Nature, Politics, Revolution

Roger Brown, 'Talk Show Addicts (1993)

Events are named after the prominent objects situated in them, and thus both in language and in thought the event sinks behind the object, and becomes the mere play of its relations. The theory of space is then converted into a theory of the relations of objects instead of a theory of events... If you admit the relativity of space, you must also admit that points are complex entities, logical constructs involving other entities and their relations.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

Immanence is, upon its surface, just a word which indicates that amongst the present relationships we observe, we perceive them as interlocking -- that reality is ‘inner space.’ Another way of saying this would be to say that we do not believe there to exist a deepest space. Thus when we make a claim of ‘pure’ immanence, we assert that there are no ‘extra’ layers of being above or beyond the situation, and that nothing spontaneously intervenes from another order of time. Immanence implies something special about the initial conditions of any space it is applied to: namely, that they open onto multiplicity, and fold in upon themselves without reference to an exterior. That there is no ‘outside’ of Being: this is pure immanence.

Nothing encapsulates an anti-immanent perspective more closely than the delicate epistemological framework inaugurated by Plato (but exemplified best, perhaps, by the cogito) which asserts that knowing and experiencing are but modalities of a fundamental distinction. Life is essentially separate: both within and without, split between thinking and acting.

In fact, a closer look reveals a complex topology of theoretical spaces. We find sense separated from truth, yet mysteriously contained within it. We ask: if reality is just what is contained in our modes of experience, how can we account for the existence of undistinguished situations (out of which our 'distinctive containers' evolved)? The answer is -- we cannot! Because of the ‘implicit transcedence’ in a distinctive geometry of experience, we literally cannot speak them -- because we “aren’t them."

Is it really so clear and distinct that such separated spaces would not communicate? Whatever the case may be, in every theory advancing a transcendent distinction as primary, there emerges the necessity for an enduring interface produced by a geometric projection between the distinguished spaces. In the ontology of Alain Badiou, ‘fidelity’ names the connective operation between elements of an enumerated network of forces. In the clarity of this fidelity, the distinctions between subject and event, process and underlying ‘reality’ become critically blurred and radically ambiguous. The void can no longer be absolutely distinguished from the situation. That radical reflection which discerns the indiscernible becomes autonomous by this same maneuver -- in his somewhat classical conception, the subject-space is divided between art, science, politics and love. But we should not judge from this that these spaces are indeed so indubitably separated (in reality or in Badiou’s ontology,) nor should we conclude from his idiosyncratic treatment of the ontological question that his project is without precedent.

For example, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “Love is an index of the reactionary or revolutionary investments of the libido in the socius,” they are indicating a requirement not only for political thought, but for creative activity in general: when we participate in sociality, if we do not do ‘it’ with love, the engagement becomes reactive, anachronistic, even “passive-aggressive.” Badiou's sort of fidelity has a similar requirement: you belong to the event only when you have made it what it is--and by this process, we become what we are. You either enter with love in your heart and hands open in passivity -- or you do not really enter at all, or only to critically misjudge the nature of your relationship to the event. For without love there is no revolutionary necessity.

Love is most important when it is immediately political, when it is immediately ethical. When love is so intense that it resonates, when it is totally without jealousy, this is when love unfolds its mysterious potential: its capacity to inspire, to dominate, to intensify a flow of desire. Love is reality: it’s affect is most closely claimed by the word ‘infusion.’ An unasked-for love is indiscernible, if only in its inclusivity -- which is why love is an ethical intercourse, or else a tragic ignorance: “If you do works of faith and you have not love, you do not know me.” I think it has been forgotten that Nietzsche descries not only pity, but also philanthropy, for within he could smell the vulgar desire to be praised. There is a kind of giving which is a selfishness posited for a love of mankind, and there is a kind of “love” founded upon God looking upon us and thinking of us as blessed. But love without jealousy is love without guilt, and a self-praising lifestyle is unfit for the faithful. Love is first giving in, not giving out.

We say love is perhaps the revolutionary impulse, for it is that emotion which first reminds us, with piercing clarity, of our real condition. Suffering is not guilt; pain relates to situations which are not eternal, to arrangements which evolve and change by their nature. To love means we could not stand the shame of another’s degradation; to love is to know the shame of the situation and to not accept it. Hope is only for a truth which is wagered upon, but love engages our responsibility to create new spaces for living-togehter. Thus to wager on an event is to become an intense potential for difference. We wager our singularities, and we have faith; only then can we create a new kind of situation. Faith has to be propelled; it doesn’t exist in rest. Ontology is the science of rest, the psychology of sleep: it provokes the deepest revelations, but not the deepest joy. That there is still a non-ontological space for thought today we perhaps owe to the endurance of joy. Our experience of political reality is intimately shaped by an careful community ‘surgery’ which conditions potential expressions of value. In practice, only a delicate subdivision accomplishes the total vision of faith, or ontology. A numerical theory of the event aims at continuity through becoming, where a genetic theory of society aims at becoming through intensity. The political is the abstract: the question of politics is that of clarity, and the truly political desire is a progression: from the will to transparency, to the will to distinction, and finally, the will to loyalty -- or the will to power.

Thus the rise in vivid experience of the Good and the Bad depends on the intuition of exact forms of limitation. Among such forms Number has a chief place.
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (107)

Time Warp

A little time warp this time. This extract is from the first 'series' of scattered early writings, almost two years ago now. I hate looking at old stuff but in practice it can end up teaching you a lot. So here it is:

A personal relationship with the universe is accomplished in the separation which constitutes daily existence. The portion of the universe which is given meaning by my observation and interaction is absolutely separated from the perspective and comprehension of the other. What we speak of is not an absolute reality from which we are separated; our individual perspectives, our relationships--interactions, connections--with external reality constitute appear to constitute a totality. this totality is the self, which we believe to be a unity, that is, to be singular. Common sense suggests that there is only one you. A personal relationship with the universe is the existence of a conscious mind: they are not isolated from one another, but in fact are defined by one another. However, a self-aware creature's reality is unique, singular unto itself, isolated by an infinite abyss between the realities of other conscious minds, yet the conscious mind is not limited by this separation: a personal relationship with the universe is a linking of finite consciousness with infinity, the absolute, with Being.

Strong but loose. For clarity's sake, I'll try to identify two of the major theoretical mistakes I made here. It's strange indeed to see the resurfacing of themes and examples. Also the way I'd emphasize different aspects of the relation to the other now, like the machinic interfaces and images which mediate the relation between singular beings. I'm now starting to think that the issue of class and money comes into the whole question of ontology much more strongly when you consider the political and sexual connection between systems of knowledge and systems of power. For example, we can't just say: absolute being is one thing, and processes (natural or human) are different: they have different rhythms, cycles, and so forth. This is because their cycles are all in some sense interdependent even though always seemingly only locally informed--this primal 'reconnection' I assumed to be absolute being, but it seems in the light of a more psychoanalytically inclined mindset to be pure narcissism, the desire to assume primary importance in a parasitic modality.

This leads us to the second theoretical mistake: question of ethics remains completely unraised in this text--even as the relation to the other is ceaselessly invoked. It goes implicit, unmediated but ultimately unstated. Perhaps, after all, we cannot state an ethics--but nonetheless, a certain degree of meta-ethics is always required in any project. I would now identify a link within conscious self-reflection to the idea of a bad infinity, a good infinity being represented more clearly in discourse, reason, cooperation, co-evolution. A 'pure' meta-ethic would run something like: abuse and addiction are negative forms of infinity; restoration and ethical practice are positive forms of infinity.

This question of being always seems to elude, in one way or another, the traumatic realization that nature's rhythms are not always sensitive to ours, and likewise that ours are not sensitive to nature's; but this is no will of a capricious deity, no contradiction-- but a fractalized interdependent network of impressions and movements, that is, there's nothing but different events. And isn't the ultimate mystery the locus of our own self-difference? The key to this crisis is the relation to the other, and is identified fairly clearly in the text, but still--without any sort of mediation, or modulation of this 'personal' relation to the universe.

How is such a relation, after all, not supposed to totalize us, to reduce us to a naked singularity, to quantize us and see us as interchangeable and replacable? It's only in the rhythm and pulse of the social realm that we are irreplacable--but at the same time, through economy made completely replacable, through politics completely displaced... Society plays a much more complex role in terms of transcendence and sense than can be accounted for merely in the idea of the infinte, or the relation to the other as such... This, then, would mean we need a sort of phenomenology of social forces, or put another way: a meta-psychology of ethics.

Anaximander and the Infinite

'The principle and beginning ... of beings is the limitless ... where beings have their beginning, therein also have their end according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time.

[The limitless is] immortal [...] and imperishable.'

ἀρχὴ ... τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον ... ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι͵ καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.

Ἀθάνατον [...] καὶ ἀνώλεθρον.

[Fragments of Anaximander]


The idea of the infinite is, perhaps, the oldest philosophical concept in the Western tradition, dating back to the earliest fragment of Anaximander. In the Physics, Aristotle credits Anaximander as the first to name the infinite as the material cause of all things and cites him as asserting that “the first element of things was the Infinite.” What is absolutely spine-tingling about this ascription of generative power to the idea of infinity is the deduction following it: since the other ‘elements’ oppose and balance one another, none of them can equal or surpass the infinite. Thus infinity is both the material cause of all things as well as their ultimate be-ing, since all the other elements which exist are finite, deriving their existence from infinity. And, since it is always within the ‘domain’ (as it were) of the infinite that “things take their rise” and “pass away once more, as is ordained,” these finite creatures, derivative of the infinite but separated from it by their antagonism for one another, must “make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time.”

From the very beginning of what we think of as philosophy, the infinite has been tied not only to that which floods and exceeds the bounds of all creation, both temporally and materially, but to a fundamental conception of justice and ethical principle. In the idea of the infinite the ethical relation is already asserted. The infinite is not just an illustration of the ethical relation, or the other way around; nor is it a mere similarity in ontological or metaphysical structure which is being played upon; the very transcendence embodied and overflowed in the idea of infinity already ordains respect, as from some ontological height so awesome as so to metaphysically sublime, demands that justice be "paid" or en-acted, not in some afterlife, but "according to necessity," within time itself. That is, justice is not some transcendent figure by which a cosmic judgment is placed; justice must be rendered by “reparation and satisfaction” towards one another within time, “according to the appointed time.” There is no truth without justice and there is no justice without the ethical relation. That is to say that love demands justice, there can be no conception of true justice without invoking an infinite love--that is, there is a radical pre-ontological priority of the relationship to the human face which is the origin of social justice.

The infinite is the meaning of an unencompassable height, radically transcending us, calling our freedom into question by its monstrous presence. This calling into question by that which is limitless, by that which is beyond-being, imperishable and immortal-- is already ethics, for justice is demanded by love, the relation to the other is already transfigured by an ethical relation, by the infinity which the coming of the other into my realm actualizes. The idea of infinity is a sun truly too bright for philosophy to bear without squinting at the truth. Nietzsche's reproach of the philosophers, that they approach it all too directly, is an appreciation of the enigma and wonder of infinity, as well as its (inevitable, we're human, right?) erotic dimension, as Nietzsche puts it: "Truth is like a woman." In other words, philosophers confound themselves with the paradoxes of infinty, whereas there is a completely rational integration with a properly conceived religious perspective. This "trick" is simply an appreciation of the out-of-bounds surplus which the idea of infinity embodies: transcendence, right? In other words, we are situated asymetrically relative to an Otherness which precedes and supercedes us ontologically and metaphysically; the only possible relation is one of submission, i.e., ethics, being a host, welcoming the other, etc. In sociality we are rewarded amply for such a "subjection" to the beyond. We can see the infinite in language. In short, there is a completely valid perspective which integrates (post)-religion and philosophy while retaining political and moral integrity: in other words, a proper conception of the infinite and of the other, that we are always situated in relation to an-other, and that this being another-to-myself constitutes awareness itself, and moreover, is already an ethical relation.

We are close to Hegel when tells us there could be religion without philosophy, but no philosophy without religion; the idea of infinity is not just the pure formal representation of 'endlessness,' but is a thought which overflows itself, already springs into action as of its own accord Even the idea of infinity radically phenomenologically exceeds ourselves: and isn't this Descartes discovery, where he discovers himself and the absolute simultaneously, as it were? But the temporality is actually reversed, for only once the absolutely infinite is glimpsed, must he squint and dilute the purity of the discovery by conceptualizing perfection or purity itself, purged of the violence of the sacred; he discovered the pinpoint self, the Cartesian subject.

Badiou rediscovers the infinite multiplicity at the core of being one-self, and concludes that the One is not (i.e., God is dead); in ontology, the radical encounter with the idea of the infinite is completely purged of the violence of the sacred. However, to reinstitute it, we don't need recourse to religious faith per se; we need to embard upon a re-understanding of religion, as (after Marx, of course) Badiou himself knows, having written a book about St Paul, not to mention he sometimes calls his project a "laicization" of the infinte, which implies an atheist re-interpretation of religious values. Indeed, he has been preceded on this point by Emmanuel Levinas, who also speaks of a "desacralization" of the world, so that ethics could truly take place (i.e., without the totalitarian structures which currently mediate our relation to the other.)

A proper reunderstanding of religion would recognize its function politically and psychologically. Such a revaluation would necessarily involve a reorganization of almost all the academic discourses, a radical re-territorialization of arbitrarily bifurcated and sutured disciplines (ways-of-speaking and ways-of-being.) Honestly, it is about time for another great revolution in even the major categories of human understanding and the way we organize reality. The time is ripe for a concise answer to our epochs' "life persistent questions," some kind of post-religious ethical value-system/life-style which happens to incorporate a convincing rational explanation for our presence and meaning in the universe.

I wonder....