Alain Badiou’s political theory and its implications to the p2p approach

An introduction by Andy Robinson:

(for background on Badiou, see his book on Metapolitics here)

“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.”

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