Truth In Fidelity, Doctor Who: The Monks Trilogy, Reviews, 06/06/2017

Yesterday, I introduced my latest take on why Toby Whithouse is a terrible writer. I think if offers some useful instruction in how to avoid being a shitty writer yourself. Because as soon as you permanently avoid being shitty, you start being good.

Today, I’m getting into the genuinely interesting ideas of the Monks Trilogy. In the light of yesterday’s post, I’ll also get into why and how Toby Whithouse fucks the Monks Trilogy up. Not irreparably, but it’ll require a serious redemptive reading to find the value in it.

The Monks Trilogy is a story of meditations through science-fiction on
the power of truth, lies, and devotion. The most arresting image in its
last episode, "The Lie of the Land" is the Doctor in a spartan
chamber editing, revising, and rejecting countless drafts of reality
for his next propaganda broadcast.

This is my first pass at that redemption. There will definitely be

SPOILERS!!

No Real History Frozen in Time

Let’s unravel this arc. Get suitably epic and conceptual, because that’s the level on which the Monks Trilogy’s theme unfolds. In this, you can actually see how high-concept a villain the Monks truly are, so much so that I think Moffat pushed the limits of Doctor Who yet again.

The Monks Trilogy reveals three visions of truth. There’s the truth of the necronomiconic book Veritas. It reveals that the entire world is a malevolent simulation. You’re an inadequate copy of a real world, ontologically unable to express the real potential for random movement.

That’s what the ordered numbers mean: You’re not just a clone, you’re an inadequate copy. The real you could speak random numbers, as could any real duplicate of you. But we all are iterations. There’s no real difference in the world of The Veritas. Only a deterministic simulation, so all you can do is what you’re programmed to do.

There is no originality, only the initial conditions and the limits of the simulation’s power.

In “The Pyramid at the End of the World,” the Monks flaunt their power to see many possible futures. But those aren’t real timelines. Those are simulations. That’s what I meant last week when I called the Monks fake Time Lords.

The Monks are, in a way, ghostly con-men. All their technology and
power is based on the manipulation of lies – propaganda, false
memories, and simulations. So naturally, they constantly
associate themselves with truth and blast in the loudest possible
voice that their voice is the truth. The only truth that matters.

The Time Lords are the genuine article because when they observe the possibilities of history’s development, they observe real, ongoing history. They aren’t observing parallel universes, because in Doctor Who, parallel universes are just that. They aren’t produced by time travellers changing history. They’re just around.

No, in Doctor Who, there is only one history, and time travellers are always changing it. Well, everyone and everything is always changing history. Time travellers just do it in more complicated ways, which can blow holes in history if they aren’t careful. History is the real process of material existence.

So the Monks claim to know history. But they never actually examine real history, only deterministic simulations of history.

Our leads discover in “Extremis” an existential truth: They are not living organisms, but flickers of energy in one of those threads. One of those flickers sends a message to the Doctor, starting “Pyramids.”

Veritas in Extremis

The second vision of truth is a straightforward kind. The truth of authority. It’s the truth that the cops, oligarchs, kings, and raging alcoholic dads reveal. It’s a truth about your immediate future – You will do as I say!

To get people to do as they say in “The Lie of the Land,” the Monks invent a whole history that humanity generally remembers. They use their telepathic technology to rewrite everyone’s memory of their own and humanity’s history.

A key question for those of us in the wider Eruditorum community
is what Doctor Who can be in the context of the Trump era.
Sarah Dollard's "Thin Ice" offered one vision, and the underlying
ideas of Steven Moffat's Monks Trilogy is another. The two can
go together quite well.

But the Monks always have to keep forcing this history into humanity’s heads. They use the Doctor’s broadcasts, they use their own signals. They use the force of their security squads, labour camps, and secret police. The truth of authority is that you will believe what we tell you to believe, and the truth is what we say is true.

“The Lie of the Land” is about fighting that truth. The Doctor, Bill, Nardole, and the faceless rebel gang straight out of a Terry Nation story aren’t just fighting to reveal another truth. They’re out to destroy the power that the Monks’ truth has over people.

That’s another message of what Doctor Who for the Brexit/Trump era should be. We aren’t in some era of post-truth – we’re in an era where the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies lie to us and order us to believe their lies. The answer isn’t to reveal truths – it’s to break their power to force our belief.

The third kind of truth is ethical truth. The truth of an action that breaks power. In “Extremis,” the Doctor knew the Master would be redeemable if she were to think of anything good about herself or do any good thing without reward of any kind. Here is the moment of truth – veritas in extremis.

She found that potential in herself, in her feelings of friendship for the Doctor. That was enough to save her, and begin the long, strange process of rehabilitating a canonical villain.

“Pyramid” ended with an ethical truth too. Bill submits to the Monks to save the Doctor’s life, as an act of friendship. Just as the Master’s was. So the role of “The Lie of the Land” was to find the ethical truth that would defeat the monks. What friendship would redeem the Earth?

I think what most annoyed me in this episode about Whithouse's
stupendously boring ideas was how he treated the Master. Her
redemption requires the most subtle writing imaginable. Her
remorse is literally the remorse of a deranged god whose killing
sprees have wiped whole civilizations from the heavens. Yet he
writes her utterly dull dialogue about "remembering so many
names" of people she's killed. The Master isn't a tinpot warlord,
she's a cackling destroyer of worlds.

To Be Faithful to a Memory

The Monks are never able to overwrite time, any more than they could manipulate real history. They’re grotesque con-men, talking up their powers to be more than they truly are. Their possible futures were simulations. Their overwritten history is a set of false historical memories broadcast into every living human.

The fundamental lie of the Monks is a memory – the memory of the Monks living side by side with humanity throughout its history. They demand – through their security state and concentration camps – that you’re faithful to this memory. You must define your very identity on their terms, as a submissive child of the Monks.

The ultimate crime on the Monks’ Earth is breaking fidelity to this memory – to declare that the Monks have not, in fact, always been here. This breaking of faith is important, but its power is limited. Only one person screaming that everything we all accept as true is actually a lie is easily shut up.

We lock them away as easily as people in tinfoil hats screaming anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Some of those people work in the White House.

To shout the truth is not the same as fidelity to it. Shouting only disavows one common sense truth as the lie that it is. It’s only your own disavowal. To genuinely overcome that lie, you need a truth of greater power to replace it.

That’s why the Doctor’s attempt to hijack the central Monk projecting the lying memory of Earth’s false history fails. He’s just throwing his memories of what’s actually happened to Earth into the memory stream. He isn’t faithful to any one of those memories, he isn’t committed to them in any way that defines his personality or identity.

Pearl Mackie's intensity as an actress just barely saves one of
Whithouse's most pathetic failures of unoriginal dialogue from
being totally unwatchable.

Bill finds one memory to redeem the world from the Monks’ lies – the memory of her mother.

This, however, is also a lie. Bill never knew her mother, which is why she’s never able to have a real conversation with her in any of her imagined morning chats. Bill’s imagined mother, at the beginning of the episode, sits silently as a photograph and listens.

Because that's all Bill has of her mother – photographs. And she didn’t even have those until the Doctor arranged their existence in the first episode of the season. No matter how Bill’s mother actually lived, Bill’s own memory of her is a lie.

Yet it’s effective in overwriting the Monks’ false history because it’s a lie. Their own massive, intricately designed lie of a false history has a reference point to every real event in human history. But it has no link to Bill’s own false memory of her mother. The Monks could only edit themselves into truths, not lies.

A Philosophical Story Arc

So the complex symmetries of the Monks trilogy fall into place. In a way, it’s the most intricate abstract narrative Moffat has ever woven into Doctor Who.

An abstract narrative is a story woven into a far-flying anthology whose nature and shape only makes sense when it’s finished. A beautiful sculpture running underneath an otherwise chronological sequence of stories.

River Song’s life was the most intricate and complicated abstract narrative because of how many different parts the whole edifice had, and how different glimpses of that whole shape appeared in disparate places over years. But the Monks trilogy is his most profound, because it’s based in the highest concept Moffat has ever developed.

It's also significant that the Monks appear in the garb of a religious
order. It's an institution whose job is to provide people with
authoritative truth, but which all too often becomes an
authoritarian institution whose job is to enforce their fidelity to
your truth. But the fidelity of chains is no faith at all.

A meditation on the concept of a link between ethics and epistemology – that love is truth.

Genuine truth is revealed in the most extreme situation – Veritas in Extremis. Such a truth isn’t just any old fact. It’s a truth that has such a power for you that you can devote your existence to it in that instance. You can live the whole rest of your life in fidelity to the core idea of that truth.

Facing death, or with the world and your best friend’s life in the balance, or as the last, tenuous anchor to reality and the phantom of a worthwhile life.

Respectively, the Master facing execution, Bill’s submission to the Monks for saving the Doctor, and Bill’s fidelity to the memory of her mother that she created herself. These moments of ethical truth are moments of salvation – for the Master, the Doctor, and humanity respectively.

The Monks, in contrast, are creatures of lies. They create simulations – false, inadequate realities, revealed through a book called VERITAS. Their security service is named TRUTH.

More than the revelation, VERITAS is the lie’s truth – the Monks’ act of lying. TRUTH in “The Lie of the Land” is also the Monks’ act of lying – their punishment of those who speak the truth as liars.

So the arc of the Monks Trilogy is the demonstration of how to give truth power over lies.

The Faith That Makes Itself True

Each truth whose expression has the power of salvation can be the focal point of a wholly new world coming to be, defined by fidelity to that original saving truth.

This concept of fidelity to a memory that provides the core of your
identity has its roots in the philosophy of Alain Badiou, who
described the mechanism of how this fidelity develops in his
Being and Event. He talks about the event, rather than a memory,
but the function is the same.

That truth is the fidelity of the Master to her friendship with the Doctor that saves her life and begins her transformation into something potentially much more interesting than a mad supervillain. That friendship has defined her life since that moment.

Same with Bill’s fidelity to the Doctor that saves his life and defines her devotion to finding him and overthrowing the Monks with him. That’s a fidelity that’s expressed in “Pyramid,” but comes to fruition in “The Lie of the Land.”

Bill has another fidelity as well, to the memory of her mother. But if it’s a false memory, how can it have the same power as a truth? Because it’s the image through which Bill understand that she has potential beyond being a fry cook, that she has the power to study great concepts and sciences, and to voyage to the far reaches of the universe.

Bill’s image of her mother is itself a lie, but its her image of her real ability to overthrow tyrants and save worlds – an image of humanity more dignified than a mere slave. A false image that stands for a deeper truth, a truth to which she devotes her entire life after meeting the Doctor and getting to know his life.

A factual lie can have the same transformative power as a factual truth if it has the power of ethical salvation.

Of Course He Fucks It Up

What does Whithouse make of it all? Bill’s triumph is a generic “power of love” retread from back in “Closing Time” six years ago. That’s only one way in which he utterly misses the ideas about the nature of truth underlying the entire episode.

"Do you now understand the truth?"
"Uh, not really."
How underwhelming.

Here’s another example. When Bill finds the Doctor again, he’s been the editor of The Voice of the Monks propaganda channel for months. Their confrontation is a perfect moment for a conversation about the nature of truth and lies in the service of power.

That would have been the conversation that drives Bill to shoot the Doctor in a fit of rage. Instead, Whithouse writes the Doctor a generic speech about alien invasion as benevolent paternalism and Pearl Mackie is thankfully a good enough actor to make it work through her sheer intensity.

The philosophical density of the Monks Trilogy as a whole is reduced to a crap joke about Bill’s paper on free will being six months late.

But he understands nothing about this complex, difficult, and densely philosophical meditation on the relation of truth and love. He just writes out the plot with a few old clichés.

Maybe such an ambitious story structure was bound to flop the first time out. Let’s not forget that it can be done.

Will I Follow or Will I Be? Better Than Tragedy, Research Time, 03/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . So where does this idea of fidelity leave us? It’s the romance of the lost cause. Again, this is one part of the many reasons why Alain Badiou chose the Paris riots of summer 1968 as the event to which he was faithful.

The book where Badiou lays all this out, Being and Event, is a big, long, complicated book that relates political principles and activism with deep ontological conceptions, like how set theory is the best way to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. It’s huge and it’s weird. 

The 1960s saw plenty of student activism and riots around
university campuses throughout the West, but the Paris
riots saw true political radicalism (compared to liberal
democracy) in that community for the first time. There
were seriously a lot of genuine Maoists in the French
student community of the time.

But one essential point of his thinking in what I want to think about today is how important that one pivotal event is in each of our lives.* Because that one event literally defines each of our lives. 

* Leave aside all his ontological stuff. One, it’s too complicated to explain as a side point among what I actually want to discuss in this post. Two, it ends up delegitimizing all political positions but a communism so extreme as to deny the singularity of individual people. So yeah. Glad I don’t roll with any of his ontology.

Your pivotal event defines your life because its memory lingers with you, and provides the spark that animates everything you care about. But why does it linger? What is it about human psychology that would make some event linger with us, sticking around in our minds to inspire our political and social lives, and our very identity as people?

Because there’s nothing that lingers in our memories like disappointment. And in a political context, the greatest disappointment is failure. Our fidelity to the event that shaped us is a memoriam to its potential. Because in our real experience, that event petered out into failure and disappointment. 

The ruined potential of our formative event becomes, in our fidelity to its memory, a dream of a perfect future. Utopia in the counterfactual, in the possible world that was denied to us. “What might have been.”

For Badiou, that disappointment was in the reactionary movement that crushed the idealism of the May ’68 demonstrators. I can see that disappointment today when I look at the social media feeds of dedicated Bernie Sanders supporters in the United States, now that he has virtually no path left to the Presidential nomination. 

Yet those radical times are easily romanticized in our
memorials to them. Take Bernardo Bertolucci's The
Dreamers, which understood the riots and their political
radicalism through the symbology of dirty sex.

At least those few – isolated and loud though they are – who believe that the Presidential campaign is really all the movement is about.** The ones who don’t know that Sanders is a lucky ally of the wider social movement that began with Occupy – the actual revolution in Western politics.

** Are there even any of these people?

The problem with this way of thinking about political inspiration is that it presumes idealism to serve only impossibilities. The only events that can inspire us to build a better world are moments when we could have, but which came crashing down. The idealism of the graveyard. 

Why would Antonio Negri contrast this vision with Michel Foucault’s conception of the event in politics? Because it makes the best contrast. However, it doesn’t necessarily make the clearest concept. At least not to me.

Because I’ve been trying to write about this more creative conception of the pivotal event, rooted in present action, for the last two days. And I’ve just ended up waxing poetic about Badiou’s politics of regret for two days in a row. It’s useful, as there will probably be a more poetic passage about this idea of Badiou’s memoriam.

An aspect of their personal lives and positionalities as people will probably play a role in this too. Badiou is a lifelong academic, who was inspired in his aggressive political radicalism through a period in his life when France was almost profoundly changed in an uprising that began on campus.

Pictured: The barest hints of transgression and a vision of
a new kind of humanity.

May 1968 was the only time in European history after the Second World War when a student movement grew truly radical and could have massively changed the country. The rest of his life, Badiou could only talk and write about such change. He could only ever memorialize and remember.

Foucault was himself a gay man, whose writings and everyday life constituted a kind of activism. His ordinary, everyday desires constituted a radical set of new social and political possibilities just by existing. 

I think I’m figuring out how to talk about this. I’ll try again along these lines tomorrow. . . . To be continued

Will I Follow or Will I Be? The Comparison, Research Time, 02/05/2016

When you write something that compares how two thinkers understand a particular idea, you have to be seriously careful how you present the discussion. You can very easily make that discussion about the two thinkers themselves, even though you might have intended to discuss the ideas.

Most of the time, ideas and concepts are more interesting than the people who think them. Even concepts that someone like Michel Foucault thought about, and he was probably one of the most interesting people in the last century of philosophy.

Because I want to talk about a conception of event. There’s a discussion of this in Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth that I find fascinating, and could very well become a centrepiece of my own Utopias. And Negri discusses it as a back-and-forth between Foucault’s and Alain Badiou’s conception of the event. 

The last time I talked about Badiou was more than two years ago. He’s another one of those philosophers who, once you mention him or one of his ideas, rapidly makes the conversation all about him. I don’t really like that in philosophy – or any creative field, really – because it takes the emphasis away from the ideas and draws you into arguments about one particular person’s set of ideas. Heidegger’s another one of those people.

So Utopias is a book that explores how we understand our political attitudes and the strength of our dedication to a cause through our relationship with time. The different ways in which we can unfold our lives shape how we engage with our communities, promote social change (or not), and our potential optimism for the future.

That's the guiding idea behind the whole book. Or at least it will be. So it was really interesting for me to have seen Negri write about how these two build their intensely political conceptions of event. And it fits very much with what I’ve read of both those thinkers too. 

It breaks down, basically, like this. 

For Badiou, the politically relevant event is an inspiration. It’s an inspiration so profound that it shapes your entire character and all your moral, political, and ethical beliefs. It’s always in the past. 

You identify the pivotal event retroactively – maybe it first inspired you through your experience of it, but its power over you only ever becomes apparent through your memory. Not just your memory in reflection, but your memory in action. Because you intend every action that you take in the world now to reflect and pay homage to that event and its power over your life from the past. 

The pivotal event is always separate from you, in Badiou’s thinking. It’s not necessarily about striving to re-create the event, because you can never really bring it about again. Nor would you necessarily want to.

I mean, think about how horrifying and violent some of the pivotal events in people’s lives are. Maybe it’s some massacre or attack. I’ve often thought about the September 11 attacks as one of these pivotal events that have shaped my political consciousness. 

You wouldn’t want to re-create that. Not only would it be horrifying, but it would take away from the original event’s power. It had that power to define your personality because of the way the event hit you at that moment. And part of what was special at that moment was that there had never been anything quite like that event before. 

That's why there’s never any true repetition. Whenever something happens again, it’s never quite the same event, even if it unfolds exactly according to the same script. The history is different because the event has precedent. 

Badiou calls this relationship to a pivotal event fidelity. We’re faithful to the event that shaped our lives and personalities. Our relationship with it exerts a powerful force that constitutes a lot of our subjectivities. Our contemporary actions become a tribute to that event’s power.

The pivotal event for Badiou and his philosophy, to which he returns continually in
his own Being and Event, is the time of May 1968, and the riots that convulsed
Paris in dreams of a radically different society.

Foucault’s concept is very different, and I’d say it’s the one that Utopias the book will prefer. Foucault is interested in the event as our own power to create events. The event is the new beginning that we create with our political action, with our daily life working in our society and community. 

One is a past event that inspires our action in the future with our faith and fidelity to it. One is our own power to create change in our world. You can see which one I’d choose. The question is why. . . . To be continued

Why Communism Anyway? 3: Existence Is Inadequate to Living, Research Time, 25/02/2014

Badiou’s ontology doesn’t tell the whole story of ontology’s entire domain. If you take set theory as the basic and comprehensive language of ontology, the framework of the nature of existence itself, then it leads you to the conclusions Badiou reaches (at least in that ontological context). A body is, as regards fundamental ontology, a member of a set, so only exists insofar as it is always already enfolded in a collective, even if that collective only has one member. I don’t actually disagree with him when considering ontology from its fundamental perspective.

Why do you have to complicate my simple ontological principles with all this proliferation of difference, nebula?

The difference between myself and Badiou, philosophically, is ultimately a difference of emphasis. He emphasizes the fundamental, and I emphasize complication and complexity. At the most fundamental level of any ontology, being is univocal, and there is no real difference among bodies in terms of their existence. But actual bodies proliferate and develop in directions far more complex than their most fundamental dimension. Subjectivity is one direction of this tendency of existence to complicate itself, but it's far from the only one, and not necessarily the highest one. All ranking is relative to a purpose anyway. The distribution of energy in the universe was uneven, and so clumps into stars and galaxies. As matter/energy clumps together, tendencies to motion that never existed in less dense arrangements begin. The arrangements of molecules become increasingly complex, and the most complex arrangements, assemblies, and relationships occur on biospheric planets.

My mother always said I liked to make things complicated. Well, I’m not just being obstreperous; I’m following a natural tendency of existence itself.

All the elaborate conceptual mechanics in pure ontology that concern Being and Event is an elaboration on only the most simple, universal aspect of any being: its mere existence, that it exists. Now, if you’re of a philosophical disposition that privileges the fundamental as the most important aspect of a domain (e.g. existence considered as such, the epistemic problems of skepticism, the categorically necessary principles to make a system of rules a morality), then good for you. We can have some great conversations. 

Under our masks that allow us to act collectively, we have
faces that strain against being anonymous.

But I don’t share your disposition. I’m more inclined to the styles of ontology that concentrate on these complicating movements that make existence as it is lived categorically different than existence as such. Philosophy about existence as such focusses on the ways in which all bodies are ultimately the same, the nature of being. A focus on existence as it’s lived sends you searching after all the ways that bodies and fields can differ from each other, mapping those differences, and conceptualizing the principles of their emergence. This is why I affiliate myself with thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Margaret Urban Walker, Bruno Latour, John Dewey, and schools of philosophy like STS. Their ontological eye is on the creation of difference, so can encompass the myriad variations that Badiou’s fundamentally univocal ontology passes over.

Just as Badiou’s fundamental ontology of the collective implies a politics of communism, my own ontological focus on differentiation implies a politics where emancipation is along anarchist lines. Zizek concluded Living in the End Times with reflections on what a new utopian vision for the world could be, because the versions of statist communism failed. Badiou’s essay on failure in The Communist Hypothesis is similar, but appears to be more of a cop-out than Zizek. Badiou sees no flaw in communism itself, but only in the struggle for a new order: for Badiou, failure of emancipatory revolution lies in the intensity of the war unconsciously shifting revolutionary priorities from destroying the state infrastructure itself to replacing the leadership of state infrastructure with yourself. Zizek’s exasperation is more profound, that of a man searching for a new model for emancipation itself. I don’t have all the answers either, but Badiou still has too many answers for my taste.

I admire Badiou because he really is a systematic philosopher, having derived political and social principles from an ontology. But I don’t think he’ll ultimately play a major role in the Utopias project, because of this fundamental philosophical difference between us. Even though you can definitely call him a utopian thinker, on this very basic level, he’s incompatible with the underlying philosophical priorities of the project. The Utopias project ultimately is about articulating a relationship with time, one’s personal and social temporality, that encourages the proliferation of difference, the multiplication of singularities. 

• • •

I think if I was on a more historically conventional employment track in academia, I’d spin this argument into a book-length polemic against Badiou’s philosophy. After all, it connects his ontological with his political principles, and takes their integration seriously, just as Badiou’s own thought does. I think it would be the kind of book that could solidify the reputation of a young scholar. 

But that’s not my career path anymore, because the likelihood of my securing any permanent academic work in future is minimal. Union rules for sessional work in this region of Ontario lock virtually all new labour market entrants out of employment, and no one in their right mind would move provinces or countries for a four-month contract worth less than $7000 (and most of the American adjunct contracts are half that pay scale). Although I’ve seen it done, I have little expectation that I’ll ever land a tenure-track university position without spending a long time drifting from gig to gig four months at a time. My life just isn’t compatible with that itinerant lifestyle anymore. 

I, and a lot of other young scholars, likely won’t get a university position despite our qualifications and skills. So we have to hustle ourselves as writers and editors and publish as independents. Frankly, I have to hit more ambitious ideas than devoting years of work to a single book that would still be in the shadow of an already-successful and near-legendary philosopher. 

What Is Communism Anyway? 2: Come and Join the Collective, Research Time, 24/02/2014

Continued from previous. Ultimately, as a philosophical matter, my biggest problem with Alain Badiou is his conception of the subject as collective. That is, individuality is only ontologically possible insofar as a person is counted as one, counted as a member of a collective. That collective can even contain just one, but it is still a collective. This may sound like some dogmatic Maoism, one more fool uncritically following a doctrine which they believe on the basis of faith. In his political writings, Badiou does discuss how an individual must have total faith in the movement to bring about a just world and change human character along the lines of justice and true material equality among people. But those words about faith do not seem to be for him. Badiou himself has already discovered the reasons why the subject is necessarily constituted through a collective. I think it lies at the fundamental basis of his entire philosophy.

Badiou can be quite difficult, especially in his ontology,
but he deserves his reputation as a tantalizing author.

You see, the first I read of Badiou was Being and Event, a copy that I picked up while on vacation in Toronto back in 2006. It was a Book City bookstore, which is why I’ve always had good feelings about that franchise: most relatively commercial bookstores have pretty miserable philosophy sections, and this one had an esoteric, huge, and complex account of set theory as the original ontology of existence itself, and how political devotion to a revolutionary cause arises from our encounters with events that are incommensurable with previous orders of being and re-inscribe participants into a new collective. Being and Event is one hell of a book, and I consider it one of the greatest philosophical achievements that a single person has made since the Second World War.

However, we don’t always agree with that we admire. Sadly, I don’t see enough admiring critique in philosophy. Young partisans and fans of Badiou tend to lionize and worship him too much. But the grounds of my disagreement lie in Badiou’s conception of the subject.

A detour that isn’t really a digression. The hallmark of Being and Event was, for me, Badiou’s account of set theory as fundamental ontology. Basically, because at its most basic level, in terms of a body’s mere existence, it can always be counted as a member of a set — the most we can do is count them. He spun several more elaborate ontological principles from applying the operations of set theory in an ontological context, but my story today only requires that basic starting point. Even if a body is counted only as one, it is still one only insofar as it is a set; it would simply be a member of a set with one member. Even nothingness counts as one: the null set. 

So every body is only an individual insofar as it is part of a collective; in the most fundamental aspect of its ontology, its mere existence, a body is part of a collective. So it goes for the subject; even at the individual level, it exists only as part of a collective. To deny this status as a collectivity ignores the most fundamental aspect of its very ontology: that it is only what it is insofar as it is a member of a set. Even a set of one, or a set of nothing, is still a collective. And every individual is a set.

Badiou has done something quite remarkable in following through the implications of his approach to fundamental ontology completely into an ethical and political philosophy, his theory of the subject. Bear in mind that this is only speculation after a partial reading of his work. I don’t speak as an expert on the corpus of Badiou (that may never happen, depending on your standard of expertise), but as an expert on philosophical research and reading exploring an idea of Badiou’s in some essays. So any categorical statements I make now will be provisional (and elaborated a little more tomorrow, but not in the sense some of you might think). 

In an essay in The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou describes
China's Cultural Revolution, particularly is first three years,
as a properly subjectivizing event.

In a political sense, the event, that incommensurable opportunity to change the character of one’s existence, is a moment in a subject’s life when he can actually subjectivize himself. It is a moment when he can change who he is: from a self-conscious individual who believes in his separateness from all others, he realizes that he is a member of a set. The event is the kind of moment that wakes a person up to understand that he only exists as a member of a collective. 

One of the earliest criticisms I made of Badiou was that a person’s formative event need not be one that lets someone actualize himself as a radical/communist egalitarian, but could instead have inspired Nazi nationalism, robber-baron capitalism with absolute contempt for the poor, or some other repugnant ideology or faith. Now that I have a better handle on the implicative relationships of the ontology to the politics, I think I understand how the communist political philosophy follows from it. 

Communism is the only political form that is adequate to the fundamental nature of a body’s existence, existing only as a member of a set, a collective. So the only authentic subject is one who struggles for communism, the radical material equality that counts every person as one, just as every being is counted as one.

My central problem with this, and the topic of tomorrow’s post: There is more to the subject than its existence alone.

What Is Communism Anyway? 1: States and Affairs, Research Time, 23/02/2014

Badiou is a fascinating philosopher, but my own work may
not even really need too many of his ideas.

I’ve thrown enough digs at Alain Badiou over the last few months that I should finally dive in more detail into some of his work. As I mentioned on Friday, my friend B sent me an article of his, “The Idea of Communism,” and it’s given me an excellent set of ideas to react to. I still have fundamental disagreements with Badiou’s approach to politics and philosophy, and even though I very much respect that perspective, I’m not actually sure to what degree his work will be useful for the Utopias project. There’s one inescapable element of his thinking that I find remarkably disturbing, his conception of the subject as a collective. This will spread over multiple posts.

“The Idea of Communism” contained two sprightly concepts, each created from merging two ideas that are typically kept separate. One such concept is his term, “State,” always capitalized, to refer both to the institutions of territorial government typically given this term, and simultaneously the situation of one’s current life. In other words, he unites the State with the state of affairs. If you think this sounds fishy, it is, because we experience these phenomena very differently. Of course, most original philosophical concepts sound fishy when they’re first developed, until you can work with them and figure out what they can do. This is the true test of a philosophical concept: what and how it lets you think. If you believe an idea wasn’t worth thinking because it isn’t immediately transparent in the terms you’re most accustomed to, then you’re a bad philosopher.*

* And also a social conservative, but that’s immaterial to this meditation. Maybe.

But there are some further problems with blurring this distinction between institutions of governance and one’s general worldly situation. Badiou, because he’s writing specifically about politics in this essay, is working through how to oppose the injustices of capitalist systems. In particular, he discusses how to overthrow our state institutions of governance. 

The problem is that the enormous capital flows that constitute our modern financial systems are bigger than most states. So overthrowing a state might not cut it in terms of making a substantial dent in the system where it really matters: not the governance institutions that are tied essentially to a defined territory, but the flows of money, credit, capital, and material which constitute a moment that can crush many states. Yes, a state can raise an army, contract mercenaries, run weapons factories, and even control nuclear arsenals. But state actions, even those of the most powerful, have lately been about reacting to developments in these world-sized waves.**

** The People’s Republic of China so far may be the only state whose single actions have had a serious active effect on this process, when they injected billions of dollars worth of credit into their investment markets and construction projects. It is seriously enough to almost double the size of Wuhan. If this credit extension collapses, shit could get seriously serious, even compared to what’s happened already.

Far from withering, Marxist governments
tend too often to over-solidify themselves
in state power. Eventually, they need a new
revolution for one more shot at the
institutional justice the first one failed to
achieve.

So a focus on states as the primary political and economic units of our time is one problem with Badiou’s concept of the State. However, it also lets us inject some greater profundity in what is, to me, one of the most abused and idiotically parroted ideas in the Karl Marx corpus: the idea that, under communism, the state would ‘wither away.’ When we talk exclusively about a communist party taking over a governance institution, the state doesn’t wither away through the direct social connections of collectivization. It more often results in the slow strangling of a country through bureaucracy. 

It’s an unfortunate side-effect of one of my most hated legacies of the 19th century, the equation of the state with the public. After the last century of failure, a genuinely revolutionary attitude wouldn’t trust the institutions of the state to bring about social change through top-down edicts. At least I don’t.

But Badiou actually has a decent account of how this conceptual union of state institution and state of affairs means for the event of withering. What the social revolution, in Badiou’s perspective, brings about is literally the end of injustice. The state institutions are themselves conceived as the state of affairs. He doesn’t conceive communism as a party in warfare and electoral politics, but as a movement advocating for justice. His conception of the just is bound in communistic principles, but the state of affairs that changes is the whole world we live in.

This leads me to what I think is the greatest benefit of Badiou’s concept of the State. All too often, we think of our government and its bureaucracy as more stable than the mountains. We take its basic functions for granted. At least in the West, they’ve persisted for so long that their nature feels immutable. But we conceive of our worldly situations as fluid, open to change, and always fluctuating to some degree anyway. By blurring the boundary between our worldly situations and our governance institutions, conceiving of those institutions as one element of a wider situation, we can open our thinking to imagine more radical changes to governance. We can see the capacity for change in what we too easily take to be immutable.

About the method of that mutation, Badiou and I still have some very angry words to say to each other.

Cult of Personality, Research Time, 31/01/2014

Zizek has given me another reason to distrust and dislike the philosophy and politics of Alain Badiou. I say this in the knowledge that Zizek is probably twisting some more subtle point of Badiou’s into fodder for his own arguments, as he is wont to do. But given some of my knowledge of Badiou’s thought already, the following idea makes sense. 

Alain Badiou will tell you what to do.

According to Zizek at least, Badiou has endorsed the cult of personality in social revolutions against capitalist systems. That is, a revolutionary no longer justifies his actions in terms of the universal principles — escaping a hardscrabble existence in the name of human dignity, overthrowing social structures of stratification and servitude in the name of freedom. Instead, a revolutionary commits the acts he does in the name of his loyalty to the Leader. I do what I do because it is the will of the Leader.

Holy fuck. I have yet to check this, as I haven’t had time to track down a copy of the conference presentation where Badiou presented this idea. But the conference was called “On the Idea of Communism,” it was organized by the School of Law at Birkbeck College in London, and the conference took place over 13-15 March 2009. If this is at all accurate, then the Utopias project would have few enemies bigger than Alain Badiou. It advocates a politics in which you surrender your will to a movement and its Leader in the name of freedom. Well, no, actually, it goes beyond that. You don’t even surrender your will in the name of freedom, but only because the Leader demands that you surrender your will.

This makes sense in the light of some of Badiou’s writings which advocate that philosophy can only occur in the structure of the master-disciple relationship: Alain is the master, who develops new revolutionary thoughts, and you rabble are the disciples who absorb those words and act according to the master’s guidance and orders. 

Badiou used to send his dedicated students to shout down his colleague Gilles Deleuze in the middle of his lectures, accusing him of cultural conservatism, hatred of the people, and similarly awful things. The point was only to assault and humiliate a fellow professor, and not even to do so to his face. Why would a student agree to act as Badiou’s proxy, spewing hatred at a professor when his own master did not have the guts to behave so anti-socially? Because Alain is the master, and you are the disciple.

As it is in philosophy, so it is in politics, a fundamental parallelism in Badiou’s thinking. The reasoning goes that the universal or universalizing concepts to which we currently have reference to justify our actions can’t be genuinely universal. They’re products of the current regime of thought and life, a regime that the revolutionary (following from the conclusions about the nature of the revolutionary in yesterday’s post) seeks to overthrow completely. In a genuine revolution, nothing of the old order remains. There is a total ontological change, no continuity between this world and the next. So to usher in the next world, a political movement must have no reference to the concepts that were created to deal with this world. It must be the product of an idiosyncrasy, a singular presence.

Such a singular presence is not a concept, but a person or a leader. Sorry, a Leader, or specifically, his proper name. The proper name escapes the context of contemporary universals precisely because it is a singularity, both in terms of its uniqueness and its nature as a limit concept, that which we approach and transcend.

A nice goal, certainly. But its possibility is doubtful. More thoughts as I think of them, I think.

One Reason Why I Try to Be Humble, A History Boy, 28/11/2013

To people who know me personally, you may find that title a little strange. I’m not exactly sheepish about my ideas in philosophy or literature. But I’m discussing humility in a more broad sense, particularly because I’m taking a break from my Arendt discussions today to talk about a new book I discovered yesterday about Alain Badiou.

François Laruelle has written a book called Anti-Badiou. It doesn’t get any more confrontational than that. Badiou is a huge figure in European philosophy, though I don’t know if anyone takes him seriously in North America beyond the self-identified Continental philosophers.* I agree that Badiou is brilliant, but I’m very glad this book exists, because despite some very intriguing ideas, I don’t think his overall effect on the culture of professional philosophy is positive.

* I’ve discussed in a previous post how I think this is an unfortunate label, because it treats as a single tradition what is actually seven distinct, if sometimes mutually influential, schools of thought. I originally wrote of six, but later realized I should have made one more distinction: hermeneutics, related to Heidegger’s work but different, had slipped my mind. It’s the school I work with least. Badiou’s influence, as well, may now constitute an eighth division in so-called Continental philosophy.

I don't dispute Badiou's brilliance. I
dispute his philosophical methods.

Some colleagues have told me that Laruelle’s other work isn’t exactly impressive, but I consider the book valuable at least for trying to poke some pins in Badiou’s reputation. I’m very hesitant about philosophers who tend to be worshipped, let alone those who encourage that kind of worship while they’re alive. It bespeaks an arrogance that I don’t think people deserve. No human, no matter how brilliant, deserves to be treated as though they’re a messenger of The Truth.

My own encounters with Badiou’s work over the years have demonstrated this. I first read Being and Event in 2006, as I was about to start my MA. I thought his ideas about interpreting set theory as a fundamental ontology were brilliant, as were the techniques he began developing in the book to do so. I had doubts about his approach to political philosophy in that book, particularly over why the student revolts of May ’68 could be taken as a foundational political event for a person, and why some more conservative cause could not. An individual’s foundational encounters with the world don’t have some pre-set political agenda; an event can make a person a racist social conservative, but if he had experienced a different event that similarly affected him, he may become a radical socialist. At the time, however, I was working on other projects in philosophy of mind, and while Badiou intrigued me, I put his work aside.

When I became more interested in Gilles Deleuze’s work later in the decade, I found Badiou’s book about him, The Clamor of Being, first published shortly after Deleuze’s death. I expected a respectful critical examination of Deleuze’s work, like Deleuze’s own book on Michel Foucault. But instead I found a book that argued Deleuze’s philosophy was precisely the opposite of the exploration of a world defined by differences, where stability was a slow-moving flux, where the universe offered potentially endless variety in thought and existence. Badiou instead presented Deleuze as a philosopher of total Oneness, where all variety is superficial and all that matters is the unity of flux. Even worse, he described the unity of flux as inevitably culminating in the death of everything in total entropy. He turned Deleuze from a joyous celebrator of variety, difference, and the hopeful potential of life into a dour worshipper of death.**

** This interpretation isn’t necessarily a hack job. Peter Hallward’s book Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation ultimately reaches this conclusion as well through a reasonable critical analysis of his work. I think it’s plausible because Deleuze’s philosophy walks a tightrope between the nihilism of a world of pure flux on one side, and the relativism of every perspective legitimated by having its own cause on another. I think Deleuze’s philosophy is precisely focussed on the tension between these two ontological ideas. Quite appropriate of him.

No one should attack this man as simply as Badiou did. He's
wily, not like a fox, but perhaps like a sorcerer.

What’s more, The Clamour of Being claims that Deleuze admitted as much in an exchange of letters between them where Badiou built a detailed argument against him, and Deleuze admitted that Badiou was completely right. He also claimed, however, that Deleuze destroyed all the letters in this exchange before Badiou could make them public. That immediately made me suspect him, but I first simply dismissed The Clamour of Being as a mediocre book and moved on in my Deleuze research.

A few years later, I read a biography of Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, François Dosse’s Intersecting Lives. One incident Dosse describes happened while Deleuze and Badiou were both teaching in the Paris VIII Vincennes campus in the 1970s. Badiou had converted a group of students to his version of Maoist radicalism, and he would regularly send these students to interrupt Deleuze’s lectures and scream Maoist slogans and denunciations at him, violent verbal attacks whose goal was literally to drown him out. So this is how Badiou treats his philosophical rivals: He has patsies scream at them until they shut up.

I do not believe that the deeds of a philosopher in his life can be treated separately from the ideas he develops. I know that life operates too fluidly for such perfect compartmentalization. About a year before I read of the violent and disrespectful way Badiou treated Deleuze when he was alive (and a departmental colleague, no less!), my friend B became very excited for Badiou’s new book about Wittgenstein just coming out in English. I was a fan of Wittgenstein, the book was very cheap on Amazon, so I bought it. And I read the following passage. Page 68, to be precise.

"The philosopher assumes the voice of the master. Philosophers are not, nor can they be, modest participants in team work, laborious instructors of a closed history, democrats given over to public debates. Their word is authoritarian, as seductive as it is violent, committing others to follow suit, disturbing and converting them."

This vision of philosophy displays a dictatorial attitude. The philosopher, he says as he elaborates on this introductory passage, must act as a master, shutting off debate and critical questioning of any kind because the philosopher’s task is to deliver the truth. He is the master, everyone else is a disciple, he tells you what to think and how to live, and you obey. I do not believe knowledge can progress from this authoritarian attitude. 

I’ve spoken with advocates for Badiou over the last couple of years at conferences or online. One considered his authoritarian streak an ironic stance. Another considered it unimportant to his wider philosophical inquiries. Discussing this review yesterday, another considered this authoritarianism advocacy for truth against all dispute, that political chicanery like climate change denial can’t truly stand against the facts of the universe. 

I remain very skeptical. I look at Badiou’s meta-philosophical writings where he expresses this authoritarian attitude toward how his own work should be received, his shoddy treatment of Deleuze both before and after death, and I find him untrustworthy. I consider philosophy to work best when all participants treat each other as equals. Badiou claims to be an egalitarian in his politics, but in the practice of philosophy, there is a clear division of rank between the philosopher (particularly himself) and the rest of the world. It looks like cheap hypocrisy to me.

Lost in the Collective, Research Time, 01/09/2013

One of the most dangerous elements of research that comes out of a Marxist tradition, like the Critique of Dialectical Reason, is that of the collective. This never really becomes a problem if you stay within a context of interpreting Marxist theory. But it definitely becomes a problem when you start following the Theses on Feuerbach,* and use your philosophy as a program to change the world. Because you can’t do politics that still respects people while treating them as units of a collective.

* I like to think of the Theses on Feuerbach as Karl Marx’s proto-twitter. Because it makes me laugh.

Sartre pegs the central problem of thinking about humans as a collective first, and as individuals second, which doesn’t appear as a problem to a disturbingly large number of Marxist figures, to the best of my current knowledge. In fact, he’s remarkably progressive on this point in comparison to a lot of left-wing theorists among his contemporaries (like the vastly overrated Frankfurt School). The Marxist tradition tends to believe that identifying the conformity of your interests with a group is a condition of liberation: when everyone realizes they’re equally suppressed by the current political order, they’ll band together to overthrow it.

But Sartre is right to see that this kind of politics of conformity to common interests can just as easily be perverted to destructive ends. Because when the members of a group or a class are treated the same solely because of that membership, that’s what we call racism, sexism, classism, and any other form of discrimination out there. Sartre specifically talks about anti-Semitism, because he’s an upper-middle class Frenchman in the mid-20th century who lived through the Second World War. But it’s true of any attitude that subsumes individual identity within a group identity. And it’s true whether someone does it to you, or whether you do it to yourself.

This is the principle that underlies my suspicion of Alain Badiou’s philosophy as well. I don’t have time to get into the (many, many, many) details of Badiou’s philosophy right now. But his idea that an individual only counts as existing insofar as that individual is counted as one of a collective is, for me, a very dangerous thought. There’s a lot of interesting and valuable ideas in Badiou’s thinking, but this principle makes me distrust him.

I think this is a peculiar insight to which strange people are prone. I’m a strange guy, and I’ve always resisted philosophies that understand humans as assimilating into a group identity. I’m sensitive to the fact that a human’s identity doesn’t fit into easily categorizable boxes. The modern marketing industry is getting better at that, but only because their frameworks of analysis have become far more finely detailed than they used to be. Buzzfeed does this insanely well with demo-listing, absurdly narrowly focussed articles which are targeted to very specific groups. 

But I’ve never fit in well to any group. I’ve always been a misfit, and I’m proud of it, because it’s part of what makes me remarkable. Conformity for the sake of conformity is never liberating. And conformity for the sake of solidarity is dangerous. Eventually, you want to be given the space to grow on your own, especially if you’re strange or unusual enough that you don’t want to assimilate your personality completely to a regime of appropriate behaviour or thinking. This mistake, I think, underlies all the repressive activity of communist regimes: social solidarity and conformity may be required for revolutionary activity, but a society will never be free after a radical political change until we can discard solidarity-at-all-costs for the freedom to think and experiment as individuals.