Sunday, March 12, 2006
(6:11 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Being and Event Reading Group: Week 4 (pp. 184-239)
We are in the midst of Part IV - The Event: History and the Ultra-One. In the first two meditations of this part (pp. 173-183), Badiou has established first (Med. 16) a nature-history dichotomy such that history does not exist. But if no history, no militant. Historicity, in fact, 'lies entirely in the singular; that upon which the state's metastructure has no hold' (174). What's more 'being comes forth ... by way of historical localization ... something is subtracted from representation, or the state' [breakthrough of the real I presume]. Second (Med. 17), by way of 'the matheme of the event,' the concept of the ultra-one allows us to posit the ways in which an event does and does not belong to a situation. An event 'evokes the void and interposes itself between the void and itself' (182-83) and 'can only be revealed in the retroaction of interventional practice' (178).Meditation 18: Being's Prohibition of the Event First of all, we have a problem. 'Ontology does not admit a doctrine of the event.' Thus, 'event is the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology' (184) - everyone but Jared and Charles, together, ''aaahhh". Neverthless, the maths can help us out by way of the axiom of foundation (AoF). The AoF, 'introduced rather tardily by Zermelo' suggests that 'in fact every pure multiple is historical, or contains at least one site. According to this axiom, within an existing one-multiple [a multiple counted as one by a situation], there always exists a multiple presented by it such that this mulitple is on the edge of the void relative to the initial mutiple' (185). While as metaontological and thus generally considered surplus by working mathemeticians, the AoF in fact 'touches on the ontological difference between being and beings' insofar as every situation is historical, and there are historical multiples everywhere' (187). Drawing on earlier Meditations, we know that nature as stable consists of 'non-ontololgical situations' in which 'foundation via the void is impossible,' but 'ontology uniquely admits founded multiples' of the void via the doctrine of the Two (Med. 12). As such, one could hastily conclude that ontology is 'entirely orientated towards the though of a being of the event' (188-89). However, the ontological formalization of such a thinking would be alpha belongs to alpha. Is this possible via a theory of the extraordinary set? No, the AoF actually forecloses such a possibility such that 'ontology has nothing to say about the event' (189-90).
Meditation 19: Mallarmé The posibility that 'ontology has nothing to say about the event' gives rise immediately to the most beautiful Meditation of the book thus far. A striking juxtaposition, the height of metaontological mathematical abstraction precedes Mallarmé's figue of a seasoned ship captain, arm raised high, fist clenched against a pitch black horizon in a raging storm. In his fist, the captain holds the possibility of title of the work A Cast of Dice ... . With no way to properly summarize the Meditation's ethos, I'll simply quote from the conclusion: "On the basis that 'a cast of dice will never abolish chance', one must not conclude in nihilism, in the uselessness of action, even less in the management-cult of reality and its swarm of fictive relationships" (198).
We now move to Part V The Event: Intervention (Med. 20) and Fidelity (23). Pascal (21)/Choice (22); Hölderin (25)/Deduction (24). The latter two will be considered next weekend.
Meditation 20: Intervention Intervention is 'any procedure by which a multiple is recognized as an event' (202). 'Nomination of an event is what constitutes it' (though 'not as real') (203). In a sense, an event nominates itself as the name of the event must emerge from the void. Nomination is essentially illegal since it 'cannot conform to the law of representation' (205). I cannot help but thinking of Genesis here ... . Interventional choice inevitably upsets the logic of the one, and the state of the situation can only resecure stability at the price of spotlighting the void it is supposed to foreclose. For Badiou, 'Time is intervention itself' (210); there can be no primal event or radically new beginning. Such thinking of the nascent is the 'false thought of the event, Revolution, or Apocalypse' (210). Rather, what is crucial is following an event's consequences through (not glorifying its occurence). Disciplined or 'organized control of time' equals fidelity to an event' (211).
Meditation 21: Pascal The event in Christianity par excellence is 'the death of the son of God on the cross' (note the difference from the later written Paul book). Fidelity to the meaning of that event is critical, but alas Christianity was long, long plagued by ontologies of presence. Here Badiou is refering back to a previous chapter that brings forth this claim (we all know what folks like Milbank, David Hart, and Reinhard Hütter would say to such a charge: analogy, participation, negative theology). Pascal, however, is heroic for Badiou insofar as he attempts to refound Christianity on the thought of human infinity rather than finity. Pascal renovates fidelity to the Church (the first institution to pretend to universality - Rome? Greece?) in the face of the challenge of science. Where others such as Voltaire have bemoaned Pascal's mathematical genius exerting itself on religion, and especially the miracle, Badiou appreciates Pascal's commitment here insofar as Pascal is a wonderful example of the militant. [I would very much like further illumination from Badiou on this from p. 219 - 'what the apostles did against the law, the atheist nihilist can redo'.]
Meditation 22: The Form-multiple of Intervention: is there a being of choice? Early in the twentienth century, according to Med. 22, mathematicians were embroiled in a major row over whether or not the general existence of a function of choice exists with respect to infinite sets. Everyone agreed to the existence of such a function with respect to finite sets. 'The axiom posits that for every existent multiple alpha, there correpsonds an existent function f, which 'chooses' a representative in each of he multiplees that make up alpha' (224). In short, there appears to be something, un-delegatable in infinite multiplicity' (225). Over time, however, even the skeptics have come to accept the existence of a function of choice in infinite sets because otherwise they would have to give up certain extremely important principles in other mathematical areas that are only possible if one supposes the existence of such. Badiou concludes that 'ontology declares that intervention is, and names this being choice ' (227-28). Such a choice or intervention, however, maintains a certain illegality and anonymity as 'outside the law of the count' (229-30). Paradoxically, the advent of an intervention in math almost always precedes a return to the most banal forms of mathematical rigidity just as political history demonstrates that 'immense revolutionary disorders engender the most rigid states of order' (230). At the end of the day, the state of the situation is left to deal with the ahisotoricity of the form-multiple of intervention. The most profound lesson of the axiom of choice is that it is only 'on the basis of the couple of the undecidable event and the interventional decision that time and historical novelty result' (231). By itself, intervention is fully subsumable under the rubric of order and even hierarchy.
Meditation 23: Fidelity, Connection An extraordinarily fruitful meditation that I cannot possibly adequately simplify. But to begin, Badiou describes fidelity as 'the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation (under the supernumerary naem conferred by an intervention) of an evental multiple. ... To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance.' Here we finally get the two titular terms together in the 'amorous relationship ... [of] the dialectic of being and event' (232). From here Badiou procedes to three preliminary remarks to which the rest of the Med. is devoted to seriously qualifying if not outright overturning: 1)fidelity is always particular (but later, we must think the universal form of fidelity) 2) Fidelity is not a term mulitple, but a structure. Strictly speaking fidelity is not (but later, it can be grasped in a provisional result composed of effective enquiries into whether multiples are connected to event. With respect to the state fidelity is almost nothing, with respect to the situation it is the quasi-everything. Thus the famous 'so we are nothing, let's be everything' (236).). 3) Fidelity acts by counting the parts of a situation or operates in a sense at the level of the state of a situation (but later, fidelity actually works as a counter-state or sub-state insofar as 'it surpasses all the results in which its finite-being is set out' (236).). For Badiou, there are three types of fidelity, spontaneous, dogmatic, or generic. The first two are not able to escape the power of the state but in the case of generic fidelity, fidelity remains distinct from the state to the extent that it is 'unassignable ot a defined function of the state' (237). Badiou promises more in this regard in Med. 31, but leaves us with some intriguing thoughts in the final two pages here (238-39) on the possibility of an 'infinite fidelity' in which a generically faithful subject is able to build 'a kind of other situation, obtained by the division in two of the primitive situation,' organizing 'within the situation another legitmacy of inclusions' and thus extending the results of an originary event into a vibrantly new, contemporaneous event!
