[from a correspondence - November 9 - 16, 2003]
I've set aside some time this week to jot down some more notes for you on the truth-event. I was pleased to note in your message to me that this topic interests you. At the time of our summer correspondence I was relying on Zizek's summaries and elaborations of Badiou from two of his recent books and hadn't yet had the opportunity to read Badiou directly. I finally read his short work, Ethics, last week, and I can now detail for you his concept of the truth-event in greater fullness.
Badiou is a political philosopher. He was a student of Althusser and a distant disciple of Lacan in the 1960's and 1970's, and he was one of the leaders in the 1968 student uprisings in France. In France he has been recognized since the 1980's along with Derrida and Deleuze as one of the three foremost living French philosophers, but unlike Derrida and Deleuze, who have been known in the English-speaking world for quite some time, his works have only recently been translated into English (a translation of his major work, Being and Event, is due for release next summer).
Ethics seems to have been intended as a brief and popular exposition of some of the most important aspects of his thought. It is amazingly concise and easy to grasp, and in less than a hundred pages the author introduces an ethico-political philosophy, the implications of which, as with the political philosophies of Plato, Hobbes, and Marx, refer readers back to the most fundamental issues of philosophy (being, knowledge, truth, language, etc.). Badiou's dual springboards are Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, both of which are radically simplified - meaning that he takes a few key motifs from Lacan (most notably the conception of the Real as opposed to reality) and whittles Marxism down to the fundamental gesture at the heart of Marx's project - namely, the need to politicize the (global) economy (thus, similar to Zizek, fully realizing the implications of Althusser's epoch-making reading of Marx during the 1960's).
If Marx and Lacan serve as Badiou's springboards, the views propound in Ethics are conceived in antithesis to mainstream leftist political philosophy and to contemporary ethics (which Badiou refers to as an "ethics of the other") - both rooted in Derridean deconstruction and in the related, theologically tinged philosophy of Levinas. Badiou holds that the "ethics of the other" and the ideologies such as multiculturalism which have perpetuated it are designed predominantly to offer consolation to leftist intellectuals who, increasingly in the past two or three decades, have renounced any hope of a true socio-political revolution. He notes that it is the same "multiculturalists" who have been happy to announce "the end of the old ideological struggles" and, following from this, even the end of ideology itself. In so doing they have merely proven that multiculturalism is the predominant ideological expression of the global economy (all I need do, incidentally, to convince myself of the verity of this equation is glance up at the block-wide Benetton commercials that adorn Taipei, with their careful inclusion in exact proportions of stereotypically "black," "white," and "Asian" faces). Badiou thus provides along with Zizek one of the two major critiques of multiculturalist ideology that I am aware of that have been launched from a radical leftist rather than conservative or neo-conservative standpoint.
I'll summarize the main thrust of Ethics before honing in on the concept of truth-event in an attempt to elaborate more fully the direction in which I was heading in our correspondence of this past summer.
Badiou begins with a summary of the "ethics of the other". He claims that the entire university jargon concerning "otherness" can be traced back through Derrida's first books and the works of Lacan's feminist students to Heidegger and his critique of Western metaphysics, based in turn on Nietzsche (this conception of the other has little or nothing to do with the Lacanian notion of the Big Other that I frequently mention…this in passing). Badiou claims that this entire quest after the "other" is misdirected since, in ontological terms, "otherness" is all that there is. The problematics of "otherness" have obfuscated the fact that what is truly amazing about the human animal is that it harbors these "irreal" notions concerning the Same. In empirical or ontological reality (the two are the same in Badiou, for whom there "is" nothing besides matter and material existence), "otherness", “difference” and "multiplicity" - those things, namely, sought after so strenuously by certain contemporary philosophers and by those who espouse the "ethics of the other" - are in fact all that exist. He writes: "Infinite alterity [a term from Levinas meaning "otherness"] is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences." In other words, insofar as we are merely human animals, all that exists for us is an infinity of heterogeneous elements that comprise our experience, no two of which are alike. Badiou introduces here one of his key terms - "situation." Each human animal, as with every other sort of animal, finds itself in its own particular "situation" - which Badiou defines as the particular finite infinity of elements that make up any given animal's experience ("finite" because each situation is a selection of possible elements that make up animal experience, "infinite" because, presumably, one can never fully attend to all of the elements which comprise his or her situation, so that they indeed stand over and against the individual as an infinity). In addition, this infinite, we must keep in mind, is that of a banal material reality, and not that of a theologically tinged transcendence (as in, say, Romantic conceptions of the infinite).
This, briefly stated, is Badiou's ontology (theory of being), and it is so ingeniously simple that it almost reads as a spoof, say, of the pre-Socratics. In other words, it's simple to the dual points of polemical vituperation and half-improvised self-irony. Yet it serves as the basis for a conception of ethics that is compelling and far-reaching.
Out of this fundamental, ontological, and thoroughly banal difference and multiplicity that is animal existence, how do we get the Same? The Same does not exist in itself (as all that exists in itself is infinite banal difference); rather, it is that which effects change from one situation (or one finitely infinite multiple) to another. Or not so much that which effects change as the change itself. The name of this Same that either effects change or is itself change is Truth.
Okay, we have a transition from one "situation" to another. Yet why does Badiou call this transition, or the agency that effects this transition (it's not entirely clear which) the Same or Truth? He does not elaborate very far in this direction, but we can presume that, for Badiou, the very reason that we can cognize sameness (and hence truth) in any given situation is precisely on account of its difference of that situation with respect to situations that are either temporally prior to it (as when we say, "the situation has changed") or spatially exterior to it (as when we say, "I don't know what the situation is over there"). The ontological supposition here is that, insofar as we are "merely" animals, we have no means of distinguishing one situation from another; we come to an understanding that "our" situation is the same with respect to itself and in opposition to all other situations only via the occasional shifts or transformations or interventions that take place within our otherwise static situation. We call these shifts or transformations or interventions (or the agency or agencies which serve them or place them into effect) Truth (or truths in the plural, more precisely), simply because it is via such shifts that the infinite multiplicity that is our banal experience slows down to a tempo at which we can apprehend that certain things are the same (e.g. every time my infant son's diaper is wet, it means he has pee'd) and that certain other things are true (e.g.1 + 1 = 2, Andy loves Rebecca, Taipei is not part of the People's Republic of China, etc.).
That last paragraph was an improvised explication of an extremely laconic few sentences from Badiou, but I think it's pretty much in line with what Badiou has in mind.
The element I have left out thus far is Immortality. To the list: “finite infinity”, multiplicity, and radical alterity/otherness, we add the mortal. In contrast, we list Immortality with Truth and the Same. Why? In our everyday, situational experience, all that we seem to know is constant mortality, the constant and infinite coming-into-being and passing-away of the elements that make up the particular situation in which we are embedded. The diaper-changing I undertook a few hours ago at bottom has nothing to do with the one I accomplished five minutes ago. It was a different me putting a different piece of cloth on a different baby. Yet I conceive sameness in the two experiences. That "ideal" sameness I cognize between the two experiences is the reverse of the mundane heterogeneity that actually took place in material reality ("ideal" in quotes because Badiou doesn't use this term, which I'm borrowing from older philosophy to indicate that sameness is "conceptual" rather than "empirical" or “merely experiential”). Similarly, Immortality is the "ideal" reverse of the banal mortality of our everyday experience.
The examples that I have provided here, both because Badiou does not provide them and because I'm trying to explain it all to myself, are ridiculous. But I think I've elaborated the basic matrix of Badiou's initial argument pretty clearly. Anyway, from diaper-changing we now proceed to the truth-event and the four "procedures" of truth that take place in interactions of humans with each other and in community: love, science, politics, and art.
It is at the level of intersubjectivity (or, if we prefer not to use such a loaded term at this rudimentary level, simply of human beings in interaction with each other) that we realize more fully why Badiou equates sameness with Truth over against difference and multiplicity. The fact that all or most human beings seem to recognize that certain situations in which they find themselves are the same as or similar to others in which they find themselves (or in which other human beings find themselves) is the condition that leads them to agreement, and the most basic name for agreement between human beings – the one we keep returning to more than any other – is Truth. The true is whatever pairs or groups of human beings are driven to agree upon, and you might say that there is no truth beyond such agreement. Yet there are two modes of truth. The first of these is with respect to knowledge. Of what do we have knowledge? We have knowledge of love (which is the relationship that obtains between two individuals), of science, of politics, and of art (these latter three relationships are properly collective, in contrast with the duality of love). Knowledge is that which allows us to proceed within the particular situations in which we find ourselves – that which allows us to perpetuate ourselves therein. Yet from time to time, something happens that cannot be accounted for within that knowledge via which situations account for themselves and via which we account for our positions within them. Something transpires, which Badiou calls an event (he sometimes refers to it as a "supplement" - a term borrowed from Derrida), that compels us to conceive of a new way of being (i.e. a new situation). Thus, in distinction from the truth we have through knowledge, we have an additional notion of truth arising from the events that effect transformations from one temporal situation to another. Badiou's initial examples: in love, Abelard and Heloise; in politics, the French Revolution; in science, Galileo and the creation of physics; in art, Haydn and the invention of the classical style.
After elaborating this conception of the truth-event, Badiou goes on to suggest that truth is not only the event in itself but the fidelity to the event that one takes upon oneself subsequently. One remains within the situation, yet rethinks that situation from the point of view of the event/supplement - always in itself an element that is unthinkable according to the standard laws that govern our conception of how the situation works. As Badiou writes, "Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event known by the name of "Schoenberg", cannot continue with fin-de-siecle neo-Romanticism as if nothing had happened." A truth-process, to rephrase the same idea, is always heterogeneous to the instituted knowledge of the situation from which it has sprung. Borrowing an image from the late Lacan, Badiou suggests that it "punches a hole" in knowledge.
Further, it is only in terms of the truth-event and the truth-process of fidelity to the event that it makes sense to speak of the "subject" (in the philosophical sense of the word). Prior to the truth-event, all that we have are groups of human animals. In fact, it is not even correct to speak of individual human beings as "subjects." There are merely subject-points, like nodes in a truth-process, which individual human beings may assume. The subject doesn't pre-exist the truth-process, which is the same thing as saying that the empirical human being living in Austria, in his early string quartet doodlings under Zemlinsky, is by no means that same Schoenberg we know as the name of the subject-point of the truth-process of post-tonal music - the subject-point which that brilliant, empirical Austrian took hold of and claimed as his own around the turn of the century. In summary, if “events are irreducible singularities, the beyond-the-law of situations, [then] subjects are local occurrences of the truth-process."
That's the truth-event in its essentials. In the latter part of Ethics, Badiou goes on to develop a philosophy of evil (again in contrast to contemporary ethics) that is rooted in this conception of the truth-event. He begins with the assertion that, at the center of every situation, there is a void that the truth-event seeks to address and that is nothing more than what must remain unspoken if the situation is to retain its consistency. His clearest and most sustained example again concerns the emergence of Viennese classicism in European music history: "At the heart of the baroque style at its virtuoso saturation lay the absence of a genuine conception of musical architectonics. The Haydn-event occurs as a kind of musical naming of this absence. For what constitutes the event is nothing less than a wholly new architectonic and thematic principle, a new way of developing musical writing from the basis of a few transformable units - which was precisely what, from within the baroque style, could not be perceived (there could be no knowledge of it)." (Note: If Badiou seems at all technically vague or insufficient when he speaks of music, as he does to me, it is because he is very evidently not himself a musician. But his interpretations are fundamentally sound, I believe…he's a good listener. He relies almost exclusively on Rosen's classic book, which by the way seems to have been accepted by a lot of European thinkers as a token and as it were unconscious piece of American structuralism.) Other examples: What does Marx do in The Communist Manifesto if not name the void at the heart of classical economics and then undertake a re-reading – one that lasts three decades – of the classical economics "situation" from the perspective of that void, which he names the proletariat? What does Schoenberg do if not name the void at the heart of European music and go on to re-think that situation, in his compositions and in his writings, from the perspective of that void, which he names dissonance? What does Lavoisier do if not name the void at the heart of classical chemistry and go on to re-investigate the data that comprised that situation from the perspective of that void (phlogiston, thence called oxygen) (this last one is my example, taken in turn from Marx and Engels)?
I've summed up by now the most interesting aspects of Badiou's philosophy with respect to its implications for thinking about music, and I won't go into his theory of evil in detail. Suffice it to say that evil first arises when the fidelity to a truth-event has failed. In advance of the truth-event, according to Badiou, it makes no sense to speak of good and evil (he quips with a counter aimed at Nietzsche when he writes that, in general, "human beings are beneath [rather than within] good and evil"). There is merely the infinite body of opinions that comprise circulating knowledge about situations. The Good arises with the truth-event, and Evil with the breakdown in the truth-process of fidelity arising subsequent to the event. Badiou asserts that there are three modes of failing the truth-process. The third of these (which, again, I won't fully elaborate) concerns language and the naming of elements that compose a situation and that permit the exchange of opinions about and within the situation. I'm most interested in this portion of Badiou's theory because it is here that Badiou suddenly connects back into the heart of Lacan and to the theories of signification that are of central interest to me in my study of Adorno. In a truth-process, the subject continues to employ the language of the situation. In the end, however, the elements that comprise the situation are re-named. Language subsequently becomes divided into the language of the situation (the language of knowledge and opinion) and the subject-language (the language of truth). To return to our Schoenberg example, musical language becomes divided into post-Wagnerian tonality (and the rules that exist in theory to discuss that tonality) and free atonality (later, the 12-tone technique). The clearest example, however, is with respect to science: "The mathematized language of science is in no way the language of opinions, including opinions on science [i.e. such as those that are perpetuated in textbooks, in which the inevitable metamorphosis of the scientific truth-process into institutionalized learning takes place]." Eventually, of course, the older situation may be abandoned altogether and the truth-process codified into a body of received opinion in which the outlines of the truth-process become increasingly difficult to discern. Badiou specifically names the institutionalization within bourgeois society of the classical style in music, which has decreed that it is a perpetual and truly prodigious undertaking for students of that music to re-hear it in the vitality of its revolutionary utterance (I know this in my own experience with Mozart…It's really true what they always tell in your youth, that you'll never properly understand Mozart until you've been thinking about music and living in it for a very long time): "A whole body of musical knowledge was quickly organized around the great names of the classical style…There is no "progress" here, for classical academicism, or the cult of Mozart, is in no sense superior to what went on before…Of course, these modified opinions are ephemeral, whereas the truths themselves, which are the great creations of the classical style, shall endure eternally." Similarly, "the eternity produced from mathematical truths is not itself at issue here, but they have forced knowledges for the arranging of sociality, and such is the form of their return back to the interests of the human animal."
Anyway, that's Badiou in a nutshell. Unfortunately, I have to wait until next summer when the English translation of his far longer, major work will be available. I'm fairly sure, however, that Badiou will be one of my primary reference points in my continued work on "Reading Adorno." There is much here that allows one to bridge structuralist and specifically Lacanian conceptions of the linguistic nature of truth with the important and in many respects far different conceptions of truth in Adorno and Benjamin - based as they are on a Hegelian-Marxist conception of material for which the concept of "mediation" is a signpost. In addition, Ethics contains a couple of important tools that I will surely utilize in my lengthy answer as to what I have identified as the central enigma of "the Name" in Adorno's philosophy of language: for one, his theory concerning the role that the truth-event plays in the naming of elements in a situation (and “situation” of course is simply Badiou's word for "system" or "structure" in the classical structuralist sense - an updated version of a notion most famously worked out by Levi-Strauss); for another, the idea that one of the three possible courses that Evil takes is the attempt to utilize the subject-language to obsessively re-name every element of the situation (I didn't go into this in the above summary…he ingeniously reads Nietzsche's succumbing to insanity in 1889, the Stalinist purge trials, the degeneration of neo-Romantic aesthetics into fascism, and the collapse of the Chinese Cultural Revolution into the Red Guard Terror in 1967 in these terms).
In any case, I'm perhaps a few steps closer to being able to answer your question concerning what the "fleeting manifestations" of art and music are indeed the truths of. In addition, I particularly admire the book because it has allowed me to come to the beginning of an understanding as to the ethical dimension of my own writing. I very much feel that my adult life has been defined and shaped by the fidelity to a truth-process. What is the subject-point I have been maintaining and attempting to maintain all these years? What is the event to which I have striven to be faithful? I guess I'm still in the process of "naming" it. But I can state very definitely that I uncovered or arrived at this subject-point on a late winter day in early 1992 when, after working unceasingly for a year, I suddenly stumbled upon that right combination of elements (in "Anonymous Bosch") - amounting to technically little more than a meter, a stanza, and a commitment to non-esoteric, everyday language - that has served me (or which I have served) ever since, and the fidelity to which has been my constant and constantly renewed pre-occupation.
I hope these notes encourage you to look further into Badiou someday!
* * *
It is Sunday afternoon, the 16th of November. I worked on the above off and on throughout the past week. Since completing A Lehusa Be I've been trying to tie off a few ends of my most recent reading so that I can make a clean break of things in advance of returning to work on Baron, All Too Baron (the sequel, a bit more than a third way through completion, to Pages in a Second Round). I've been waiting for months to reach the stage in my thinking and in my writing at which I can make a large-scale return to my poetic activities after four years of reading and of writing prose pieces that have reflected that reading. Two weeks ago, I made my first initial efforts to return to my poetry, and the initial results, I believe, were spectacular. With this message on Badiou completed, I think I'm finally ready to turn to Baron for a half-year's worth of daily attention that I estimate I will require to finish it.
Just a few end-notes to my thoughts on Badiou. It's amazing how the things that you choose to read during a given period of time often refer back to each other in unexpected ways. This morning, after having completed the above notes on Badiou last night, I sat down with my Essential Husserl and completed the last forty pages or so of reading that I had set myself as a representative survey of that thinker's output. 95% of Husserl is technical and thoroughly boring. The problem is that, as with many other philosophers, you can't just skip that 95% and hone in directly on the 5% of "real meat" (not dissimilar to the same problem many of us have with Schubert's long-winded piano sonatas). You've got to read through it in its entirety to even be able to recognize what the "real meat" is. I've read through three of his most important works and have relied on the editors of the Essential Husserl for the choice bits from his other works (which I would have purchased and read in themselves were it not for the fact that, apart from less than a handful of his most widely read works, Husserl is only available in prohibitively expensive translations generally purchased only by universities for philosophy collections - we're talking $200 per volume).
Anyway, today I read through the "essential" sections culled from his final work, written in the mid-'30's, The Crisis of the European Sciences (the manuscripts had to be transported clandestinely out of Nazi Germany and deciphered by his disciples in France). Not knowing the extent to which Badiou's theories are indebted to Husserl (whom he doesn't mention in Ethics), I found much that resonates with the thoughts summarized above. Husserl's task in this book apparently was to seek to explain, at the end of his life, that Europe had gotten itself in the mess that it had through a gradual corruption of science since its modern advent in Galileo and Descartes. He describes the advent of modern science as a sort of return to and rehabilitation of conceptions that had their true beginning in ancient Greece. That's nothing very original in itself, of course…but the way in which he develops his outline of scientific history is so strikingly similar to Badiou's notion of the truth-event that it struck me that Badiou's theory must be indebted to Husserl in very large measure (and his analysis of the crisis of Europe circa 1930 reads like a close ancestor of Badiou's analysis of Evil as the betrayal of the truth-event). It is almost as if, with Badiou, you have a return of sorts to the very foundations of 20th-century continentalist thought. Reading Husserl close upon Badiou also gives me further ammo in my ongoing attempt to separate the good from the bad and the old from the new in Adorno, who, along with Husserl's student Heidegger and most of the thinkers generally grouped with Adorno under the rubric "Western Marxist," relies famously on a rather one-sided conception of science as a sort of original sin of Western civilization. The mid-century French thinkers, in contrast to Central Europeans such as Heidegger, Lukacs, and Adorno, never had any problems with science or with the positivist philosophy that accompanied it in the 19th-century (Foucault, for instance, follows the Nietzsche of Human All-Too-Human in directly declaring himself a positivist - meaning someone working within the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften who aspires to the same sort of conceptual and organizational rigor characteristic of physics, mathematics, etc.). In Badiou's formulations on science and scientific history, he seems, following Althusser, to be at pains to retain the "Western Marxist" critique of scientism while declaring himself in favor of the radical core of the truth-process at the heart of Western science. In such a way he represents a return to the phenomenological foundations of 20th-century European thought.
A couple of quotes from Crisis: "If we adhere strictly to Galileo's motivation…we must make clear to ourselves the strangeness of his basic conception in the situation of his time…The whole of infinite nature, taken as a concrete universe of causality…became the object of a peculiarly applied mathematics." Note Husserl's use of the word "situation" (of course this may simply be a coincidence between the two translations). Husserl here indicates how difficult yet necessary it is for students of an epoch-making truth-event (such as what went on with Haydn and Mozart) to relive the strangeness that the new conception must have presented to contemporaries.
Further: "Like arithmetic itself, in technically developing its methodology [algebra] is drawn into a process of transformation, through which it becomes a sort of technique…Here the original thinking that genuinely gives meaning to this technical process is excluded." This passage resonates with Badiou's discussion of how the truth-event eventually leads to institutionalized knowledge. "A technization takes over all other methods belonging to natural science. It is not only that these methods are later "mechanized." To the essence of all method belongs the tendency to superficialize itself in accord with technization. Thus natural science undergoes a many-sided transformation and covering-over of its meaning."
Further on: "A theoretical task and achievement like that of a natural science (or any science of the world) can only be and remain meaningful in a true and original sense if the scientist has developed in himself the ability to inquire back into the original meaning of all his meaning-structures and methods, i.e. into the historical meaning of their primal establishment." What is this if not a perfect elaboration of Badiou's conception of fidelity to the truth-event, in which the subject is involved in a perpetual seeking and re-seeking of the origins of that event, of the void at the heart of the subject's situation.
In a final quote, Husserl defines the course of science since Galileo as a renewal of the truth-event presented by the Greeks: "We have become [functionaries of modern philosophical humanity] through a primal establishment which is at once a reestablishment of the Greek primal establishment [Nachstiftung]. In the latter lies the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such."
Anyway, all of this has made me wonder yet again why, as a poet, I have been compelled to spend so much time reading philosophy, far away from poetry. It dawned on me this morning that poets study scientists (or philosophers, as philosophy would fit under science in Badiou's conception, I believe) and vice versa because, in order to maintain fidelity to the truth-event in which one finds oneself, one needs from time to time to examine how individuals maintaining fidelities to other truth-events cope with the questions and problems that confront them. This made me think further, in turn, on the exact contours of the truth-event in whose flow is caught the subject-point that I grabbed in 1992. For now, it is an unanswerable question. I don't think that I am situated at the advent of any new truth-event, for the very reason that no void was discernible within the poetic situation in which I have found myself that might allow for a whole-scale rather than piecemeal overhauling of the elements that comprise that situation. In other words, I am not Surrey, Sidney, or Wyatt in mid-16th-century England, confronted with a youthful language demanding an entirely new poetry. Nor yet am I Wordsworth in the 1790's, confronted with a poetic language that has become overly literary, divorced from common speech. Nor am I Robert Frost, confronting a poetic language that demands further modifications to suit contemporary American speech. But broadly speaking, I would say that my subject-point is situated in the conic sections of these three progressively narrower truth-vectors that account for American poetry. Surely we could go even further past Surrey, Sidney and Wyatt - back to Ovid and Vergil, perhaps even further. But like the villages located thousands of miles away from Imperial Headquarters, as in Kafka's story "The Great Wall of China," my horizon doesn't extend that far to the remoter of origins - and maybe that's for the best.