate the important things in life such as family, friends and relationships. True happiness one might say.

It’s difficult to really take issue with anything that Stewart is saying and I certainly don’t wish to dismiss him simply as an idealist and write him off. However, even before the recession became official in Ireland throughout the media there was already a wave of articles and features on what were effectively ethical business people: entrepreneurs whose businesses seemed as concerned with profit as they were with environmental or human rights issues. Again, what could possibly be wrong with that? And again I’m not exactly here to say that there is, however I do think there is more room needed to introduce a critical analysis. Taken as a whole, or as a movement it would seem that these ethical-entrepreneurs are advocating social change through consumer choice. As a phenomenon this is not particularly new, one recalls how just a few years ago Shell’s advertising campaign focused purely on their environmental projects and had nothing to do with the company’s product itself. This is brand marketing and I do not wish to use this space to launch a critique of that, it has already been covered elsewhere.

If we take for granted that the media do engage in certain amount of agenda setting as regards politics, and relatively recently people’s own private concerns, the proliferation of these kinds of features can be seen to constitute a form of propaganda advocating that people, the individual, can become active through consumerist choice operating within the set of rules laid down by the free market economy; seeking social change through the mechanisms and supports of business and operating within our own small sphere of influence. The word active has multiple meanings. It has a political/social sense: I can change things by buying a particular product which donates to charity or by helping a man on the street. Following on from this it also has a very personal sense. In effect what one can say is: I become active through my choice, through my choice in the market, selecting this product because it is more ethical or charitable than this other one, or doing what I can. Here we enter a very personal and contentious space. We are talking about the individual and how they are individualised.

The theory of the individual is obviously a vast subject to try and attack and I’m certainly not setting out to formulate a theory of it here. However what we can say in a very summarised way is that the formation of the individual in both an ethical and political sense is something akin to a battleground. If we take Foucault as a staring point (and I certainly do) we can begin to look at the various struggles throughout history which have centered around the constituting of the individual and one of the major weapons of course in these battles was ideology. The notion that we live in a post ideological age is slowly dying after a quite a short life, and all the better for it. What I think has happened however, since the great ideologies fell at the end of the twentieth century is that we are now faced with a new battleground, one that is a lot murkier, less dualistic and while maybe not more complex perhaps it is more subtle. If left and right don’t particularly mean anything anymore we remain in a much hazier middle. If we acknowledge that ideology has played and continues to play such a key role in the formation and constitution of the individual then what is left when ideology itself becomes such an uncertain territory?

I think we are seeing at least some of the results now. To quote Badiou “the being of the individual is the lack-of-being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project of that exceeds him that an individual can hope to attain some subjective real”^1*. While I can’t really go along with the notion that lack-of-being constitutes the being of the individual (this seems to me to be too psychoanalytic/Christian in outlook) I think what we can take from this is the idea the importance of the movement (project), a movement driven by an ideology, in the constitution of the individual. Consumerism is a movement. It works like any other setting out forms of conduct and behaviour, setting down beliefs and defining individual outlooks and lifestyles, these are all individualising factors. One unique feature of consumerism as considered in this way is that it actually works towards making itself invisible while at the same time spreading its influence further and further. What consumerism works towards more and more is to position itself as both non-ideological and at the same time unquestionable, as some kind of natural order and it has succeeded in many respects.

Following on from all this what can we say about Ark and Cameron Stewart’s article. Well a few things. I wish to reiterate that I’m not completely opposed to someone coming along and simply asking people to be kinder to one another. Stewart specifically says “we are a movement more than a company…” however the problems with such an argument, especially one coming from somebody who actually runs an enterprise, is that it presupposes a fundamental idea that the individual is a consumer and lives within a predetermined sphere of influence. As such it encourages them to become actively individual through their consumer choice and by performing small acts of kindness. What of course is not taken into account in this analysis is the determining effect that consumerism itself plays in the constituting of people as consumers, and the formation of their sphere’s of influence. It’s the prison officer asking us nicely to keep our cells tidy and be friendly to our fellow inmates.

What before might have been an ethical consideration worked out in relation to either self assessed beliefs or one imposed/encouraged by a religious network has now become inexorably tied to the market, a market which over time has evolved to treat everything, even concepts like charity or compassion, as marketable commodities and as such devaluing them completely. Consumerism can be regarded as complicit in the creation of the world in which its new humanitarian messages/angle have become necessary. We can perhaps consider this movement, and Ark is just one of many, in the same light as the merchant classes of the Middle Ages commissioning so many artistic and civic projects but at the same time working to maintain the status quo, the exploitation of the workers and so on. While those businessmen in no way considered the masses as capable of taking part in civic life today we are encouraged to make change, as long as it is, of course, within the system and status quo we already find ourselves. In a time when real tangible benefits to the poor are in danger of being cut in order to balance the state’s budget it is perhaps not enough to simply ask that everyone help one another within the system they find themselves, it’s time to ask real questions about the system itself.

Notes & References:

*I have substituted the word ‘individual’ for the word ‘subject’ in this quote in order to maintain a coherence to the piece. I feel it doesn’t sacrifice too much Badiou’s original meaning

1. Badiou, Alain, The Century, tr. Alberto Toscano, Polity Press. 2007, pp 100-101

I’m reading Badiou for the first time, hoping to understand what set theory does for him.  I’m particularly interested in this because most of the topology books I’ve been reading start out with set theory, and, although I don’t know why yet, it’s surprising to me that at least using Deleuze/Serres and Badiou to compare, set theory and topology can resonate very differently in philosophical concepts.  Right now, I just want to try to tackle Being and Event, and seeing how difficult it was for me to get through to the second meditation, this might go slowly.

I think these first two meditations can be organized well around what Badiou calls his wager.  That is, that ontology is a situation, and that this situation is the presentation of presentation (27).  What does this mean? Situation, for Badiou, is the multiple, or pure multiplicity.  He also calls it the regime of presentation and I think domain might also work.  Thus, for Badiou, ontology, the ‘science of being qua being, quickly becomes the ‘science of the multiple qua multiple.’ (28) He’s interested in pure multiplicity.  However, along with a situation, or pure multiplicity, comes a structure as well (there is never one without the other).  A structure, he calls ‘the one,’ and this isn’t a singularity but rather the result of an operation. In this way it is a number, and thus a composition or also a multiplicity.  This requires us to differentiate between two kinds of multiplicity.  The first, ‘inconsistent multiplicity,’ is pure multiplicity, that of presentation.  The second, ‘consistent multiplicity,’ is that associated with number, ie. a multiplicity of composition. 

So if everything can be described in terms of situation and structure, where structure, or ‘the one’ is basically an ordering of pure multiplicity, how do we get at being?  Badiou traces this question through Plato’s grappling with whether or not the one is being.  If we posit the non-being of the one, then we are left with pure multiplicity: the ‘ungraspable horizon of being’ depicted in the dream in Parmenides, which Plato confronts as the void.  Unable to think being/void, Plato (and others that Badiou mentions) concludes being as other, and not to be found in the study of pure multiplicity.

So how does Badiou get around this, since he also assumes the non-being of the one?  This is where Cantor’s set theory comes in.  Until this moment, according to Badiou, we were unable to grasp ontology as a theory of pure multiplicity.  This ontology would require that the multiple be understood as composed of multiplicities (ie. no basic element) and that there would have to be an operation of the one (since there always is a structure) that allows us to recognize the multiple, which could only be done implicitly (ie. it’s never directly named).  For Badiou, only a system of axioms  defines but never directly names (29)*.   And it is set theory that indirectly names the multiple as it is built on the void-set.  Therefore, with set theory, Badiou’s found his access into ontology as a situation, the presentation of presentation.

…the truth is that there are no mathematical objects.  Strictly speaking, mathematics presents nothing, without constituting for all that an empty game, because not having anything to present, besides presentation itself—which is to say the Multiple—and thereby never adopting the form of the ob-ject, such is certainly a condition of all discourse on being qua being (7).

 

*This made me think about Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza and expression and how expression is never directly defined by Spinoza, yet becomes defined as the result of his system as a whole.

right now i’m reading Alain Badiou’s Theoretical Writings. it’s a collection of his work that claims to be a good introduction to his philosophy. so far, i agree. i had read his Metapolitics a while ago and remember liking it but supposedly, straight politics, which that book was,  is not Badiou’s thing. apparently, it’s math. badiou loves math and seems to have this unnatural fascination with infinity. i dont quite get it yet but i think i’m starting to understand how he feels. throughout all his essays the possibility of ‘the neverending’ plays a major role, bouncing off other peoples’ theories, and explained through vocabulary lessons and analogies.  

for example, Leibniz’s Pond:

“Each portion of of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every  drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond.” pg. 66 Theoretical Writings.

that’s a pretty vivid image of infinity. now take Spinoza. the only thing i knew about Spinoza before reading chapter 7: Spinoza’s Closed Ontology was that he was a Spanish (actually, Portuguese) Jew who lived somewhere around the 1600s and was ostracized  by his community for being blasphemous. i then learned that the story i’d heard wasn’t entirely true but can’t remember what the real story is. in any case, i do know that he had some notion of God that people didn’t like.  now that i’m halfway through the chapter, i know that Spinoza believed in an infinite God who was at the same time One. multiples unified. God, as one omnipotent power, is everything that we are, everything we aren’t, and everything we know, and everything can’t.

to be fair, Spinoza’s theory rest on the notion that our intellect is how we understand this concept of God – and that our intellect is something reliable. this can not be proven and therefore you get a choice to agree or not. or, as badiou asks:

“how is it possible to think the being of intellect [intellect's essence]… depends upon the operations of the intellect?”

although i see how it would be hard to prove God with concretely/scientifically, i don’t think Spinoza’s idea of God is a dangerous one, and therefore, i’m willing to accept it.

badiou’s love for infinity and obvious approval of Spinoza’s Infinite God made this chapter a lot of fun.

“At the century’s end, animal humanism wants to abolish the discussion itself. Its main argument, whose obstinacy we have already encountered several times, is that the political will of the overhuman (or of the new type of man, or of radical emancipation) has engendered nothing but inhumanity.

But that’s because it was necessary to start from the inhuman: from the truths to which it may happen that we partake. And only from there can we envisage the overhuman.

…

Let us call our philosophical task, on the shores of the new century, and against the animal humanism that besieges us, that of a formalized in-humanism.“

Badiou, The Century

Rencontre avec Elisabeth Roudinesco

Alain Badiou (ENS) et Elisabeth Roudinesco (psychanalyste), conférence à l’ENS le 29 avril 2006.

Cette conférence, dans sa première partie, est très philosophique. Cependant elle reste très accessible. Les questions qui sont posée me semblent essentielles car elles concernent le rapport entre organisation politique et le dévelopement d’un certain scientisme psychiatrique.  L’enjeu est d’autant plus important que comme le dit Mme Roudinesco, ce que l’on fait aux malades mentaux préfigure ce qu’il sera fait aux autres…

lien

Rancière is skeptical of the persistent critiques of the “crisis of democracy” and its link to individualism, narcissism, and capitalist logic. Yes, Rancière concedes, democracy as we know it today is problematic, but not necessarily for these reasons. Rather, democracy is problematic in its exclusionary practices. Both in the sense that at present the democratic system is based on a distinction between the public and private realms, and in the sense that the masses are controlled by a minority of the population deemed to have expertise in governing. Thus, we need to challenge expertise and who is telling us democracy is the best or most legitimate form of governing[1]. We also need to recognize that democracy really isn’t about the power of the people; this is a point the critics have right. The distinction between the public and private realms keeps us in what Rancière describes as a double state of inclusion and exclusion because it separates man from citizen (like the Arendtian distinction) and therefore those who can vote from those who cannot, who can participate in politics and who can’t. Instead of suggesting like Arendt that rights are problematic because not all people can claim them, Rancière—like Badiou in many ways—suggests we should start claiming rights, even if we are excluded. Thus, for Rancière, democracy (which he does NOT consider to be a form of government or state) is about fracturing the public-private distinction and counting those who don’t count. Democracy, then, isn’t implicitly evil; we just need to recognize that the democracy we talk about is not the democracy we should be envisaging. (This is a strange argument; why does he call it democracy then? Why not just critique democracy and call his own political vision something else?)

Question: what is democracy?

• Etymologically, democracy comes from “an expression of hatred” (p. 2). Rancière however is explicit that he is not interested in following such a critique in this manner.
• Democracy allegedly means “power/government of the people by the people”. Everyone has a stake. Yet, democracy is inherently contradictory; it can never be achieved because it would require absolute equality. Those in charge of democracies (oligarchies) want us to think we are all equal. Really, as Rancière says, this isn’t the case. We aren’t all represented equally.
• As Rancière explains, democracy in one respect places itself in opposition to other governmental regimes which are deemed “malevolent” such as tyranny, totalitarianism, dictatorship. Yet, in this way because democracy plays a role in controlling life as democratic it is not so unlike these regimes after all (p.7).
• Democracy has been aligned with democratic individualism. (Individuality as logic of capital, narcissistic, against ‘common good’, only for “elites”): “Democratic life becomes the apolitical life of the indifference consumer of commodities, minority rights, the culture industry and children produced in laboratories. It comes to be identified purely and simply with ‘modern society’, which in the same blow is transformed into a homogeneous anthropological configuration” (p. 29).  This, he argues is problematic. It’s known as the “crisis of democracy” whereby democracy is pathology: an illness; “the reign of the limitless desire of individuals in modern mass society” (p. 1).
• This vision of democracy is opposed to the collective good.
• Therefore, there is a “double bind” in democratic government: how do we control both collective activity and individual withdrawal/privatization inherent to a democratic life? (p. 8).

N.B. Sounds like Foucault’s “Shepherd’s paradox”* See Security, Territory, Population

            Hence, Rancière discusses “pastoral power” (p. 30): “Democratic crime has its origin, then, in the          primitive scene that consists in forgetting the pastor” (p. 30).

Shepherd’s Paradox & Pastoral Power

 Question: How does this relate to Schmitt’s idea of secularization and the fact that sovereignty is still      founded on theological beliefs?

Question: Where does the idea of “transcendence” fit into all this? (see pg. 30).

“The distress of democratic individuals…is that of people who have lost the standard by which the One can be harmonized with the multiple and everyone can unite in a whole. This standard cannot be based on any human convention but only in the care of the divine pastor, who looks after both the whole flock and each member of it” (p. 30-1).

• In times where we no longer necessarily have theological beliefs we are bound to the idea of kinship as a saving grace; hence, “the law of kinship” replaces the bond we have under God. E.g. divine right of kings.
• Democracy goes against kinship though, so in a way it is considered sacrilege (p. 33). I.e. “the Moderns cut off the heads of kings so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure” (p. 33)!
• The only person who can rule without any injustice is the shepherd (p. 34). But, Rancière asks, “how turning back toward the lost shepherd has come to impose itself as the ultimate consequence of a certain account of  democracy conceived as the society of individual consumers” (p. 34).
• For Plato, democracy (as opposed to a republic) is about pleasure, individual liberty and a disregard for collectivity. “The term democracy, then, does not simply mean a bad form of government and political life. It strictly means a style of life that is opposed to any well-ordered government of the community” (p. 36). (This is one reason why Rancière says that democracy isn’t a form of government per se).
• If we interpret democracy in this way which is to say that everyone is equal, no one has authority over anyone else, and that basically all the hierarchies in society are inverted, we may think this is crazy. But, Rancière says it’s positive; it highlights the fact that we had a previous homogeneous view of society which was based on a hierarchy of positions based on the law of kinship, and believed this hierarchy to be continuous with nature (p. 40). Politics begins, however, when we separate government from kinship; when we sever the ties with the shepherd or God. Democracy—or the absence of a title—is what breaks this bond between government and kinship (p. 41). The notion of the individual, narcissistic consumer merely conceals the deeper issue which is that it is “simply dissolving of any standard by which nature could give its law to communitarian artifice via the relations of authority that structure the social body. The scandal lies in the disjoining of entitlements to govern from any analogy to those that order social relations, from any analogy between human convention and the order of nature. It is the scandal of a superiority based on no other title than the very absence of superiority” (p. 41).
• The paradox is that for a government to be political it must be founded on “the absence of any title to govern” (i.e. birth or nature)—left to chance (or other means of deciding/modern politics of opinion?)
• “Democracy is not a modern ‘limitlessness’ which destroys the heterotopy necessary to politics. It is on the contrary the founding power of this heterotopy, the primary limitation of the power of forms of authority that govern the social body” (p. 45).

Question: What does he mean by “democratic Europe…is born in genocide”? (p. 10). Does this relate to the idea of HOMOGENEITY? (I.e. we require equality in democracy and therefore sameness. Any differences need to be assimilated and if they cant be assimilated they must be exterminated…)

• “There is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization” (p. 4). Essentially, democracy is strategic in the sense that it is problematic when we allow it to be “corrupted” and use it to appeal to equality at the same time as respecting difference, yet it is deemed positive when we want to rally up individuals to form patriotic solidarity to defend “civilization”—which basically means to defend Western individualism and impose this on subordinate, “threatening” nations [N.B. Think how things have changed post 9/11][2]. We impose democracy onto other cultures and don’t realize the potential harm this can cause (p.6).
• According to Rancière, “we live in societies and States known as ‘democracies’, a term by which they are distinguished from societies governed by States without law or with religious law” (p. 71).
• Democracy is not a form of State. It is “beneath and beyond these forms” (p. 71).
• Democratic politics, for Rancière, is the taking part of those who have no part (Chambers, 2005. p.1). Democracy, however, cannot be a ‘regime’; it’s the practice of politics—performativity?
• “Democracy is not a constitution, nor a form of society” (p. 46).
• We can’t just get rid of this power of democracy by the critiques previously made; if so we would have to get rid of politics itself (p. 48).  
• The police is the system of distribution and legitimization. So, almost everything that we would think of as politics is actually police. Interest group pluralism in liberal democracy can’t add up. Dissensus shows us this.
• Democracy should therefore be seen as a struggle against privatization of the public sphere (p. 55). This doesn’t mean appealing to State encroachment on society; it means including those who are excluded from police logic and changing our understanding of representation so it doesn’t refer to representing dominant interests (p. 55-6).
• Essentially, the people who claim a “crisis of democracy” and the horrors of democratic individualism aren’t necessarily defending collectivity; rather, it’s a specific collectivity under the guise which ranks knowledge under the “wise elite” (see p. 67-8). Moreover, as Rancière explains, individualism itself is not problematic; it’s just problematic when anyone and everyone can share in it. Basically, the hatred of democracy is the hatred of equality. “…‘democratic individualism’ is simply the hatred of equality by which a dominant intelligentsia lets it be known that it is the elite entitled to rile over the blind herd” (p. 68).

Question: How does the notion of Human Rights (or the Rights of Man) fit into this?

Question: Why is the public/private distinction important?

Human Rights/ The Rights of Man

Individual sovereignty/liberal individualism        Vs.       Collective/common good & egalitarianism           (“good” democracy)                                                                         (“bad” democracy)

The Declaration of Human Rights was viewed as the charter that epitomized this delicate balancing of the collectivity and guarantees of individual freedom. The contrary of democracy at the time was referred to as totalitarianism. The dominant discourse designated States as totalitarian if, in the name of the power of the collective, they denied both individuals’ rights and constitutional forms of collective expression: free elections, and the freedom of expression and association. The term totalitarianism was reserved for designating the principle of that twofold denial. A total State was a State that suppressed the duality of the State and society, extending the sphere of its exercise to the totality of collective life (Rancière, 2007, p. 11).

 Such duality has been problematised by Burke, Arendt (“via Marx”), and Agamben (see pg 58-9).

Problem? à why do we need two principles for politics (i.e. to be a man and a citizen?) Why isn’t just being a man (a human being) enough?

Typically we can see this division as outlined in the following table:

Rancière wants to fracture this divide through a different conception of democracy.

• Comment: The logic of universal/particular is strange as you would think the life of man would be universal given that this is the life available to each and every one of us when stripped of political association/ citizenship rights.
• P. 81: Rancière speaks of oligarchic government inventing “supra-State institutions” which he posits “are not States…are not accountable to any people, they realize the immanent ends of their very practice: depoliticize matters, reserve them for places that are non-places, places that do not leave any space for the democratic invention of polemic. So the State and their experts can quietly agree amongst themselves”. Although Rancière provides the EU Constitution as an example of this, so too could be the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Question: How does this relate to biopolitics?

Biopolitics

Question: Could we say that if politics was based merely on being human and not on being a citizen (i.e. having an identity which is not merely human) we would be reducing politics to bare life? Or, is        this what politics is reduced to anyway since citizenship rights may appear to exist formally in politics but they cannot be claimed by all? (See Caldwell, 2004).

• Arendt: “. . .human rights are an illusion because they are the rights of that bare humanity that is without rights” (p. 16); “Bare humanity…is not a political subject” (Rancière, p. 58). Arendt is of the opinion that we need to enter the sphere of politics in order to gain rights and become political subjects. Without this subject status we are mere life/bare humanity. Yet, as Arendt explains in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the individuals who need to claim political rights are precisely those who are excluded from claiming them (the stateless).
• According to Rancière, however, although Arendt privileges citizens as political subjects this, too, is not the case: “The subject of politics can precisely be identified neither with ‘humanity’ and the gatherings of a population, nor with identities defined by constitutional texts. They are always defined by an interval between identities determined by social relations or juridical categories.” (p. 58-9).
• The key difference between Arendt and Rancière is that for Arendt the equality of men is grounded in citizenship and this is only found in the juridico-political sphere (p. 57). This buys into the distinction between public and private which allows domination because it is domination which keeps them separate. Democracy is problematic in that it allows the public man to lead a life in common by allowing him in public but in doing so it dichotomizes man and citizen. Hence, the citizen of constitutional texts is no more a subject than man without citizenship rights.
• Agamben: democracy is the state of exception—hence, for Agamben rights claims are dangerous in that the power (and violence) of law enters the realm of life from the moment of birth which can be detracted at any moment (see Rancière p. 16)

• Marx: Those who have rights are the bourgeoisie; those who possess the means of production: the State of human rights was the instrument of the dominant class (Rancière, p. 17).  
• Rancière is saying that these critiques of human rights and thereby democracy are problematic in that they “reduce democracy to a form of society” (p.20). As Rancière states: “We do not live in democracies. Neither, as certain authors assert—because they think we are all subjected to a biopolitical government law of exception—do we live in camps” (p. 73).

Question: Is he saying, then, that we need to consider the sphere of politics, society, and economy             separately since, as Lasch and Bell identified, they’ve been collapsed into the notion of “self- realization” and individual hedonism (p. 21)?

Essentially, for Rancière, “The ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ are the rights of those who make them a reality” (p. 74).

• The citizen is supposed to circumvent the private inequalities of birth/wealth as all men are deemed equal as citizens in the public sphere. When we refer to “man” we are opposing someone to this sphere. I.e. someone who is merely man/human cannot enter the public realm of politics and is therefore not considered equal (p. 59-60)
• “The opposition of bare life to political existence itself can be politicized” (p. 60)
• This is marked by the particularity of the private sphere and the universality of the public sphere.

            *Served to oppress women’s rights and contain them to the private (p. 60).

• As Rancière explains, Arendt and Burke claim:

Either the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, that is to say, the rights of those who have rights, which is a tautology; or the rights of the citizen are the rights of man. But as bare humanity has no rights, then they are the rights of those who have no rights which is an absurdity (p. 61).

• A Third way?

“Women’s and citizen’s rights are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not” (p. 61).  Thus, in this instance, political acts which claim rights without having rights supposes a “double relation of exclusion and inclusion inscribed in the duality of the human being and the citizen” (p. 61).

• For Rancière, then, the democratic process is about subjects who break the public/private distinction; who don’t have political identities (or who work the interval between them) and can, in the process of claiming rights they do not have, “reconfigure…the universal and the particular” (p. 61-2).

Question: How does this relate to Badiou?

In “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, Rancière appears to strike a similar argument to Badiou. Taking his departure from Arendt’s claim that the Rights of Man are either “the rights of those who have no rights or the rights of those who have rights”, Rancière argues that this position is tautological because the individual in need of claiming them is stateless and therefore does not have the right to claim them, and the individual citizen who already has rights does not require further rights.

To overcome this problem, Rancière posits the following: “the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights they have not” (p. 302). To elucidate he explains how women were born equal citizens and therefore had rights, yet at a point in time they did not actually possess these rights in society because they were subordinate to men. Hence, women “acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not” (p. 304). 

“DISSENSUS”: This is what Rancière terms a “dissensus”—“putting two worlds in one and the same world” (p. 304)—which sounds very similar to Badiou’s ethics. Here it is worth quoting Rancière at length: 

A political subject…is a capacity for staging such scenes of dissensus. It appears that man is not the void term opposed to the actual rights of the citizen. It has a positive content that is the dismissal of any difference between those who “live” in such or such sphere of existence, between those who are not qualified for political life”. The very difference between man and citizen is not a sign of disjunction proving that the rights are either void or tautological. It is the opening of an interval for political subjectivization. Political names are litigious names, names whose extension and comprehension are uncertain and which open for that reason the space of a test or verification. Political subjects build such cases of verification. They put to the test the power of political names, their extension and comprehension. They not only confront the inscriptions of rights to situations of denial; they put together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not. They put together a relation of inclusion and exclusion” (p. 304).

Badiou’s Void

• In a way, this appears very similar to Badiou’s politics. For example, for Rancière, politics is not about counting the counted but counting the uncounted; a point similar to that expressed by Badiou in Metapolitics. For example, he argues in that we must count that which has not been counted—which is the void—to be counted as one, which is the totality.
• Thus, Badiou’s argument that sans-papiers must be counted by the state is the same notion Rancière prescribes when he discusses the example of the women being counted in politics. The sans-papiers work in France but because they are illegal immigrants they do not have any rights. Therefore instead of viewing them in the way Arendt would which is to say they have rights but cannot claim them, Badiou would likely concede with Rancière that they should be included—yet for Rancière this would be by means of dissensus whereas Badiou would opt for a political militancy and a radical break from the situation by shattering the idea of belonging.
• Hence, Badiou would probably agree with Rancière’s critique of Agamben (and Arendt?) in that he “misses the logic of political subjectivization. Political subjects are surplus subjects. They inscribe the count of the uncounted as a supplement” (p. 305).

References:

Caldwell, A. (2004). Biosovereignty and the emergence of humanity, Theory & Event, 7(2). Retrieved             from Project Muse Premium Collection 

Enns, D. (2007). Political life before identity, Theory & Event, 10(1). Retrieved from Project Muse      Premium Collection

Rancière, J. (2004)Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man? Theory & Event 103(2/3). Retrieved from           Project Muse Premium Collection

Rancière, J. (2001). Ten theses on politics, Theory & Event 5(3). Retrieved from Project Muse Premium         Collection

Republicanism (Plato) and Sociology:

• 2 sides of the same coin (p. 64).
• A hierarchical social body
• It doesn’t limit society by the State but, rather, tries to educate through institutions. E.g., those privileged by birth able to become elites with capabilities (those who have more time to become learned and therefore educate others). (p. 65).

• [2] * This relates to Jasbir Puar’s argument in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, where she argues that “homonationals” (middle class, white, gay males) are included in democracy to fight the “war on terror” in a time where patriotism is required. As soon as this minority group is no longer needed they return to being a minority and respect for difference vanishes. Question: Could Rancière’s work be read as a new way to understand identity politics?

[3] Politics Versus ‘Police’ 

• Police as a “symbolic constitution of the social”.
• This is opposite to politics which is those who have no part in the whole (i.e. the excluded part) still participating in the common.

Public/ Private Distinction “Political action…opposes to the police logic that separates into spheres another usage of the same juridical text, another staging of the duality between public man and private individual. It overturns the distribution of terms and places by playing man against citizen and citizen against man” (p. 59).

I was recently at the annual North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) conference in Ottawa and, after chatting with another graduate student, discovered that Badiou’s name had spread like wild fire and was a hot topic at his university too.  Having presented on Jacques Ranciere, Badiou’s contemporary and oftentimes political ally, I was pleased to have a fellow graduate student involved in our field who is interested in this “hot” theorist. I was lucky enough to take a class on Badiou and Ranciere, and have some working notes/questions to share with others interested in these theorists and hope to start thinking through their application to sport in more detail…

The following themes are taken from Badiou’s Metapolitics to discuss:

Arendt and Kant on Common Sense and the Political Kant and Arendt place the following in opposition with one another: Philosophy Politics “Truth” V Opinion/ Doxa. Because truth cannot be “tyrannical” or “univocal”, freedom must be found through opinion. For Arendt, following Kant, this occurs in the public sphere as opposed to the private sphere. In What is Enlightenment?, Kant argues that an enlightened subject is one who is rational, liberal, and has reached the age of majority (i.e. we are able to distinguish between private beliefs such as religion, and questions of public import such as property). The distinction is based on the premise that in the public sphere, where one acts politically (and therefore votes), one is rational and has “common sense”. This common sense is what Arendt continues in her discussion of politics. Hence for Arendt, politics occurs in public because we need other people (a community) to act politically and our ability to share collective beliefs comes from our universal common sense. Problematically for Badiou (and many others who reject Enlightenment ideas of rationality), the question becomes a matter of believing that because the political sphere is so closely linked to the State, “common sense” as it were may just be an ideological ploy by the State and consequently not “truth” or “real democracy” (p. 23-4). Thus, as Badiou posits, Arendtian philosophy merely sustains the State.

Question: How does the notion of public/private fit into this?

Badiou’s position could be read in two ways. From one perspective he is a classic anti-humanist in that he wants to rid us of the notion of collective rationality in the public realm which neo-Kantian scholars appeal to. Thus, he dismisses the notion of man as animal rationale. However, conversely, one could argue that he in fact ascribes to a liberal humanist discourse because he represses culture (i.e. he considers culture to be a means of division and difference—an appeal to the Other), and is in favour of a “politics of thought” which reinforces the man/animal dichotomy and appears to reinforce the public/private distinction (yet from Badiou’s perspective would have to be a “Stateless” distinction).

Question: How can we talk about culture in Badiou’s politics? It sounds like we cannot because multiculturalism is reduced to, in Oliver Marchart’s (2007)Heideggarian summation, to the realm of the ontic (being) as opposed to the ontological (Being) because multiculturalism supposes “infinite multiplicity” whilst Badiou is concerned with the ontological notion of being “indifferent to difference” (p. 117). Real politics, instead, is “the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists” (p. 24). *Real politics instead of cultural politics? Agency and Subjectivity The notion of agency is, arguably, problematic in Badiou’s thought and as a scholar committed to political activism this is somewhat surprising (Hewlett, 2006). Badiou posits that subjectivity occurs only in the void of an event and thereafter when maintaining fidelity to it. Thus, “The universality of political truth that results from such a fidelity is itself legible like all truth, retroactively [italics added]” (p. 23). This appears to leave the notion of subjectivity retroactive—hence one can only become a subject post-event. As Hewlett (2006) posits, this supposes that one cannot plan an event, for example a political revolution, and therefore can have no control over an event. Further, this places us in a passive position as individuals whereby in fact we can perhaps go through our lives never experiencing an event and therefore never knowing subjectivity. In a sense, Badiou’s argument is ultimately deterministic.

Question: How can we generate agency in Badiou’s theory in order to act politically? It appears that it is a deterministic argument in the sense that we are passive “recipients” or “consumers” of an event—does that make us, rather than from Adorno’s perspective a “cultural dupe/dope”, an “evental dupe?” (If the event can’t be predicted or even generated by political militancy then it sounds “divine” like the Altogether Other for Levinas.). Moreover, how does this relate to the point made in Badiou’s text on Saint. Paul that we can have fidelity to an event that is yet to come? Violence

Question: Violence appears to play a central role in Badioiu’s politics since any seizure of truth requires militant action. Could we say that Badiou’s idea of the event or the rupture with knowledge (referred to as “grace” in the book on St. Paul) is analogous to Benjamin’s mythic/divine violence, whereby mythic violence is the normal law preserving status (i.e. fact/law for Badiou) and divine violence is the law destroying violence—remembering of course that divine violence is not meant in a transcendental way (the void/event—a rupture with thought from nowhere)? According to Žižek (2007), Badiou’s violence is “subjective” whilst Benjamin’s divine violence is not something “transcendental”—he meant terror; revolution. Does this mean their notions of violence are allied? As Žižek (2007) explains: In a way, it is the “optimistic” mirror image of the model you find in someone like Agamben, who presents not so much a pessimism but a “negative” teleology, in which the entire Western tradition is approaching its own disastrous end, the only solution to which is to await some “divine violence.” But what is Benjamin talking about? Revolution—that is, a moment when you take the “sovereign” (this is Benjamin’s word) responsibility for killing someone. What does violence mean for Agamben? He responds with “playing with the law” and so on. Power, Knowledge, and Truth

Question: How does power operate for Badiou? Badiou posits the following: “Why was Foucault (whom Lazarus salutes as the ‘first theoretician of singularities’), after having isolated irreducible configurations within his category of episteme, unable to achieve a true thought of interiority?”: “Because after having posited that the operator for the identification of singularities was the relation of words to things, he did not localise this operator and left unclear the whereabouts of the enunciated multiplicity of epistemai. The result of this omission is that the words/things relation remains external. Foucault’s singularities (analysis of discursive formations, positivities, and the corresponding knowledge) remain composite, lacking an identification of the prescriptive or subjective kernel that lies at their heart. Foucault did not think his own thought. But his immense merit was to have bequeathed us the question of how it might be done, since his teaching persuades us that ‘declaring the existence of singularities does not resolve the problem of thought which permits their investigation.” (p. 44-5). Here I think Badiou, via Lazarus, is critiquing Foucault for his understanding of power being “everywhere”; embedded in discourse without a single site of operation (i.e. power is not hierarchical). Perhaps the two scholars are suggesting that Foucault’s own work is infused with power and therefore is not separable from the State or ideological power (i.e. he tries to escape State power but in a sense it is embedded in his own teachings). Foucault does not “prescribe” a new politics, in which case his theory is not revolutionary and does not suppose a break with current knowledge or an event. This is further reflected in Badiou’s critique of Foucault’s “archaeology” (p. 51-2), which is a historical technique (and therefore is anti-philosophical and positivisitic, undermining his attempt to “escape” totalising power through an appeal to singluarities) In some ways, however, Badiou’s theoretical perspective appears to be an extension of Foucauldian understandings of power and knowledge, rather than a break with Foucault and other postmodern/ poststructural scholars as Badiou asserts. For Foucault, knowledge and power are indiscriminate (hence, power is bound to knowledge through discourse). Therefore, truth cannot be attainted because power saturates knowledge and cannot be located in an origin per se. In terms of politics, Foucault would argue that power operates in this way through discourse in order to construct and shape beliefs and values in society, yet in Badiou’s terms Foucault would argue that we can never really “know” whether a political event was true per se (in the same way post-structural scholars argue that there can be no “subject” in the sense that identity is merely representational). This is why Badiou considers Foucauldian and other post-structural theories relativistic. Badiou, in contrast, suggests that we should not give up on the idea of “truth” and we should state axioms, but we should recognise that it cannot be attributed to the State and needs to be distanced. In many ways Foucault agrees with the distancing from the State (i.e. power cannot be hierarchical) but disagrees with any attempts to find a “truth”. Although Foucault believes we cannot rely on historically situated happenings for “truth” (therefore an event cannot arise from historically grounded or emerging beliefs because these are imbued with power (or are ideological), Badiou still conceives of Foucault’s perspective to be grounded in these very assumptions he wishes to terminate. As Badiou (2002) explains, “knowledge” is “the past”, not “truth”. While I think Foucault would concede that because knowledge is so tightly linked to power we can never know “truth” per se, Badiou’s argument suggests we can rupture this power/knowledge nexus from the void. Hence, truth is different to knowledge which is merely repetition (i.e. history, which is positivistic) and instead must be something new. Therefore, it might be read as more of an extension of Foucault’s argument rather than as a break.

Naming, Spatiality and Temporality

“The name is nothing other than the Real”. As the translator notes, the Real is not “reality” per se, but “knowledge which lies outside of our grasp but which we can come to know—albeit retroactively, after the event—by way of a truth procedure” (p. xxv).

Like Lacan’s “Real”, Badiou’s “Void” is external to the situation and can only be known retroactively. See below:

Lacan/ Badiou

Real/ -The Void (resists representation)

Symbolic/The Event

Imaginary/The Subject and Simulacrum

Question: Can we link Lacan and Badiou in this way?

References:

Badiou, A. (2002). The event of truth (Online Lecture). European Graduate School, Retrieved January 29th, 2009, http://www.truveo.com/Alain-Badiou-The-event-of-Truth-2002-1/id/1088990719

Hewlett, N. (2006). Politics as thought? The paradoxes of Alain Badiou’s theory of politics. Contemporary Political Theory, 5, 371-404. McNulty, T. (2007). The commandment against the law: Writing and divine justice in Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence. Diacritics, 37.2-3, 34-60.

Marchart, O. (2007). Post-foundational political thought: Political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wright, C. (2008). Event or exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, towards a politics of the void. Theory & Event, 11(2).

Žižek, S. (2007). Divine Violence and Liberated Territories: SOFT TARGETS talks with Slavoj Žižek Retrieved February 1st, 2009, from: http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php

Dissent | Text

I decided to feature this article, because for me it seems like a fairly common response to Žižek’s thought. It accuses him (along with Badiou) of being a crypto-authoritarian, of having a ‘fantasy category’ of ‘The People’, of ‘bracketing reality’, proclaiming it a ‘Stalinist Theory’ and of course, of being nothing more than a pop-phenomenon. And like other similar responses (remember Adam Kirsch?) the text is not an actual engagement with his thought, but just a quick effort to dismiss Žižek. The misrepresentation is astonishing. Of course, the reader can decide for himself.

Text

What does our era enjoin us to do? Are we equal to the task? It seems to me too easy to claim that the imperative of the times is one of completion, and that, as modem Narratives linking subject, science and History are foreclosed, we must either explore the formless dis-covered this foreclosure bequeaths us or sustain turning back towards the Greek origin of thinking – a pure question.

Spring 2009