[p2p-research] any commentary on badiou's metapolitics?

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks for this amazing introduction to a complex thinker and for drawing
out its implications to the p2p approach, I'll published it around march 21,

Michel

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 4:12 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiya,
>
> Haven't read this one before, and don't have time at the mo, but I've read
> some of Badiou's stuff before and can give a few comments.
>
> The first thing to note about Badiou is that he is heavily influenced by
> Lacan.  He is one of a group of French post-Althusserians (among them
> Ranciere and Balibar) who found refuge in Lacan and poststructuralism after
> Althusser's sudden transition to unfashionability, and who for generational
> reasons are very visible today, at a time when the previous wave of
> poststructuralists (many of them old enough that they actually went to
> Lacan's seminars) are mostly dead or inactive.  French theory is not what it
> once was, after the onslaught of the 'New Philosophers' of the 80s and the
> slow dissipation of the energies of '68, and none of the contemporary
> theorists are having the vast cross-disciplinary effects of figures such as
> Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze.  Badiou is something of an eclectic figure,
> very much a theory-builder and systematiser, and like many French theorists
> also something of a 'Master' figure, fixated on the unfolding of his own
> project above all.  His approach is interesting, but quite deeply flawed.
> The most basic flaw is common to many continental theorists: he tries to do
> too much, with too few concepts and models.  He presents what might be quite
> useful as a partial model, as a total theory.
>
> He is probably best-known for his theory of the Event.  In my view, the
> Event (and its offspring, the Zizekian Act) is a misunderstanding of how
> social change actually happens.  In Badiou's theory, social change happens
> through a sudden rupture in which the unspeakable is suddenly spoken.  This
> has the effect of shattering the existing frame of the situation and
> creating an entirely new situation.  A rather masculine, 'heroic' sense of
> how change occurs - however much Lacanians might try to pass it off as
> feminine.  And attractive to many people at an emotional level, as is clear
> from Zizek's wide-ranging resonance.  But this is not in fact how social
> change happens.  If one looks at what appear to be Events - the French
> Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Battle of Seattle, the rise of new
> religions, scientific breakthroughs and so on - they very often turn out to
> be simply the point at which a growing force bursts the bounds of an outer
> frame within which it has been expanding for a very long time, the end- or
> mid-point of a cumulative process of rupture irreducible to any single
> point.  At most it is 'the point where quantity becomes quality', and most
> often simply one of many stages of a strategic interaction of forces.  The
> fixation on the moment of the Event, as in Badiou's thought, is actually
> rather authoritarian - this moment is taken out of its diffuse temporal
> context and turned into a master-signifier to which one should have
> fidelity, while the Event itself is either incarnated institutionally and
> hence recuperated, or ceases to operate as a revolution in everyday life.
>
> To complicate the Event further, it is connected to a rather reductive
> schema as to *where* such a break can take place.  For Badiou, in every
> situation, there is one (and only one) void, which expresses the
> incompleteness of the situation and its constitutive exclusion.  The Event
> emerges from the void in a situation, in the same way psychoanalytic
> symptoms emerge from the Real.  But what does this really mean?
> Interpretively, it means reading backwards into past events the future
> developments which lead out of them.  Politically or agentially, it means
> looking for one point in the situation which expresses this role.  But
> again, the past is being misunderstood.  It is certainly the case that for
> instance the industrial revolution or the invention of guns transformed
> industry or warfare, but the Badiouian rephrasing that the void of the
> absence of heavy industry was the condition of possibility of feudalism
> makes little sense.  For one thing, there is no way one could have known in
> advance that this particular breakthrough would be the source of
> transformation.  For another, there is little reason to assume this is the
> *only* possible path out of feudalism.  Perhaps some other 'Event' on some
> other 'Void' would also have produced such a transition.  Finally, it is not
> clear that the absence of heavy industry was a real and active *lack* in the
> situation, with distorting effects a la the Lacanian Real.  Rather, it was a
> simple absence.  These problems arise in other fields such as politics as
> well.  In each situation, there are many possible transitions, not simply a
> single void.  This said, I find the idea of the social symptom rather
> useful, as a way of tracking how excessive forces are assigned a
> signification of threat and otherness in dominant discourses and hence as
> tracking the points from which radical change might emerge.  We need to
> remember, however, that the symptomatic status of certain groups is a
> feature of how the dominant system labels them, not of their inherent
> logics.
>
> There is another major political problem with Badiou's politics: while his
> political alignments are progressive (he still terms himself a Maoist), his
> theory has strong conservative implications.  This is true of most of the
> theories which have come out of Lacanian analysis, because the
> constitutivity of lack and alienation in such a framework preclude
> affirmative change - the idea of an autonomous, self-replicating network for
> instance is dismissed in such a frame as an illusion, denying the necessity
> of the 'properly political' moment of mastery, authoritarianism and so on.
> Badiou accepts which calm resignation that every Event is necessarily
> partial and temporary; it must slips back into the mundane field, from
> 'truth' back to 'opinion'.  Hence, the structure of the situation as
> exclusionary does not change; the site of exclusion is simply moved around.
>
>
> On a related point, there is the matter of Badiou's critique of Deleuze
> (and by implication, of all networked, autonomous or affirmative kinds of
> theorising).  The argument is deceptively simple: the proliferation of
> difference in such theories is conditioned on the unity of the One, and
> therefore on mastery and repression.  This One can be identified as the
> underlying logic of capital.  Such a reading is, of course, entirely
> misguided.  It is based in a contestable reading of several early texts by
> Deleuze (*not* the better-known later volumes), and operates mainly by
> subsuming Deleuze into Spinoza's ontology of substance, with its ultimate
> assumption of the unity of Being.  Since Deleuzian theory does not refer to
> a substantive unity of Being but rather, to a primacy of
> difference-producing becomings, the critique really does not work in
> relation to Deleuze.  Still less does it work in the way it has been used in
> the wider literature: as an easy means for residual vanguardists to dismiss
> any theory which appeals to networks, horizontality, autonomy, etc., as
> alternatives to hierarchy.  Badiou has provided a handy rationalisation to
> people looking for any excuse to dismiss anti-hierarchical approaches to
> politics which are becoming increasingly threatening to dominant,
> 'hegemonic' modes of theorising, and hence contributed, perhaps unwittingly,
> to the closure of discourse in political theory.
>
> As a general theory, Badiou's work is awash with seemingly groundless
> eccentricities arising from the author's preoccupations and (apparently
> intuitive) assumptions.  Badiou's obsession with number is a case in point.
> He apparently believes that Being has a basically mathematical structure,
> but does not provide much of a reason to believe this.  Basically, he uses
> number as an ersatz master-signifier, providing the coherence and totality
> to suture his philosophy.  His use of number is a representational backdoor
> for failing to think the 'multiple' (singularity, becoming, multiplicity)
> sufficiently radically.  One should remember here the relationship between
> number and alienation, as in Zerzan's excellent critique.
>
> Even more perplexing is Badiou's insistence that there are four - and only
> four - basic fields in which Events and Truth can occur - Art, Love,
> Politics, and Science.  Why only four?  And why these four?  Why not ethics,
> or religion, or psychology, or play?  Why is politics as a field included,
> but not everyday life?  Why is love included, but not social relations more
> broadly?  Where, if anywhere, would social science and the humanities fit?
> It is all rather random and groundless.  I think Badiou relies on the
> explanatory power and emotive appeal of his total model to keep people from
> asking such questions about the gaps in his doctrine.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 5:26 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20721054/Badiou-Alain-Metapolitics-2005
>>
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>


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
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