Checking For Loopholes: From Conception to Reconception
Posted by Mike E on October 10, 2010
by Mike Ely
I’ve been thinking over Dave X’s remarks made when I recommended Ed Pluth’s commentaries on Badiou.
Dave X starts:
“I am glad the Badiou study is going well for you and am curious as to any conclusions you draw. I am a great admirer of this blog, read it every day, and find much of what you write very insightful and ‘right on’.”
Noted and appreciated. Then Dave X continues:
“I don’t really get Badiou however or your interest in him and I do not say this from a position of complete ignorance, having read a couple of his books, and having some degree of both mathematical and philosophical training.”
Also noted and appreciated. My interest is simple in some ways and I’ll try to present it in a set of analogies:
First: When the comedian W.C. Fields was approaching death in a hospital, a visiting friend supposedly caught him reading the Bible. The friend asked the notorious sinner what he was doing. Fields replied: “I’m checking for loopholes.”
Obviously we are neither dying nor reading the Bible. But we are “checking for loopholes” — through a re-examination of texts and a re-examination of the situation we (i.e. both humanity and revolutionaries) find ourselves in.
Second: The early astronomer Ptolemy did something remarkable: he tried to come up with a thought-system that explained the movement of heavenly bodies.
The very idea of having such a theory was radical and, if you think about it, posits many things about the universe: its materiality, the existence of major patterns, the possibility of humans detecting underlying laws of motion, the idea of comparing theory to data, and more.
The epicycles of Ptolemy's system
And the power of his system (i.e. its apparent coincidence with available data and with other world conceptions) was such that for centuries it flourished as an explanation.
But, at a certain point, it started to falter, because (as human society knitted itself more and more closely, and as records of human observations accumulated) the powerful and beloved theory could no longer claim to encompass the evidence. Something was wrong.
In the case of Ptolemy’s work, the problem was pretty fundamental: His was an earth centric system, and assumed that the bodies circled the earth. And it proved weak in predicting or organizing the accumulated information because it had an error at its heart.
There were several responses to that problem. Some creative minds started amending Ptolemy’s system, inserting complex cycles-within-cycles to the model, hoping to refine the theory to better encompass the data. It became baroque and strained.
The other approach was to consider alternative models — that (like Ptolemy) saw the heavens were material, had laws of motion, were potentially predictable, consisted of “bodies” in motion, etc. but that did more than simply amend and tinker. Those newer theories too had problems, and even the early sun-centered (helio-centric) theories didn’t fit the data that well (until they were amended with the hypothesis that planetary orbits were elliptical not circular).
There is a view of science that focuses on all the ways that Ptolemy was so wrong and Copernicus was so right. But that approach often under-appreciates both the necessity and value of ambitious attempts, and the real need for early theories in order to advance to newer theory.
Human conception emerges in radically non-linear ways — in fits and starts, in ambitious attempts that (precisely in their shortcomings, and voids) sometimes open doors to the next advance.
Getting too shallow to just paddle
Third analogy: The communist movement has paddled a long long way up a particular creek — by unfolding and elaborating on a very particular set of ideas, theories and assumptions. In my opinion, that creek is getting shallower and shallower and we are forced to ask, “What now?”
This world needs a communist solution more and more acutely. The contrast between private appropriation and social need has become ever more stark. But we are deeply challenged by the question of the subject — how do humans become the active players in needed change. And that is (precisely) the core of Badiou’s exploration.
After Long Fidelity, a Need for a Leap
I have been paddling a long ways with a particular idea. I have been part of embracing and seeking to apply a particular conception of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and then (based on extensive practice by a relatively small force) find the right mix of theoretical adjustment and practical innovation to push through.
Others (nearby) have been working on different (but sometimes related) conceptions.
I have become convinced that the creek is getting too shallow to just keep paddling. As a result of a rather protracted and intense involvement with an elaborated and somewhat integrated theory, I am particularly aware of its problems, not just its breathtaking promise or comprehensiveness. My sense of re-conception is very closely wedded to the troubling voids emerging within a previous process of conception.
In Badiou’s work “The Century,” he has a particular passage on his encounter with Maoism — and how it threw him from one path onto another.
He writes:
“It took place in May 1968 and the years that followed. I felt that the uprooting of my prior existence (that of a minor provincial civil servant, a married father, with no other vision of Salvation besides the one provided by writing books), the departure towards a life submitted, ardently submitted, to the obligations of militancy in hitherto unknown places (workers’ hostels, factories, markets in the banlieus), the clashes with the police, the early morning arrests, the trials — that all this originated, not from a lucid decision, but from a special form of passivity, from a total abandonment to what was taking place.”
(Note: Badiou is upholding this. His work is focused on the way of maintaining and maturing such an event into a process, including with a dedication to change and a daring into the unknown.)
Sometimes for a cohort of people, there is a “total abandonment to what was taking place” — and a pursuit of understandings wherever they led. We need (today) to remain possessed and willing, even if we don’t know (and cannot know) where it will lead, or even precisely what we are doing.
Unfortunately, the response of some to our current problems (worldwide) has been to abandon the struggle. Some do it by flipping back to conservatism. Others cling to an exhausted form of theory (while adding irrelevant curlicues of amendment and adjustment).
I’m convinced that the theoretical knife has to cut much deeper. I am not willing to “keep on tolling the bell” (as Mao put it) — or keep repeating stereotypical forms of practice that seemed obvious the first time, but exhausted the fifth or sixth time they are revved up.
Timely Appearances
And so, into this mix, into this moment of sitting checking for loopholes, a few important appearances have happened. Comrades relatively unknown to us have been working in parallel and have some things to present. Badiou is one, and I feel the Nepali revolutionary movement is another. And there are others. Some of those others are not literally “appearing” for the first time — but they are encountered as if they were new by people emerging from bubbles.
It’s not like any of these appearances simply solve our problems — or as if their political situation and theoretical explorations are without their own intense contradictions.
But there it all is nonetheless — emerging from history’s most revolutionary current (communism refracted through the Maoist experience) with some new and meaty proposals.
Badiou has done it in the realm of philosophy (which is not familiar terrain to me). And the Nepalis have done it on the canvas of real life (with a rare fusion of communism and mass aspirations in some highly contradictory ways).
It would be infantile to imagine that we now have magic potions, or rush off like converts or children to (yet again) adopt without critical analysis or synthesis.
But (like Bill Martin) I think we have been lucky — and the very process of engaging these bodies of work helps shake the walls of that little hospital room, and gives a widened hint of what reconception might look like, and does so precisely without abandoning what is key — i.e. the whole revolutionary communist project.
Contributions from Without
Some Marxisms have become closed loops — assuming that “new leaps” of theory and insight will come from mainly the application and summation of our own practical application of our own previous theory.
But I don’t believe that.
Darwin’s theory was revolutionized from without — because genetics (as a field of study and a body of discoveries) flew in from a different direction and demanded to be made part of a new synthesis.
Our reconception of communist theory needs to synthesize work and phenomena that our movement (and not just the Maoists here) sometimes has rather militantly ignored. One example: the stubborn lack of appreciation for the global impact of the Internet and social networking among some people– and the startling lack of creativity in exploiting such things, among communists who (grandiosely) imagine themselves at cutting edge of both reality and change.
Reconception is Hard Protracted Work
Dave X writes:
“If someone like Bill Martin has to break out the commentaries to even begin to ‘understand’ [Badiou], what does that say?” I am not saying there is no place for commentaries in philosophy but they are entirely overused in so-called ‘continental’ philosophy and speak to a fundamental error of approach.”
My immediate thought is: What serious theory doesn’t need commentaries to understand? I read commentaries on Capital and Grundrisse at the same time I tackled Marx.
I often return to Althusser’s two reads. We can all give any text a “first read” — go through the words and pages, and let it “wash over us”. But to really engage something, we need a second and quite different kind of read (which Althusser demonstrated in his book “Reading Capital“).
(In the next passage I’m not responding to Dave X in particular:)
There is a too-common assumption that theoretical work should (somehow) involve only texts, concepts and problems that are accessible. I see no reason to believe that. And, in my experience, that is associated (among communists) with a confusion between theory and popularization (which we spoke about in the 9 Letters).
Some have been taught to think that the popularized Marxism (that we all have read and shared) are all there is — that those codified, inherited, tapped-down explanations are Marxism. In fact, popularizations of Marxism are just that, popularized snapshots of the theory at one moment and one version of its development. I believe that distilling Marxism to some accessible ABCs is necessary for introductory purposes, but also strips it of some of the complex, supple and unfinished character required of a living theory that can guide living practice.
There is even a view that the purpose of communist theory is to popularize our goals and explanations to the relatively new or unconvinced. On the contrary, the point of communist theory is mainly to guide revolutionary practice — and that happens (first and foremost) in that locus where the plans, formulations, initiatives, abrupt shifts and line struggles of whole movements are concentrated. The communist theory needed to create, build and lead movements (in that kind of way) is far different from the theory that gets codified in introductory pamphlets (whether Quotations from Chairman Mao or Bukharin’s ABCs of Communism).
For example: Lenin, preparing to re-enter Russia in the midst of World War 1, undertook study to free his mind and prepare himself for audacious action. He didn’t go read some codification of Marxist principles by the popularizer Bebel. He went and restudied Hegel’s dialectics.
I re-ask Dave X’s question: What does that say?
Learning With a Critical Mind
David X writes:
“The whole Franco-Germanic cult of the ‘master thinker’ is ultimately counterproductive and gives philosophy a quasi-religious not a scientific cast. This is by no means intended to be a dismissal just pointing out what I see as a real problem and for the matter what I see as a problem when someone like yourself approaches a thinker like Badiou in the way that you seem to be doing, quasi-reverential, on a pedestal, pupil to master. Is this a communist approach to doing philosophy (yes, well all too often communists have done philosophy like this, but is that a good thing?)? Is this a scientific approach to philosophy?”
I am not a fan of “whateverism” — where we set up thrones for “rare, special, unique and irreplaceable” people, and seek to pour their ideas into our heads. On the other hand, I am quite eager to be a student of those who have done some real work. Communists need to stop being know-it-alls. We need more humility and open-mindedness — precisely because it is appropriate for a scientific approach.
There is a method (exemplified in the RCP’s embarassing critique of Badiou), where engagement becomes a series of checklists. In one column we list what some specific thinker or a movement says. And in the other column, we list what we currently believe to be true. And our “critique” consists of comparing the two columns — and exclaiming (at each discovery of difference) “What? Hey, that’s just not right!”
This is the method my inner-RCP tutor sought to explain to me in 2006. This is also (unfortunately) the method applied far earlier (during the 1980s construction of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement), when the RCP came into contact with the writings of Badiou’s UCFML or the Peruvian Shining Path and (largely) evaluated them against a checklist of the RCP’s own, pre-existng ideas .
Dave X writes:
“The case for Badiou in my mind is far from made, indeed he strikes me as precisely more of what we don’t need. I will however keep an open mind and am curious as to the results of your study.”
Fair enough. I am not in a rush to crank out specific results, so don’t wait up tonight. But others have been more sharply engaged in this than I have been, and I’m curious to see the results of their study (which we plan to publish here.)
What, in your mind, is what we do need?
RW Harvey said
This is such an excellent approach to outlining why new synthesis is crucial, and how such a synthesis must be based in awareness of emergent phenomena and not simply on old maps of static and stagnant terrain. To have cordoned ourselves off from other experiences in other fields because these experiences do not coincide with the Tenets — especially preconceived and held as tightly as Dumbo’s feather and with a faith that THIS will enable us to fly… well, this is the leading edge of consciousness when it comes to preparing for revolution.
What we need to do? Debate and clarify (as best as possible) the following:
One: Differentiate bourgeois democracy from revolutionary democracy;
Two: (Related to One.)Discuss the role of the state apparatus after a sucessful revolution and determine how it too must be something that emerges, changes, and dissolves. It is all too easy to use “defense of the state” as a justificaiton for creating/liquidating enemies, and for keeping it sacrosanct (and thereby unalterable);
Three: Wrestle with questions concerning technology vis-a-vis the planetary ecosystem. If a communist future is technological control — however efficient — over a dead Earth, then what is the point? If communism means ever increasing technology and production (however rational and planned), and more destruction of the environment, then what kind of vision is this? Mechanical models that envison increased industry and therefore increased proletarians, apriori rule out more local and smaller forms of production and caretaking of the earth.
Four (and lastly): In the spirit of this essay, ongoing dialogue as to what constitutes raising of consciousness — just enough ABC’s to mobilize an overthrow of power, or igniting people in their millions with an embodies sense of the primary importance and responsibility of engaging versus passively going along. The first can certainly bring about shifts in power; the second will have the greatest potential of transforming people and society to be able to meet and grapple with the inevitable contingencies of social existence.
dave x said
Thanks for the long response, I wish I could do the honor of an equally long reply but that will have wait for a change in my current life circumstances.
I will agree with your description of our moment as one of ‘checking for loopholes’ and this is one of the reasons why I find Kasama so valuable.
Your description in the first part of your response owes a debt to Kuhn which I here make explicit. Are we facing (the need for) something akin to a Kuhnian ‘paradigm-shift’ in communist theory? Quite possibly, though I don’t claim to know what exactly that will look like or what form it will take.
I am prepared, however, to admit the need for it. It is worth noting that their has been extensive debate around the notion of the ‘paradigm-shift’ in philosophy and history of science. This is a question I think is worth investigating in its own right – how do major theoretical shifts happen, actually? The reality is somewhat messier than the theory.
You link the Nepalese revolution and Badiou as ‘timely appearances’. Are they? I am agnostic about this. Certainly they are appearances -of our time- and so perhaps we can learn something about where we are from them.
First I will separate them. There is a long history in the left of taking some revolutionary experience somewhere and proclaiming it the new ‘model’ for revolution and then over generalizing it in all sorts of inappropriate ways. It happened with the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution and more recently with the Zapatista and Venezuelan experiences. I -don’t- think this is what you are doing here but it is something that makes me cautious when I meet new ‘timely appearances’. Revolutions are always highly particular events and I think we tend to overestimate how much we can generalize from them and to underestimate the barriers to our understanding of their local conditions. None of this is meant to detract from the importance of the Nepalese experience, just a note of caution.
In regards to Badiou, it is important to distinguish between Badiou the thinker – who we should take on his own merits – and Badiou as the reception of Badiou in the English-speaking academic world. In terms of the latter, Badiou is the last of a long line of predominantly French intellectuals who been imported for the production of scholarly hay, all too often with little understanding (being mostly irrelevant to the scholarly hay business) of the concrete situations and debates which conditioned their thought. Moreover the reception is largely uncritical and each in turn is turned into a new philosophical superstar who is going to overturn everything and save philosophy – that is of course until the next faddish French thinker comes along and kicks them out of the limelight.
I say this as someone who believes there are valuable insights to be found in Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc. but who has become very skeptical of the hype and thinks a more modest and critical approach should be taken to the importing of new theory.
I think it is important to acknowledge the problematic character of these receptions and to try and avoid replicating mistakes.
Similarly I think we should problematize the hierarchical, quasi-reverential and too often uncritical method of doing philosophy that often surrounds members of the pantheon of ‘continental’ thinkers (and also the marxist pantheon).
We need a mode of doing philosophy that is more open, more concerned with dialogue, clarity of exposition and the possibility of collective scientific engagement. A philosophy in this mode will have the potential to be both more revolutionary and more scientific than the cult of master thinkers. In some ways this is part of what Kasama seems to be engaged in even if in my opinion it sometimes seems to slip into a bit of master-thinkerism. If you asked me for a model of what I am talking about I would point you to the Unity of Science Movement of the 1930s. Reich’s discussion in “How The Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science” is the best account.
My own studies in philosophy over the last few years have been in the realm of philosophy of science and mathematics. The question of ‘what is science?’ is a challenging one and it is one that historically speaking has changed over time. What constituted science for Marx (or Hegel) would not necessarily constitute science for us today (indeed certainly would not, at least not in the same way). What does it mean to engage in an enterprise at once revolutionary and scientific in the early 21st century? There is a lot more I could say on this but I don’t have time to do it justice now.
So far I haven’t addressed Badiou qua Badiou. Mostly I have paid attention to the ontological questions in Badiou and there is a lot I haven’t read so I will keep my focus narrow. There are some who think Badiou is a crank for the way he uses mathematics and set theory and it is true that most mathematicians and most philosophers of mathematics would find how he uses mathematics to be very problematic. From my own investigation I do not think that Badiou is a crank, he more or less knows his stuff mathematically and how he uses this makes sense within the framework he sets for himself, a form of set-theoretic realism not far from some forms of mathematical platonism.
My disagreement with Badiou qua Badiou is precisely over this framework which I regard as untenable (being a thorough-going naturalist and materialist in all realms including that of mathematics). For an introduction to some of the history and philosophical issues around this I recommend Stewart Shapiro’s ‘Thinking About Mathematics’.
The fact that Badiou takes as a starting point something that I view as an obvious mystification (mathematics = ontology) makes me skeptical about Badiou as a starting point for a reconceptualization of communist theory (if I were to put this in a ‘continental’ framework I might say that on ontological questions I am with Deleuze against Badiou, in an ‘analytic’ framework I would say I am a post-Quinean naturalist).
As for what I think would be a good starting point? I don’t know. Maybe a good starting point doesn’t really exist yet and we have to make it. Derrida had a quote that one should start:
“We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.”
Building a revolutionary future will require a willingness to use whatever we have at hand and the ability to be creative about it. Any starting point is of necessity provisional and exploratory. I am exploring and I am glad that there are places like Kasama that are exploring as well. There is a lot of value in our different revolutionary traditions (I come out of Trotskyism) but I think this is a time when we need to take a fresh look at things, come to terms with where we are, where we have been, where we might be going.
RW Harvey said
Learning from Aristophanes and Arendt…
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_democracy_dies_lessons_from_a_master_20101011/