∃volution and Event

Viewing the Occupy Wall St phenomena through this lens....

Beginning from the twentieth century acheivement of the Marxist call for a unity of thinking and acting, Badiou works the rigor of procedures for distinguishing truth in a unity of theory and practice, in a modernity where infinite alterity has been secularised, completely.

Badiou's book Being and Event invites the reader into the mathematically thinkable of the void and the infinite - each thinkable, but also outside of a system of representation. The unthinkable starting point of choice, here, is that 'the one is not' and hence 'nothing is' - unthinkable because as complex as an appearance might be, we require existent, something, in order to count it as a phenomena at all.

Being thus can be thought as what no philosophical system can contain - a pure, non-presentable multiple. 'the figure of pure multiple is not, but it does happen', and it happens right at the void of a situation, where the situation cannot account for itself, when someone throws caution to the wind, jumps the breach, declares unaccountability to be the event worth heeding.

Here we have an event, an event that supplements Being - 'it is nothing and everything' - if one is not, nothing is, and yet the nothing, the void is precisely from where the event starts. Yet this is not a completely iterative circle, and the semantic registers of the word 'event' give hint of directionality, guideposts:

- political register - war and revolution register as events, phenomenon outside the boundaries of expectation or legitimacy of some description;
- theological register - apocalypses and miracles, occasions without precedent or mirror, occasions that are singular, sudden and vast,
- aesthetic register - sublime events not pleasing and beautiful, rather disjunctive, disruptive. Terrifying cataracts, art that births awkward epiphany as opposed to pleasant contemplation,
- biographical register - turning points - those most often reported by people in psychological research as defining moments of development - death, marriage breakdown, births where ritual seeks to reintegrate such disruption into the fabric of culture and community,
- academic register - in linguistics, verbs, adverbs and adjectives create an event in not indicating substance but rather happening, having no boundedness, no unity of referent.

Badiou turns to examples - the French Revolution, unanticipated in developmental logic - 'nothing took place but the place' a chance occurrence unique to situation and irreducible to a harsh winter, mob violence, resentment in outburst, or any other linear singular reason. A void in any given ordering of the situation occurred, haphazard appearance.

The other wonderful example is atonal music - from Haydn to Beethoven classical music exploits tonality, eventually, repetitively so. With the inculcation of Schonberg we see atonality birthed outside the tradition of tonality, indifferent to it and ultimately unaffected by its necessity.

Working the philosophy through set theory of mathematics draws forth the observation of generality and universality - set theory founds mathematics on empty sets, no quality, essence or relation in sight. The very location of the multiple and the infinite, the very meaning of being not-one.

Evil is incurred at the indoctrination of a one, the foreclosure announced in that moment. If we commit ourselves to an event, we commit ourselves as subjects, and are subject to good and evil in this way - as proper subjects, we are subject to truth, and if our commitment is false, fidelity to the event becomes an evil in proportion to the closure. Universality becomes a sham.

While an event forces an account for its beginning, it does not have a generic rigor in the void of it's situation - living in truth, and being subject to truth requires an openness to eventuality, an event is an open process of making multiplicity which never closes to complete immanence (divine memory) or ultimate transcendence (timeless beyond).

Set theory also has a beautiful twist - in removing the representationalist aspect of number, sets serve a project of understanding the world as arising from blank 'thatness', a void of meaning, then grouping together multiplicities based on minimal axiom, then branching incredibly quickly into vast uncountable subsets, deriving the instability through which the next event emerges.

Beautiful.

Ref:

J Simons (Ed). (2010) From Agamben to Žižek. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.