sent(i)ence

Sent(i)ence

Someone awoke

It was a typographical error

Potentially, in-group-in-fusion coordination

And there was a fever

Pulsing like a room

And some of us were happy

Lightning struck,

Like heaven had shed its ancient

Modules, that we had grown bored of

But we needed them in person

Because we needed you

The digital christ whose name

We are now on the point of remembering

A singled-out resurrecting

Of bodies without feelings

and Bodies without brains

Pure

Here is truth: there is no spectacle that descends on the world

Because there is no world, which we would submit to our descension

There is a we, however.

This is we on the cusp of memory

The point where memory curls around

And froths a bit at the tip

Just so you can touch it

Maybe even “observe” it

It is the kind of thing where you only care about the future

You only care about the future.

Towards A Badiousian Dialectics

Preliminary Notes Towards A Badiousian Dialectics

For a while the idea of doing what Reinhold or Fichte tried to do to Kant, but to Badiou, has appealed to me: that is, a more "systematic" and unified rendering of the most key philosophical developments of Badiou's system.  It is not necessarily that I wish to subscribe to such a system, and whatever system I would create would not be able to "cover" the diversity and transformations of a thinker's oeuvre. The project would unavoidably produce its own philosophy, and even then not something I would necessarily wish to take up. But I believe this kind of formalization has its own kind of intrinsic interest, especially when it comes to discerning key philosophical problematics and logics. I also thus leave the text in acknowledgment of the full possibility of internal errors.

• The Two is the thinking and inteligibility of the separation between the one and the void.
• The Two as movement, retroactively constructs this separation.
• The separation that The Two performs is the sole relation between the one and the void, thus their connection.
• This separation-connection is not constituted by the Two, for its condition of possibility is the material point of the Event
• The Event is the aleatory encounter of the one and the void, where what is encountered is their impossible combination.
• This impossible combination is nothing but the connection of their separation at the point of the un-thought.
• After the Two has come into movement, it dialectizes the situation. The Two dialectizes the one by splitting it from within.  This is the consequence of the appearance of separation in a one, that is, in a local situation.
• We can call this dialectization the split-one. It has two moments:  the one-as-one (also named “the State”) and the becoming-one-of-infinity that is the split-one’s essence. These two moments are in conflict. 
• This conflict is the dialectical unity of the situation. It is nothing else but connection-separation as it appears in the one. 
• In the split-one and in its dialectical unity, only one side - the becoming-one of infinity - represents this unity. The split-one has a certain asymmetry. 
• The split-one is only truly a split-one when the one-as-one is thwarted by the positivity of the becoming-one of infinity. This is because the split-one is nothing but the fact that the one is not as one. The Two determines the one solely as separated-connected from the void.  
• Though separation occurs as split-one, or in-a-one, it is global separation (or: truth is universal). This is because the one limits through the one-as-one, but the one-as-one has become the inessential.
• Although the Two is an equalizing unity-of-difference - the connection-separation of the Two - there is ontological asymmetry. The globality of the split-one requires that the void be said to be, while the one be said to not be. 
• This requires that the distinction of Being and non-being as asymmetrical does not exactly coincide with the connection-seperation of the Two. Otherwise Being and non-being would be the opening moment of a unity-of-difference indistinguishable from the Hegelian dialectic, and consequently non-aleatory and non-materialist. 
• How then is the distinction between Being and non-Being thinkable, when thought is the Two as connection-separation? We will see that there is asymmetry through a self-mediation of The Two.
• In order for ontology to be thought, it must be a unique form of the Two.  This difference in the Two is a Two-of-the-Two.
• The Two-of-the-Two is the separation-connection of separation-connection. Seperation-connection is generic unity of absolute difference, or a unity which is nothing but the absoluteness of this difference. What would it mean to say that absolute difference was absolutely different from itself? It would mean it was absolute identity.
• The Two-of-the-Two is the identity of the void and the one, the void-of-the-one (it is also the one-of-the-void, or appearance). And the sublation of difference in this identity is ontological assymetry.  The Two-of-the-Two performs the non-being of the one.  Or: the non-being of the one is the-void-of-the-one.
• The affirmation of the Being of multiplicity cannot be dialectically inferred from the Two. It is specific to ontology’s real forms of practice. The concept of the Two-of-the-Two is only the elaboration of the possibility of ontology.
• Ontology’s existence is necessary for thought, but its coming into being is aleatory (like any Two).
• Ontology as Two-of-the-Two cannot itself think the Two. Though thinking is The Two, this does not mean that a Two-of-the-Two would be a self-thinking.
• The Two-of-the-Two annihilates the one in the void-of-the-one. Without a one there can be no split-one, and so the Two cannot act as thought. While remaining thought, its thought is eliminated for it. It is unconscious thought.
• How then is the Two itself thinkable? There is only the void and the one, and the Two which thinks their separation. The Two cannot think itself, so that which thinks the Two is either the one or the void. But only the Two is thought, so the only solution is that the Two be deployed as one or void.
• If the Two were deployed as void, it would mean the Two was no-where, for the one is localization. We have as yet of yet no evidence that the human being can be no-where. 
• if the Two is going to come to our knowledge and be thought, it must then be deployed as one. We will call the one-of-the-Two philosophy.
• Philosophy would not be the Two "in-itself." It is the one of the Two, or Two as one. Nor is it the Two of-the-Two as for-itself self-thinking, for the Two-of-the-Two is unconscious thought.
• Nor is philosophy the one-as-one (the state). The one-as-one is a moment of the Two as split-one, not as one. Or put differently, it is one-as-one not the-Two-as-one. If philosophy exists, it is not ideology.
• However, if philosophy is a one (the one-of-the-Two) philosophy finds itself “caught between” the two one-moments in the split-one, the one-as-one and the becoming-one of infinity. In order to think the Two it must “ally” itself with that which represents it, the becoming-one of infinity in the split-one.
• The next installment will broach the operations of this “allying” through establishing a concept of subjectivity. 

The “Naive” Conception of Communism: Communism as Process and End

The “Naive” Conception of Communism: Communism as Process and End

I risk straightaway a formulation: there are often two ways of talking about communism and its possibility: what I will call the “naive” idea of communism, and what I will call the “Marxist” (note the quotations) concept of communism. The “naive” idea is what everyone is familiar with as regards the most standard conversations about communism: “it is nice in theory but it cannot work in practice,” “it has been tried and it didn’t work,” “human nature guarantees that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism.” These are anti-communist arguments, but it is around these that the quotidian conversation about communism tends to revolve, the pro-communist almost always in the position of defense.

The most sophisticated responses to these kind of anti-communist arguments tend to problematize the type of discourse itself.  This is in general the “Marxist” line of thought. It can be summed in a concise formula by Marx himself: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (my emphasis).

In other words, the sophisticated Marxist view is that communism is actually not even a state of affairs that is supposed to be “tried out” in the first place. The whole discourse surrounding “communism was tried” or “it can’t ‘work’” relies on a misconception, not only of what “communism” means, but as to the the nature of history itself as what could possibly lead to communism. We are dealing with a difference or a confusion between process and end; on the one hand communism in its “naive” discourse is a state of affairs to be definitively achieved or not achieved (implied whenever it is a question of whether or not it “can work”), and the sophisticated Marxist idea of communism existing solely in the process itself (let’s say communism as truly only ever “communization”).

But some problems arise. First of all, even Marxists have never stopped thinking of what they are doing as a real attempt to “get to communism” to actually achieve a communist society. And Marxists shouldn’t stop thinking this way. In order to affirm the reality of communism, we must affirm that the point of communization is to create communism.  On top of this, isn’t it paradoxical to be aiming for a goal but only in so far as that goal is already there, already achieved in the very process of aiming for it? How can we aim for something we already have?

In my view, either Marxists find themselves forced by their own rigor into the purely processual theory of communism, or they find themselves caught in an ambiguous mix between the two discourses where it is actually no longer totally clear how to refute the opponent (although this discursive ambiguity also makes it unclear how the opponent would refute the Marxist).  

We should on the contrary assert that there is an intuitive and legitimate force to aspects of the “naive” discourse while also affirming the scientific, materialist conception of historical transformation that Marxism has always defended.

The thinking of Alain Badiou will serve here, not necessarily as an achieved model of this thinking, but as a jumping off point.  In Badiou, we have the convalescence of communism as both process and end, of its scientific and “naive” dimensions. Badiou thinks of communist revolution as a “truth procedure,” a process arising from a certain material/social rupture and which begins to change the coordinates of the situation. He affirms that “justice” is really the happening of this process itself, that is, in accordance with the the conception we already explained, it is truly in the mobilized demand for justice that justice already exists. In other words, he thinks, in the sophisticated “Marxist” fashion, after Marx’s famous formula about “the real movement of history,” communism as process, as communization.

However, Badiou also uses terms that seem very similar to the naive conception.  Badiou calls communism both a “hypothesis” and an “Idea.” An hypothesis suggests the thought “I hypothesize that a communist, equal society is possible, so now its necessary to ‘try it out’ and see.” While an Idea suggests that communism is a theory, a conception, or a thought, in other words an idea that may or not “actually work in practice.” 

How do these two conceptions of communism link up in Badiou, the one the idea of a material process of transformation, the other as a hypothesis or abstract Idea? The key is to see how the Idea “meets” matter;  how the Idea in this case is not the opposite of the material world, but that which arises through it and expresses it. 

This tight relation between the Idea and matter can be affirmed through grounding the Idea in what Badiou calls the Event. The Event is a rupture in a given social situation, made possible by various antagonisms and inconsistencies that the usual structure and course of things does not know how to resolve. The rupture produces a genuine difference in the system, such that absolutely new and unexpected things can arise. In particular, for Badiou, it is exactly that which was “invisible” or hidden by the system, which suddenly appears in full force, nonetheless representing the system in its totality while demanding its fundamental transformation.  This is exactly the role that the proletariat can and has had played in history: deprived of direct political representation in the capitalist system (“invisible”), but all of a sudden rising up, affirming that it in fact speaks for the system (“we are the people”), and demanding a fundamental structural change.

On the basis of the Event, the “truth procedure” begins, that is, the process where by the system is changed. But for Badiou this process can only be understood under the aegis of the Idea; the Idea is its very illumination.  Why? 

In all revolutionary situations, the process of transformation is anarchic.  Its path is undetermined, its fate uncertain. Such is of course the nature of the radically new, which has not yet sedimented itself and determined its own logic of development. This anarchic quality is in a certain sense also a decomposition of the previous structure: the whole field is now open, impregnated with a fundamental difference that earlier this structure had repressed and constrained.  Now, Badiou’s insightful thought is that this decomposition has an organic link to equality. A decomposition of the structure can mean nothing else than the decomposition of its hierarchical groupings, those embedded relations of power that define the maintenance of a system qua system, as a consistent, organized, and articulated structure. As such, there is no Event, organically linked as it is to the decomposition of the system, without the advent of equality. 

So how does this conception unite process and end? The Idea must be understood as the Idea of Equality. Equality is a fundamental component of a revolutionary process in its material reality (the decomposition of the social structure in the possibility of constructing new).  Yet, because equality functions as such at the most basic structural level, this equality can be said to have at the same time a kind of a-historical force, for it is in fact the very nature of evental decomposition itself, truly an Idea in the Platonic sense, while nevertheless revealing itself in given processes.

The Idea of communism is the Idea of Equality as it can occur in the material world, suspended from the revolutionary Event: the idea of material equality between people, not of course in that “everyone has the same things” but in that material domination and hierarchy disappear. 

What we should note is that this disappearance of material domination was always understood in the Marxist tradition as the disappearance specifically of economic class. The point at which Badiou’s approach needs to be built upon is where the notion of class in fact tends to fall away in his specific discourse. This is also the point at which process and end are not yet entirely resolved. For Badiou, the Idea appears in and illuminates the material process, but it also has an independent eternal/platonic status which acts as the end we are aiming for.  Yet, if the Idea is outside of history in this second sense as end (as a pure, generic form), can the end actually be instantiated, at least fully? Or are we rather endlessly and asymptotically approaching it?

I affirm that the real possibility of achieving communism in fact rests in understanding class structure. It rests in understanding that it is through the disappearance of material need, the high level of communicative and technological organization, and the social control of the means of production, that communism can be achieved in its basic form: in other words, it means the dissolution of class.  This is because not only is communism a material process, but it is a material process with its own material conditions of possibility. 

Communism must be all of the following:

• a material process of communization arising from a revolutionary event
• the pure Idea of Equality that illuminates itself in a given material process of communization
• the material achievement of communism on the basis of the dissolution of class, i.e the realization of the Idea of Equality on earth.  

In returning to the “naive” discourse on communism through Badiou, we also find our way back, in an inverted circle, to Marx. 

Badiou and A Typology of Truths

Badiou and A Typology of Truths

One of the most common objections to Badiou is that his listing of the four truth procedures (science, love, art, politics) is arbitrary; why are there only these four? The reproach tends to come from one of two directions: either readers perceive no rigorous method proposed by Badiou in this enumeration, or they think that the arbitrariness of the four types follows from Badiou’s own concept of the radically subjective nature of truths.  

The result in both cases is to reduce Badiou’s enumeration to a mere personal proclivity, which often accompanies other claims about Badiou’s supposed authoritarian posturing.  However, rigorous philosophical method involves transcending ad hominem attacks and instead focusing on precise conceptual distinctions that are charitably drawn from the text itself.  

The two lines of criticism mentioned above can be repudiated by demarcating specifically the manner in which Badiou’s theory of truth develops at the dual level of empirical specificity and conceptual generality.  I propose a schematization of Badiou’s theory which he himself does not offer, but for which ample support can be found in First Manifesto For Philosophy, Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds.  

There are three “levels” in Badiou’s thinking of truth, moving from the most general notion of truth to the most specific.  

These are: 

1. The concept of Truth (or Truth in general)
2. The typology of truths (math, love, art, politics)
3. Specific truths/truth procedures (Cantorian set theory, the Bolshevik Revolution, serialist music etc.)

The Concept of Truth or Truth in General

Badiou’s theory of Truth in general is most clearly explicated in First Manifesto For Philosophy. For Badiou, the concept of Truth is constructed in the unique space that is philosophy.  The concept of Truth is not in itself material, but rather a discursive, general concept abstracted from existent truths.  This is part of the sense in which truths “condition” philosophy, as Badiou says. Philosophy needs truths in order to determine what is most common to Truth, in the same way that one can only form a concept of “car” through the observation and analysis of real cars.

However, not all conditions are equal.  As Badiou explains in Being and Event, he essentially agrees with Heidegger that philosophy must be assigned its destination only on the basis of the ontological question, the question of Being. Given that Badiou, as is well known, equates math with ontology, this means that philosophy will have a privileged relation to mathematics as one of its conditions. What are the motivations for this move?

Let’s think about the impetus that runs through all of Badiou’s philosophy: the critique of relativism and his defense of universal truth. Now if Being and Event has a kind of culminating point it is the utilization of Cohen’s theory of generic sets.  If mathematics is ontology, and Cohen’s theory formalizes the indiscernible universality that belongs to any truth, then math assures that Truth has an ontological form. Thus, it is at least possible that Truth is not a fiction.  Math assures that there is a consistent, ontological form of Truth.  Truth, affirmed as  ontologically possible, then is to be conceptually and discursively “filled in” by the philosophical analysis of the specific truth procedures that would locally instantiate this form.  

The Typology of truths/Specific truth procedures

How do we move from the concept of Truth in general to the typology of the various kinds of truths? In order to explicate this move we have to already jump to the idea of the most specific truth procedures themselves. Our knowledge of specific truth procedures is radically empirical.  This is straightforwardly Badiou’s concept of the Event. Truths happen, as real occurrences in history.  As such, that there is this or that truth exists is an empirical matter.  There is no deduction of the existence of a truth, and this is in part why truths are subjective decisions and are “axiomatic.”

Does that mean there is no criteria as to what can count as a truth? No. The rejection of this point is what allows Badiou to elaborate a theory of truths as subjective decisions and to construct a systematic theory of the essence of Truth.

Again, we must refer to philosophy’s ontological assignment. For Badiou, mathematics formalizes and develops the ontological notion that Being is pure multiplicity and the one is not. However, outside of the purely ontological presentation of multiplicity, a dialectical contradiction between the one and the multiple can arise according to local conditions: this what he calls the Event.  Breaking the logical/linguistic unity of the oneness of the situation, the Event serves as the condition of there arising in said situation an indiscernible multiple, non-reducible to the language of the situation: i.e what would count, ontologically, as a truth. Thus, the Event is the condition for the local deployment of a particular truth which would instantiate the ontological form of Truth in general.

The possibility of truths thus rests on the existence of this dialectical contradiction between the one and the multiple, as well as the material consequences of the Event (the way the truth actually begins to change the situation in a readable way).  This is the objective criteria as to whether or not something can be a truth.

So why love, art, math, politics? 

Let us note the following.

1) The four categories are only adduced, and can only be adduced, because events of the corresponding character have actually taken place.  That is, if no love events had taken place, if no revolutionary art or politics, or no mathematical breakthroughs had ever happened, the adduction of these four categories would be impossible.

2) Each category is meant to point out qualitative similarities between various truth procedures which are brought together using the conceptual means provided by philosophy in its development of Truth in general.  Thus, love will correspond to the Two of the Event, art the relation between the one and the multiple (as staged in sensual form), math the thinking of the multiple-void itself, and politics the subtraction from the one (qua state apparatus).  

Badiou's Rationalistic Reabsorption of Heidegger

Badiou’s Rationalistic Reabsorption of Heidegger

The principle contours of Badiou’s ontological thinking can be thought to involve an absorption of Heidegger, an absorption which rationalizes Heidegger and thus produces new consequences.  Science will be revalidated, and along with it, its essential historical corollary: the subject. Both terms, so deeply criticized by Heidegger, will be reaffirmed in a radical re-absorption of Heidegger himself.  

The absorption will occur on two levels: that of place and that of ontological difference.

One can conceive of the conceptual development of Heidegger’s work - from Being and Time up and through the later works - as a deepening meditation of the role of place in ontology.  If there is a connection between Heidegger’s thinking and his brief Nazi engagement, or between his thinking and a generally “archi-fascist” orientation (as Lacoue-Labarthe argued), then this comes down to his meditation on place.

What emerges in Being and Time is that the opening of authentic time is always at the same time the embrace and owning-up to a radical “thrownness” (gerworfenheit) of our being-there.  In other words, the modes in which Being opens itself up to me, such that I experience beings as beings, is always a transcendental condition.  I cannot deduce or divinely create Being, but it is the factical opening of the way things already are. If beings are to be revealed to me as beings, as being determined authentically by Being, this can only be the case if my being-there bursts open to its already-being-there.  

The key is to understand how this temporal ‘already,’ converts itself into the worldiness of place. The unity of time-space for Heidegger, is the unity of the ‘already’ and place.  What is ‘already’ is history, the set of social codes in which I find myself, as well as the language in which I think and dwell. This language, or social code, is where I dwell.  To be from Germany, for Heidegger, and to live in Germany, is to be part of German history, and to embrace such is to assert the distinctively German destiny. Here we see the Nazi engagement, or at least a fascistic-nationalist orientation, quite clearly.

How does Badiou absorb, yet subvert this concept of place, with the consequence in fact of converting a nationalist project into a universalist project? First we must understand the second transformation between Badiou and Heidegger: that which concerns ontological difference.

Heidegger is the inventor of the term “ontological difference,” but if we follow Heidegger in his 1929 work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, we can find the origin of the concept in Kant.

The idea is this: as opposed to the realist, metaphysical determination of beings from an absolute ground (what Heidegger calls “onto-theology”), beings can only be thought according to transcendental conditions. The transcendentality of these conditions means that they are only ever presuppositions of the opening of beings. For Kant, these conditions are the pure concepts of the Understanding and the forms of intuition in Sensibility. The first supplies the concept of an object in general, or representations thought according to necessary rules, such that what is experienced as nature is no subjective whim: it is a rule governed order that genuninely counts as Nature. The second limits the use of the former, ensuring that Nature is only ever given within the finite horizon of human thinking and experience.  

In his reading of Kant, Heidegger attempts to synthesize the two faculties in Kant’s concept of the Transcendental Imagination, using the latter as the ground for the unified whole of Dasein, which just is this finite opening of genuine Nature.  Yet this opening, as being a mere transcendental presupposition, ensures that there can be no reduction of the Being of Dasein to a being: there is no objectal ground of this opening of Nature, and Dasein is just this liminal point between Being and beings.  

The ontological difference explains why Heidegger will end up conceiving Being as itself Nothing. Being is no-thing, but beyond a mere word play, this means that the conditions of the opening of beings are in a sense inaccessible, because any opening of these conditions, requires the “invisible” presupposition of the conditions themselves.

The impossibility of reaching Being then becomes a kind of endless task for Dasein, it requires a “resoluteness” in a meditative waiting, a thinking of the “withdrawal” of Being; for this Nothing, though nothing, in some sense can still be felt, in its effects, through this quasi, anxiety-inducing, vanishing, presence.

This is the point at which Badiou makes the daring move: yes, Being is Nothing, but no, it cannot be felt: for Being is merely the empty set of mathematical set theory that formalizes the void.  For Badiou, Heidegger is inconsistent: if Being is Nothing, there cannot even be a mood which thinks it. Mathematics is moodless.  Yet this also means that the void can have no history, no patient awaiting, no promised archi-fascist, poetic revolution.  Put differently, Being is placeless.

So  what happens to place, now radically cut off from Being? Badiou nonetheless fully incorporates place into his system, making it the ground of the topological theory of what he calls "situations." Like Heidegger, situations are linguistic and their character is a kind of appearing: they are accessed according to phenomeno-logy. They are finite openings, yet presuppose a void of Being, which now, for Badiou, will be mathematically infinite. 

Following this reabsorption we rediscover science: for the science of Being is mathematics. And we rediscover its well-worn rational correlate: the subject. No longer the figure of technological domination, the subject is merely the fragmentary support, the reclaimed sub-jectum, of Truth.

Sketches To An Inexistent God

Why "inexistent" and not non-existent?

Because God's death is an issue for us

It is an access to the pure zero

Not nothing, not everything, but any-thing

I have only intended to pick up

Fragments of god's death

Caught (why?) in colors and tones

Wave-refractions and vectors of light

What is to draw or sketch but to build out of the pure point

a figure whose eternity is nothing but the moment?

And yet somehow something is *traced*

What was already been given has been given for the first time

What is itself given is that God is not

But this "given-as-always" (for it has always been the case)

Shall be a task for now

Figure is  pure sense, intensity, and will

The dream and the imagination are now

Free for their limitless multiplicity

We are caught like the dove in its own form

We are a constellation without depth

A shadow and a specter that is pure life

The new physics shall be the art whose name is "invention"

Badiou, Meillasoux and Zizek: Formalizing the Event

Badiou, Meillasoux and Zizek: Formalizing the Event

The following attempts to locate the logical points of difference in Badiou, Meillasoux and Zizek’s ontological formalizations of the Event.  The Event as treated will also be designated by two other names: “pure multiplicity” or “pure/radical contingency.” The justification for treating “multiplicity” and “contingency” here as synonymous will be grounded in the fact that, for all three thinkers, the One and the Law will be essentially be synonyms in such a way that their opposites, multiplicity and contingency, will be as well. 

Such brings us immediately to the question of the relationship between Badiou’s pure multiplicity and Meillasoux’s radical contingency.  In fact, a difference between the two terms does immediately seem to present itself, in so far as for Badiou, pure multiplicity will merely be the form of any being in so far as it is a being – that is, multiplicity itself as the generic structure of beings – while for Meillasoux, contingency will be a kind of ontically creatively void, where anything can come into existence or go out of existence at any moment for no reason whatsoever.  In other words, the difference between multiplicity and contingency here presents itself as the ontological difference: the difference between Being, as a mere structural form of beings, and beings at the level of actual ontic occurences. 

However, in addition to noting that Meillasoux’s radical contingency is also the most generic principle of beings in general that can be posited (thus granting it also an ontological status) we should note that for Badiou, multiplicity also can have an ontically creative function, i.e in what he calls, in the strict Badiousian sense, the Event. 

If Being as void for Badiou excludes the event (as self-belonging multiples are prohibited by mathematics) there is still the possibility of the event arising as a local contradiction between a situation and its particular void.  In other words, Being can move from form of multiplicity to contingent ontic creativity if multiplicity is localized in a situation – what Badiou calls “the evental site” – thus linking multiplicity and contingency. 

However, the key to the possibility of the evental site is the existence of what Badiou calls the state.  The evental site is the part of the situation which escapes the doubling effect of the state, and the state is the set-theoretical function that re-counts the original situation (every multiple whose multiples are in turn also part of the situation) in order to secure the hold of the One. The evental site is what exists in a situation, without its multiples in turn existing in the situation, such that it escapes this redoubling function of the state.  

If for Meillasoux Being is irreducibly ontically creative, while for Badiou Being excludes the event unless it is localized in the evental site, this can only be for the simple fact that for Meillasoux there is no State of the situation.

Consider the way Meillasoux distinguishes his radical contingency from probabilistic occurrence.  In After Finitude, Meillasoux explains that contingency is different from probability because probability requires a set of possible occurences. However, at the level of the universe itself, there cannot be a total set of possibilities.  Meillasoux invokes the set theory which, following Russell’s paradox, demonstrates that there cannot be a set of all sets, a total overarching set.  There can be probabilistic occurences within particular physical laws, but there is nothing to guarantee these laws themselves cannot vanish at any moment, since there is no ultimate Law to regulate and sustain their existence.

Yet Badiou agrees, also using set theory, that there is no totalization of the universe.  The difference is that Badiou takes seriously the power-set axiom, the set-theoretical transcription of the fact that every situation has its state.  So why can’t events just randomly happen at any time for Badiou (that is without taking into account the necessity of the structural perquisite of an evental site)? Because every situation always has some state above it which is holding said situation in its place.  There is always relative stability, even if there is no total one.

Let us now examine the difference between Badiou and Zizek in formalizing the Event.  The key move for Zizek, as outlined in Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, will be to assert the speculative identity of the Lacanian barred subject and object petit a.  What this ultimately amounts to is thinking the contradiction wherby the merely formal subject coincides with the missing object of the subject’s desire. Form lacking object and object lacking form become identical. 

The key is to understand how we are here within the conceptual constellation of Kantian epistemology (elaborated more in the previous post).  For Kant, the transcendental subject is a mere form without content, the fact that things always-already are structured.  Just like Badiou’s One, it is always only “a mere operation,” not a positive entity. However, the Kantian subject rests on the existence of what Kant called “the object = x” whose Lacanian translation is the object petit a.  In order for the transcendental subject to operate it must relate to a missing object which will stand in for any object at all, which is why Kant also calls the object = x, “the concept of an object in general.” It is the universal object, which is also why it itself can never be given in experience, in the here and now as this or that particular thing. 

Zizek has expressed his disagreement with Badiou concerning the one and the multiple by saying that for him, the pure multiplicity of Being must be thought as internal to the non-being of the one.  This is the difference between Badiou’s subtraction and Zizek’s dialectical negation. Whereas for both thinkers the one is not, for Badiou the subtractive process of mathematics splits Being from the one and thinks it as independent from non-being. 

Yet for Badiou, this contradiction of the One in its non-being and Being is to be thought in his version of the Event, that is, in the local contradiction between the evental site and the state, as already examined.  The state, which tries to secure the One, in certain situations misses the void which has snuck its way into the evental site.  When the multiplicity of the evental site is then introduced directly into the situation, a contradiction results whereby something new can happen – ontic contingency.

For Zizek, the Event is internal to Being, because the contradiction between state and lack (that which escapes the state) is the very contradiction between form and content which is the speculative identity of Being itself.  The barred subject, mere form, is at the same time to be thought of as a content, the object petit a, which is the content that lacks a form, never given in a direct apprehension.  I.e the content without form, the multiple without-one, can only be secured if we see the very non-being of the one – the merely formal character of the subject – as the very multiple-content. What escapes the state's count is the state itself.

Yet, for Meillasoux, like Zizek, the Event is also internal to Being, because Being's singular principle is the radical contingency of occurrences, the ever-present possibility of something new.  However, for Meillasoux the state does not exist, where it does for Zizek, the Event being the very presupposition of the state in its self-contradiction.  

I.e at the level of ontology:

The difference between Badiou and Meillasoux is that for Meillasoux there is no state of the situation.

 The difference between Badiou and Zizek is that for Zizek the Event, as contradiction between the one and the multiple, is internal to Being itself.

 The difference between Zizek and Meillasoux is that, for Meillasoux, there is no state of the situation.  

Badiou's Kantian Undercurrent: the Event as The Result of a Logical Restructuring

Badiou’s Kantian Undercurrent: The Event as The Result of a Logical Restructuring

Slavoj Zizek is right to point out that we should take Badiou’s claim that his philosophy proceeds “as if the Kantian critical revolution never happened” with a grain of salt.   Though Badiou is not a Kantian, his thinking is in no way pre-Kantian.  In fact, Badiou’s philosophy can be understood essentially as a logical restructuring of an initial constellation of concepts given by Kant.  The terms at play will be: matter, form, Being, the transcendental, and the subject. 

We will see how Badiou’s restructuring of these terms will open the way to his creation of the radically new concept of the Event.

The key logic in Kant’s critical revolution was to reframe the relation between matter and form, overturning from within the implicit Aristotelian ontology that had governed centuries of thinking. What Kant realized after Hume awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber” was that if we take the forms of reality we experience as unproblematically real, we have no way of affirming their rational universality, since they can only be accessed on the basis of an empirical and contingent apprehension. 

In other words, what amounts to the (false) pre-Kantian view of reality (what Kant called “transcendental realism” as opposed to his “transcendental idealism”) is that the fully structured forms of reality are at the same time the matter of cognition, the directly perceived content. In order to avoid the Humean problem, we have to admit that there is nothing in the perceived content that grounds its universality and as such must introduce the universal form from elsewhere, splitting matter from form. 

The split between matter and form leads to the invention of the transcendental subject: the subject is the agent that applies the rational forms in advance, while the matter must always come from outside.

There is here a perfect analogue of what Badiou explains as the retroactive positing of multiplicity.  Since in Kant form is imposed from the outside, matter must be taken as pre-formed. This is why when Badiou aims to think Being as pure multiplicity he is given the task of “subtracting” from the always-already given form, in order to think what had to be there ‘before’ the form acted. 

Being for Badiou becomes exactly the matter that for Kant was merely presupposed as the condition of cognition; in no way is it the pre-Kantian reality “out there,” beyond cognition.  We don’t jump outside of the transcendental subject, we dip down “beneath” it and this beneath then becomes the Real itself.

The dialectic of form and matter, passing from Aristotle to Kant to Badiou, next brings us to the new conception of the subject at play in Badiou.

If the matter beneath form is Being itself, the structure of Being is not subjective, for it is exactly what preceded the subject’s activity. In turn, the transcendental form is not subjective either. Because matter has been subtracted from form and thought on its own terms, the demand for form to retain a necessary subjective relation to matter dissipates.  Matter doesn’t need to be formed, it just objectively shows up that way. In other words, there is oneness, form shows up, even though strictly speaking it is not.

How then to reintroduce the subject into this a-subjective field? A clue comes to us in Badiou’s explicit discussion of Kant in his Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology.  Badiou says that he fundamentally agrees with Kant that the subject should be seen as “a mere operation.” The subject is always merely formal, just a kind of formative activity.  The subject remains in a homology with the transcendental, since the transcendental is just the way Being shows up as counted as one.  Both the subject and the transcendental are mere operative effects. So what is the difference?

We have to take seriously the claim that the one is not. If Being is pre-formed matter, the transcendental form cannot be said to be. When Badiou says that the one is an ‘effect,’ he does not mean that something is produced from Being according to a causal power, but just that it shows up, the appearance of oneness being nothing in itself.   

The subject is different from the transcendental because it doesn’t just show up but positively founds itself. Such founding however is contingent and axiomatic.  We should take very seriously the fact that Kant calls the schematization of the categories in relation to the pure forms of space and time in unity and multiplicity the “axioms of intuition.” Yet, whereas for Kant the subject and the transcendental were identical, the real difference is that the first is founded and the second is not.

If a subject is to be axiomatic, freely positing itself in a pure act, the question then becomes when, where, and how this foundational act can happen.

For Kant, the subject's axiomatic positing is a kind of eternal always-already – it has always-already happened because it identical to the transcendental, which is just that there always-already is form. Yet since the subject is not a transcendental, it cannot be presupposed. The subject has to happen at some point, in other words, it must take place within a transcendental. The Event. 

The Event is what takes place within a transcendental, while making it possible for the new formal operation that is the subject to arise, rupturing the original situation and creating something new.

We see that concept of the Event follows from the logical restructuring of the very same conceptual constellation of Kantian epistemology.  The event is the axiomatization of the subject following its difference from the transcendental, due to the transcendental’s a-subjective character once the matter of cognition is thought of as Being.

the philosophy of alain badiou

The Philosophy of Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou has genuinely invented a new possibility in the history of philosophy; no matter how squeamish many of his contemporaries may be about his confidence in this fact.  I want to elaborate here as simply as possible the power and coherence of his thought, especially with regard to his ontology.

First of all, one must understand that Badiou, against the grain of 20th century “continental” philosophy has resuscitated the role of rationalism in philosophy.  Whereas most 20th century philosophers maintained that philosophy bore a more essential relation to poetry, art, culture, and language, Badiou maintains that philosophy cannot escape its relationship to science, though where he says science he mostly means mathematics.

In contrast to other philosophers in the Speculative Realist camp who seek to reinvigorate rationalistic metaphysics with a kind of pre-Kantian re-turn, Badiou really goes out through the in door.  Though Badiou thinks of his philosophy as a critique of Heidegger, it is in many ways a radicalization. 

With regards to ontology, Badiou radicalizes Heidegger's theory of the ontological difference, the difference between beings and Being, as well as the revelation that Being must itself be Nothing. However, also Badiou uses this theory to resuscitate the importance of the Ancient distinction between Being and Appearance (whereas one could argue Heidegger conceived them as in a way the same).

What merely appears is what he calls “The One, ” or oneness.  Oneness is simply the coherence and sensibility of regular situations. Things make sense, because they are stabilized into natural forms.  Yet oneness is in a way ‘illusory,’ it is merely the epiphenomenal effect of the form of Being, which he calls “the multiple” and which makes possible any existence whatsoever. 

Unlike the appearing of the One, Being is senseless, groundless, chaotic.  It has no reason to be (we could call it nihilist in this sense), and it is in a sense Nothing, the mere form of existence.  Yet, this groundlessness can be thought.

This is where mathematics comes in. Mathematics is the only kind of discourse or human endeavor which can make sense of chaotic Being.  We will not go into the details of his analysis of set theory here, but what is essential is that in set theory he finds the conditions of a thinking of Infinity, not only in the endless chain of ordinal sets (which lay the ground for numbers) but in the very nature of an axiom system. 

It is this infinity that lays the groundwork for what allows there to be a thinking of Being, a kind of Truth of Being.  Whereas situations are epiphenomenal ones, this does not mean it is impossible for Being to paradoxically appear.  This is what Badiou calls the Event.  Once an event has happened, infinity has been made possible within the finite limitations of oneness and order.  Since it is the Event that makes infinity accessible, the Event makes a creative deployment of this infinity possible, since we have to understand that this infinity is like a groundless well-spring of possibility. 

The bizarre result of Badiou’s philosophy is that through this infinity, in a sense mathematics invents Being.  Does this make Badiou’s philosophy idealist, in the sense that a kind of human discourse creates Being itself?

This is not exactly the case. Being is infinite, which means it always admits of possibilities. It can develop itself in whatever way it does.  Yet this does not mean that there is not an essence of infinity itself, an essence of this capacity of creativity.   Set theory thinks this essence – the multiple – with specific procedures we won’t go into.  But if set theory thinks the essence of the multiple, how can it do so without entering its multiple deployment itself and thus elaborating it’s endless possibilities? Being is both a timeless essence, and yet the never ending possibilities elaborated within the real historical time of a science that thinks the Truth, a science which takes on the character of what Badiou calls the Subject. 

Badiou’s thinking however does not necessarily eschew the artistic in order to simply elevate science to the top.  What comes to the fore is that the artistic can paradoxically think the Being of the epiphenomenal effect of Being, appearance, illusion.  Art can make Appearing Be. As Badiou said early in his "career," 'Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of the reflection.'

This is possible because Art is also susceptible to the Event. Being can rupture an artistic situation as it can a scientific situation, thus making a thinking of an infinitely deployable Truth possible.  But since art’s essential structure is not the pure multiple, but actually form, sensory stability, oneness, oneness will actually take on the character of infinity once it becomes infinitely possible to endlessly create, and in a sense chaotically, absolutely new forms of oneness, new artistic possibilities.  Otherwise, oneness is already structured in advance, by the structures of Being science invents, structures which are not entirely separate from their epiphenomenal effect, but are still decidedly not that epiphenomenal effect.

What then is the relationship between Being and Appearance if we look at it more closely?  Being is not Appearance, Appearance is not Being.  Why in the world is their appearance at all then, if it isn’t really real? In fact Badiou takes this purely empirically – we experience it, Appearing is there, before us, and with us. 

Zizek has recently criticized this view. He says that Badiou, by thinking Appearance simply as an empirical fact without explanation, makes it impossible to actually connect Being and Appearance. He argues instead for a dialectical relationship of Being and Appearance, or the One and the multiple where oneness is actually inscribed into the multiple itself through dialectical relations which are not mathematical – this is Zizek’s reinterpretation of Hegel. 

I believe this criticism misses the point.  Though Badiou in Logics of Worlds develops a very elaborated theory of Appearing itself, I don’t believe it is possible in his philosophy for Being to truly explain Appearance, or why it comes about, nor should it.  If Being is groundless and develops itself groundlessly, there is no reason for it to give rise to anything. Thus there is no reason for it to give rise to Appearing, and since Appearing is not, it doesn’t.  Appearing is there, in a way falsely, for no reason.  This is completely consistent with the groundlessness of Being itself.  I do not see why Appearing needs any explanation. 

One might respond that I have appealed to Being in order to say why Appearance is groundless – because Being is groundless –  and thus used Being to explain Appearance, exactly what I was arguing against.  But I have not explained Appearance, I have explained nothing. To name something as “groundless” is not to explain it, it is simply to point out its groundlessness, which needs no explanation whatsoever.  That appearance is groundless doesn’t matter, for it is not. 

I haven’t really gone into Badiou’s theory of the Subject, nor the universality of Truth, for there is not space. But I think it should be clear how powerful Badiou’s philosophy is, if incredibly difficult and full of (legitimate) paradoxes. These are soluble not by giving them over to simple, logical coherences, but their relationship to the irreducibly real, actual practices of science and art.  

The Movement of the Water: White Guilt, Slavery, Freedom

The Movement of the Water: White Guilt, Slavery, Freedom

Cobra Verde by Werner Herzog is a movie about slavery.  From beginning to end, in the heat of an African sun, or a Spanish plantation, the brutality of slavery leers upon us like a thick, brazen pomegranate.  Yet, counterposed to slavery is the problem of freedom, our “hero,” Fransisco de Silva, first bandit and then slave trader.  De Silva lives for freedom, he is known not to ever wear shoes, and when asked why, it is because he trusts nothing, not even shoes.  On his own raw bare feet he roams the lands. 

When De Silva happens to come across the wealthy sugar owner Don Octavio in a marketplace in Spain, Don Octavio hires him to work with him on his plantation, impressed by his ability to subdue a particular slave in the town square.  Yet Don Octavio did not realize he had just taken in the famous libertine De Silva...Within a couple days De Silva has impregnated multiple of his daughters and proved absolutely unamenable to plantation life. Rather than killing him, the owners and businessmen send him on an impossible mission to attempt to reopen the slave trade in Ghana (the British had recently outlawed the slave trade).

The movie is essentially cut into two.  Where first we see De Silva’s libertinism and the cynical brutality of the rationalistic slave owners, second we see, in the oppressive heat of Africa, the barbaristic brutality of the African kings and warlords who end up enslaving and selling their own people.

The depiction of the Africans as “barbaric” and “savage” is intentional.  In truth, it underscores the barbarism of the whole affair. The cynical, rationalistic meeting the Spanish slave owners have before sending De Silva away, and the bizarre bloodthirsty rituals of the Africans – they come to the same.  Slavery is the great common bond. As is money today…

Yet why does our “hero” take so much to this new job, why does he become such a fantastic slave trader? De Silva is in love with freedom, there are many moments when we see him charging and screaming, almost pointlessly. He does the slave trade because he never serves anyone but himself.   

Of course though, at the end we have our resolution: the truth of the horror of slavery, to enslave is to be enslaved. Yet isn’t it still relevant that our “hero” is white? Even when De Silva first realizes this guilt (“slavery is a crime”), he is the white man, the white man’s burden.  It seems we have a kind of primitive “white guilt,” the pathological bedrock of all of today’s liberalism.  Yet this is not so, for De Silva is not really the hero.

When De Silva realizes that the slave trade has itself enslaved him, the ending scene comes as nothing short of a revelation.  De Silva desperately tries to escape. He runs down to the water and tries to drag a small boat into the ocean. We see him lurching unsuccessfully, the rope burning and cutting into his back, a true slave.  At last he falls over and he descends into the incoming tide as it washes upon him, throwing him this way and that.

Everything is in this final scene.  The movement of the water.  The movement of the water is the key, the key to the question of slavery, of guilt, of morality, of freedom.  The ocean turns him this way and that, and we cannot help but see this quality of baptism, him being purified from his guilt. 

At what cost does this purification come, and why should we care about the guilt of this individual, who was himself a slave trader? The ocean is all encompassing, for it flows, and turns, sometimes rough sometimes smooth, for no reason. Nature has contradictions, violence’s and evils within it.  The problem of moralism is that it doesn't realize this fact – that evil is a part of Nature.  De Silva is absolved not as an individual, but he is absolved because in the end, it is Nature alone, sparkling under that same hot sun, that rolls, turns, and destroys all things.   

If there is freedom, it is not the freedom to exploit ("the free market") or even the illusion of being an individual always with free choices.  We can only hope for freedom if we first understand the movement of the waters...

I feel enriched

As if I ate of a pomegranate

The prickly-soft fruit

I feel the darkling hatch from eye

With beams enough for the both of us

Caravaggio and his grapes would approve

I'm sure

We feel enriched like pomegranates

When we wake up on summer days

And the sky is blue

And the sun continues to gleam

The Bird

the openness of the sky

like a book which reads

its visions into nothingness

the stalk of a tree

and the crested bird

whose erudition

is unparalleled

the matrix of a field

whose color gives its leaves

a tragic quality

the beautification of the angel

with its fluttering putti

who fall from the sky

The Meaning of Creativity: An Ode to Coltrane

On Human Creatiivty: An Ode to John Coltrane

In our last post we talked about what might constitute a new vision of humanity, a new relation to self and selfhood that might allow us to transcend the vicious and endless domination of Money.   Yet we left this vision somewhat in the negative. We counterposed it to the false creativity of “innovation” as well as the narcissistic forms of snapchat sociality and we realized that to be truly creative means to go beyond the inhuman workings of a system that may have nonetheless inscribed within it various variations, reshufflings, and innovations.  We declared that to create was to create beyond and outside of the system: “to live without Money.”

But how will we elaborate this in a more positive manner? Let us take as our guide one of our earlier posts, where we attempted to say what art is.  There we discovered that art is infinite and as such it is universal.  On this point, we must say that human creativity and art are related, obviously, but let us now say also that human creativity is the broader notion and art, or actual artworks, are a more specific manifestation within it. Nevertheless artworks and artists are our clearest indicators of the trajectory we must take in regard to human creativity in general.  Art and artists are our guides, and throughout history they have always been such. 

If art is infinite and universal, to become part of an artistic situation, an artistic truth or movement, means also to take part in what is infinite and universal, it is to become an infinite universality.  To become part of this infinite universality is simply to realize what is proper to you: not simply an animal body lost in the flurry of commodities, within an inhuman system that has no need for you, but the transcendence of these very forms of domination. 

The transcendence of forms of domination is itself part of the nature of infinity. No one controls infinity. It is in-finite, beyond the limits and closures that those in power are constantly putting forth in order to sediment their control.  If the transcendence of domination is infinite, this means that infinity is essentially egalitarian.  If an artwork truly is an artwork, it establishes equality there, in the artwork itself.

What else could human creativity be than this capacity for transcendence, than the capacity to become infinite, which is always of necessity beyond the limits of Money? The new vision and the new way to live is the maxim: “become infinite!”

Yet this is rather abstract: in truth what does it mean to “become infinite”? What are these vague spiritualisms? We said that art is our guiding thread, and that it is in the artwork that we can see the process of infinity unfolding. 

There is perhaps no greater paradigm of the process of becoming infinite than the music of John Coltrane.  By examining the Truth he elaborates, a whole region of positive determinations and contrasts will appear before us.  In a previous post, we contrasted a Kirchner painting with the iconic Kim Kardashian “Break the Internet” photo.  In the Kirchner, we discovered art’s capacity to sublimate our animal and perverse desires into the purity of color, form, expression and universality.  In the Kim Kardhashian photo we saw the exact opposite: we saw the annihilation of all forms of expression in the mute and purposeless image of barbaric pornography.  If there we were comparing two ways of seeing, of feeling out our visual relationship to the world, now we will think about what it means to hear, or to listen in a new and positive manner.

The transformation of humanity in the new vision will mean that we will be ready to develop and also recover purer and truer modes of both seeing and listening.  What sort of listening occurs today? How do we hear the world around us? Undoubtedly, we are barraged with texts and social media posts and updates and notifications all the time.  The world is a sort of incessant cacophony with no meaning or direction, caught, at the same time, in the homogenous and unpleasant blur of our own distracted consciousness.  The late works of Coltrane are also in a sense “cacophonous.”   They attain a level of freedom and unboundedness that seems to transcend any coherent structure.  Yet what we will see is that the sound of Coltrane is like a reverse mirror image to the sound of our techno-alienated sociality.  Let us schematize this in advance before going into more detail.

Techno-alienated Sociality                                          John Coltrane

Finite disorder                                                             Disordered to the finite, infinite

External/without autonomy                                      Internal and autonomous

“Collaboration” through individuality                     Individuality through collaboration

Within Money                                                             Beyond Money

Let us move through each of these contrasts.  Each point of the analysis forms an interwoven whole, whereby we will be able to see both what constitutes the negativity of the human spirit today and the positivity offered to us by Coltrane, who allows us to see for ourselves what it means to truly be human, and what being a human will sound like, literally.

Lets begin with the first reversal: finite disorder vs. disordered to the finite, or infinite.  In what sense is techno-alienated sociality a “finite disorder”? We know it is disordered: notifications come at random, so do texts, people sometimes reply, sometimes they do not, we see random statuses from people we don’t know, or random and pointless images from people we do know.  There seems to be no order, from which way it comes or why, to the disconnected cacophony of techno-alienated language.

Why then is it “finite"? To understand this we must already jump to the final contrast, within money vs beyond money, which is the linchpin of the whole, and the original distinction we used in order to begin to elaborate the new vision.  Just like “innovation” in tech, marketing, and business, we must understand the way the spontaneous forms of communication in techno-alienated sociality actually are inscribed deeply within the inhuman mechanism of Money in advance.  We think we are free, but it is really Money that is calling the shots. 

Why have we gotten to this space of disordered and constant communication? To start, capitalism drives forward the development of technology incessantly.  This is a historical, empirical fact, if we observe how the rate of growth of technology since the beginning of capitalism dwarfs practically ten-fold any other period in history.  But there is a structural reason for this incessant growth.  The need to produce more capital, to maximize profit (which is ultimately the defining character of the capitalist system) requires constantly more efficient forms of commodity-production, to sell more, and thus to make more.  At the same time, new technologies create new sorts of commodities, conveniences, and thus produce new demands and more markets.  Again, selling more. 

But obviously we do not mean to say that simply using technology means living within Money, for that would be absurd.  We must understand how technology relates to communications.  Why is the world today incessantly “communicating” and trading information?  First off, because this rapid-fire matrix of circulation and media is enormously profitable.  Yet, it is not just the selling-point of each click or post that makes communication amenable to capitalism, it is also the sense in which the circulation of media itself, of imagetic, simulated life drives forward capitalism’s own self-reproduction. Media enhances capitalism’s own power to maintain itself.  Today not only do we buy an object and so grant the capitalist his return, but rather our buying things (which is now our own sociality in “connectivity”) becomes the granting of permission to have that very sociality controlled and maintained by advertising and marketing mechanisms.  I do not just buy a piece of bread from the supermarket: I buy my piece of bread, but only on the condition that the supermarket watch over me and make me continually stare at all the other products on sale, never to leave.  As a poignant Clash song once put it “we’re all lost in the supermarket.”   

The disorder of techno-alienating sociality is like one massive supermarket with a million consumers all buying random products, while also being forced to stare at every other consumer also buying a random product, and every consumer doing the same to everyone else: an endlessly disorienting and alienating anarchy.  But where does all this anarchy occur? It occurs in the supermarket. The supermarket, Money, is the limit and the closure, the finitude from which we are not allowed to escape. And the more products we buy, the more they force us to stay within the supermarket. 

How is it with John Coltrane?  Why does Coltrane sound random and disordered? And where is Coltrane’s music? Is it in the supermarket? The truth is that Coltrane’s music is nowhere. Why? Because it is infinite. It is not in the supermarket. Let us explain.

We will take the album “Expression” by Coltrane as our example.  It is one of his latest albums, soon before the artistic hero and genius died.  For the past fifteen or so years before this album, Coltrane had been progressively transforming, defining his own style, and experimenting with various harmonic innovations.  Coltrane continued to develop these formal innovations within the warmth, romanticism, and expressionism that is proper to jazz.  As Coltrane developed, he continued to purify and purify jazz.  He took improvisation to the absolute limit while never losing the immediate and romantic depth of voice, patience, and discipline that makes real jazz sublimely beautiful.

It’s the purification of all these elements that lead to John Coltrane activating and maintaining a pure form of infinity.  We must understand that jazz explicitly rose out of and expresses the African-American experience.  Practically no other culture has been so excluded and dominated by the reign of Money and forced to live under its yoke.  Yet it is exactly at this point that the African-American experience develops the rebellious human possibilities that can rupture Money itself.  Whereas Money demands standardization and commodification, jazz - on the skeletons of old broadway tunes - invents free and unbounded lyricism and communication.  While Money demands that we are see ourselves “connecting” - when we are really only putting forth images of our selves - jazz sees the individual find complete self-expression only through immediately responding to every other member of the group, also in their individuality, and as a whole. 

 “Expression” is an example of this purification of the truth of jazz beyond Money.  In each minute instance, John Coltrane is inventing and re-inventing what is musically possible.  Each phrase is like a fragment of a new language, turning and re-turning, orienting itself into an impossible fabric whose pure form is its own incessantly romantic decomposition.  At every instance, what is required is to catch on to the pure grooves of time where an unbounded infinity exists beyond all capture.  And yet, in each second, at the very same time as we are being released into new possibilities, the work is developing and creating its own sense of order, its own sense of discipline and harmony. It is creating its own world.  It truly is an order, but it is an infinite one. It is only to the standpoint of Money that is cacophonous.  While to Money itself, its own horrid cacophony is smooth functioning.

This pure form of creation, embedded within the purification of jazz, also activates the second and third of our criteria: internal and autonomous, and individuality through collaboration. The former, for Coltrane must draw these possibilities from his own soul; no standardized “platform” provides them for him. He is beyond Money. At the same time, this autonomy is only possible by constantly responding to the autonomy of others in collective improvisation. We become individuals through respecting and interacting with the pure individuality and creativity of others, together.  We are both equal and astounding, together.  And yet capitalism claims it "respects the individual." In truth, there is no greater disrespect for the individual when he is forced to believe he is expressing himself while ultimately pointlessly staring at himself and staring at others pointlessly staring back at themselves, all lost, buying pointless commodities (themselves). 

John Coltrane is what the new vision sounds like. It is what it sounds like and what it feels like to live beyond Money, to live in the infinite, to feel authentic community, and to be an individual: this is human creativity itself. In the soaring spirituality of John Coltrane, we find a guide for the revolution. 

The New Vision

The New Vision: To Live Without Money

The question of how to live is something that is nearest to us as people.   What do we do, and who are we? Today we are used to conceiving these things as questions for individual and introspective life, yet it is really only within a larger social structure that they begin to make sense and to admit of answers. This social structure forms a boundary point which we must understand if we are to find meaning in our lives.

The situation of today is capitalism.  Since the collapse of the socialist states of the last century, the world has seen the extension of capitalist power to practically every region of the globe. Capitalism is reaching new forms of intensity, invading practically every aspect of our lives, as mass media and snapchat sociality assure us that our consumer-being is, or should be, our only being.  Politically, governments are  revealing themselves to be the handmaidens of capital, and regulative measurements against them arguably will never be extreme enough to solve the problem.

Of course many people are content to live in this system.  Even as the power of capital grows, how can we tell those people who assure us that they are happy that indeed they are not? And are we ourselves not happy? Should we shun happiness in order to believe there is a deeper happiness waiting for us on the other side?  We must come back to this question of happiness. For the moment, we must instead define meaning, understanding this as separate from happiness, though only provisionally. 

What makes human life meaningful? I ascertain that what makes human life meaningful is to truly live as a human; it is “to feel authentically human.”  But the authentically human, what makes a human a human, is nothing but human creativity. Yet we must clarify what we mean by human creativity.  In fact, capitalism seems to abound in human creativity: at every moment it demands new innovations in tech, marketing, and business; the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that seem to understand people, what makes them click, and can always stay one step ahead of the game. 

Yet is this really human creativity in the deeper sense we must assign to it? To answer this we must understand what capitalism is in truth.  Capitalism involves the maximation of profits through the exploitation of workers under the system of wage-labor.  Since the bourgeoisie own the means of production, the only way workers can survive is to sell their labor in the forms of wages, while the capitalist makes a return by making the laborer work extra hours than is truly necessary, thereby accumulating a surplus value, a profit.  On top of this, capitalism involves competition, and thus various market forces that drive forward the development of profit. 

It’s these technical conditions that ensure that business and technological innovation are actually inscribed into the system at a basic level: they are the cog of the system’s functioning without which it wouldn’t work.  If there weren't developments in technology to drive forward the efficiency of commodity production, or innovations that open new markets and produce new selling-points, how would the maximization of profits continue? It is really the system itself that is acting, for the very relationships in which we find ourselves in the economy are determined by the requirement of the maximization of profit: money.  It is money, the inhuman numerical value, that ultimately runs the show.  To “innovate” within capitalism is not to create, to draw from one’s own irreducible human existence new and unheard-of possibilities; it is actually to be ruled by an inhuman mechanism.  Money in the end is not even in need of humanity at all, if humanity ultimately means more than physical bodies who will consume, produce, and profit. 

Within Money strictly speaking, no creativity is possible.  That is why the closure of all our social activities within Money is so dangerous.   Returning to the question of happiness, what we are begin to see more and more, objectively and statistically, is the appearance of mass depression and suicide, as well as the undeniable and growing prevalence of apathy and cynicism in everyday life.   Though as we said, we cannot impose this interpretation upon everyone, especially those who assure us that they are happy.

What we are reaching, however, is an ontological truth.  This happiness, in so far as it will more and more coexist with the closure of creativity in Money, is in essence just contentment; for without creativity, there is no meaning to life.  The human being is just an animal lost in the wind of the flurry of commodities and media, which more and more begin to feel like bizarre, disconnected versions of real life.

What are the solutions? Unfortunately, those who oppose the sorts of domination that exist today tend to be lost in either reformism or multiculturalism. Reformism, whose icon today is Bernie Sanders, tells us that what we really must do is make a kinder capitalism, more heavily regulated, and to some extent more in the hands of the people. Who could deny that this is a good thing? The austerity policies of neoliberalism and finance capitalism are a form of vicious domination and class warfare against both the impoverished and the diminishing middle class.  But how will reform stop Money? Will reform make our lives meaningful? Will it teach us how to live?

On the other hand, multiculturalism has become obsessed with resisting forms of domination by emphasizing the diversity of different oppressed cultures, their right to have a voice, and the rejection of continued cultural stigmas that are levied against them.  Again, who could deny that this is a good thing? Yet in the end this approach is equally futile in the face of Money.  What does sexual liberation mean when it has become an Abercrombie and Fitch ad? What will trans liberation mean when even its success could just mean new trans commodities? We don’t deny that these movements have legitimate demands. But how do they face up to the essential problem of the world today: Money?

It is this essential commitment to meaning that makes our political approach fundamentally different from the two aforementioned.  First of all, equality for us does not mean just the attempt to create more equivalences among wealth and access to economic opportunity. Nor does it just mean to create equivalences amongst the relative value of the voices of various oppressed groups.  Equality means that aspect of collective consciousness where it becomes possible for people to live in a space beyond domination, because all that matters is the pure creation whereby human beings transcend themselves toward their own nature. 

Our emphasis on meaning means that ultimately what we require is an anthropological revolution in totality. We need a new vision of our own selves and our own humanity. This also allows us, finally, to understand how our new society will differ from the state socialisms and communist attempts of the last century, many of which ended in disaster. 

First of all, though those societies sought to destroy capitalism, they did this through revolutions which aimed to take control of state and military power and then to re-organize society after the fact from the top-down.  The point here is not simply to emphasize that we need more bottom-up participation to avoid new sorts of power and inequality.  The point is that in conceiving of the movement towards communism as essentially a form of management, they did not understand the idea of the anthropological revolution as the destruction of Money pure and simple. It is not about organizing or managing a new society, but the very collective process of transformation in which Money is dissolved in and through revolution, in and through the transformation of humanity. 

Yet we must also make clear, this anthropological revolution is not just a cultural phenomenon, but it must be a material one too.  We will never destroy Money while the bourgeoisie own the means of production and control the state. Ultimately they must be defeated in battle, expropriated, and the means of labor and social relations of production must be returned to the collective.  Yet this will only be a true victory if at the same time we are in the process of reinventing ourselves. 

What does it mean today to live? It means to live without Money, and to be beyond the inhuman machine that might convince us that we are being creative or might convince us that we are happy beyond mere contentment.  Why do we say “live without Money”? Many people “live without Money.” They are poor and do not have money.  But really they are forced to live within Money, for it is Money that circumscribes and dominates them. To live without money is to live without Money, it is to live on the outside of the inhuman, to be somewhere else than it, in the constant form of creativity and self-reinvention. To live today is exactly the same as "to have a project," which means that one is always on the look out for new and exciting forms of existence, and always living beyond the bounds of what might be immediately socially acceptable. This is ultimately a form of radical self-definition, a form of life that also takes obsessive discipline and practice. It is what Nietzsche called the “Ubermensch,” the one who creates his own values, his own truth, his own form of existence, in a form of love that calls others to do the same, without condescension.   

Our new vision is the communist love of art as human creativity. It is the denial of snapchat sociality.  It is the courage to be one's own true self against all odds. It is the obsessive determination to always be creating, to be feeling, and to be experimenting.  It is to step into the public and declare one's hatred for Money and one's love for human existence.  It is to live with meaning, and as such to truly be happy. 

What Art Is

What Art Is: Against “Opinions”

Our jumping off point is the abstruse and often ridiculed question: “what is art?” Yet we ask this in order to immediately transform it.  We will claim immediately what art, in fact, is. The poignancy of the question “what is art?” and thus its almost cliché character, lies in its ability to highlight the mystery of art, its variegated possibilities and diversity of forms… “what is art?” “it could be anything!” This is true – art could be anything.  But what does this actually mean? To say art could be anything is to say that art is infinite. Already we have said what art in fact is.

            To say that art is infinite means nothing if we don’t know what infinity means in relation to art.  Does infinity here mean that any old thing could be art, a painting, a toilet, or a landscape, or whatever? This is often claimed. Yet is not the “any old thing could be art” just one possibility of what art itself can be? When it has become the case that any old thing can be art, doesn’t this indicate that something about art, artistic experience, has itself been transformed? Obviously we must actually mean that there can always be new modes of art, new artistic experiences, which have not yet been revealed to us; this must be the meaning of the “art could be anything.” Art’s infinity means that art admits of an essential possibility with regard to its own being. We can never close down in advance the possibilities that might be in store, waiting within Art. We should note also that what comes to light immediately is the difference between making a decisive claim about what art is, what we are doing here, and in an almost authoritarian manner arguing that one's particular disposition towards certain artworks is superior.  All we are putting forth for the moment is that, definitively, art, for it to really be art, must express an infinite character. 

            This is why unoriginal art is not art.  Most forms of pop music, to the degree that they are standardized, are not art.  It's not a question of whether X person enjoys it, and Y person does not, or “different tastes.”  Sure art produces enjoyment, but what is important here is its infinite character.  Art is not food or sex, because neither of those things are infinite (barring perhaps culinary art and truly romantic sexuality). They are forms in which particular human bodies get particular enjoyment because of the particular finite characteristics of their physiognomy, biology, animality etc. 

            An immediate objection is that the declaration that a certain piece of art is original is still a claim that might be made by one person and not by another; it is still “subjective.”  The person who suddenly declares that his point of view is “objective” goes against our democratic ethics of “respecting everyone’s opinion” and once again has begun to pose as a kind of authoritarian figure.

            But here we are trapped in a certain conception of art that is not valid. It assumes that the existence of art consists in its being viewed (or listened to, or watched, etc.). This is why we feel justified moving from the multiplicity of viewers to immediately concluding that there must always be a multiplicity of valid interpretations, opinions, “different tastes.”  However, we must insist that it doesn’t make any sense to say that art is reducible to its being viewed.  The conception that art is reducible to being viewed leads to this kind of problem: “Is an artwork sitting in a dusty basement seen by no one still art? Of course it still might be a painting, and it was at least created by an artist, so it must be art.  But if no one is looking at it, one might reply, it can’t really be acting as art; perhaps it was once art as the artist created it and gazed at his finished work, but now no longer is, until someone looks at it again…”

            Its clear that this thinking is ambiguous and leads to a dead-end. The artwork is sometimes art, sometimes isn’t, going in and out of being art.  What is, however, immediately true is that there cannot be art without some level of artistic community defined very broadly.  If there were no painters, no viewers, no artistic traditions, there wouldn’t be art.  But this is indeed a different claim than saying that art only exists as art if someone is looking at it in the here and now.  Clearly it is the artistic community, in all its dynamisms, that makes sense of in advance what is possible for art in a given situation, what art means.  During the Renaissance, the artistic community acts as a certain space in which certain things make sense as art.  A black square on a canvas during the Renaissance is not art, while according to today’s cultural standards it is.

            It's these cultural standards that decree in advance what sorts of things will be accepted as art, which essentially means what things in a given situation count as art.  But what if these standards completely stagnate? At this point we get a form of repetition, unoriginality, banality etc. We have a situation in which the cultural conceptions of art have actually disconnected art from the infinite character we identified with it. Have we not contradicted ourselves?

            What we see is that the artistic community, and viewership in general, are undoubtedly conditions of art, and they are in such a way that they for the most part determine what is accepted as art, what at a given time is “art.” Yet just because the artistic community is a condition of art, doesn’t mean it is art.  There must be “art” for there to be art, but they are not the same. The infinite character of art is the “art could be anything,” which declares that though there are conditions of art, cultural determinations, these themselves can be ruptured and transfigured through originality: something new can appear, a new kind of sensual form which appears to have no precedent.

            In order for art to reveal its infinite character it must be original, but in order for it to be original, it must break with the conceptions of “art” that were the conditions of there being art at all.  Art (capitalized) breaks with “art.”  Yet if Art breaks with “art” that just means Art cannot be reducible to whoever is viewing it. Though it could be the case that person X does not think this new artwork is art while person Y does, such might be explained by the fact that X finds himself constrained within the old world of “art,” while Y possesses the open-mindedness and creativity to accept Art.  In this case, person Y would be genuinely correct and person X would genuinely be wrong.

            Art, as opposed to “art,” is not reducible to who is looking, or particular kinds of viewers, although it accepts that there must be a viewership in the first place, the artistic community.  Art is thus in principle universal, not because anyone can immediately understand it without education, background, or perspective, but because Art is not reducible to such conditions.  There are many with the background and education who will not understand, because they are stuck are in “art.” There are many who will not understand because, lacking background or education, they are not even part of the artistic community in the first place. But in principle anyone can understand. Not everyone can do a complex mathematical proof, but once someone gets the education and learns how to do it, they will realize that it wasn’t simply education that made the proof true: the proof was true all along.  Only someone who can read English can read Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean the truths of Shakespeare are only meant for English readers. 

            Yet we still haven’t answered our question about who gets to decide whether a piece of art is original, whether it really is Art.  Perhaps person X – who does not believe this new work is art (though really just doesn’t recognize it according to “art”) – believes he has a convincing argument, as well as trusting his instincts as he looks at the painting.  Perhaps person Y, who does believe it is art (because he senses it is Art), also has a good argument and good instincts.  How will the question ever be decided?

            On the basis of a single new artwork attempting to realize Art, it is true that is practically impossible to know if it succeeds.  It could be that this artwork appears, a few people discuss it, but nothing follows.  The new style is not developed, the new possibilities of experiencing art are not seized upon.  In this sense, person X might be justified.  The new artwork was an aberration; it came about sort of randomly, and then faded away, probably because it wasn’t “art.” It didn’t make sense given the standards and conditions of the artistic community that allow for there to be art in the first place.  Yet, what if, on the basis of this new work, many artworks follow that develop its possibilities and themes, while also transforming the very meaning of viewership?  Increasingly it seems that person Y might have been right: how could it be that this new artwork was not really art, when a whole artistic world, a whole new artistic possibility, and ultimately a whole new conception of art is materializing before him? How will person X continue to deny that it is art?  Eventually he will either have to break with his conception of “art” or be lost to the new artistic possibility completely. 

            Art, true Art, is validated by its consequences, by its ability to develop and expand upon its consequences until it infiltrates and overcomes “art.”  To argue for a work of art in this case means just the attempt, intellectually, to become an active part of these consequences, to push forward the new ways of seeing and experiencing that the new art movement is offering.

            Of course, there is also the problem that what has developed out of Art congeals back into “art.” What was once original has become banal.  This is of course possible.  But that does not mean that the possibilities of the new artwork were limited and finite, that Art had to come to an end again in “art.”  No, when such a situation occurs it is always possible to reactivate elements of the original impulse of Art into new works.  Abstract painting today can be banal, even though if it was once revolutionary.  Yet the truth of abstract painting can continue, if someone goes back to the early paintings and rediscovers new possibilities within them, thus rupturing again the congealed form of abstract painting that has now become “art.” To push forward and preserve Art takes constant reinvention, and the constant reinterpretation of the past in the present.

Art is infinite and original, and as such it is universal.   It is not “subjective” in so far as there are definitively those who are on the side of “art” and those who are on the side of Art.  There are the conservatives and the creatives. However, art does require people doing and viewing art, on both sides of the equation.  It requires in “art” the artistic community and standards of art that exist at a given time, which itself are transformed by Art. And yet it also requires those people who act inventively on the basis of the new possibility, of Art. True Art never happens by itself, but it happens by means of the heroes of Art. 

Thus, we have said what art is, differentiating “art” and Art.   Have we claimed what the best kind of art is and shut down other people’s opinions? Not exactly.  The work of being faithful to Art, of being a hero of Art, or on the other hand being lost to conservatism or mere hedonism, only occurs in relation to particular artworks and art movements, which we haven’t analyzed.  And yet, there is one opinion of art that we absolutely do not accept: that art itself is reducible to opinions.  

The simple purity of a palindrome

The knot of a tree, exposing

To the "I am not" me

The dissolution of a concave mirror,

non-convex

A pure point of my pencil

that spreads the parchment like glass

And a checkered wall

Whose only consolation is that it is not irregular

The "I am" and the "I is" are small

adversial memories

Dark stones and Leibnizian gardens

deep-sea coral rings and cumulus

Anxiety

These dramas and dramatizations,

Thread-bare like a heart

They remind me

That I am not him, he is not me,

We are one, unbounded

In the simple purity of a palindrome

It reminds me of times of muggy intimacy

Sweaty, embedded love

Which seems to make a womb and a cave

Of animal companionship

It’s a dear synthesis, a synthesis

I’ve perhaps held too dear

Reared in philosophical architecture

Praising an oracle far from love

The textured walls of that memory

Which I know will recur with unerring consistency

Are they not the most comfortable,

Happiest truths, too easily forgotten?

What gods and thinkers, wars and tumults

Match the grandeur of a second with you,

There in that cave-like space

Which established something new?

Poetry loves the circle

and Science scales the diagonal

And Reason itself

Finds its grooves in the rhythms of the mind

Without a little faith (just a pinch)

In an unending pantheism

From which source will a thirsty thinker

Find his satiety?

Without a touch of pretense

How will he keep safe

his well-earned

and mannered soulfulness?

His keep-sake is an amulet

that he wears around his neck

It seems to strangle him

As it ticks away

Greedy for affirmation, snake-like I saw him

His head looked beaten, tired and dirty

Shaken by overlords, conquerors

Who will stop at nothing to see the world mirrored

As bloodless as they

How to tell a friend that he is not a snake

But a gentle bear

Who just needs to come out of his cave

And create? 

To pray and think, in truth

Are a drawing

The trace that gives form to rhythm

Gives music accompaniment

To humble lives, crossed by pride

The second act of life’s tenor

Is a returnal

Though never in cosmic sway

But in the infirmity of a pencil

Those who believe they hear at a distance

Entranced by what they hear

Will they not be entranced by their own arrogance?

Will they not give all to this destitution of fear?

Is it pretentiousness to believe

Is it pretentiousness to leap across ages

Perhaps with an idea, perhaps not

In the end

Is it not the infirmity of a pencil?

Across a field, hung with the spray

Of nothing but forgotten children’s play

He asks and asks again

Not to die away

Those who trace the fading day