When Everything Seems to Change: Badiou and the Event
Posted by John Steele on December 2, 2008
Both structure and conjuncture deeply impact politics — and the tension between them runs through revolutionary theory and debates.
How much is it the very structure of class society that gives rise to a revolutionary people, and how much is it exceptional moments and crisis within particular societies?
Why did a great eruption of conciousness and revolutionary hope break out around 1968? When does tremendous discontent jell into movements for something radically better? As revolutionaries today “hasten and await” what exactly is it we are awaiting — what are its configurations, how much can coming crises of the society be anticipated, how can we work to hasten them, and how can we transform ourselves to be nimble, perceptive, influential and revolutionary when deep social crisis emerges?
Also central to these questions: How much are the transitions here defined by continuity and how much by discontinuity? How much of what we now believe will be outdated and discarded as part of the past, and how much will be crucial for navigating and understanding the new?
The radical philosopher Alain Badiou has focused a great deal of his life’s work on understanding conjuncture, through a concept he calls “the Event.” And in the following essay, John digs into that.
by John Steele
Several times in his recent Kasama #3 essay, ‘Elements of Exhaustion, or, Rubber and Glue’, Bill Martin uses Alain Badiou’s concept of “the Event.” And that appearance gave me the impetus to try to articulate this concept, which forms such an important part of Badiou’s work and which helps, I believe, open up genuinely new philosophical territory in a way that is directly relevant to rethinking the great project of revolution and human emancipation.
What is Badiou’s conception of an Event? (I will capitalize the word when the reference is to Badiou in order to avoid confusion with “event” as used ordinarily.)
Very roughly speaking, an Event is an important sort of “eruption” in some basic field of human social activity and thinking. It is, Badiou says, something which has happened “that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’,” and “which compels us to decide a new way of being.” [1]
It is something which Badiou believes is literally unpredictable and indescribable within the situation in which it occurs. It is a thrusting forward, as it were, of something that is truly new, and the status quo, the situation of things as they are and as they are accounted to be, does not have the resources to either predict or even describe the Event.
Some examples of Events in the political sphere are, for Badiou, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the Cultural Revolution in China. He also cites, among other examples, “the appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical Tragedy; the irruption, with Galileo, of mathematical physics; an amorous encounter which changes a whole life,” [2] as well as “the creation of the Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the creation of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg….” [3]
Clearly Events occur in several areas of human endeavor. (Actually Badiou thinks there are exactly four: science, art, and love, as well as the political.)
Obviously none of these are just “things that occurred.” Not only are each of these major revolutions in their (different) areas, but they are phenomena involving human desire, work, and thinking. For Badiou, in order for Events even to exist, it is necessary that people recognize and grasp them; “only an interpretive intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation.” [4]
That recognition, in turn, means little unless it is followed by an embarkation upon a new course as a result. To recognize an Event is to recognize it as potentially life-changing (and society-changing), and to catch a glimpse of a whole line of thinking and practice that follows from it. There is thus a tight linkage between the being or existence of an Event; its being recognized as such (as the eruption of the new); and the unfolding of what are seen as the consequences of the Event.
What follows from the Event
Because the Event is not describable or knowable within the parameters of the situation-as-it-is, Badiou says that the Event is supplemental to the situation. So: In order for an Event to have occurred, it must not only have been seen and recognized, there must not only have been an interpretive intervention, but a decision must have been taken to relate to the world as it is “from the perspective of its evental supplement.” [5]
For those who recognize the Event, in other words, it is something that will shift their perspective on the world, opening up a whole new landscape, so to speak – and this begins a process of re-thinking, acting, and relating to the world in terms of this Event.
Through this process – the decisions to intervene, to think and act in the light of the new perspective offered by the recognition of the Event – there comes into existence what Badiou terms a new subject: those who make a basic decision to follow this out, to relate to the situation and live their lives with reference to the Event and to follow the consequences. (Note that the subject is social, not individual.) And the process that unfolds off of the Event, propelled by this subject, is what Badiou calls a truth-process: it is the creation of new truths. (In fact, for Badiou, who makes a sharp distinction between knowledge [roughly, the summing-up of what is] and truth [= the enunciation of something new], these truth processes, born from Events, are the only means by which truths come into the world.)
Finally, just to finish an outline of the points of Badiou’s thinking about the Event, there is the question of “fidelity.” This fideligy is simply the process, ever renewed through continuing decision, of tracing out the consequences of an Event. As such, it is necessarily oppositional: “An evental fidelity is a real break (both thought and practised) in the specific order within which the event took place.” [6]
You could say that a fidelity, then, is a process of remaining faithful to the Event, not in the sense of a reverent worship or dogged hanging-on, but in a process of ever pushing-forward development of new consequences and truths. As an example Badiou cites, for instance, “the politics of the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practise a fidelity to two entangled events: the Cultural Revolution in China, and May ‘68 in France.” [7]
No guarantees
There are no guarantees in any of this, no way of proving oneself right in terms that the world recognizes, and no assurance of success in the venture. “An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable,” says Badiou. “Take the statement: ‘This event belongs to the situation.’ If it is possible to decide, using the rules of established knowledge, whether this statement is true or false, then the so-called event is not an event….On the basis of the undecidability of an event’s belonging to a situation a wager has to be made.” [8]
Event, truth-process, subject, fidelity: all of these have to be understood together; they are co-defined and highly interdependent concepts (that form a basic framework within Badiou’s philosophy). And they are each highly subject to contingency and human choice.
Without an Event there is no truth-process; equally, without the intervention which touches off a truth-process, there is no Event. But the recognition of an Event and initiation of a truth-process is at the same time the birth of a subject. And “the procedure of fidelity” [9] is simultaneously a truth-process and constitutive of the subject of that truth-process.
None of this is necessitated or determined; it is a matter of choice and active intervention without assurance or guarantee: “The undecidability of the event induces the appearance of a subject of the event. Such a subject is constituted by an utterance in the form of a wager. The utterance is as follows: ‘The event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate, nor demonstrate, to which I shall be faithful’.” [10]
Is an Event Coming to Redefine Our Times?
Badiou’s philosophy in all its ramifications, including his theory of the Event, raises many questions for Marxism (as well as for other world-views and outlooks), and I believe it’s important – vital even – to pursue these systematically. But for now I’ll just come back to some questions about the Event, and the utility and appeal of this theory for us right now.
Bill Martin spoke, in his last post, of “the extreme ‘anti-evental’ character of postmodern capitalism.” Without knowing precisely what he meant by this phrase (and I look forward to some further discussion on this point), I think all of us who have lived through the past 25 years have a deep sense of what he is pointing to. For this has been a period in which the logic of capital, in its most savage form, has remorselessly engulfed and more deeply penetrated the globe; a period in which wars, imperial and local, raged almost without cease, virtually none with any higher reason than aggrandizement of narrow interest or group; a period in which oppositional movements popped and fizzed, none able to gain a purchase in the situation for more than a few brief years; a period which in the imperial metropoles saw new modes of thought and styles of life proliferate, opposed by reactionary counter-movements – the culture wars – in a spectacle of both thinking and popular energies mobilized in such a way as to be without effect on the functioning of capital and empire.
It has been a time, in brief, which has cried out for fundamental change, for turning the world over, for a basic redefinition of terms – without anything of the sort coming forth. It has been a time without an Event.
I think this sense of fundamental stasis, of a longing for a breakthrough, is very widespread today, and by no means only among those who see themselves as revolutionary or oppositional (in fact many “revolutionaries” underwrite their own version of stasis). This widespread sense is in effect addressed and articulated and given theoretical form by Badiou, and is I think a reason for his burgeoning popularity as a thinker over the past decade. And deservedly so, for he speaks deeply and creatively to one of the central issues of our time.
If we accept that something like this is an accurate depiction of our situation today, where does this leave us? It’s worth noting that although an Event, in Badiou’s theorization, is not predictable, its occurrence is not a miracle either, not something which comes from nowhere. As Badiou emphasizes, “what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc….an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.” [“The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98]
But nonetheless, what do you do while “waiting for the event”?
I don’t want to address this question here, so much as open it up.
* * * * * *
Notes
[1] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (originally appeared 1993), 41.
[2] Badiou, “Philosophy and Truth” in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, 62.
[3] Ethics, 41.
[4] Badiou, Being and Event, 181. This results in a paradoxical reflexivity of Event and intervention: Whereas “the event alone…founds the possibility of intervention,” it is also true that “if no intervention puts it into circulation…the event does not exist.” [Being and Event, 209]
[5] Ethics, 41.
[6] Ethics, 42.
[7] Ethics, 42.
[8] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.
[9] Being and Event, 239
[10] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.
[11] “The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98.
Tell No Lies said
Thank you so much for this John. This is a remarkably concise presentation of a number of powerful concepts that I’m sure will be a help to those here who have yet to wade deep into Badiou themselves. I’ve made a number of stabs at badiou and my greatest success was with “Saint Paul, The Foundation of Universalism.”
I first encountered Badiou’s idea of the Event in Mihalis Mentinis’s “Zapatistas, the Chiapas Revolt and What It means for Radical Politics.” I have to go back and re-read it in light of my subsequent reading of Badiou, but he posed the question of whether the 1994 Zapatista uprising was an Event. I’m grappling with this question myself and am not entirely sure what I think. But in trying to figure it, the St. Paul book was useful in helping me to see beyond the spectacular character of Events like the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and May 68. Badiou’s study of St. Paul is the study of Paul’s fidelity to the Event of Christ’s resurrection, an Event that presumably didn’t even really happen but that nonetheless marked ta profound rupture with the way things were. I can’t do this little book justice here, but suffice it to say that it made me think about the problem of figuring out what precisely constitutes an Event in the flow of events. My thought is that perhaps the 1994 Zapatista uprising was not the Event, but that rather it was an earlier occurrence, that being the clandestine fusion of a conventional politico-military organization with the indigenous-campesino movement of eastern Chiapas that produced something genuinely new. Seen in this way the 1994 uprising was one, albeit quite important in a series of attempts at fidelity to the original Event.
Another way of thinking about this is to see the emergence of the Zapatistas not as an Event itself but as an expression of fidelity to the Event of May 68, which then raises the question of whether our present situation is one of waiting for an Event or rather one demanding fidelity to one that has already occurred, May 68 which represents a rupture with the saturated revolutionary sequence initiated by the Russian Revolution.
I’m thinking aloud here, but it is something I’d like to hear the responses of others to.
Eddy said
How does Badiou’s concept of history compare with Marx & Engels’ (and others’) historical materialism? Does he consider his framework to extend or to replace or to refute historical materialism?
Regardless of the cascading significance or impact, every moment in society is — most importantly — a social practice (created by population groups, not by individuals acting in isolation; a condition that never exists). Thus, any Event is the result of a process of becoming and produces further, extended social consequences.
or as Marx & Engels wrote at one pointt:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service…”
RW Harvey said
What a thought-provoking essay. When I think of an Event I think of the metaphor of Rupture, and what immediately comes to mind is the basic outlines of a revolutionary situation: the oppressors cannot rule in the same way and the oppressed cannot live in the same way. And, if I read the essay correctly, the inability to define the Event/Rupture comes from the very fact that the old no longer serves as explanation or solace and the new is too far on the horizon to offer solid footing. In other words, the world becomes exquisitely liminal.
Of course, within this liminality, there will emerge a fantastic contest over what to do, with the immanent responses of fight, flight, freeze, and a desire to return to the previous state. It seems that within this contested space is where revolutionaries can best lead, can best describe the new horizon and carve out the best road to get there. It is in this process that an event becomes an Event.
The crisis and possible disintegration of the American imperium appears to be shaping up as the Event.
As much as revolutionaries have wished this, when it happens it will be mind-imploding, as all manner of breaking apart will ensue. Revolutionaries will be tested utterly.
What should we be doing? It seems that it is impossible to “wait for the Event,” since we are a part of it. Plus, the idea of waiting does not jibe with Badiou’s theory that the event will be indescribable and therefore easily misunderstood.
This leads me to wonder openly and hesitatingly that the entire idea of “hasten and await” is misplaced. Rather, the work of exposure and raising of consciousness — regarding both the Imperium and the socialist vision of society — becomes fundamental. As the famous Einstein quote goes: we can’t solve the contradictions of the day with the same level of consciousness that created them. The irruption of the Event proves this dictum and calls us to work as hard as we can to be as close to the leading edge of the Event as possible.
zerohour said
“When I think of an Event I think of the metaphor of Rupture”
Just a quick clarification, Event should not be confused with Rupture. When Badiou spoke in NYC, he defined an Event as “the possibility of possibilities”, which is why a significant historical trauma like the Nazi regime would not be considered an Event, even though it can be considered an event, with a small “e.” As such, the notion of Event retains a sense of progress.
grumpy cat said
Eddy wrote:
Whilst Badiou refers to his method as that of the ‘materialist dialectic’ I think it is quite different from historical materialism as we commonly understand it. The Event does not emerge so much from processes within a society, but rather from the Void,that which is not counted by the ‘state of the situation’. I have never really understood what that means in practice. But I think rather than seeing struggle as the production of internal contradictions Badiou sees the Event as the emergence of that which was excluded or invisible…..
rebel love
Dave
emil said
IS Badiou really so important for politics? who decides what is an ‘event’? Badiou himself, me, you, who? furthermore, badiou writes about ‘truth’, but he does not say what he means by it, or what makes something a ‘truth event’. the only example he really gives is that of St paul, ie a religious event. it seems to me badiou,zizek etc are fashionable, but they are not particularly great nor important.
Seven said
It seems to me that fidelity to an Event has been a consistent problem and cause for blindnesses on the North American left. This is true for the early Communist Party in their imitation of the Bolsheviks and for Maoists whose fidelity to the event of the Cultural Revolution causes them to use a language and an emphasis that has proven not very useful in the United States. I’m not saying that we should not learn lessons from the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, but I’m saying that the leadership of those revolutions is notable for their lack of fidelity to a prior Event, and their immersion in the Event of their own time.
Also I think a distinction has to be made between profound social transformations that happen TO a people and transformations that are made BY people. The deindustrialization of the United States is a huge event, but it’s one that happened TO the vast majority of the people, who had no voice in deciding whether it should happen. The election of Barack Obama, regardless of who he is or what he will do, was a paradigm shift that many people feel like they had a hand in creating. That, I hope, creates a certain confidence that may be a small step towards breaking apart the Event-less nature of a people beaten and tricked into passivity.
Eddy said
1. I don’t think that historical materialism is yet ‘commonly understood’, and probably won’t be until humanity is well into the socialist epoch.
2. how can a social practice (such as the 1917 Russian revolution or the 1789 French revolution) ‘emerge from the Void’? how many people live in this Void?
John Steele said
Just a few quick comments (more later):
Emil says, “badiou writes about ‘truth’, but he does not say what he means by it, or what makes something a ‘truth event’. the only example he really gives is that of St paul….”
Badiou does indeed say what he means by truth, and truth-process, in several places and in some detail, and he gives many examples of what he regards as truth-processes. If you look at the examples of Badiouian Events cited in the essay above — the French and Russian Revolutions, the Cultural Revolution in China, “the appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical Tragedy; the irruption, with Galileo, of mathematical physics; an amorous encounter which changes a whole life,…the creation of the Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the creation of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg…” — each of these is also the start of a distinctive truth-process.
Zerohour says, “Event should not be confused with Rupture,” and goes on to cite Nazism as a rupture that was not an Event.
True enough, but it’s a little more complicated, I think. Badiou talks about Nazism in his Ethics as a simulacrum of an Event, and says that “Nazi politics was not a truth-process, but it was only in so far as it could be represented as such that it ‘seized’ the German situation.” (Ethics, p. 66) It’s worth remembering that there is a line of analysis of the Nazi takeover which sees it as stemming from a failed revolutionary situation. Certainly it’s true that the failure of the German revolution in the post-World War I period laid the groundwork for all that failed. One might see Nazism as the simulacrum of a truth-process resulting from an Event from which a real (revolutionary) truth-process failed to grow.
Grumpy Cat says: “Whilst Badiou refers to his method as that of the ‘materialist dialectic’ I think it is quite different from historical materialism as we commonly understand it.”
I’m not aware that Badiou ever refers to his method (in his present line of thinking, over the last 25 years or so) as “materialist dialectics.” He is pretty clear on the materialist grounding of his thinking (although he may have different thinking on what this means than you expect), but he has also been clear that he has criticisms of dialectics; he calls his own method “subtractive.” What he means by this is a complicated matter, which would be good to discuss, but I won’t enter into it right now.
Certainly it’s true that his method and approach is “different from historical materialism as we commonly understand it.” The pertinent question is, is this a reason to dismiss Badiou out of hand? I think not — quite the contrary. Badiou is, to my mind, one of the most penetrating, deep and complex radical thinkers of our time. Obviously this is not a guarantee of correctness; but to dismissively reject new thinking in the name what we understand to be historical materialism is a good map for driving down a dead-end street. (To be clear: I’m not accusing Grump Cat of this sort of rejection; but it’s obviously true of many.)
niama said
thank you john, your piece inspires a deep engagement with this still-alive! and revolutionary figure.
just wondering about the notion of progress connected to the Event… It is implied, (or in fact stated) that there is a conscious, social character to the occurance of the Event. Does this mean phenomena such as the rise of neoliberalism- a conscious event (not determined but created in many ways, socially) still taking its course, effecting every area of life for all the worlds people, and, i would argue, fundamentally transforming the ideological plane of the status-quo as post-modern ontological notions are inherited in mass consciousness, as a result of and in relation to the conditions neoliberalsim continues to unleash- might be considered an Event?
It is certainly not a progressive Event- and perhaps its not an Event at all, might an Event come into existence in response to the inherited situation of neoliberalism (if it is simply a situation)? or is that the rub- that we dont know, except after or perhaps during its occurance… are there no recognizable conditions making an Event’s occurance “ripe” as some traditionally conceive of in the making of revolution?
I’m also needing a clarification on a smaller point- might an Event become such only if it is recognized as new by all or very, very many (both those for and in opposition to it)?
Eddy said
While we will never understand Badiou by dismissing him out of hand, of course, we still need to understand the relationship of his philosophy with historical materialism, and with an epistemology that grounds knowledge in social practice.
And indeed, regardless of what Badiou thinks of himself, how his philosophy addresses HM and the social practice of knowledge are determinant of whether he is a materialist and a Marxist philosopher.
Laz(e)rus said
Eddy,
Badiou is not a Marxist in terms of his analysis or philosophy, though much of it is informed by Marxism, more so by the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism. I think if you dig around you can find out exactly what he thinks about Marxism, historical materialism, etc. An interesting place where some of this gets worked out is in an ongoing discussion between Badiou and Zizek (who does claim to be a Marxist/Communist, though not by any means a “classic” Marxist). Both of these thinkers are deeply influenced by Jacque Lacan, and I think this is partially responsible for their creativity.
As John pointed out, “Knowledge” and “Truth” are separate things for Badiou. They are both clearly social, and he doesn’t deny this fact, but it’s sort of a banal point, as everything involving people is social. If you’re asking whether he thinks that ideas are directly derived from the class struggle, he does not. He thinks that ideas and truths are derived from gaps and voids in reality and social coherency, where subjects fill these gaps with discoveries that then transform the social coherency.
I think he has more specific discussions about how his conception works out in the field of science in his book “Infinite Truth.”
emil said
reply to John
but the events that you refer to as ‘truth events’, the french and russian revolution, theatrical tragedy, schoenberg etc. what makes these things ‘true’? why are the french and russian revolution events, but not, say, the islamic revolution in iran? why schoenberg and not nirvana or hip hop music? my question is this; what makes something ‘true’ for badiou? i have looked in his book, (alto i admit i cannot understand nor have the time nor see the importance of set theory, and so have found ‘being and event’ hard to read). simply referring to historical events, some of doubtful importance ( such as schoenberg…), and calling them ‘truth events’, does not add anything particularly to these events or our understanding of them. ie what is badiou’s theory of truth? i do not see that he has one, but is simply juggling with words like a good postmodernist.
Dave said
I think that if a writer feels a need to capitalize a word in order to imbue it with some kind of ethereal Meaning beyond the meaning understood in common speech, he or she is probably engaging in idealism and metaphysics.
The Russian Revolution improved the living conditions of millions of people, inspired the struggles for liberation of millions more, and drove terror into the hearts of oppressors everywhere. Schoenberg wrote some music that most people haven’t even heard of, let alone listened to.
I must admit, however, that it is a stunning testament to the marvels of the human mind that it is possible for the brain to postulate that a common “truth” or “event-ness” that is shared by these two completely different things, and then spend many hours speculating about the nature of this “event-ness.” I doubt whether any other animal brains would be capable of this feat.
niama said
Is there not some recognition of the importance of abstract ideas here? Das Kapital has not been read by most people- so toss it in the fire? Lenin studied HEGEL- an idealist metaphysician if there ever was one- because people need to understand the nature of reality in order to effect change- and Lenin recognized that Hegel had something to contribute to that.
Capitalization of a term doesn’t necessitate imbuing it with a metaphysical character or with grand significance, it is simply to denote a concept that no, doesn’t exist in common everyday language because as, imo, it should be obvious, we don’t have the framework or the ideas already worked out that can get us out of the situation of postmodern capitalism that we are all stuck in and we need some new conceptions to help us out. BTW, Badiou is not a postmodernist (just because something doesn’t match up with your conception of truth doesn’t make it post-modern).
Badiou, as Bill Martin pointed out, takes us back to Plato, a place where many who consider themselves historical materialists don’t want (or find it necessary) to go back to, and yet Plato may still have something to offer. (maybe not, but we have to go there to find out).
On the other hand, I share some of the concerns expressed around the conception of a truth-process, and I am fearful that framing certain ideas around “cold, hard” mathematics might be problematic… but I also recognize that it might take a little more than looking in (one) book, Being and Event, to figure it out.
Eddy said
Laz(E)Rus wrote:
Oh I do wish that the question of knowing (epistemology) was banal, but as our social reality demonstrates ‘daily, hourly and on a grand scale’, our consciousness lags well behind our social being, and especially so at this stage in human development.
That lag explains why there are some (an important minority) who think that capitalism has far outstripped its social utility and sits as a tremendous burden on the people of the world (as well as the biosphere) and should be forcibly removed from the scene, and others who think ‘its all good,’ and others who suffer in relative silence, and others who join fascist organizations and others who … (you get the picture).
FWIW, I don’t, and Marxists generally don’t (or Marx didn’t, at any rate) prescribe a specific social practice (e.g. ‘the class struggle’) as the principal field for cognitive development or learning, but class struggle is essential to human societies to date.
zerohour said
To go back to TellNoLies question about May 68 and the Zapatistas, I think it would be interesting to talk about the Paris Commune. I don’t know if Badiou considers that an Event, but they all share one feature in common: none had overthrown the bourgeois state. For Badiou, the meaning, status and effects of an Event can’t be known ahead of time. In fact, they are often designated after the fact. the example of the Iranian Revolution brought up above raises this point. If we adhere to Badiou’s point that an Event opens up historical possibilities [towards freedom - my word, not his, and it may not be what he would choose to say], then the Iranian Revolution cannot now be considered as such, but at the time, it wasn’t so clear, as reflected in Persepolis.
Like all historical occurrences, an Event can and will be disputed. Was the US Civil War an Event? What kind? Was it a struggle between two modes of production, or one mode of production split into two historically-determined, but incompatible forms? The usefulness of such a category is that it moves us beyond the stale binary of reform/revolution as if that encompassed all significant social movement. It may be that this is inadequate as well, but it should not be rejected on the basis that it does not conform with the inherited categories of historical materialism. The application of Event to practices outside of politics is interesting in that it may further enable us think about social behaviour in a non-deterministic way, ie, “revolutions” in different areas of life are not absolutely dependent on political revolution, and may, in fact, produce conditions for political revolution. I’m still exploring Badiou’s work, so I may be wrong in my estimation of it’s potential.
Back to the Paris Commune: although it did not overthrow the state, it enacted a liberatory practice which opened the terrain up for the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Even though Marx and Engels had a glimpse of this potential, there was no way to understand the Commune’s larger significance until years later. I believe it still remains to be seen whether May 68 or the EZLN have played similar historical roles. I’m reminded of the exchange where Chou Enlai is asked what he thought of the impact of the French Revolution on western civilization, and he replied “It’s too early to tell.”
John Steele said
Just a couple of quick notes:
Dave – Badiou does not capitalize the word “event.” I did so in the above essay, in order to set it apart from ordinary usage: “I will capitalize the word when the reference is to Badiou in order to avoid confusion with “event” as used ordinarily.”
Philosophy generally has need of technical terms, as it were, and every major philosopher of which I’m aware has terms whose usage is defined relative to his/her philosophical theories. If you think that’s somehow illicit or unnecessary, then you might as well declare yourself opposed to any systematic philosophical enquiry. (But then science does the same thing, and other disciplines and studies….)
Emil says: “but the events that you refer to as ‘truth events’, the french and russian revolution, theatrical tragedy, schoenberg etc. what makes these things ‘true’?”
Badiou does not say that “these things are true” – he says that these are events which at the same time give birth to distinctive truth-processes and to new (social) subjects. This is what I say as well in the above short essay. I do not refer to these as “truth events,” nor does Badiou. (Badiou’s term is ‘truth process’, not ‘truth event’.)
“my question is this; what makes something ‘true’ for badiou? i have looked in his book, (alto i admit i cannot understand nor have the time nor see the importance of set theory, and so have found ‘being and event’ hard to read).”
The question of “what makes something true for Badiou” is not something that can be explained in a sentence. (The same would be true, for the same question, if asked about Plato, or Hegel, or any major philosopher.) I hope to write a post before too long attempting to explain Badiou more fully, and why he may be regarded as important for our purposes and our project, but in the meantime, the book I’d point you to is not Being & Event (which is difficult and requires dedication), but his book Ethics, which was written for a broad audience, and deals with some of his central concepts — event, truth-process, subject, and fidelity.
And “…is simply juggling with words like a good postmodernist”) as Naima mentioned above, Badiou is certainly not a postmodernist under any definition of that term. In fact he characterizes philosophical postmodernism as a contemporary version of sophism.
Finally, with reference to what Badiou says about an Event arising from a situated ‘void’ and questions as to how that can be (#5 and #8 above), just wanted to indicate that this void empty only relative to a particular knowledge, not absolutely.
Eddy asks, “how many people live in this Void?” Depending on the void we’re talking about, the answer may be, a very large number.
Hope to write more later.
nando said
Eddy asks, with some obvious sarcasm:
And john answered (with a straight face):
There is an exploration here about how the “world is born anew” — not literally (i.e. it doesn’t come out of nothing, the “void” is the antithesis of the existing status quo within it). And clearly (imho) there are moments when something happens, and “the world” must be looked at anew (in light of that event), and all kinds of phenomena need to be “renamed” anew in light of that event. And that new “truth process” is not simple truth as mirror like reflection of reality — but deals with the complexity through which we come to know truths (and explosive patterns of new truths), and the process through which those insights and passions become exhausted.
Some methodological points:
You can’t tell if a thought is valuable or not, or whether it is true or not, by simply asking “Is this consistent with Marxism?” Because that logic assumes that Marxism is fine and complete as is.
There has been a bobbing up of a recurring theme of suspicion, dismissal and even mockery of ideas — often without any engagement. If you think about it, that is a dogmatic approach, not a materialist or scientific one. And it is not surprising given the training in the existing communist movement. when I left the RCP I had never heard of Badiou, and I had only heard of Zizek because he wrote a preface to Avakian’s Conversations book. So clearly there has been a bit of a self-reinforcing bubble — where folks are ignorant of radical thinking around them, and simulataneously dismissive of it.
Eddy writes: “While we will never understand Badiou by dismissing him out of hand, of course, we still need to understand the relationship of his philosophy with historical materialism, and with an epistemology that grounds knowledge in social practice.”
Well, yeah, we need to understand his relationship with marxist philosophy (as we have known it). But we don’t understand that relationship by assuming (a priori) that “our” epistemology (as inherited) is “correct,” and therefore if Badiou departs from it he “must be” incorrect.
And really it would be an odd starting point when we encounter a new idea (or an elaborate set of new ideas): to simply and automatically ask “does this jibe with Marxism as we currently understand it?” Is that really where we should start?
Shouldn’t we start by trying to understand the ideas (both in their internal relations, and their external relations with reality)? And then on that basis evaluate them (AND previously-existing Marxism).
Unfortunately, communist history is full of examples of the wrong approach (“Einstein’s theory of relativity [or Bohr's quantum physics] doesn’t easily fit with materialist dialectics as we have understood them, so lets expose Einstein [or Bohr] for what they are.”
The apriori assumption that this or that verdict of Marxism (as we have inherited it) or that this or that “classic” statement from Marxism is an alpha and omega for evaluating ideas (from now on?), denies the existence of contradiction within all theories and verdicts that we hold (or have held).
And the issue may not be (is imho unlikely to be) to discard historical materialism in favor of Badiou’s theory of “multiple of multiples”…, but also whether to modify, morph, amend, enrich (or even radically reconceive) our existing revolutionary philosophies with elements or insights that arise elsewhere.
Althusser’s theory of “overdetermination” was (in the 1960s) a unique and new contribution to Marxism. His theory of Marx’s “epistemological break” was also lifted from elsewhere and brought in (with a real contribution) to Marxism’s insights. (Now rendered rather less profound by Avakian’s claim to have made such an “epistemological break.”)
But isn’t that inevitable that ideas will come from many quarters? And isn’t such an infusion of ideas and an envigorating through debate especially needed now, when so much of Maoism (and other currents of explicit Marxism) have seemingly sealed themselves off (for decades!) from the rich discussions and insights of science, philosophy, and more.
Niama spoke of “fear” and “concern” above:
The main point here is, of course, correct: she recognizes that it might (heh, might?!) take more than looking in one book to figure it out. Well good. But that insight comes caked in fear and concern.
Maoists need to get out of a fearful crouch when it comes to new ideas. Relax. Read it. Debate it. Let it wash over you. Think about it in terms of making revolution — and also in terms of the nagging problems of Marxism’s shortcomings or its race to “catch up” with our times.
As Mao says, don’t put up a lot of warnings and personal firewalls, just come through it and go out the other side.
There is a larger question of line here: Is inherited Marxism sufficient for the next waves of revolution? (Or put it another way, is MLM sufficient? Do we need a new leap involving new breaks with the past? Does the work of revolution require negation of elements within previous Marxism in the course of its development? Or is it one way or another “there for the taking” — without some new creative engagement with a world of thought that surrounds us?
For me the issue is not “is Badiou a Marxist?” (He is pretty obviously not.) And it is not simply “Is his approach consistent with materialist dialectics or historical materialism?” (Since he is clearly suggesting things outside the framework of historical materialism.) The issue is not “should we become Badiouists?” (I don’t feel that attraction, and think there is a material underpinning missing in his work.)
But for me the question is “Is there something valuable in Badiou’s exploration? Does his examination of events (their origins, their unfolding, their aging process, their reversal or perversion) add something new, even something needed, to Marxism (from without Marxism).
Perhaps his views are sharply opposed to Marxism, but in ways that are more true and valuable for the revolutionary project than the concepts currently within Marxism. Surely that is not outside the realm of possibility, right?
Eddy said
and the distinction between a philosophy and social science.
The question is not (I’ll suggest) ‘does Baidou conform to existing marxist texts.’
Perhaps it is worth pointing out here that historical materialism is a true theory, that is, a systematic summation of phenomenon with proofs that verify its operation: how society operates. It is not speculative or conjectural, although like all theories, it may be subject to modification. It is also subject to refutation and so one question is, rightly, does Badiou’s philosophy refute HM? (But – and it is a hugely important ‘but’ – what is the proof?)
Historical materialism is also the basis of Marx’s social science. Whether ‘we’ (or me or you) understand it accurately is another question altogether. (For example, in the 20th C. there were various communists who privileged industrial development as the key necessity to establishing a socialist economy and the political rule of the proletariat. That turned out to be disastrously untrue, but it gained currency because it appeared to align with a historical materialist analysis.)
It may also be worth pointing out that the grounding of knowledge in social practice is also a true theory, drawn from empirical evidence of how cognitive development and knowledge acquisition take place. That is how we learn to learn, and how we subsequently learn (acquire knowledge). Humanity is social, there is no biological alternative possible. An epistemology that posits otherwise cannot be accurate. (or else, it must provide convincing proof of its alternative.) It is not true because Marx or Mao spoke it or wrote it down, it is true in itself and they observed it to be so. (and not only them, this truth has been verified through work in linguistics, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, ‘action’ sociology, cultural anthropology and several other fields of ‘empirical’ inquiry, as well as in the field of ‘political activism’.)
Eddy said
Nando mistakenly observed
Not so, Eddy asked in order to focus discussion on the most important quality within social science: people.
Adrienne said
Hello there.
I’m de-lurking for the first time after visiting this site for awhile. I’m not always in perfect accord with some of the opinions I’ve read (I’m a democratic socialist — so go ahead, tell me I’m nothing but a dirty revisionist) but I really like this site and the intelligent people who are contributing here.
First of all, I’d like to say that I think this a very well written essay, John Steele.
Badiou’s work seems to be difficult for many (including myself) to fully grasp, seeing as a person needs to be very well grounded in both philosophy AND math — especially set theory — since much of Badiou’s philosophical conceptions have grown from that particular discipline. That being said, and even though I realize that I’m not fully grasping his works when I read them, I truly admire the unbounded creativity of the ideas Badiou has brought forth.
As an artist, I feel at least a passing acquaintance with ‘The Void’ that Badiou speaks of, and which some of you have been discussing here in the responses to this essay. I am of the opinion that the vast majority of human beings are capable of visiting and producing from somewhere in the vicinity of that Void. Though unfortunately, too many of us don’t even realize this is possible.
While absolutely possible, it is unfortunately, pretty rare. In fact, most of what passes as truly creative and original, and is frequently perceived to be something howling purely out of The Void — be it in science, art, and politics — is not purely from there at all. (Btw, I’m intentionally leaving out Love, because that’s a whole other exotic, smoking-hot kettle of fish. A kettle containing the sublime and the ridiculous, and everything in between!) When studied closely, what mostly becomes clear is that such movement more often grows from unfolding sequences. Movements that occur and grow from the thoughts of others, onto another person or group of people, and onto the next person, or groups of people — into infinity. Furthermore, a few people along that unfolding sequence may additionally end up producing something somewhere in the vicinity of the Void.
Now, what I’ve written above probably sounds like a lot of nonsense, so allow me to give a clear example of what I mean:
Let’s take Hegel’s philosophy. Widely read, and widely critiqued. Now add Karl Marx reading Hegel and reading the many and various critiques of his day. Then add Marx thinking that realism was sorely lacking in Hegel, and that this is what was missing from the various critiques of his work. So Marx produces his own critique of Hegel’s philosophy. Known as the ‘Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right’, this in turn causes Marx to begin developing his earliest theories and marks an important milestone on his road to Historical Materialism. Then add Marx meeting Engels, and their combined effort in producing the Communist Manifesto. From there we can add Lenin reading Marx and also studying Hegel. We can also add Mao to that sequence. And many others, including Badiou. Etc., Etc., right up to those of us who are currently reading Kasama!
Unfortunately, we could also take this example in a totally different direction. Due to the fact that Hegel’s philosophy is also known for having inspired some fascist thinkers.
Anyway, we can all play a part in some unfolding sequence. If we’re really lucky, we might also visit and produce something from the vicinity of the Void. And maybe we may also suddenly produce something which comes howling purely out of that Void. Like a comet blazing out of nowhere. Totally original and creative.
As for truth, and Badiou’s theory on it…
I don’t know.
I think I stand a little closer to Kierkegaard, and also Nietzsche, than to Badiou.
Then again, maybe I don’t understand his theory enough to even grasp what the man is truly getting at.
Okay, back to lurking now…
future's ours said
Hi there. I would like to add some words, if I may.
I would like to side a little more with Eddy here. But we should give more consideration to social practice, the pelople, and class struggle. And I don’t know if materialist history is now considered just a dogmatic thing, or something old fashioned. But it seems to me more and more mind-powering.
Right now I can remember two rules:
1. The law of contradiction. There are always social forces struggling around us.
2. The law of progress. The new struggles with the old. The new will end up winning.
Schoenberg did not live in a void. His invention is actually a collective process. So is the breakthrough made by Galileo, Einstein. Of course Einstein discovered relativity. It is his achievement. But there were a lot of people around him dealing with the subject.
This is a major fight between idealists and materialists. The idealists, the people who claim that there are no laws whatsoever in history, say that history is a succession of Geniuses. People who invented new things because they were superior. Or some divine intervention made them do it.
But even Hitler did not do all that he did because he happened to do it, but there was a historical need, on the side of the bourgeoisie. He was doing it in behalf of the bourgeoisie.
So we have to go back to the process of history. To class struggle. And to our progress, unceasing, zigzagging, toward communism. That is our biggest Event.
RW Harvey said
I am not sure Badiou’s Event or Void would agree with the idea of a “law of progress” — especially an approach that the “new always wins.” In order to avoid a linear view of movement, and to avoid misconstruing “the new” as “the best,” it is important to understand that what supersedes the old may be retrograde, or may be the next best adaptation, may be revolutionary, etc.
I also thing Nando takes Badiou and opens up a rather vital stream of dialogue around our inherited notions of M-L-M. Good stuff, this.
emil said
1) if it is so hard to really understand what badiou is getting at, as it seems it is, then i cannot see of what use it is in mass politics, and how easy it would be to abuse such a system. does the discovery of lsd qualify as an event? it certainly changed the lives and possibilities of Aldous huxley, the beatles etc. my point is that the ‘event’ does not add anything to our knowledge of things other than calling it an ‘event’. so what if something is or is not an event? it does not matter to anyone apart from badiou scholars.
2)have you guys read chomsky’s letter on postmodernism. it is worth reading. i am not saying that Badiou is a ‘postmodernist’(who admits to such a thing??), but the things he says regarding this style of french philosophy are quite correct.
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
Eddy said
To clarify part of my argument: I think we should ground our understanding of historical materialism in the fact that our being is social and organized around the reproduction of society (what might be called economics but is actually much more).
In the course of that reproduction, societies have divided into strata and class (initially prompted by an emergent division of reproductive tasks within the population group). An analysis of this process was attempted by Engels (Origin of the Family), based on Morgan’s field data, and since modified and corrected by further field work and analysis (see Leslie White for a mid-20th C. example).
That’s a five-second explanation and not exhaustive. In any event, I subscribe to Marx’s summation (c.f. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy):
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
“The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Marx and Engels did observe (Communist Manifesto) that human history was a history of class struggle — that is surely the case in recent centuries — but Marx was also careful to point out that ‘the existence of class struggle’ is not the basis of his theory.
More to the point, and the reason it is important to continue to study in practice how society operates and is operating in any constellation of events (not meaning Badiouvian events here), is that human society is not a mechanical operation, but a highly dynamic matrix of relationships.
That dynamism is due to the internal and external contradictions present in/among those social relationships, and this ‘contradictoriness’ has been both the basis for misinterpretation and consequent socio-political ‘setbacks’ as well as the opportunity for ‘big leaps forward.’ (quoted because these are partisan perspectives.)
There is no Marxian ‘law of progress’ in any specific sense. Revolution is not inevitable, socialism is not inevitable, classless society is not inevitable, nor will they ‘just happen’ — they must be made by people acting together within those extensive matrices. I would think it’s obvious, but for clarity: those actions are made deliberately, consciously.
lazerus said
[moderator note: This post was moved to its own thread. Don't miss it.]
Eddy said
Emil wrote:
It certainly reads like Chomsky. I take his characterization of Foucault as it is, and recommend that in addition to The Order of Things or language, counter-memory, practice, interested readers should check out a copy of The Chomsky – Foucault debate on human nature (which NC mentions in that usenet posting you cite.)
I would also (perhaps first) recommend David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity as a cogent discussion and with Harvey being a Marxist.