Some Random Links

Just a short post to point anyone interested over to Metastable Equilibrium, who has graciously provided a in-progress translation of Meillassoux's seminar "History & Event in the Writings of Alain Badiou". I haven't read it yet, but considering Meillassoux was a student of Badiou's, and judging from his exceptional and systematic take on Deleuze in Collapse, I'm sure it'll be an interesting read.

Completely unrelated, but also worthy of being highlighted is this story of diplomats in Zimbabwe. Actually gives one some hope that even without international oversight, maybe the upcoming run-off elections won't be so easily stolen by Mugabe.

And of course, also worth looking at are any of the Recommended Links on the right, which are always being updated.

Complexity and the Food Crisis

In considering the causes of the recent world food crisis (sparking riots in numerous countries), it’s disconcerting to see how many commentators hold to a rather simple view of the causes and solutions. For instance, while it is widely agreed that the changing diets of Chinese peasants arising out of poverty, rising input prices, agricultural subsidies, droughts, and the rise of biofuel are all contributing to the surge in food prices, most commentators still seem eager to pinpoint the cause down to one dominant aspect. Moreover, once a single cause has been pinpointed, the commentators then offer a simple solution based upon resolving that unique problem. Given that shifting the diets of millions of Chinese, reducing oil and fertilizer prices, and removing first world agricultural subsidies and tariffs are all political non-starters, it is not surprising that biofuel has taken most of the heat for the problems. My aim here obviously isn't to argue for a solution to the crisis - something that will take a lot of highly specialized and technical knowledge - but rather to point out the limitations of thinking along simple cause and effect lines.

As Robert Jervis argues in System Effects, the international system of politics (but also of finance, food, weapons, etc.) is an interdependent system. This interconnectedness entails a major obstacle for thinking in terms of a naive version of cause and effect - namely, that any single cause will have multiple, unintended and sometimes contradictory effects. The food crisis is a major example of this. In reaction to climate change, biofuels were only a few years ago considered to be highly useful tools for reducing reliance on oil and reducing emissions. In the environmental realm, biofuels were thought to be a simple (partial) solution to a major problem. The immediate consequence of the government decision to support biofuels was to make them relatively profitable for agricultural producers. Through subsidies, a significant portion of farmers switched their lands from using one crop to using crops designated for biofuel. The environmental decision therefore had an effect on the economic realm. The secondary effect of the initial decision, however, was to reduce the amount of land reserved for actual, edible food. Hence, as with the current oil situation, once supply went down and demand remained largely inelastic (food and oil being necessities), the prices began to rise rapidly. This is not to suggest that biofuels are the only problem or cause of rising food prices, but they certainly contribute.

As we can see from this example, a simple decision made to resolve an environmental problem leads from the environment to the economy to the world food system to political repercussions including social turmoil and collapse. Moreover, this is only following one single line of causal influence. We could, for example, look at how the subsidies for biofuels have made them profitable in areas such as Brazil, leading to more clear-cutting of the Amazon, thereby effectively countering the ostensible reason for biofuels. These are only large-scale effects too - for example, in times of hardship for developing countries, it is not uncommon for children and women to bear a disproportionate amount of the burden. Hence, at a personal level, many women and children could be feeling the effects of the world food crisis particularly acutely. A similar causal influence could also be drawn for the changing diets of the Chinese people. The inadvertent effect of bringing millions of people out of poverty (an undeniably admirable achievement when considered on its own) has been to raise food prices around the world, contributing not only to poverty in other countries, but also plunging fragile political systems into chaos (see Haiti, most obviously, but also potentially Egypt among other countries). Each aspect of the problem contributes in a non-additive way - we can't simply sum up the effects of each problem independently, because they interact with each other and produce results that are truly emergent.

That the international system is interconnected in such a way is not surprising to most people, I would think. The repeated discussions of globalization have been saying as much for years now. What is surprising is that decision-making and commentary are still routinely focused on a very narrow realm of causes and effects. Much like the academic world is plagued by insular disciplines with little cross-pollination, so too does the decision-making elite (and the media) seem trapped into small boxes. What needs to be done? In my opinion, as in the academic world, there needs to be not only dialogue between different areas (economists speaking with environmentalists speaking with politicians, etc.) but a more concerted effort to understand exactly how each realm (with its own particular logic) interacts. How, in other words, are relations constructed between heterogeneous realms? It is not enough for economists, with a particular style of analysis and specific values, to argue with politicians, with another style of analysis and a different set of values. If the different modes of analysis aren't taken into account, you get situations such as economists' confusion over why every country doesn't submit to the 'laws' of comparative advantage and free trade. This isn't to argue for constructing some overarching framework which would encompass all the modes of analysis, as if the social were reducible to a single approach, but rather to respect the heterogeneity of each area while at the same time building real bridges.

But there's another significant problem for any approach to the world system: because of the complexity of the system, many of the effects are unpredictable, perhaps even in principle and not only in practice (although this gets into the ontological ramifications of complexity). Once a problem has appeared on the global stage, it is of course retroactively clear that certain decisions had significant unintended effects, but there are important limitations on predicting the outcome of any particular decision. As the example of biofuels shows, even seemingly good ideas can have adverse consequences. What is needed, instead of some false sense of certainty about the outcomes of a decision, is a proper respect for the invariably contingent, unpredictable and open nature of decisions. In a certain sense, although perhaps on a different level (revolutionary politics versus bureaucratic administration), this accords with Zizek's notion of the Act and the necessity of taking full responsibility for one's action even and especially in the face of decisions with unpredictable outcomes. It seems to me that something like an ethics of decisions is necessary both for mitigating large-scale mistaken decisions (e.g. the invasion of Iraq), and for taking the proper time to reflect on the potential consequences of any single decision in an interconnected world. In that respect, perhaps the final comments made in Zizek's recent interview at Democracy Now take on a new significance:

AMY GOODMAN: Last words to leave our audience with here in the United States and, well, all over in Latin America, in Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: From me?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It will be simply—OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don’t beat—don’t get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, “You’re doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let’s do something,” this is the threat. This is the threat.

Today’s hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don’t be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It’s time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?

What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don’t do the job. We even don’t have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call “cognitive mapping,” you know, that you get an idea what’s going on. We need theory more than ever. Don’t be—don’t feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what’s going on.

(via Daily Humiliation)

Zizek & Materialism

Adrian Johnston's newest book, Zizek's Ontology, is an impressive attempt at systematizing Zizek's notoriously hyperactive writing style. Focused on developing a "transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity" - i.e. an ontology capable of accounting for how subjectivity can emerge from an asubjective realm of matter - Johnston places Zizek's work squarely in line with the contemporary materialists. As we will see, this perhaps raises some issues about whether Johnston/Zizek can meet the requirements of a truly materialist ontology set out by Ray Brassier (via appropriations of Francois Laruelle and Quentin Meillassoux), but regardless, Johnston's work presents a huge rejoinder to both naive cultural studies proponents of Zizek and overly simply critics of Zizek. Cutting through the myriad of pop culture references and political interventions, Johnston aims at the heart of Zizek's philosophical project - a re-reading of German idealism (specifically, Kant, Schelling & Hegel) through Lacanian psychoanalysis.

A dense book that can hardly be done justice in a blog post, for now I just want to follow a single line of argument that leads to some initial characterizations of matter. The first step in this direction is to shift the focus of Kant away from the epistemological limitations of cognition and to the properly ontological limits. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously set out to determine the immanent limits within which reason could operate, in an effort to establish the proper boundaries of philosophical thought. Taking experience as a given, Kant deduced what he deemed to be the necessary structure of thought. In order for experience to appear as it does, the mind must organize experience according to some fundamental cognitive structures - the pure forms of intuition, the categories, and the regulative Ideas. These structures produced our phenomenal experience, outside of which we could have no knowledge - they were the rationalist basis from/for empiricism. Outside of experience, however, lay a number of problems for Kant. On the one hand, the sensible intuitions are given their impressions from something outside of experience - what Kant will call the noumena. Any characterization of these, however, was prohibited. In the other direction, reason is led to ask questions that it cannot answer by reference to experience (e.g. is reality finite or infinite?). It is led, through the pure use of reason outside of any application to experience, to establish contradictory propositions concerning these questions. But even more distressing is the fact that we can not even know ourselves outside of how experience phenomenally presents it to us. My knowledge of myself is limited to the empirical presentations that pass before my gaze. What I am - ontologically - remains a gap in knowledge. In Lacanian terms, we are only ever presented with imaginary egos and subjects of statements, but never the subject of enunciation. As Johnston argues, this gap in knowledge leads to an antinomy concerning our own subjectivity: on one level, we are well aware that we are finite beings, subject to mortality. Yet, on another level, we can never experience our own deaths or births, and so we are led to implicitly believe in our immortality. That is to say, my lived existence has no beginning or end for myself (no doubt, this is in part where religious ideas of immortality get some measure of plausibility).

In response to these gaps of the subject, we instead take up various imaginary egos and symbolic identifications in order to try and fill in the empty space at the centre of our beings. This is what accounts for the strength of various identifications (particularly ideological), since to remove these various attachments is to be forced to face up to our own nothingness. Doing so provokes horror and disgust as the framework within which reality is meaningful disappears, and we are instead put before the Lacanian Real. A similar phenomena happens with respect to our birth and our death - incapable of representing them to ourselves as experienced (since there was no 'I' until after our birth, and there will be none at the moment of death), they effectively index our ontological finitude. Reacting against the horrors of mortality and the body, consciousness covers over these ontological gaps in phenomenal reality by constructing what psychoanalysis refers to as fundamental fantasies. These fantasies provide a sort of mythical structure within which we can imagine our own origins and our own demise, thereby removing any sense of our own non-existence. (Take, for example, the thought of being present at our own funeral; of being present without existing.)

The result of these defensive reactions against our ontological finitude is to set out on a path between mind-body dualism and theories of harmonious embodiment or mind-body identity. Instead of a complete separation or a harmonious unity, Johnston argues that while subjectivity originally arises from material reality (presumably through some sort of neurological basis), it then reacts against its own material conditions, aiming to separate itself from the body. As Johnston puts it,

"The subject's anxiety in the face of anything that threatens to strip it of its seemingly transcendent, immaterial status through a reduction to its brute corporeal condition isn't a mysterious, inexplicable phenomenon. Only a form of subjectivity that constitutes itself as inherently incompatible with its own finitude experiences the prospect of being plunged back into its fleshly materiality, the inevitably occluded ground of its mortal being, as a horrible danger to be avoided no matter what." (59)

At this point, however, we have to move to Schelling to further flesh out a transcendental materialism. For while Kant can point towards the gaps within phenomenal experience, he fails to provide us with any genetic account of the subject's emergence. Schelling's contribution is to outline how matter immanently produces the transcendence of subjectivity. Key to his account is the idea that the materialism which underlies subjective experience is, in a sense, pre-ontological. Rather than being a physical substance - complete and deterministic according to physical laws - matter is instead riven with contradictions and conflicts. It is itself not-All, to use Zizek's term. If reality were complete and whole, Zizek argues, then subjectivity and freedom would be impossible and the simplest versions of determinism would hold. In Zizek's reading of Schelling, it is therefore the discord of the psychoanalytic drives (themselves derived from a deeper groundlessness) that causes the emergence of subjectivity as an attempt to domesticate these dueling impulses.

In Schelling's work, this idea of materialism is fleshed out in part by reference to its form of temporality. Curiously, at least as Johnston reads it, Schelling appears to put forth an argument similar to Meillassoux's arche-fossil argument. That is to say, that each aims to point towards an ontological time that is outside the time of phenomena. For Meillassoux, the arche-fossil (any object that indexes a time before life) reveals that schools of thought like idealism, phenomenology, and anti-realism are not closed in and complete ontologies. The arche-fossil shows that not only are there gaps within phenomenal experience and not only are there unperceived phenomena, but that the entire realm of phenomena is itself subject to its own determinate origins and endings. At a certain point in time, the possibility of objects manifesting themselves to consciousness appeared, and at a certain point in time, the possibility will disappear. Reality couldn't care less for consciousness. The difficulty in describing this non-phenomenal realm is that present-day science, relying on empirical objects, is within the field of phenomena that Meillassoux is criticizing. To take empiricism as the definitive basis for ontology is to fall into the correlationist trap that Meillassoux is trying to escape. (I think this also raises the question of the status of scientific discourse in Brassier's Nihil Unbound, but I'll leave that for another post.) Similar to Meillassoux, Schelling argues that matter is never present but is instead situated within a past time before (linear) time.

While explicitly described as a non-conscious mode of time, there is also the question of what precisely initiates the movement whereby subjectivity emerges from matter. Beyond the tensions and contradictions within being, what is it that leads specifically to the emergence of ideality? Why does being not remain within itself, for example? For Schelling, the reason is because proper to natural being there is a "desire" for the ideality of subjectivity, and it is this which ultimately causes transcendence to emerge from immanence. But in answering the problem this way, Schelling reintroduces a form of teleology whereby reality has always been aiming at consciousness, thereby effectively incorporating the "non-conscious" past within the framework of the present conscious moment. The materialism here therefore remains subject to the sort of correlationist approach that Meillassoux more adeptly escapes from. As it stands then (and I'm only part way through the Schelling section of the book), if Zizek's materialism remains grounded upon this immanent desire of reality for the ideality of consciousness, then he still remains stuck with the criticisms of the speculative realists. Following Brassier, a truly speculative materialism must evacuate all ideality, something which he believes can only be achieved through Laruelle's difficult concept of unilateral duality.

Exploring the Global Political Economy

In Benjamin Cohen's narrative of international political economy's (IPE) development (International Political Economy: An Intellectual History), one of the recurring themes is of the limits of the different methodologies underlying the American and British schools of thought. In the American version, privilege is given to economics as the social science which appears to most closely emulate the natural sciences. Rigor, clarity, parsimony, and verifiability are the supreme virtues, with rational choice theory being the dominant way to model social reality. While undoubtedly useful in many ways (e.g. their focus on concrete occurrences and well-researched data being an important counterweight to the overly abstract theorizing Sinthome has spoken of in a number of places), it also brings with it numerous flaws.

The most obvious is the subtly metaphysical approach that rational choice is forced to employ. By forcing the phenomena of the social world into pre-established and invariant ideas of what constitutes an actor and what causes actions, rational choice theory ends up denying a wide variety of alternative actors and alternative sources of actions. The more sophisticated adherents of rational choice argue that it is only a useful tool to simplify a complex reality, but then the question becomes when do the values of parsimony, clarity and simplicity outweigh the values of empiricism? When, in other words, does rational choices disconnect itself so far from reality that it becomes merely an abstract, metaphysical theory? An illusory sense of clarity and a false certainty of the continuum between natural and social sciences doesn't warrant the dominance of rational choice in American IPE (and political science more generally).

Even if it's granted that the criticism is off-base, another problem arises for IPE. By emulating economics' emulation of natural science, international political economy ends up tossing aside any systemic theorizing, instead preferring to analytically dissect phenomena into ever smaller constituent parts. So, for example, instead of analyzing processes of global economic change, American IPE tends to focus on specific issue-areas like taxation on foreign investment, or trade policy for rice. While not denying the importance of these studies in any way, I merely want to point out the subsequent lack of systemic theorizing. Again, the demand for parsimony and verifiability lead IPE to avoid what they see as overly metaphysical and vague notions of systemic transformation. Certainly, in some cases, IPE's criticisms are on the mark: references to things like 'social forces' or 'national culture' too often function to hide the limits of the theorist's study, substituting the determinate context of a social event with a vaguely specified generic term. But, that doesn't mean there's no value to systemic theorizing, and that doesn't entail that there's only one way to theorize the global context. In a world of increasing interconnectedness on a number of distinct planes, we are becoming more and more subject to systemic processes, and so an understanding of their dynamics has become increasingly important. The current food crisis, along with the fallout from the subprime mortgage debacle are only the most recent examples of such systemic problems requiring systemic responses.

The British school of IPE has attempted to overcome these faults by taking on the responsibility of thinking about large-scale transformations of societies and economies. Taking a cue from Marxist theory, many in the British school focus on outlining various historical periods of large-scale social structures. Without eschewing historical detail, British IPE has managed to avoid the pitfalls of American IPE's endless analysis and instead worked towards synthesizing various insights into a coherent theory of structural change. The problem with much of these theories is that they often end up overly general and overly homogeneous. Eager to examine the large transformations that have affected society, too often these theorists examine solely the generalized processes like modernization, development, or globalization without an eye for the precise detail involved in these transitions. As a result, things like the uneven spread of globalization are often missed, as well as the alternative movements which refuse to be categorized along a globalized/non-globalized basis.

So what's the alternative? Can the benefits of each approach - the detail, clarity and replicability of American IPE findings versus the systemic and historic awareness of British IPE - be combined? One attempt would possibly be the study of mechanisms that sociology has recently taken up. In sociology, and specifically in the study of social movements and contentious politics, the enemy mechanism-theory has reacted against is the structural movement. This movement was characterized by a methodology which drew up generalized and static social categories (mobilizing structures, framing processes, repertoires of contention, etc.) and then proceeded to examine how each aspect functioned in a particular case, seeking to draw out generalizable relations from a variety of cases. The problems with such an approach was that it was largely static, unable to really account for the dynamism of long-term periods of contention, and that it was overly general, forcing a wide variety of empirical phenomena into an a priori framework of understanding. While the framework permitted wide-ranging and disparate periods of contention to be compared against each other, it also tended to neglect the novelties created in periods of unrest. This is not say that these theorists neglected, for example, that petitions were created out of a particular business practice, but novelties were always placed within an already established framework that determined in advance what their possible effects could be.

Mechanism theory, by contrast, prefers to ignore the established structure of social movements studies, and focus on the conjunction of mid-level recurring processes. So, for example, the mechanism of brokerage functions to connect previously unconnected social sites: two Kenyan tribes unite against a colonial power, or neoliberal supporters merge with cultural conservatives to vote in the Republican party. The benefit of mechanisms is apparent - while offering the generalizability demanded by 'scientific' studies (the same mechanisms can be repeated in a variety of circumstances), they are also capable of taking into account contextual variances (different conjunctions and sequences of mechanisms lead to different outcomes), and of including an indefinite number of novelties (mechanisms not being limited a priori). However, the problem noted earlier with American IPE - that it ignores systemic transformations - also seems to apply to mechanisms, albeit not intrinsically. Theoretically, it is possible to map out systemic transformation in terms of a very wide range of concurrent mechanisms, but practically, proponents of mechanisms seem to have stuck to explaining mid-level phenomena. (Although I would be happy to be proven wrong on this account - if anyone knows of more global uses of mechanisms, let me know! As a sidenote, anyone interested in reading more on mechanisms should definitely read Daniel Little's blog Understanding Society.)

If mechanisms aren't enough on their own to meld the benefits of both American and British IPE, then perhaps another theory could supplement it? In this regards, something like Bruno Latour's social theory seems useful to me. His approach to the problem of scale (micro versus macro) manages to deflate the irreducible difference between the two and place them on a single plane. In other words, the systemic can be made contiguous with the local. Latour's key to this notion is the idea that the macro is constructed in a particular localizable place. The "whole" is simply another part, rather than an all-encompassing structure. He provides the useful example of lingustic structure: "The millions of speech acts that make up a dictionary, a grammar, or a language structure in a linguistics department have been extracted from local speech acts, which have been recorded, transcribed, collated, and classified in various ways using many different mediums." (Reassembling the Social, 177) The linguistic structure is not something pre-existing all possible speech acts, but rather something constructed and then reflected upon by linguists. On the level of international political economy, we could see how the structure of, say, capitalism, is not simply some ubiquitous aether in which all social relations are embedded. Rather, it is produced in particular spots (e.g. Wall Street, or Dubai) and it is spread around through specific conduits (e.g. computer networks for financial flows, or small networks of phone contacts). The idea of capitalism's enveloping of all social relations is what Latour calls a panorama - it is a holistic vision of the network constructed as an extra part of the situation itself. The whole itself is constructed, whether through academic literature (e.g. Marx's real subsumption), populist commentary (e.g. Friedman's flat world) or everyday conversation (e.g. 9/11 conspiracy theories). In each case, the macro-level system is reduced to a construction of localizable networks.

Similarly, in the opposite direction, the micro or local is a construction of these networks as transmitted through time and space. So, using the linguistic example, any particular speech act is itself dependent on a long history of speech acts that have coalesced into a widely (implicitly and explicitly) recognized linguistic structure determining the use of words, phrases, intonations, etc. Or, with capitalism, a particular stock trade is itself produced through the prior construction of trading networks on Wall Street, trade regulations constructed in Washington, the education and experience of the particular trader, etc. These aspects are already there, giving us the correct intuition that there's something beyond the local, but the solution isn't to find the supplement in an irreconcilable macro level. Rather, networks of agents (agency widened to include material objects) function to produce both the macro and the micro.

By taking Latour's approach, we can see how specific mechanisms could be acknowledged as responsible for constructing the macro or global level structures. Immanently, from within a particular situation, the analysis could move towards both the micro and the macro by "beginning in the middle" - one of Deleuze's favourite quotes. In this way, perhaps, the benefits of both American and British IPE can be combined in order to deal with the problems of an increasingly interconnected world.

Conceptual Horror

Readers interested in coming to grips with the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy should welcome the arrival of yet another volume of the Collapse journal. Their consistently high-quality collections touch upon not only novel topics within the philosophical world, but also offer intriguing glimpses into the parallel movements of the art world. They've also provided perhaps the main space from which speculative realism has been quietly undermining the philosophical establishment, with contributions in the past from Badiou, Harman, Meillassoux, Churchland, Grant and Brassier.

Their latest volume focuses on 'Concept Horror' whose "task is not to promote theories of horror, but to uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable."

Their website will soon be is taking pre-orders, with the book being due out in May.

In their words:

The volume brings to fruition Collapse's vision of a miscegenated text in which contributions interact and produce a series of interzones or objectively-collaborative spaces. Throughout the volume many different styles of philosophical texts and graphic works intermingle, creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of victimhood.

In weird fiction author Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of nihilism...

...As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Ukrainian Oleg Kulik, a prominent contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series 'Dead Monkeys'.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the ontologies of horror from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his ability to evoke the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake Chapman, half of the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld, who unveil their infernal new work Fucking Hell in London next month, contributes a set of etchings created exclusively for Collapse in response to the other contributions in the volume.

Quentin Meillassoux's work is familiar to our readers. In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous.

German artist Todosch's (Thorsten Schlopsnies) meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation...

...A perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the naturephilosophische work of Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

A rising star, Canadian artist Steven Shearer, contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire, introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal, the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit...

...Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 330pp[TBC] // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Reassembling Iraq

Taking a break from the usual topics of this blog (while not straying too far!), it seems that recent developments in the Iraqi situation offer an interesting example of the sort of materialist analysis that Bruno Latour advocates. In his Reassembling the Social, Latour organizes the first part of the book around 5 uncertainties involved in thinking about the social: (1) the nature of groups, (2) the nature of actions, (3) the nature of objects, (4) the nature of facts, and (5) the type of studies done by sociology. Having only made it partially through the book so far, it is the first uncertainty that interests me here.

If you have read through any Anglo-American social science literature, you'll be familiar with the fact that one of the most common introductory moves is to define the basic unit of the analysis, and to draw limits upon the scope of the study. Thus, international relations theorists commonly emphasize the nation-state as their object of study, and (more often than not) set aside domestic or transnational actors as irrelevant for the purposes of the study. Or economists define a rational individual as their basic ontological entity, and delineate an area of perfect knowledge and frictionless transactions as their space of study. In either case, however, the result is the same – an a priori limitation on the objects of study themselves. As Latour rightly notes, such a move would be denounced as illegitimate for any other science – the power and strength of natural sciences comes precisely from their ability to let the objects speak for themselves without the scientist pre-judging what the observed phenomena is made of (see Isabelle Stengers work on science for some excellent commentary on this view of science). Any attempt to determine in advance what the social is made of (individuals, communities, ethnicities, nations, etc.) is ultimately an idealist conceit.

By contrast, Latour argues that we can replace the setting up of artificial boundaries with the analysis of the elements which always exist in debates over the nature of groups. These elements pertain to the aspects of processes which generate continually evolving and changing groups. So, for example, the first element is “to have spokespersons which ‘speak for’ the group existence.” (31) In the Iraqi situation, this occurs at multiple levels, one which we may call the initial, material level (the level of the Iraqis themselves), and another at the reflective, media/political level (consisting largely of the Americans). On the first level, the dynamics can be largely mystifying, particularly for outside observers such as ourselves. There are the 4 major groupings of the Iraqi situation – the Shiite, Sunni, Kurds, and the Americans (and their coalition). (Keeping in mind Latour's arguments against traditional social science, these groupings are used only as a preliminary starting point, since any study must start somewhere.) These groupings are voiced by a variety of different actors, religiously, politically, and militarily. Obviously, these different spokespersons are not working in tandem, which not only leads to a tension-filled and dynamic group of Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds, but also invites splinter groups and militias to develop their own spokespeople. Thus, to take the most prominent examples of late, the Shiites have come upon a major faultline in the division between the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who speaks for the nationalist Shiite, and the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who speaks for the elected government (albeit a government elected with the help of gerrymandering). On the other hand, the Sunnis are organized not only along the more radical al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) lines, but also among numerous militia groups which have been co-opted into the Awakening program initiated by the US military. The Kurds, are perhaps the most successful group in Iraq, and the most cohesive amongst their voices, but there are undoubtedly different voices for the Iraqi Kurds and the nearby Turkish Kurds (which, along with Iran’s Shiite influence and Saudi Arabia’s Sunni influence, shows the futility of any analysis which preemptively attempts to box in Iraq). Lastly, the Americans reveal in particularly clear fashion how spokespeople can construct groups – prior to the Awakening initiative, Sunnis consisted largely of numerous tribes, each with their own distinctive voice (projected politically and militarily). Each sought not only to ensure their own victory in the power struggles amongst themselves, but also to expel the American occupation and resist Shiite domination (and revenge). With the support of US funds and the declaration of an “Awakening” movement, however, the Americans were able to produce a group largely united against AQI and refraining from attacking Americans. The homogeneity of the group was increased through an influx of money and the American and Iraqi government's public voicing of their unity (albeit not without significant internal fractures remaining).

The Awakening Councils' defining of itself against AQI also shows Latour's 2nd element of group-formation - that of defining alternative groups (which may be opposed to the initial group, or merely indifferent). These groups provide the context within which a social grouping unfolds - a context that is itself continually changing as groups redefine themselves and others. Moreover, this means that the context is not 'discovered' by the impartial observer or social scientist who alone can see the 'whole picture'. Rather, the context is created by the actors themselves, without any necessary regard for social science's clean demarcations. Viewed from a hypothetical (albeit impossible) overarching view, it can also be seen that each group creates its own context (there are similarities here to Luhmann's idea of a system) which need not correspond to the contexts created by others. Rather, there are overlapping and interacting sets of groups and their contexts.

The framing and creating of groups, however, isn’t restricted to the initial level on Iraqi soil. The American media has played a large part in acting as spokespeople for the various groups involved, constructing them in numerous ways. A prime example of this would be the naming of so-called "Special Groups" which the American government created (and the media picked up) to refer to the groups which Maliki was ostensibly targeting in the recent military offensive. These were the supposedly rogue elements of Sadr's group who had refused to follow his declared ceasefire and had been co-opted by Iran against US forces. Despite their declared intentions, it seems clear from the actual military operations that the target was not simply a few Special Groups, but rather Sadr's entire Mahdi Army. The grouping here had been created merely as a political cover for Maliki (with American support) to attack and repress a political (anti-American) rival.

Another example of the media's function in creating groupings (this time, for its American readers) is the seemingly recent revelations by most of the media that the Shiites are not a unitary and homogeneous group, but involve numerous groups competing for power. This simplification is largely a matter of knowledge (how many media outlets had experts on Iraq before the war?), but it’s also a matter of business (with consumers of the media generally preferring simple stories). More importantly, it’s also a matter of the fact that despite the media or academia’s attempts to postulate intrinsic groups (whether as Arabic, Islamic, Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Iranian, etc.) and then map out their interactions, the process of group-formation continues regardless. The objects themselves have an agency of their own that is irreducible to any reflective construction by an observer. This, I believe, constitutes a portion of Latour’s unique brand of materialism whereby the objects of study – even ‘social’ objects – have aspects irreducible to any conceptualization.

This process can be seen in the recent (politically genius) move on Sadr’s part to turn to the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq, Ali al-Sistani (i.e. the highest religious Shiite authority in Iraq) for his thoughts on whether Sadr’s militia should be forced to disband under Maliki’s orders. Knowing full well that Sistani would rule in his favour (as he had in the past), Sadr effectively used the appearance of a deference to the Shiites' religious spokesperson to ultimately incorporate Sistani’s approval as a new spokesperson for Sadr’s cause. In other words, Sadr has expanded his group by subtly requesting the approval of the spokesman above both Sadr and Maliki’s in-fighting. In some ways, this can be seen as Sadr's attempt to become the voice of the Iraqi people (as a unified nation, and not merely a heterogeneous conjunction of disparate sects and religions). The extension of Sadr's nationalist leanings via Sistani's tacit approval makes his easily the most politically influential group outside of the government, and the one most agitating for Iraqi nationalism. As is apparent, Sadr’s group is continually in process, and continually open to change. As is Maliki’s however, who recently received the verbal support of the Iranians (Maliki, of course, is also supported by the US, along with having a militia composed largely of ex-Iranian Revolutionary Guards – throwing into complete disarray any narrative which rationalizes staying in Iraq as a means to repel Iranian influence!)

Now as Latour points out, it is fairly common to say that groups must be constructed or changed. Where Latour believes actor-network theory differs, though, is that the classical accounts see what is being changed or constructed as being composed of the same material - the social. Change and innovation are merely transitory expressions of the social substance in this way. For Latour, on the other hand, without the performance and voicing of a group, there simply is nothing. The group has a tendency to dissolve in a sort of social law of entropy. If Sadr's group doesn't continue to pay deference to their leader, if they act against the wishes of Sadr (as some have in their disavowal of the declared ceasefire), then they dissolve into multiple smaller militias or small-scale communities and families.

Beyond the changes though, each grouping must also attempt to stabilize their boundaries (this is Latour's 3rd element). In the Iraqi situation, this has largely occurred via territorial occupation, with Maliki confined to central Baghdad and Sadr dominating southern Basra and the surrounding areas. But with their recent acquisitions of new spokespeople (Maliki with Iran, and Sadr with Sistani), they can also be seen as trying to stabilize their groups via appeals to other authorities, religious and political. As we also mentioned, Sadr may be attempting to invoke Iraq as a territorial and national entity to generate new associations for his group. However, in the highly dynamic setting of Iraq, with elections coming up fairly soon, and violence and its effects a constantly unpredictable factor, the reliance on stabilizing a political grouping appears to be a maladaptive behaviour. The context is continually changing and new associations are continually arising at an abnormally rapid pace, making stability a sure-fire way to be left behind or destroyed.

This dynamism is what gives Iraq the appearance of anarchy or chaos to an outside observer, yet it should be clear from this analysis that even rapid change doesn't entail chaos. There are clear movements (in both its dynamic and group sense) at work in Iraq and the surrounding area. That being said, the study of these movements must, of necessity, be seen as contributing to their very creation. Latour's fourth and final element points out that the study of these groups and their voicing is no different from the mechanisms which construct the groups in the first element. That is to say, both entail using spokespeople to construct a group; the social scientists merely use different tools to delineate them and have the privilege of occupying a 'professional' social position to speak from. Political analysts, media members, and social scientists all function along with the Iraqis and Americans on the ground to assemble the social groups. With this necessary embedding of social science into politics, the question then becomes how can social science be put to a progressive use? Going beyond any attempt to delineate a 'pure' space of disembodied observation which would leave unaffected the object of study, social science must grapple with its necessary involvement in constructing the social.

The Object of Philosophy

While beginning in a fairly straightforward fashion – through an idiosyncratic, albeit persuasive re-reading of Heidegger’s analysis of tools – Graham Harman’s Tool-Being ultimately takes a turn towards the strange in the final pages. This is not to say that it is unconvincing – far from it, as Harman provides a detailed and dense series of arguments to generate his points – but the final result is certainly a unique system of speculative metaphysics that recalls Leibniz’s system in its aberrance.

The main argument of the work is that Heidegger’s notion of readiness-to-hand and his analysis of tools have been consistently misread in anthropocentric terms. Rather than being merely the practical or useful (for Dasein), or the unconscious, pre-theoretical experience of objects, tools instead index an inaccessible realm of the object itself. Against the common interpretation of Heidegger which sees him moving from the Dasein-centered work of the Being & Time-era into the being-centered later work (reaching its apex in the notions of Ereignis and the fourfold), Harman argues that already in Being & Time (and, in fact, even in a 1919 lecture), Heidegger has already moved beyond any subject-centered perspective into the obscure locus of the objects themselves. It is the tool analysis which accomplishes this by critiquing any form of presence-at-hand in favour of the obscurity of the readiness-to-hand. Moreover, it is not simply a small selection of beings which contain this tool-being (such as only useful items, or productive items); rather, all beings partake in this dual structure of tool-being and presence. Each being can be presented in certain phenomenal aspects, but at the same time it recedes beyond any presence into the depths of tool-being.

One of the central points, however, is that this occurs not merely in the presencing to Dasein, but also in objects presencing to themselves. Thus, causal interactions between even inorganic entities involve the dual structure of tools and presence. To take the classical billiard ball example, when they strike each other they present themselves as objects with a particular density, momentum, and velocity; what recedes in this interaction is any number of other factors, such as the colour of the ball, the number on it, the sub-molecular fluctuations of matter, as well as any number of other aspects. To overcome any subjectivist bias associated with the term ‘presence’, Harman borrows Whitehead’s ‘prehension’ to refer to this encountering of objects – objects prehend each other, while at the same time withdrawing from that prehension. Independent of any subject or meaningful world, objects already take a perspective on each other by only encountering those aspects of another object that concern it. The key is, not only does any relational system between entities (including Dasein) involve an aspect of tool-being, but in principle there will always be some aspect of the object itself that recedes from the relational system it finds itself within.

Here we stumble across one of the major themes of Harman’s work, as well as one of its more interesting points – the polemical argument against the tendency of much contemporary philosophy to reduce entities to being mere effects of all-encompassing relational networks. While acknowledging the profound effects of the context within which an entity is placed, and simultaneously acknowledging the critiques of naïve substance metaphysics, Harman believes neither position gets to the heart of (the) matter. It is only within a relational network that we can have entities presented to us, or have them present themselves to each other, but at the same time, this network fails to exhaust the being of the beings. To my Deleuzian-saturated mind, this comes across sounding much like the concept of assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari develop, particularly in their emphasis on the externality of relations (something Deleuze in fact argued for from his very first book on Hume). The components of an assemblage can be extracted from their situatedness and placed within a new assemblage, entering into novel relations that reveal otherwise unused capacities of the entity in question. Where they differ, I believe, is in Harman’s insistence on the “subterranean” nature of the entity. It is constitutively impossible to exhaust or bring to presence the tool-being of an object, even through (as in Husserl) successive adumbrations of an object. In Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, I would argue that the components of an assemblage are themselves subject to the operations of individuation which, while being incapable of being presented as an object, can still be thought. There is no inherently inaccessible aspect of beings. The caveat here would be that Tool-Being comes across predominantly as an initial arrow shot in the direction of a much larger project. As such, the intricate details of how tool-beings function in their withdrawnness is still underdeveloped and for most of the book they are instead invoked as a “mysterious X”.

Harman does, in the final chapter, turn to a more specific analysis of what tool-being entails. The first aspect to be noted is the not only is each entity disjunctively both present being and tool-being, but each tool-being is impurely both aspects itself. This can be seen in the example of a bridge that Harman refers to throughout the book: the bridge is itself a being, and as such contains some measure of withdrawn tool-being. Thus, for a vehicle travelling over the bridge all that is prehended is what permits it to traverse the bridge. For the human observer, other aspects come into play such as the beauty of the bridge, or the size of the bridge (which may invoke vertigo, for example). Any prehension of the bridge, however, will still entail some withdrawn tool-being of it. So the trestles or cables that compose the bridge are not presented as such in the bridge-being (of course they can be looked at, but this is to move to a different being). But a moment’s reflection suffices to reveal that even for the bridge, its component parts withdraw into their own tool-being. So, for example, the cable-beings of the bridge are only prehended in particular aspects by the bridge, while some immeasurable amount of their tool-being withdraws. The relational network which is unified into the bridge-entity is incapable of exhausting the beings of its own parts, and hence each tool-being has its own tool-beings. Therefore, the first oddity to result from Harman’s work is that there is an in(de)finite regress of tool-beings.

The second oddity is the argument that “if every entity is already made up of a set of relations, the converse is also true: every set of relations is also an entity.” (260) The distinction between substance and accident is dissolved here as any new relation which an entity enters into suffices to produce a new entity. The reason why is that there is no ontological criteria capable of distinguishing between substances and their accidents. Typically, as Harman argues, what is employed to distinguish between “real” entities and their accidents, is some ontic criteria. For example, references to natural kinds rely upon a common sense idea of what constitutes a substance. The ontic is illegitimately deployed to make ontological distinctions. The indistinguishability of substance and accident or entity and relation generates a number of questions though – most importantly, what are the “ontological firewalls” that protect one entity from being affected by another? The risk here is that without some sort of firewall, Harman’s system will simply be dissolved into precisely the relational holism he’s struggling to get out of. Everything will affect everything and the specificity of a particular tool-being will again be lost.

The provisional answer Harman seems to reach is to regard entities as machines. That is to say, each entity is defined by its formal system of relations that it composes across its elements. Using the example of a piece of silver, Harman says it “is a machine, a formal reality by which subsidiary entities are arranged in an efficacious pattern. It is a real unity, and not just an aggregate surface effect at the ontological mercy of its parts. … If these protons were scattered at random across the universe instead of being effectively arranged, the silver-reality would also be hopelessly lost.” (282)

With this idea of an entity, Harman is capable of furnishing a view of the world profoundly at odds with most contemporary philosophy. Strictly speaking (and this would be the 3rd oddity), there are no relations, only entities encompassing machinic relations. (Even human perception is simply the new entity composed by the relation between an object and the perceiving subject – a perception-being.) Reality is therefore composed of entities and solely entities; moreover, these entities exist monadically, independent of each other (yet capable of entering into new relations with each other and creating new entities). Lastly, there is an indefinite regress of tool-beings that forever exceed the relational unity they find themselves within. There is, in other words, infinite levels of different beings interacting in numerous ways, each with its own independent being. Perhaps most oddly, Harman’s definition of entities as machines leads to a radical reformulation of materialism (and perhaps, should more precisely be called a realism): “What separates this model from all materialism is that I am not pampering one level of reality (that of infinitesimal particles) at the expense of all others. What is real in the cosmos are forms wrapped inside of forms, not durable specks of material that reduce everything else to derivative status. If this is ‘materialism’, then it is the first materialism in history to deny the existence of matter.” (293)

With all this in mind, Harman concludes that the objective of philosophy is “a kind of reverse engineering. … In the case of the philosopher, the finished product that must be reverse-engineered is the world as we know it. … Behind every apparently simple object is an infinite legion of further objects that ‘crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another’.” (296) As in my previous post, however, my primary question still remains: in what way can these ontologies critically reflect on contemporary socio-political situations? If the task of philosophy is to reverse-engineer the world, to what end is this undertaken in the name of? In Tool-Being, Harman is almost entirely silent on the ontological nature of ideas or language or culture, instead preferring (justifiably) to focus on inorganic objects themselves, against the typical philosophical focus on language. While the questions go unanswered there, with an upcoming book to be released on Bruno Latour's social theory, it appears Harman also feels compelled to expand beyond the inorganic.

On Contemporary Materialism

One of the most interesting and engaging trends to emerge in recent contemporary philosophy is the attempt to develop a rigorous materialism - one shorn of any hand-wringing over the inevitable mediation of language, with its endless hermeneutics and language games. Against the interpretation which would see immanence as the common theme of cutting-edge philosophy (and this I take to be one of the claims of John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy), it is rather materialism which provides the basic framework for much of the more interesting work today. Immanence itself is a fairly common thesis, put forth at least since Kant's rejection of the transcendent uses of reason; materialism, on the other hand, seems to me to be only a fairly minor position (Marx excepted, of course). It is only lately that it has really become a widespread movement. As Lee Braver shows in his excellent A Thing of This World, most of 'continental' philosophy - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, along with many, many others - are all idealist in the sense of focusing on the linguistic and representational construction of reality. This idealist tendency has had a number of unfortunate side effects: foremost, in my mind, being the fear of science. This is no doubt thanks in large part to Heidegger's criticisms, but also, I would argue, because the idealist tendency has played into the literature circles who would (obviously) much rather endlessly interpret passages of Joyce, than perform experiments or grapple with mathematical equations. (Not that there's anything wrong with either!)


One of the startling parts of contemporary materialism, on the other hand, is the full-fledged willingness to incorporate scientific discoveries into their philosophical system (without, for all that, making philosophy simply subordinate to science as some analytic philosophy has done). Deleuze, being the devourer of any and all knowledge, makes biology and evolutionary theory one of the central points of his philosophy. He also cites esoteric debates over early calculus interpretations, and references virtually unknown mathematicians like Albert Lautman, along with incorporating Gilbert Simondon's previously unknown work on technology and scientific models of individuation. Alain Badiou, of course, makes the radical (for continental philosophy) claim that mathematics is the discourse of ontology. While set theory provides the basis for his ontology, in Logiques des Mondes, category theory has become the new discourse used to illuminate the relationality of worlds. Ray Brassier, in his work Nihil Unbound (which I aim to read in the next little while) cites Paul Churchland who is famous for his denial of qualia (the subjective experience of the world) and his reduction of the mind to neurological functions. Graham Harman, meanwhile, makes the constant polemical plea in Tool-Being to return to the things themselves, against the repetitive movement into deeper and deeper conditions of things. Quentin Meillassoux, lastly, makes his 'correlationist' argument by employing scientific data to show the existence of an item which escapes any idealist tendency to make the world (even an independent one) necessarily correlated to thought. The "arche-fossil" indexes a truly materialist world, one that has only retroactively been discovered by science.

As a result, part of what makes aspects of contemporary materialism (also known as speculative realism) truly exciting is its potential to bridge gaps that have been virtually impassable for 100 years. The gap between analytic and continental philosophy can be decreased since one of the hallmarks of many modern materialists is not only their commitment to scientific insights, but also the clarity of their writings. No longer bound to respect the infinite interpretability of texts, these thinkers often provide some of the clearest arguments for their positions to be found in continental philosophy. This overcomes the immediate hurdle which plagues any reconciliation between analytic and continental camps, namely the difficulty of entering into continental discourse. The respect that the materialists have for science also facilitates this reconciliation, while hopefully giving pause to those analytic philosophers who dogmatically make philosophy secondary to science. Therefore, science, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophy need not be seen as mutually exclusive interpretations of the world, but rather mutually conditioning forces that aim at (perhaps) different levels of reality.

One question that initially arises, though, is the relation of contemporary materialism to the more classical accounts. In particular, the Marxist form of materialism. In what sense can these be productively related to each other? Does the modern form of realism sacrifice all the materialist insights of the Marxist account? I'll leave the details to some one more well-versed in Marx than I, but the questions seem worthwhile.

More generally though, and more importantly, what does contemporary materialism have to say about socio-political issues? In what ways does developing an object-centred ontology change the ways we perceive specifically human issues? This, to me, seems to be one of the major failings of Manuel DeLanda's otherwise excellent work - the negation of any sort of specifically cultural or human aspects. In his rigorously materialist history of societies, there is no question of gender or racial or ethnic identities, or any sort of immaterial power struggles. His reduction is more of a physical reduction than a material reduction, effecting a sort of synthesis of sociobiology and complexity theory. While the complexity theory avoids any strict determinism, the sociobiological aspect seems to leave aside the primary questions about the uniqueness of human societies, instead reducing them to merely plays of physical flows. Is this the necessary endpoint of materialism? Or can there be a materialism that avoids the physicalist bias, and provides a viable explanation of systems like culture, language, religion, and international relations?

Ray Brassier - undoubtedly the theorist pushing the nihilistic implications of speculative realism to its ultimate conclusions - still retains a focus on struggling against capitalism, as attested to in a number of his articles and works. This would suggest that he believes that materialism still has a powerful voice to critique modern socio-political systems. Badiou also believes his form of materialism is capable of introducing revolutionary sequences into politics, in the form of a generic community of equal entities forcing change upon the situation. Gilles Deleuze, too, argues that his transcendental materialism reveals an absolute becoming that escapes even capitalism's destruction of all stable points, effecting a revolutionary change that refuses to be bound by exploitative structures.

Anyways, I'm presently making my way through Graham Harman's Tool-Being, and I'll hopefully put up some thoughts on it when I get inspired to do so. It's fascinating to see the emergence of a new philosophical position, but nearly all of the important issues are missed in summary posts like this one. So I intend on tackling the details in future posts, if I get the chance to. For anyone who's interested though, there's also a discussion going on over at Larval Subjects about very similar issues, including a debate over art's contribution to a meaningless, material world.

Experimenting with Badiou

Alain Badiou's latest essay, a piece in the New Left Review, has already stirred a number of reactions in the blogosphere (see Poetix and Long Sunday). For myself, the piece resonates with some themes I've covered recently, wherein the question of "what is to be done?" is raised in regards to our event-less times. More specifically, it appears that in this essay we can see Badiou call explicitly for an "experimental" politics:

"[O]ur task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. ... What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth."

In particular, the experiment called for here is to reintroduce the political subject - i.e. the universal and radically egalitarian collective - into the contemporary situation. This present situation, Badiou characterizes in terms of a division into two. Against the false proclamations (by supporters and critics) of the new age of integrated, all-encompassing global capitalism, Badiou points to the fact that most of the world's population remains exterior to the market (being barred from its benefits, but in many cases also being barred from even entering it). As Poetix notes, capitalism presents a false universality - while claiming to incorporate all regardless of their ethnicity, religion, location, gender, class, etc., capitalism in fact installs a particular substantial community (the "West", Badiou says) as the universal.

Instead of this false universality, Badiou proclaims the true universality of the communist subject (defined not as the proletariat, but as the radically generic community devoid of any predicative differences). It is this subject that has emerged in various revolutionary sequences throughout history (Badiou names two in the essay), and it is this subject that Badiou hopes to call forth through his counter-declaration to capitalism's simulacra of universality.

Here, though, we reach the intriguing portion. As Poetix rightly points out, what's conspicuously missing from Badiou's piece is any reference to an event that his declaration would be naming. For the reader used to hearing about Badiou's concept of the event, this is indeed a little mystifying. A declaration without event, however, makes more sense in the context of Badiou's calls for an experimental politics. On some level, in fact, the case could be made that a declaration-without-event is no different from a declaration-with-event. In either case, the event is never to be found, appearing only to disappear. The event, in this sense, is more of an inspiration, or an injunction forcing recognition of something outside established knowledge. What is left after the event's disappearance is but the trace of the event that is constructed by a naming (as in Being & Event), or by a performative statement (as in Logiques des Mondes). The militant truth-procedure then proceeds from these declarations and constructs a generic set by investigating the situation in light of that declaration.

The absence of an event therefore entails that any universal statement be an experimental statement, rather than a statement extracted from an event. In either case, though, the statement is performatively true - in one case, being an unjustifiable decision that the event occured, and in the other case being an experimental declaration. This indeed seems to be suggested by Badiou himself:

"The simple phrase, ‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration."

The point then is that in our age where we find ourselves devoid of events, activist politics must experiment with declarations concerning the universal political subject in an attempt to see what occurs. To a lesser degree, this seems to be the idea behind Badiou's own explicitly experimental political group, the Organisation Politique, where they have made specific declarations concerning very local situations (most famously, with the status of undocumented immigrants). The novelty of Badiou's latest essay therefore appears to be the grander scale of the declaration. While still specific to our present situation, the declaration 'there is only one world' is irreducibly global in character.

Whether such an experiment will work is obviously debatable. Moreover, the ethics of experimental declarations seems obscure at the moment. What are the limits to performative statements? Granting that they must be universal and addressed to all, can there not still be reactionary and conservative declarations? It seems to me, however, that insofar as Badiou's system privileges moments of unpredictable rupture, experimenting with declarations seems to be one of the most obvious ways to generate a political subject, without having to rely on an event.

Meme Me

Thanks to Fido the Yak, I've now been involved in my first internet meme. Very exciting!

The steps are:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five bloggers.

I'm going to skip the last step because this meme has been making it's way around for a while now, and I'm sure there's not many bloggers left untouched. Regardless, the book I chose (or rather, was forced to choose) was The Praxis of Alain Badiou, edited by Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens, and published by re:press (support the independents!). Page 123 happens to open up onto a review essay of Badiou's Logiques des Mondes:

"He gives an excellent account of Hegel, a formal account of what he calls the 'three transcendental operations' (zero, conjunction and the envelope) of appearing, as well as a brilliant demonstration of the superiority of Badiou's own 'Grand Logic' over 'ordinary logic'. This section is a kind of compressed tour de force, in which the familiar operations of ordinary logic (and/or/implication/negation, the quantifiers) are derived from Badiou's new categories of minimum, maximum, conjunction and envelope. The book concludes with a notice: 'What is a classical world?' There we find that such a world has double negation and excluded middle as valid principles, that 'a classical world is a world whose transcendental is Boolean', and that - as Badiou has said elsewhere - ontology is such a classical world."

There we go. Not exactly the sexiest topic (where's my Bataille when I need him?), but such is the way things go.