« January 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
March 29, 2006
The New Badiou
A taste of Logiques des mondes, which has just appeared in France – thanks to the sorceror anaximandrake
Today, the default belief can be condensed into the following single statement:
There is nothing but bodies and languages
Let us say that this statement is the axiom of the contemporary conviction, and propose to name this conviction democratic materialism.
[...]
However, democratic materialism admits of a global limit to its multiform tolerance. A language that does not recognise universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from that equality. We call a language which claims to provide the norm for all others and to rule over all bodies dictatorial and totalitarian. Thus, it is not a question of tolerance, but of a "right to intervene" – legally, internationally, militarily if needs be: they will pay bodily for their linguistic faults.
[...]
The history of a world is but the temporal figure of the universality of its exposition. It is in the last instance the unfolding of its superabundance of being. The infinite inaccessibility of the support of being of a world gives way to the universal exposition of relations and thus to the logical completion of that world.
[...]
It is sometimes suggested that all I see in philosophy is a way to re-establish, against the contemporary apology for the ordinary and the futile, the rights of heroism. Why not? However, the old heroism claimed to justify life through sacrifice. My wish is to make it exist through the affirmative joy that the following of consequences universally procures. Let us say that the epic heroism of he who gives his life, is succeeded by the mathematical heroism of he who creates it, point by point.
[...]
The disillusioned animal for whom merchandise is the only means of orientation – we are only consigned to its form if we consent to it. But we protect the Idea of this consent, mystery of the pure present.
Posted by robin at 08:31 PM
March 26, 2006
Down with Guardrails! Up with Precarité!
Strange dissonances between the lyrical existentialism of the communiqué (see below) and the ostensible origins of the action. How does the following square with the demand for the revocation of the CPE?
The night of the eviction of the Sorbonne, part of the students had no idea why they were there or what they could do, let alone what they should do. They were wandering in anguish of the freedom offered but impossible to grasp, because it was not desired. A week later, after numerous occupations and confrontations with the police, their asserted impotence is finally giving place to an innocent taste for direct action. Pacifism finally becomes what it has never stopped being: a benign existential pathology.
What seems immediately evident is what small price the heads of a few flics constitutes, in return for the vision – surely delightful to the state – of 'revolutionary' groups revolting for security. For security within the framework not only of Capital, but of state-hobbled Capital. Surely no-one can misrecognise as a 'law' what is clearly only a dismanting of state-law in favour of uncontrolled nomos? If there is certainly a touch of the adolescent cri de coeur "I didn't ask to be born" in the following:
No one has ever voted the establishment of capitalism.
more profoundly there is the danger here of a failure to be equal, in thought, to the situation, even in the thick of potentiality: whence the antipathy for precarité? Precarité is surely the greatest gift Capital has given us. Something painful, difficult, but nonetheless a gift. Even Badiou affirms that the great virtue of capitalism's "errant automation" is its disenchantment, its destruction of every bond that effected to find the truth of any configuration of multiplicity in being itself. In short, its brutal revelation of the "subject's" nothingness is contemporaneous with the revelation of being (alias the in-itself) as inessential, impotent ordered monotony (to this extent Badiou is obviously just Sartre with a powerful pocket calculator). Capitalism delivers us irreversibly, actually, to anguish: so surely the nonsense of revolting against this gift is only the stuff of cowardice and idealism.
Leave aside the pragmatic point that the demands misunderstand the structural precarité under which business itself operates (themselves hardly free to make a salto mortale out of their situation - no limited company asked to be born either). The prospect of being obligated to a new employee for decades to come is hardly likely to make employers more likely to take on the youth of the banlieue, whereas a certain precarité might make experimentation possible - on both sides (the greatest weapon and freedom the capitalist worker has is his ability simply not to turn up). The pragmatic basis of the CPE is, yes, a capitulation to Capitalism's errant autonomy and thus a capitulation to a precarité that essentially belongs no more to the state or the multinational than to the worker. It's the skein of orthodoxy, social mores, tradition, fearfulness, propriety, in other words bad faith that limit the immediate exercise of this precarité on the part of the worker (at least, in developed economies - but how does an ameliorative, corrective politics here help the less-developed?)
If the riots marches and occupations in Paris harbour some potential it is to the extent that they make of this precarité a social, collective exercise rather than militate 'against' it in/on principle.
The event will never arrive until every dream of carrying some political booty back to the land of the 'real' is renounced; until we reach a universal affirmation of something beyond the picket line, beyond unemployment - unemployability, vagrancy, precarity, the reversibility of futility and unconditional joy, the positivity of anguish. Refusal of the wage-labourer as fetishised ideal in favour of the vagrant, the vagabond. Beckett would surely appreciate this sentiment: only when every worker and student finds their inner tramp is the purposive exoskeleton of capitalism shed and its relative deterritorialization accelerated into the production of a 'new earth'.
The constant movement, the circulation of everything is a paradoxical condition for the functioning of the capitalist machine. In the same paradox, interrupting its functioning is a condition for its disruption.
Substitute acceleration for interruption. Capitalism-schizophrenia functions only in virtue of its axiomatisation, in the freeze-frame of its systemic recuperation. If the CPE releases the brakes a little, of course it is only to shortly re-engage them. For all this, it cannot be mistaken for the enemy. Form a stone-sucking collective machine which refuses to 'function' as much as capitalism-schizophrenia does. (It goes without saying that this refusal of function is easier for students than for workers. But if there is no 'being' of the worker – that is, if we affirm something beyond ones vocational coordinates – but only a becoming, then it is still possible for that becoming to be diverted.)
Finally, the power of this turmoil is in the act, not in any 'cause' but in the practical realisation of freedom. In this sense no barricade, no picket-line, no occupation is any more or less political than Antoine Doinel's bunking off school.
No doubt the first step is taken in rejecting the sham of democracy; the words go further:
We have to embrace with serenity the fact that there will be no return to normal, and then inhabit this irreversibility.
It remains to be seen how long the affirmation of insecurity, the distancing from all cause, can be upheld.
Only wild demonstrations and occupations from now on.
Posted by robin at 10:06 AM
March 25, 2006
Communique
Posted by robin at 12:43 PM
the real beckett
Beckett is for life, not just for centenaries.
Peter Marinker of the Godot Company
Instead of spending your savings on supporting John Hurt's champagne and oyster habit, why not support The Godot Company, the only theatre company to be dedicated entirely to performing Beckett's work (and moreover without sponsorship from the Irish Tourist Board). As the result of a great deal of voluntarily undertaken work and organisational perseverance, you can now see them perform various lesser-known works in a small dark room behind a bookshop (surely the most appropriate sort of place to see Beckett performed) throughout the summer. See here for details.
Posted by robin at 08:11 AM
March 20, 2006
on the way to Hampstead Heath we were held up by a film crew filming Prime Suspect (6? 7?): a scene where a man stops his car and runs down a path after a schoolgirl. The director leant into the car and instructed the protagonist to 'do some handbrake acting' when the cameras started to roll
Posted by robin at 03:42 PM
The Liar Bell
The Sage of Tennessee is trapped in a house full of Hungarians who just don't understand about Schelling.
Which gives occasion for a search on 'Hungarian Philosophers', of which there are many, none whose work is more intriguing than András Ferenc. Thinking to uncover a refreshingly robust practical approach to the philosophy of logic, readers will be frustrated that "Russell's Paradox with Nails and String" remains as yet untranslated. But "Feedback and Paradox" gives precise instructions on how to build an electronic liar paradox by modifying your doorbell. Along with the other spreadsheet-based experimenta, this work definitely constitutes a vindication of Urbanomic's call for a programme of Philosophical Research and Development.
Posted by robin at 11:08 AM
March 09, 2006
Maybe Being is a Mess
Taking into account the importance of historicity (evental history of mathematics) Badiou's minimal claim is only that set theory is the most powerful tool we have at our disposal now for describing things in so far as they are, regardless of what they are, and therefore constitutes our epoch's access to being; which is a claim that's both clear and eminently contestable, mathematically and philosophically. It seems to really depend (like Heidegger's decision - but with very different commitments, of course) upon a prior decision as to what ontology needs to encompass.
What is questionable is the claim that by adopting set theory we remain philosophically uncommitted (just as – to continue the analogy à gauche suggests – phenomenology affects to be free of all intellectual commitments) since the decision is historically-mathematically sanctioned. B. suggests that the decision, far from being arbitrary, has in some sense been made for us by the history of mathematics.
On the other hand, it seems more or less that it is the elegance and simplicity of set theory which commends it to the philosopher. But who is to say that being is simple or elegant? Isn't this precisely an unwarranted intuitive demand on the universe? What about Quantum Mechanics? String theory? even, on Badiou's own territory, the prime number distribution, the Riemann hypothesis. [[Questions that Badiou doesn't usually get asked, but which we hope to get an answer to when B returns from the States, in an interview in upcoming collapse 1)]].
I would guess that even mathematicians themselves would regard it as a somewhat tendentious decision to regard all other approaches as negligible and actually reducible to axiomatised set theory. I think (again, just a guess) most mathematicians are, pragmatically speaking, methodological and (implicitly) ontological pluralists. But then, Badiou dismisses 'working mathematicians' from the ranks of the ontologically-enlightened as easily as he dismisses complex numbers and quaternions from ontology itself[in Number and Numbers -]...)
Looking at the background that is laid out in Number and Numbers Badiou seems to stake a lot on a particular type of linear order whose characteristics have more to do with anthropological counting systems than with the realities that are being revealed to us at the cutting edge of science and mathematics. So is Badiou's claim that 'ontology=mathematics' is a claim about discourse not about reality all too near the mark...?
What in fact comes first is a set of demands, a politics of being, the real decision, which a suitable ontology will come elegantly, inevitably, to support (again, like Heidegger...?).
Posted by robin at 08:09 AM
March 02, 2006
Dinner with Demons
Dave Brubeck on the barricades, man.
Time to throw off those unkind Virginia Woolf slurs.
demonic ringleader
Another leap forward for Anglo-Slovenian diplomatic relations.
If I look really bored, maybe he'll.....................................nope, didn't work.
How you doin'?
When I said this was a non-conversation, I meant it in the 'Philosophie II' sense.
Posted by robin at 11:45 PM
March 01, 2006
another new urbanomic blog (apart from,erm, the one I wasn't meant to tell you about) emerging here – proving undeniably the existence of 'the other Robin':
robin2
I will get round to updating the blog.urbanomic.com homepage sometime, and perhaps even start writing here again (although a new blogname might be the only way to build up the requisite impetus for that)
Posted by robin at 11:25 AM