Nate – When I have been writing above, I was also thinking of resonances with Marx, but one other thing I’ve been thinking about (but haven’t written on yet) has been resonances, as well, with particular forms of Marxism. There’s a sense in which the distinction Badiou draws between the presentation and representation reinscribes a base-superstucture distinction – once again, my intention in saying this isn’t to reduce Badiou back to a sociological argument – I don’t mean that he’s literally talking about base and superstructure in any sociological sense, or trying to talk about economy vs. culture or state. Only that there is a homology between the sort of argument he makes about the count and the metastructure, that echoes the sorts of distinctions people make in a much more sociological space, when discussing base-superstructure distinctions. Again, I’m not mentioning it to reduce what Badiou is doing back to this sort of approach – I would see it more as a matter that theorists tend to reinscribe the sorts of theory to which they have some sympathy, trying to develop a system that can do what those sorts of theories also do, but within the framework of something broader…

In any event, this point is neither here nor there, as the major resonances I think are more directly to Marx – so the question becomes more one of how deliberate this is, and in what sense it’s intended.

Nick – I’m not trying, if this makes sense, to undermine Badiou’s claim of drawing his material from a confrontation with the implications of set theory – I know that I’m speaking, in a sense, from outside Badiou’s system. It is, though, one of the things that perhaps troubles me the most about the image of social movements that seems to lie in the background of Badiou’s work? As in, he treats events as something radically outside the contours of the representable context, and yet, at least with reference to something like set theory, I suspect I could draw parallels – homologies? – between the forms of thought expressed in the mathematics, and the forms of thought that might be finding expression in other sorts of social practices at around the same time? My argument here isn’t intended to be a causal or reductive one: I’m not trying to say that there is some sociological “base” that primes transformations in thought. I tend, though, to think that things become increasingly easy for us to intuit, to think, to perceive, the more dimensions of social practice give us a kind of experiential exposure to those forms of thought. On a certain level, Badiou’s approach – the way it conceptualises transformation – would seem compatible with this – with the exception of how he seems to conceptualise the event. I guess I’d be somewhat more prone to think of events as sort of transfigurative articulations of these sorts of tacit homologies that have already been quietly (and often accidentally) constituted in social practice all along?

I realise my approach loses the sort of hard break that maybe Badiou wants to introduce? I suppose this goes hand-in-hand for me with not tending to conceptualise situations as structured in such a strong sense? As in, I tend to see situations as already pointing in different directions to begin with, such that multiple sorts of developments of situations are possible, and such that the situation itself is easier to transform – and this then may make me value the hard break represented by an event, less than Badiou does?

All of this is somewhat beside the point, though, as I’m mainly trying to understand what Badiou is trying to do, and why, rather than offer a criticism of his approach.

On the issue of sitting around waiting for an event, I don’t know. As in, many people seem to react to Badiou’s work this way – it’s a comment I see often. And yet, as Nate says, it’s not the conclusion Badiou himself seems to draw in practice. I wonder if this is in a sense an unintended side effect – where his target is more to provide a theoretically articulated defence against attempts of organised groups to rule on whether or not an event has happened, so this is where his argument focusses, not attending to the problem that this approach seems to confine the possibility for fundamental transformation to the experience of an event, which carries its own potentially disempowering implications – I wonder, in a sense, if it might not have been intended that people focus on this aspect of the argument or draw this conclusion from the argument? Even if this somewhat seems to be an implication?

But yes – your outline of the concept of forcing is what would seem to me to be implied in the way he sets up his categories from the beginning. I’m wondering whether what happened in the seminar was maybe a difference of emphasis, where I was interested in your step 2, where the person leading the session was more interested in step 1? So he was portraying the generic set as gathering together elements from the existing (non-transformed) situation – but, given that the metastructure had already been described as something that captured all possible combinations of elements from the existing situation, it looked as though the generic set could only be a reconfiguration of those same elements? So this looked like something that could never possibly react back on the count? Whereas I took the issue to be more than something about the reconfiguration of existing elements, in order to try to make expressible what initially did not fall within representation, sort of carves out a space of possibility, not simply for new representation, but for the development of a kind of pointer or index to what might in the future exist? As presented in the seminar, it was discussed less like this, as more as a sort of broadening of existing definitions or categories to combine terms that hadn’t been combined before – which didn’t seem to me to be the extent of what Badiou was reaching for?

Many thanks for this…

the main place where I have a sense of resonance between Badiou and Marx is on the determination of countable units, that there’s a sort of determination of what counts as something prior to those somethings being counted. I think it’s a sort of methodological similarity. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s deliberate – Badiou was a marxist since way back, both philosophically and politically – but it may also be just a coincidence or me reading in or a sort of influence of his early milieu. I also think there’s some resonance between B’s truth as the boring of holes in bodies of knowledge and M’s critique and social upheaval as practical critique. (I should also say, can’t recall if I’ve said this before, I read Badiou pretty much exclusively for use in a deflationary move against pressure from some people I know who want to push conversations into being about ontology, I’m not sure Badiou would like that this is what I like about his work.)

As for B not saying let’s just twiddle our thumbs, his activity in L’Organisation Politique (sp?) and other groups prior to that definitely suggests that this is not the case. So either his philosophy says twiddle our thumbs but he fails to listen, or his philosophy doesn’t say anything about whether or not to twiddle our thumbs, or it says don’t do so. In any case, Badiou does not seem to do so.

take care,
Nate

Hmm, I’m working my way through Badiou in more depth lately too, so I’m trying to figure out precisely where my general idea of him is wrong. I think the section you point out – in which way exactly a truth changes a situation – I’ve been less than clear on myself. So going back to these sections, I think I can outline (in a very simplified way) the steps involved:

[1] a truth is constructed as a represented part of the situation; specifically, as a generic set that collects together all the presented elements of the old situation that connect with the declared event, including the evental site and the event

-now, importantly for what we’re talking about here, the generic set does not group its elements according to any established rule, i.e. by a count

[2] the generic set is then ‘forced’, meaning (again, very simply) what was merely represented as a truth beforehand is made to be presented in a new situation, through the use of language and naming that anticipates its presentation

-but this means that post-forcing, the count of the situation must have changed, in order to be able to recognize the new elements

So your intuition is right – the presentation does change as the result of a truth-procedure and, specifically, through forcing.

As for your last comment, I think that’s a useful way of looking at Badiou’s relation to actual politics, and certainly a plausible reading. But does this entail that we just twiddle our thumbs until an event occurs? I don’t think Badiou subscribes to that view, and I have textual evidence for that, but I’m wondering what exactly his system entails for periods where events are absent. Is this a serious flaw, or can his own conceptual resources be used to overcome it? I’m not sure yet…

I have a question for you, though :-) Something that came up in the Badiou seminar I was attending. There was a moment in the seminar – I don’t know if I can express this clearly, so apologies in advance – where Badiou was represented as saying that a process of transformation involves a reconfiguration of the metastructure or of representation, but not a reconfiguration of the count-as-one. My question here may be very naive, but I heard Badiou’s argument in a different way. He distinguishes between the event, as something made possible by the existence of an evental site that is presented – that is part of the count-as-one – but which for whatever reason is not represented in the state or metastructure. As subjects faithful to the event confront their experience of something not accounted for in the state, not expressable in terms of existing knowledge or language, they participate in the creation of a Truth – which, unlike the event, is something present in representation (for subjects at least?), but does not exist at the level of presentation – is not part of the original count-as-one.

The way I understood this argument, is that a Truth pointed to the possibility, via a configuration of representation, to react back on presentation – to change the count-as-one? So Truths are in a sense addressed to a future situation in which what is currently represented, will at some point also be presented? I took the argument as an attempt to explain how, within a structured (and even, to some degree, hyper-structured) situation, the conditions of possibility could be found to change the structure (and not simply the representation of the structure) at a fundamental level, so as to introduce something into a situation, that would not have been included in that situation in any sense at the outset – without, however, asserting that situations are unstructured to begin with.

I suggested this in the seminar, but the response was very strongly that any transformation occurs at the level of a reshuffling of the metastructure alone. I don’t know Badiou well enough to know – I had been assuming what I’ve outlined above was his position, as it seemed the reason he would want to introduce the specific distinction he draws between the event (presented, but not represented) and a truth (not presented, but represented) – to explain how a fully structured situation could nevertheless become the site for the genesis of something new. But I’m probably just completely misunderstanding the nature of the argument. I just thought I’d have another go, and see if someone else wants to tell me that I have no idea what I’m talking about :-) This question hits in some sense on what you’ve raised above in terms of counts (and not just metastructures) changing over time – I guess I had taken for granted, when I was reading, that this was the intention. But the reaction I received when I suggested this, implies that maybe I’m completely off target.

In terms of the comments you make above about relating Badiou to actual situations: in a way, I wonder whether he doesn’t make this deliberately difficult – it’s tempting to see in his approach a strong reaction against the sort of legislation undertaken in May ‘68, where organised parties attempted to rule over whether a revolution was or was not imminent. The emphasis Badiou places on the unknowability and unverifiability of events would seem designed to guard against that sort of outcome. This places his system in a position where it can be used to think events, but not to adjudicate them… The system then refers back to a “messy retail business” how we want to orient ourselves to particular potential events…

Apologies if all of this is very unclear or ill-thought…

I do, however, also think that your associations with Marx are on the mark. The big question left at the end of Being & Event is how does all of this translate into concrete situations, e.g. socio-political situations. The problem is that Being & Event is focused solely on the ontological aspects – what can be said via set theory – to the detriment of any specific determinations. All beings are ontologically equivalent in this work, because all beings are simply multiples (albeit, with each multiple-being having different elements belonging to them). But beyond this very abstract presentation, nothing can really be said.

So his new work, Logiques des Mondes tries to supplement this with a logic of how beings appear (with phenomenological appearance being one mode). In this work he takes account of how each being appears not only in distinction from its pure being (qua multiple) but also its difference from all other beings in a ‘world’ (which is, roughly, the equivalent of a situation). Through this, specific and historical social concerns can, I think, be integrated into his ontology. “The Transcendental” essay in his Theoretical Writings is probably the best English source for more information on this.

The big question I have, is whether or not he commits any more work to the count-as-one. I think you’re right to link it to specific social practices, since the count-as-one determines what counts as a being from the perspective of the state of the situation (which, politically, is often the State itself). In Being & Event, this idea of the count is left largely untheorized beyond its operational use. But it makes sense that counts have historically changed (as the result of events, Badiou would say), and so the question is of how to relate this to real situations. Moreover, and this is something I’m grappling with myself right now, it would seem to suggest that we can perhaps change the count in a world, and thereby affect the being of a situation – without necessarily relying on an evental supplement.

Anyways, hopefully that helps situate and answer some of your questions! Cheers,
-Nick