Alain Badiou - What is Freedom?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q_FQj9fo6A&feature=related

In this post I offer a short and simplified elucidation of what Badiou opposes against the notion of freedom in 'expressive dialectics'. Against the relativization of truth, subjectivity and freedom to the sphere of individuals and cultures, bodies and languages, Badiou relates freedom to his doctrine of the event. An event for Badiou is an occurance which exceeds and resists its appropriation by the state in the situation where it happens, and which thereby opens the possibility for a new process of truth. A subject is the one who maintains fidelity to the event of truth, and which carries forth its consequences in a series of enquiries. The subject is thus always local; there are some subjects at some moments in the process of the unfolding of a truth. It is essentially distinguished from the traditional subject qua individual, or substance. For Badiou a subject is always creative in the sense that it opens new possibilities, and gradually works to develop them creating new situations.

Truth procedures are of four kinds (as a matter of historical fact, not in principle): scientific, political, artistic and amorous. An event is the emergence of a new scientific theory, a sequence of revolutionary politics, a new artistic school or a new love. Analogously, a subject would be the radical decision to remain faithful to the consequences opened by the event: Newton, Schoenenberg, Lenin, and Proust all become subjects insofar as they produce a new situation by remaining faithful to an event which disrupts the normality of the state, and begin a process which ultimately creates a new situation. That being said, we can offer the following clarificatory remarks to Badiou's exposition on the freedom of the subject, and its distinction from expressive dialectics:

1) Freedom cannot be expression in the sense of a harmony between the individual and the state of the situation: this means that freedom does not emergesin the possibility of merely reconlicing the desire of the self with the demands of state, or in the expressivity of the first within the possibilities offered by the latter. It is not a dialog between the body which makes up an individual and the social sphere to which he belongs. Rather, freedom emerges in carrying out the consequences of an event that, as a process, produces a new situation. This procedure is the action of a millitant subject of truth; the subject does not express itself, but essentially exists as a moment in the creation of a new subject (of science, politics, art or love). The subject of truth is exactly that: the local moment committed to chance in an specific enquiry, within the generic procedure which constitutes the unfolding of a truth inside the situation.

2) Freedom is not the expression of the individual self; it is always a choice against ourselves: Since we are imbedded into a situation which is regulated by the state, the expression of the individual will inside a culture is the direct expression of its prescriptions and what is admitted as knowledge inside of it- it is not an act of freedom, since by expressing itself it is already constituted by what the state determines. The imperative of enjoyment, of self creation, the roles and classes which an individual can adopt as expressive gestures of his freedom are already incorporated by the state. The gesture of expression and of recognition remains thus within that which is identifiable by the state .The subject of truth is on the other hand a fragment in an specific moment of fidelity within a truth procedure, which is fundamentally outside the objectivity of the situation where it happens. We can say, to use another of Badious's terms, that a truth is subtracted from the objectivity of situation. It is not a mere negation of the state, it is essentially a new framework for the organization of the multplicities which conform the situation.

Given that we are never simply spontaneously free in expression, and since we are subjected to the injuctions of the State (properly the unconscious of ideology) freedom cannot be the expression of a body or culture (say, of class struggle, or the working class, of the party, of african americans, homosexuals, and so on). Those names are already a part of the situation and not, as in traditional revolutionary politics, something which emerges as the possibility of expressing that which was until then impossible. Classes are, in the battlefield of contemporaneity, already part of the democratic state, and not the potency for freedom.
3) Summary and Overview: The expressive attempt to seek a harmony between social expression and individual desire is tantamount to a continuation of the normality of the state, and not of freedom. As we said, freedom is a production in that in does not coincide with the possible of the state, and so it is not achieved by seeking a harmony with it. It is not merely the subjective pronounciation in the social field, but the creation of something which opens a new field for expression, a new possibility previously impossible or unthought.

To summarize: freedom is in the side of the subject, of truth, of the event, of struggle and novelty.

Non-freedom is in the side of the individual, of knowledge, and of the state, of submission to the norm, whether explicit or implicit, and fundamentally included (represented) in the situation.

4) Finally, this is why we can say that both:

a) 'There are only individuals and cultures...': inside any particular situation what appears are bodies and cultures, individuals and the states which regulate them.

b) '...but there are universal truths': a truth bores a hole in established knowledge; something happens which is not under the regulation of the state, a subject emerges in fidelity to an event and its consequences, which are not relative to any given bodies or languages in the situation, even if the situation is strictly only composed of them. It is an 'inventile exception' to the state of the situation, and so outside the sphere of knowledge.

Against Historicist Hermeneutics

Our epoch’s ethical orientation can be best summarized as that of an avowal of a hermeneutic understanding of human nature, and of a restriction of the notion of politics to the sphere of cultural conflicts. This hermeneutic understanding begins by opposing itself to the modern univocal conception of human reason and nature by which we could safely judge different propositions, cultures, historical periods and forms of life. Thus, in a somewhat post-modern fashion, the hermeneutic orientation begins by pairing the Nietzschean suspicion against universal truths with the hermeneutic historicism proper to Heidegger or Gadamer, in order to delimit the methodological principles prior to ethics or politics. Since reason and truth are context-sensitive, it follows that an ethical questioning seeking to incorporate multiple cultures must avoid reductionisms to any one particular conception of reason, and must rather be receptive to understanding the plurality of discourses and forms of life in their dignified difference. What we have all in common is that we are all in fact different, unique individuals, in a world sharing various cultures, customs and idioms. In this sense the hermeneutic vision accepts reason as the democratic tribunal for the pacified exchange between distinct cultures in the common project of mutual understanding and of an effective politics. We may thus speak, following Badiou, of an equation between philosophy qua the discourse of the being of truth and democracy. The democratic principle tells us that all individuals and cultures are free to participate in the dialog of ethics or politics, and present their own views and opinions. Furthermore, it asserts that no subject is in principle excluded from the opportunity to participate in the dialog of reason, and so (in Badiou's language) the axiom of 'equality of minds' proposes a tribunal of practical reason which welcomes the alterity of Otherness in its fullness, and escapes the dark destiny of metaphysics once and for all.

A forgetfulness of this democratic principle, or so the hermeneutic story goes, follows to the barbarities of violence, discrimination, struggle, and war. Evil is seen as a continuation of the metaphysical violence of an ethnocentric conception of reason and is thus equated to non-democracy. If we fail to obtain a hermeneutic understanding of truth, we fold back into the metaphysical violence of onto-theology, the elevation of an entity or being into the rank of God, or supreme guarantor of knowledge, and thus to the horrors proper to totalitarian terror and the non-democratic excesses of power. Against a representationalist conception of truth which sees the intellect as mirroring the world and the task of reason as proving a singular unifying discourse about the real, a hermeneutic conception sees truth as the structural worldview proper to a peculiar culture and historical time. Against the metaphysical understanding of ethics which sees practical reason as the transparent tribunal to the universality of the Law, the hermeneutic version anthropologizes ethics in favor of a contextualism of tolerance, admitting the plurality of cultures and ways of life in their own dignity. In sum, whereas the old metaphysics identifies reason with similarity and the supression of alterity by seeking foundations, the hermeneutic worldview sees alterity as foundational for identity. It rests on accepting alterity by first accepting the radical finitude of our being and the openness of truth for human thought. By historicizing truth, the task of reason becomes fusion (in Gadamer’s sense) rather than reduction, multitude rather than foundation, the openness of contingency as opposed to the closed spectrum of universality or necessity.

The multiplicity of cultures and forms of life is accepted and protected under the banner of democratic freedom. To the axiom of equality of minds we may thus supplement that the anthropologization of ethics in our times proposes an axiom of equality of cultures. Not only are individuals free and ends in themselves qua individuals, like Kant proposed, but all cultures and traditions share this integrity as well. The fascination of our contemporary notion of human rights, for example, seeks both to secure the liberties of the individual as well as those of the forms of life he/she integrates; the individual is to be protected as the one who harbours the historical truth of his time and of his freedom to participate in a distinctive way in a world. We can thus summarize this principle along Badiou in saying that for today's political ideology there are only bodies and languages, only individuals and cultures.

Since the hermeneutic orientation of thought assigns no ontotheological privilege to any one conception of reason or truth, there are no available procedures to disavow an ethical position in principle. Ethical truth can only attain the rank of universality, paradoxically, by accepting the possibility that the objectivity it claims for itself is not transitive to other situations. So in this view the ultimate horizon for ethical truth is in fact the democratic openness to dialog and discourse, always relative to culture and history. More than a plain relativism in which all judgments or opinions are equivalent, the axioms of equality of minds and cultures value the recognition of plurality and thus equate evil to the denouncement of Otherness, or what amounts to the same here, to non-democracy.

I would claim that this democratic fetishism found in the hermeneutic understanding of ethics goes even further in its dialectics. Not only are individuals and cultures equal in principle, but it is precisely because the ultimate horizon for the understanding of intersubjectivity is found in the historicizing of truth that an individual ought to be free to live in the way he chooses. The universality of freedom of choice supervenes on the ethical neutrality of the choices one is free to choose from. The individual must be protected because he harbors in his life the truth of his own freedom. Since the hermeneutic view opens its tribunal to all cultures and forms of life, to all debates and questions, then freedom of choice and expression can be safeguarded under the banner of democratic legitimacy and protected from the tyranny of totalitarian terror.

The consequences of this view are far reaching and obviously complicated for these purposes. I will try to summarize what I take to be four of the most important results of the hermeneutic vision of the world, drawing from the works of Badiou, Zizek and Agamben:

1) Procedures of constructive politics are expected to not exceed their situational dimension. This is to say that a local project in politics should not be construed in such a way that by its criteria and formulation, its effects are transposed to other situations in which such criteria might not be assumed, validated or wanted. The universality of human rights will safeguard the independence of nations and cultures, and thus condemn traditional revolutionary politics as acts of barbarism and all acts of violence as in principle reprehensible. The localization of truth within a democratic framework neutralizes all revolutionary attempts to oppose this democratization as acts of irrational violence against the sovereignty of freedom, democracy and human rights. As Badiou puts it "The return of the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism."

2) Since within the historicist dimension reason cannot exceed the admission of the multitude of ways of life, political procedures are assigned to culture as the cornerstone for ethico-political debate. Politics and ethics are seen as tantamount to questions about cultural/ethico/religious/political freedoms, rights of cultural minorities, ethnic groups, and so on. The inability to exceed local situations entails politics must remain intra-situational, and thus confined to expert-knowledge and specialization. There are no longer truly political questions to overlap with ethics, since there is no longer the aspiration for a new common body of politics beyond the fusion of distinct horizons in cultural dialog. Cultural difference takes the place of the political by becoming the body of a human ethics, an ethics of cultural democracy.

Democracy in this way substantializes cultures as the objective bodies which participate in the political process of politics. Thus the preservation of multiculturalism entails that whoever opposes the democratic vision of the rights of man (Muslims, fundamentalists, communists, terrorists) is excluded, criminal or tyranical. To assert as a principle the fundamental opposition to another form of life, to be intolerant to the Other is to err, to sin, to violate. Tolerance only for those who tolerate democracy. (This entire procedure of human rights can be read in the succession of wars in the name of democracy which took place during the 20^th Century as part of the crusade for ‘freedom’).

3) Individuality or particularity is more important for politics than equality or universality. The imperative to respect and conserve alterity qua the plurality of ways of life and cultures, as well as the rights of the individual to freely act, compete and develop him or herself within the democratic framework exceeds the consideration of whether there is in fact equality in the situation admitted by assigning politics to culture. The priority of freedom over equality is equivalent to the priority of enjoyment over justice. The emerging result can be viewed, as Badiou has pointed out, as that of a monstrous inequality within our Western countries and especially outside them, suggesting that “…maybe this absence of justice is the price we have to pay for freedom.”

4) As Slavoj Zizek has remarked, the old Aristotelian logic of the right measure is replaced by the injunction to enjoy as part of the constitution of the free subject. We obtain the equation identity equals freedom and freedom equals the freedom to enjoy. The freedom to affirm one’s roles and identity presupposes the availability of cultural elements and identities as something one can legitimately purchase or claim for one’s own. The objectification of culture into the object of politics is adjacent to the objectification of cultural symbols as the currency of the economy in which subjects effectively participate and in which they are constituted as such. Within capitalist market dynamics this takes the form of the radical purchase of traits, products and symbols, i.e. from fashion statements, to medical implants, to the new-age obscurantist search for trans-cultural experiences, ‘food-court’ ideology, and so on. By the same token, the exclusion of an individual from the socio-political process is tantamount to the limited access to the resources of this identification; the excluded are in fact those who are not free to enjoy and to define themselves through the assimilation of a unique identity. It thus becomes a case, to run once more along Badiou’s terminology, of a nihilistic democratic materialism, i.e. the radical purchase and disposal of all bodies. The nihilistic disavowal of meaning in the world is supplemented by the injunction of the emancipation of the individual, the call of self-creation and freedom through the elevation of the living body and the aspiration to enjoyment. It is thus both a biopolitcs of life adjacent to the hedonist creed; the excess of enjoyment is but the obverse supplement of the denial of meaning, or hedonism is the obverse of nihilism.

Once our metaphysical shackles have been loosened, the individual can in fact participate in respectful democratic dialog: he no longer seeks reductions but admitts plurality, he asserts his own position but is equally tolerant to the Other. Within the dialectics of democratic materialism, the ethical neutrality of the roles one assumes allows the constant production of roles and symbols to remain in circulation to guarantee the possibility of genuine subjects. On the other hand, the hermeneutic promise for an impartial world in which horizons are fused and in which tolerance abolishes violence easily becomes suspect once the long succession of wars under the banner of democratic freedom and human rights is put to the test. The dialectic of multicultural understanding proposes a dialog between different cultures in which the integral limits of each agent are effectively ‘fused’ or ‘expanded’ through some diplomatic procedure. To review, the obscenity of this lax logic of understanding can be roughly sketched argumentatively as follows:

a) Truth and reason is context-dependent, and not univocal or subsumable under a singular ideal of reason (anti-metaphysical foundation).

b) An ethical program that seeks to fairly consider the views and opinions of other cultures and individuals cannot begin by imposing/transposing the conceptual structures of one culture to the other, since this amounts to ignoring the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each culture.
c) Ethics thus amounts to a process of dialog in which each identity affirms itself in its radical uniqueness, the prospect of a reduction betrays context-dependency; one can at best hope for a genealogical anthropology in which the views and language of the Other are respected in their uniqueness.

And yet the promise of a democratic sphere of dialog is substantiated amidst the violence of the Western world through the very unclear notion of a ‘fusion of horizons’. We claim respect for the Other does not amount to the suppression of difference, but the admission of his radical alterity. And yet this alterity remains entrapped in regurgitating the old anti-Metaphysical slogan that reverberated in Nietzsche’s thought, announcing the death of God; or through Heidegger as the death of metaphysics. The slogans of tolerance and multicultural dialog effectively dismiss how it is to one standard that the freedom to enjoy grants respect and bows to: the democratic one. To Zizek’s challenge “Would we say Hitler was perceived as an enemy of humanity because we didn’t hear his own side of the story?” the democratic trend of thought reiterates “No! precisely because Hitler represented a totalitarian power we can say that only through dialog and democracy we can reach ethical truth for which the name is justice.” But if it is this sort of justice we take as the destiny of thought and life then we can go along with Badiou to the end and plainly state: no democracy for the enemies of democracy, no freedom for those who oppose freedom. The freedom of culture or choice thus becomes reducible to the following paradoxical qualification to the commandment of freedom: “you are free to do what you want, on the condition that you do the right thing”. The justice is tantamount to opposing the non-democratic world is perhaps too visceral a claim to consider, reason for which the slogans of tolerance and dialog can effectively coat the violence of our times behind the ideologicalfacade of humanitarian nobility.

With this prospect in mind, we can clearly demarcate the democratic project as propagating a culture without believers, a decaffeinated culture. Muslims yes, without fundamentalism, without violence. Freedom of choice, yes, as long as the choice agrees with the democratic principle and its rule. One is free to choose the cultural symbols and roles one desires freely as long as these roles are already deprived of that which effectively separates them from democracy. The objectification of culture is in this way dissolved within the prospect of a globalized world in which horizons are fused; only that those who must pay for our freedom are those whose freedom is unknowingly stepped over.

What is then the role that philosophy plays in this infinitely open dimension for dialog? If hermeneutics wants to go beyond the trivial relativist claim that different situations exist, it must rely in the proposal of an operator of consensus; the 'fusion of horizons' cannot be concentrated in the patronizing gesture of acknowledging alterity. The formal requirement that philosophy imposes is that of a criterion for objective consequences, criteria for the rational discussion to emerge. The problem then does not come in the inoffensive plea to recognize the Other, but in determining the conditions under which reason must be capable of disagreeing. Put somewhat differently, one can say the task is proposing constructive criteria which restrict what can be legitimately accepted as a respectable position. Instead of avowing an all-embracing prospect of tolerance unconsciously submitted to the rule of democratic freedom we must be ready to contest the democratic fetish. Along with Zizek, we can agree in that tolerance functions de facto as its opposite; the rule of tolerance is not the abolishing of rules, but precisely making the protection of individual liberties from harassment the priority for the State. And it is indeed only within the liberal equation of happiness to the purchase of identities within a cultural idiom that we can fundamentally oppose the non-democratic vision of the world. This obsession for a 'respect for the Other' can perhaps then be exemplified in the Anglo-Saxon qualification preceding any affirmative proposal: 'in my opinion...'.

We can safely dispense of whatever completes such claims inside a purely relativistic framework; but hermeneutics seeks more than that. The 'fusion of horizons' seeks the democratic agreement and expansion of views through a peaceful exchange in dialog. And yet beyond the fascination of alterity, the democratic world restricts the free exercise of the views which it neutrally considers. No democracy for the enemies of democracy. No freedom for the enemies of freedom. The barbarity of this circular logic should appear less compelling now than it did to vulgar skepticism. The problem seems thus that once we go beyond the 'deconstruction' of the ethnocentric modern conception of reason, and the genealogical reconstruction of Otherness through the hermeneutic method, we still lack the means to construct a new logical framework for the construction of a prescriptive new politics. Until then, the 'fusion of horizons' might appear as the helpless obscurantist chant of philosophers, extending the historicist romanticism which readily unveils but does not confront. The obsession with enjoyment and the terror of violence can thus safely continue its course without any threat from the theoreticians. At least not for now.

Against the Ageless Stones

Let us explode, in this quiet now
And close the gap that arches our soil
With the toil of memory and sacred truth,
Let us build the unfathomed link
To bind the old world, and show
How indifferent was the hiss
That sang those few who walked the shore

Let's lead astray the prowling voice,
And sink our nails into strident noise
May the tilting nerve resist the chord
And gouge our hearts for the good of all

Let our frail arms be a world
And hunt down the ascending moons
That light clear stars from veils in void
And may we never lay in the cozy mourn,
Whose slumbering rule now blinks through blight
And pats in the back the ruse to avoid
Blight’s aching glow

To shovel the pale earth’s loam,
And sow the promise of new names
To call those out…
Nothing more,
Not an inch, not a sound

Hush now...
Let us break
The insolent noise

Hush now, listen…

To the gist of those left lost

Foucault vs. Chomsky or the Impasse of Ontological Indeterminism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ai5WPHqWA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0

The debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky from 1971 serves as a wonderful example which concentrates some of the crucial philosophical knots proper to post-structuralism and its critics. Foucault, well in accord to the post-modern, Heideggerean tendencies of historicism and 'hermeneutics of suspicion', follows to the gap of Gelassenheit, the point of an impasse at the moment of prescription. He remains at the neutral point of anti-essentialist recognition: all facts are culture-bred and thus intra-situational, and thus any positive programme based on borrowed concepts is but an indulgence on ideological supports for a present system of power.

The same struggle was already put before Heidegger in the famous section on authenticity in Sein und Zeit, and its prescriptive impasse: the clash between Dasein's solitude and its ontological being as Mitdasein (being-with), of authentic resoluteness existence against the inauthentic idle talk of Das Man, and ultimately the short-circuit for decision making in facing the gap between being and beings. Familiar story, told in an unfairly synthesized version, but you get the point. Foucault's suspicion is, in effect, the distribution of the ontological gap across the entirety of the state of the historical situation. The key is to 'unmask the reigning mechanisms of power' which articulate the structure of our contemporary class society.

Here we see the standard view which produces the standard criticisms against post-structuralism: the ontological neutrality entailed by the hermeneutic approach leads to an impasse at the level of action; bridging the gap between the subject and an ontology results in the twofold constriction: the identity of the subjects and objects becomes the partially determined concept of a particular structure of power, and this indeterminacy serves to guarantee immobility at the point of agency. The results of both the standard procedures of a hermeneutics of suspicion is decidedly post-Cartesian in that the category of the subject becomes part of the situation, rather than the separate point to which we can withdraw to gain an apodictic foundation for knowledge (the theme which runs from Descartes to Husserl, even Sartre). The question of an ontology takes the place of the question of an epistemology: there is no minimum definition of the subject as a substantial ground for thought; ontology itself precludes the substantializing of the subject.

In this way, the notion of a subject qua agent is put in unstable grounds. The introduction to Badiou's 'Infinite Thought' by Feltham and Justin Clemens provides a nice synthesis of the dilemma between poststructuralists and its critics, citing the impasse of historical determinacy against the possibility of independent agency in Foucault:

"For example in his middle period, Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became accounting for the source of such resistance. If the subject - right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts - is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither."

Following the necessity to constrict the conception of the subject, post-structuralism (most notably post-Lacanian) reduces the subject to being the suture of its situation; it is precisely a-substantial; it lacks a proper place of inscription, decentered, or to use Derrida's catchy phrase, it remains 'outside the text'. This is also grounds for the Lacanian gap between the Real and language. But Foucault does not yet consider the identification of subject with the gap; if anything he remains within the negative procedure of denying foundation. This way, The 'anthropological' point of departure thus consists, paradoxically, in denying an identifiable set of traits of the anthropos to be distributed within the field of knowledge, as foundational for univocal interpretation; the subject belongs to the situation and cannot be displaced outside of it without reproducing the structures which constitute the situation as such. Thus, power becomes reiterated over and again through appeal to the substantiality of the subject, which must be escaped.

In this way, Foucault begins by calling into question Chomsky's proposal of a 'human nature' and a standard for common values departing from the very general platitudes (love, justice, freedom...) since these concepts must themselves be understood as the ideological situation in which the mechanisms of power operate. But since Foucault has neither a theory of how positive ethico/political action can occur on the part of agents, nor an ontology to give which could be used for such projections, he runs against the pragmatic accusation that post structuralism "leads down a slippery slope to apoliticism". (1)

Here Foucault assumes too much about Chomsky's understanding of the concept of 'class', and for that the latter was not capable of understanding the extent to which Foucault's argument may lead us to locate to locate the knot of the problem. The crucial misunderstanding occurs when Chomsky reduces Foucault’s notion of class as that of economic classes within capitalist societies. But one cannot understand class as that assigned to any particular historical social order, and certainly not any particular economic or political notion of class. To say the transmission of power occurs just or primordially at the level of economic classes is certainly an excess. Furthermore, Foucault is well aware that classes are always in operation in the form of concrete economical and political processes and mechanisms, within concrete situations. But what must be understood is precisely that there is no singular notion of a class which underlies uniformly human life throughout historically, ontologies are determined from within and not transcendentally. Certainly the notion of class which is structured by the operation of Marxism is different from the feudal state, just as the notion of a 'deity' is not homogenous for medieval Christian ontology as that of other cultures, and so on. Of course, we should also be prepared to go beyond Foucault and acknowledge that the process of hermeneutic interpretation does not pose an exception to the indeterminacy of this process, but that it itself becomes subject to the negative process which would expose it as operating on a certain exclusion, an absent center.

The result is clear: one cannot propose an ontology on these terms, but must operate as if the hermeneutic text was exhibiting the systematic conformity of the situation to the interpretative text. Put more simply, the hermeneutic interpretation Foucault proposes can only serve to exhibit intrinsically the structures of power if it becomes at the same time part of the interpretative text being proposed itself, the analysis of the situation is not just another edifice with its distinct classes, but an entirely independent, indeterminate system for the interpretation of situations intrinsically. Of course, one must question whether Foucault's interpretative framework, guided by the operation of power and manifested as classes does not consist itself in just another text itself including the possibility for a deconstructive reading. One may simply recall the Derrida /Gadamer fiasco on the hermeneutic ideal to get a grasp on how easily the problem of interpretation turns muddy on anti-essentialist grounds. We can thus say that, for Foucault, the category of class as circumscribed to economic class would constitute a paradigmatic example of what Kant would have called a private use of reason: recurrence to a concept which is contingent and contained within the situation where power is applied directly; class is never the class of individuals, but of the universal which allows a set of individuals to be included in the situation, i.e. to be a subset.

In any case, for our purposes it is sufficient to note that Foucault wishes to produce as a concept of class itself divorced from specific vocabularies or historical presentations. That the terms belonging to the interpretative text he proposes may itself be exhibited as groundless, contradictory or resting on its own system of classes must not deviate us from the essential direction of his thought. For what is precisely at stake is precisely how the reduction of one system to a more general one, while necessarily operating within a situation and from its own terms, may nonetheless result in a possibility for change, and thus a space for individual and collective agency to emerge.

Foucault thus uses 'class' as an absolutely general concept with respect to social, political and economic standards. Indeed, the very conceptual divisions we sketch out to begin our analysis become themselves to be questioned hermeneutically as integral parts of a particular discourse. We can say that Foucault's notion of class is effectively post-Marxist, in that the state becomes understood essentially as the establishment of a relationship to classes, or to use Badiou's helpful jargon, subsets or parts. Here we can follow Badiou's clear exposition of the Marxist concept of a class to elucidate Foucault's own usage of the term:

"Marxist thought related the State directly to sub-multiples [universal, ideological, prescriptive] rather than to terms of the situation [individual, empirical, passive]. It posits that the count-as-one ensured by the State is not originally that of individuals, but that of the multiple classes of individuals. Even if one abandons the terminology of classes, the formal idea that the State- which is the state of the historico-social situation- deals with collective subsets and not with individuals remains essential. This idea must be understood: the essence of the State is that of not being obliged to recognize individuals- when it is obliged to recognize them, in concrete cases, it is always according to a principle of counting which does not concern individuals as such... This is the underlying meaning that must be conferred upon the vulgar Marxist idea that 'the State is always the State of the ruling class'. The interpretation I propose of this idea is that the State solely exercises its domination according to a law destined to form-one out of the parts of the situation..." [B&E, Meditation 9, Pg. 105]

It is clear that Foucault is operating by the same logic here. The appeal to 'human nature', 'justice', 'freedom' and so on, cannot be understood as anything but as reintroducing oneself to the parts of the situation which the state (the representation of the historico-social situation) legitimates to be counted; there is no relation to individuals in the situation apart from what the State legitimates to be counted. Which is why Chomsky’s reply that power is not necessarily manifested in the form of classes fundamentally fails; all societies have a particular system of classes, and power is nothing but the effective human exchange which sustain the structure of these classes. So we are left, it seems, with a twofold result: a gap between the subject and justification, and the gap between negation (in the sense of unmasking/challenging the structures of power) and affirmation (in the sense of determining the space for an ontology which allows for decision without relapsing into the structures of domination).

A ‘new’ ontology should thus be both conscientious of the ontological indeterminacy of the situation while at the same time challenging the structures of power presented in the situation by unmasking their operation. At the same time, Foucault offers nothing which suggests the possibility of an ontology. We thus remain, with Foucault, entrapped in the all-too familiar anthropological, anti-essentialist theses which have become themselves another economy of power, the preservation of a certain status quo through the deployment of intra-situational platitudes. These are all well-known to most of us in their many versions: universal truths are impossible, there are only different perspectives, we are all human after all, one must be anthropologically aware and not impose our concepts onto other cultures, the attempts to elevate reason in order to justify everything misses on the dynamism of change, etc. But the equally familiar point follows that when we demand a homogeneous ethico-political project for mankind by evoking concepts such as 'freedom of choice, privacy...' and deploy a particular conceptual framework for the articulation and justification of these claims, we are relapsing into universalist metaphysics; a blindness which leads to thinking humans can be judged under one standard. As Paul would have put it, from the viewpoint of universal reason "...there are no Jews or Greeks". In order for recognition to avoid identification, one cannot operate axiomatically through the concepts which are proper to the situation as such. The question is thus the question of the gap between the different positions, or as Zizek puts it apropos of Paul: "The struggle which truly engages him is not simply "more universal" than that of one ethnic group against another; it is a struggle which obeys an entirely different logic; no longer the logic of one self-identical substantial group fighting another group, but an antagonism that, in a diagonal way, cuts across all particular groups."

This perpetual oscillation between conceptual indeterminacy and the urge for positive political action cannot be resolved within the dialectic that Foucault deploys; it is merely constrained to repeat the deconstructive process of identifying the points of suture within the present state of the situation to expose them as structures of power. The 'danger' Foucault speaks off is indeed certain, but one that ultimately must be confronted. It is the danger to be found, as recognized by Lacoue-Labarthe, of repetition as such; of the inherent mimesis intrinsic to the dialectical process which follows from the assertion universality. This immediate tension, or danger, has ran its familiar course through the post-modern tendencies of discourse, ever since Heidegger demarcated Das Man and idle talk (Garede) as the (inauthentic) danger of a withdrawal of being; a deferral of the gap between the ontic and the ontological. Similarly, Derrida's notion of differance concentrates this necessary moment of deference at the point of tension between the repetition of the concept and its inherent universality:

"To put old names to work, or even just to leave them in circulation, will always, of course, involve some risk: the risk of settling down or regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being deconstructed. To deny this risk would be to confirm it: it would be to see the signifier- in this case the name- as a merely circumstantial, conventional occurrence of the concept of as a concession without any specific effect. It would be an affirmation of the autonomy of meaning, of the ideal purity of the abstract, theoretical history of the concept. Inversely, to claim to do away immediately with previous marks and to cross over, by decree, by a simple leap, into the outside of classical oppositions is, apart from the risk of engaging in an interminable "negative theology", to forget that these oppositions have never constituted a given system, a sort of ahistorical, thoroughly homogenous table, but rather a dissymmetric, hierarchically ordered space whose closure is constantly being traversed by the forces and worked by the exteriority, that it represses: that is, expels and, which amounts to the same, internalizes as one of its moments. This is why deconstruction involves an indispensable phase of reversal. To remain content with reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to de destroyed. But to sit back, in order to go further, in order to be more radical and daring, and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free reign to the existing forces that effectively and historically dominate the field. It would be, for not having seized the means to intervene, to confirm the established equilibrium." (Dissemination)

This passage condenses the very impasse which happens between Foucault and Chomsky: the double danger. Whereas Foucault is steadfast to point out that it is necessary to elucidate how the present class system is upheld by a certain economy of power, this remains an essentially negative task, it speaks as if the elucidation of the oppositions which structure the situation could be shown as having belonged to particular framework of interpretation, external to the situation itself. In the case of Foucault, this is where an ontology of power seems to transpire: since by the hermeneutic procedure of exposing the power structures of the situation one sublates them under the mark of the general system of 'power struggle' that constitutes and allows the interpretative text to operate. On the other hand, Chomsky's position succumbs to the second danger: by neutralizing the indifference given to the classical oppositions in order to go further (i.e to show how the concepts of justice and freedom have been assumed in a particular form by the organisms of power to seek a correction on the basis of these concepts) is to relapse into the situation's terms. Here I think we have a lot to learn from Badiou and his notion of subtraction, and how for an event to happen from the situation, there must be a point of absolute (axiomatic) decision. The radicality required exceeds by far that required by opposing the empirical, circumstantial shortcomings of the state of the situation, and thus much more than Chomsky's somewhat depressing conception of 'human nature' as the foundation for a new ethics or politics.

Which is why Chomsky appears (finally) as the obvious conservative: his recognition of the brooding conceptual indeterminateness is sufficient, and ultimately folds back to some very general platitudes which appear inoffensive and trivially true, but turn out to be 'Eurocentric' or worse. Of course, it seems quite cynical to deny that human beings want goodness, love, and so on; the intuitiveness of these seems immediate. But the meaning of these concepts, and how they operate inside a concrete order where power is enforced, is the impasse of such a dialectic course. What is needed is a radical reworking of our conceptual possibilities to arrive at novel possibilities for thought which exceed that allowed by the state of the situation. And this is something neither Chomsky nor Foucault have been ever prepared to give; even if the both have militantly reacted against the present organisms of-power.

Chomsky is thus finally trapped in a rather innocent ethical ontology using very broad concepts of- 'human nature', 'kindness', 'love', and reiterating the necessity of decision in light of the gap. The state of the situation is thus condensed in the following, apparently silly dilemma: if universality fails at the realm of justification (since justification itself fails to be universal), how do we resist a posture of Gelassenheit and propose an effective reworking of our social world. Of course, for Chomsky, this occurs within the organisms of society by denouncing acts of injustice and proposing improvement at the level of economical, political states by constantly referring to the abovementioned platitudes as the standards which must be preserved.

Foucault here is right in pointing out that Chomsky's optimism in founding society using as justification certain concepts runs the danger of preserving the status quo, or trivially modify it. But Chomsky is right in that the formal indeterminateness of concrete possibilities cannot perpetuate inertia with respect to our socio political acting. Then again, Foucault is also correct in that the conceptual work must be ready to denounce commitment to fundamental notions which support the order. Finally, the task seems to require to locate the possibility of a new conceptualization of the situation so we may produce, through a sufficient theory and the will to action, a new possibility to represent the situation or, to use Badiou's term, opening the possibility for an event, the possibility of producing a novelty by announcing that which has been thus far excluded by the organisms of power and affirming new ones through axiomatic decisions. This is where Badiou, Zizek, and the like, are cooperating towards a new possibility of understanding our present historical situation.

May 1968 - Atelier Populare Posters

("The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the ATELIER POPULAIRE has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an "outside" observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political plane.")

Some wonderful material from the Atelier Populaire through the May 1968 events in France. I will comment on some of the posters later.

On Badiou's Being and Event - The Void Set

I just finished meditation 6, and my worst fears each time appear closer to becoming true. Following his formulation of the axiom of union, which states that:

"for every set, there exists the set of the elements of the elements of that set. That is, if α is presented, a certain β is also presented to which all the δ’s belong which also belong to some γ which belong to α. In other words: if γ∈α and δ∈γ, there exists a β such that δ∈β. The Multiple β gathers together the first dissemination of α, that obtained by decomposing into multiples of multiples which belong to it, thus un-counting α:

(Vα)(Eβ)[(δcβ) ↔ (Eγ)[(γcα) & (δcγ)]]"

This must follow to guarantee the consistency of the ZF system's condition that the relation of belonging to a set does not take place between elements qua individuals and sets; it takes place as the relation between sets and sets. What this implies is that for any set its members as such may be shown to be multiples themselves with other multiples as their own members. Consequentially, it is implied by the irreducibility of the multiple that for every set, another set may be formulated that includes the members of that first set as being themselves sets of another set of members, thus including the members of what the first set took as self-standing elements. We thus avoid the concentration of ontology in 'the one' multiplicity which can be counted as not being itself a set, thereby avoiding the taking of a set as being composed of elements (what Badiou thus terms 'containing the dissemination of the first set). However, this apparent constriction has its obverse offering in the axiom of the void set. At the very least, now everything turns on how Badiou will respond the second part of what he calls the ‘double-question’:

“(b) Is there a halting point- given that the process of dissemination, as we have just seen, appears to continue to infinity.”

Perhaps this knot devolves in what Alexei meant in his short note by calling attention to Badiou’s reluctance to bite the Fichtean bullet; that of asserting an infinite task. His preliminary offering of the ‘axiom of the void’ seems to be the ‘ad-hoc’ operator which can initiate the prevention of that consequence. And the way this is introduced seems too rushed, and suspiciously so:

“The solution to the problem is quite striking: maintain the position that nothing is delivered by the law of the ideas, but make this nothing be through the assumption of a proper name. In other words, verify via the exendrary choice of a proper name, the unpresentable alone as existent; on its basis the ideas will subsequently cause all forms of presentation to proceed.”

Now, perhaps I’m missing something crucial, but isn’t this merely saying ‘the axiomatic system to follow will rest by the implicit reference to a nothing, explicited only through a proper name; that is to say, with no positive account of its contents.” Of course, since presumably there is no ‘content’ to the pure multiple, in the sense that it could be accounted for explicitly by a consistent multiplicity. That is to say, the void set functions precisely in that empty term which exists only as that which both (a) doesn't belong to any set and (b) has no members and thus sets as members of its own. In what sense, should we then, take this set to exist? It exists in the sense that the name itself cannot stand without itself being quantified existentially as excluding any relation to belonging. In other words, it cannot stand as a free variable being occurring freely in a formula in which the other terms are quantified, and thus cannot be be assigned a property, i.e. it cannot function as an operator for the count-as-one. This is why the void set is defined thus:

(Eβ)[ ¬(Eα)(α c β)]

But this is approaching operational dogmatism: the axiomatic rule must be followed on the basis of a term for which not only we cannot account for- but that even attempting to account to for it becomes explicitly prohibited by its own principle. The interesting result is that this is meant to prevent the boring pseudo-Kantian impasse that we have no ‘access to the thing itself’; or put in Badiou’s own language, a consistent multiple that can serve, in its count as one (and thus affirmed consistency), as primary with respect to all other multiplicities.

Yet this seems like a transcendental copout, having designated this void as an empty term to which no multiple belongs (thus pure difference, indifferent to content). How is this anything but a formalized paraphrase of ‘that which transcends the phenomenal’ being, by definition, non-graspable by thought/language? One could without much trouble read this like the strict Kantian definition of finitude as transcendental horizon (as Heidegger does).
“There exists that to which no existence can be said to belong”, “the unpresentable is presented, as a subtractive term of the presentation of presentation”, or “a multiple exists which is subtracted from the primitive idea of the multiple”.

But then this multiple which does not conform to the idea of the multiple has the operational content of deferring its belonging to multitudes; to sets as such. This is too much- since it guarantees that as soon as we try to even utter something about the void set we already violate its own law. This is a fantastic way to use the ‘proper name’ as a philosophical deity, in the strict sense of ontotheological. Of course, the system might thereby show its consistency pretty faultlessly afterwards: that assumption in place, the rest becomes almost uninterestingly valid.

The void as that which doesn’t belong, which subsists without the quality of belonging only proper to the multiple makes this a term which hushes any objector in situ. Not only we cannot define the void, but that we can all of a sudden use it as the backbone for our entire axiomatic system without ever calling into question its consistency (for, of course, it has none).

In short, I think this (again) is a blend of the two fantasies of philosophy: the scientific rigor of inductive principles and the space for an ‘unaccountable’ term which would put an end to all pretensions of essentialism (differance, ontological difference, the inconsistent multiple). I’m not sure what to make of this, but I will nonetheless see what possibilities this offers structurally. It might not be the most interesting approach I’ve read (it’s not hard to see why Dreyfus would want to tear this guy apart) but he’s make a good job of making himself noticeable by pissing off everyone off. The analytics will abhor this intrusion of nothingness as worthy of consideration (and consider it ad hoc); continentals, especially of Heideggerean/Derridean tendency, will be appalled at pretences of the axiomatic structure that will follow. This is very nicely identifiable in the following passage:

“There are not ’several’ voids, there is only one void, rather than signifying the presentation of the one, this signifies the unicity of the unpresentable such as marked within presentation”.

This has been appropriated by Zizek through his own notion of the ‘parallax’ as designating either ‘the empty place without content’ or ‘the excess of content for which no place occurs’. Either we take this ‘void’ as an empty term for which no content can be attributed, or we take it as that which cannot be captured by the structure of (consistent) multiplicities and thus ontology; as an excess. Of course, in strict Badiouean nomenclature, saying this much would already be too much. Perhaps this is why the privilege granted to the ZF system appears suspicious from the start. Guess we'll have to see...