Alex over at Splintering Bone’s to Ashes has an interesting post up on his developing antipathy towards Badiou. As Alex writes,
Whilst his ontological position has a certain minimalist elegance about it, everything he builds atop it is little more than a ridiculous hyper-structure of nonsense piled upon nonsense, an unsteady philosophical folly whose absurd (yet po-faced) architecture has only been exacerbated by (what I have read thus far of) Logics of Worlds. Whilst I admire Badiou’s style (an admittedly masterful mixture of crisply cumulative argument, mathematical abstraction, and poetic/polemic turn of phrase, indeed the style above all of the master, the father, the priest… in the best and worst senses) Increasingly I find his work unbearable… The whole notion of the relational body of a truth is ridiculously simplistic, and fails to resolve the chief spectre haunting Badiou (i.e.- Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason). His absolutism, exceptionalism, his rejection of management- well I think politics must always, in the end, return to that question, the issue of organisation, the issue of management… of relation- it is the political question. The question of relation sat uncomfortably over Being & Event – and it is with his relational supplement that Badiou is revealed as a pathological system-builder, but to what end- to what avail does he build his awkward tower? These fragments he shores against his ruins, a ziggurat of ruins, the ruin of a thought… (my thought, I think perhaps, rather than his own…).
I confess that after having read the first 200 pages of Logics of Worlds, I simply couldn’t read it any more. The more I read the greater my feelings of frustration and disappointment. Where I was looking for a realist theory of relations, the theory Badiou develops strikes me as inevitably wedded to the human such that we never genuinely reach the domain of objects or things. In other words, Badiou strikes me as being guilty of what Roy Bhaskar calls “the epistemic fallacy” which consists in conflating questions of epistemology with questions of ontology.
Throughout Logics of Worlds we find Badiou pre-occupied with questions of how to measure, identify, and evaluate objects. However, these are all epistemological terms that have little or nothing to do with the ontological status of an object as real. Badiou tells us that his account of the transcendental and objects makes no reference to the subject, but with the exception of a very brief discussion of galaxies, all of his examples of worlds refer to cultural phenomena.
Badiou claims that every object has an intensive degree that indexes its being-there or appearing in a world. To illustrate this thesis Badiou spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing Hubert Robert’s painting Bathing Pool (above). It is here, I think, that the difficulties of Badiou’s account of objects, from a realist standpoint, become clear. Badiou asserts, for example, that the columns to the left behind the foliage have a lower degree of intensity or being-there than those in the front. He makes similar observations about the women among the pillars compared to those bathing in the foreground and the statue to the right of the pool compared to the one on the left. These sorts of claims make me want to pull my hair out in frustration and ire. Such a thesis can only be epistemological and made from the standpoint of a viewing subject because the degree to which a being is or is not is an absolute binary such that it make not one bit of difference whether or not some appears intensely to us or not. From the realist standpoint something either is or is not, it is absolutely actual. I realize this sort of frustration or criticism sounds minor, but this type of conflation of reality with phenomenological appearing is pervasive throughout the text. One’s time is far better spent reading Zubiri’s On Essence where these sorts of conflations are carefully unpacked and where he develops a thoroughly realist account of essence that pertains to the things themselves, not whether or not the things themselves appear to us or whether we can know them.
At any rate, there’s much more to Alex’s post. Read the rest here.
Larval Subjects . 
June 10, 2009 at 5:57 pm
[…] LEVI comments on that post, supportively. […]
June 10, 2009 at 6:25 pm
http://www.increpare.com/2008/12/lacanian-fantasy-generator/
June 10, 2009 at 7:14 pm
[…] 2009 in Badiou, nature, politics I can not but agree with Alex’s sentiments, Levi’s comment as well as Reza’s and Graham’s bits of support. Even as I look over at my bookcase […]
June 10, 2009 at 9:18 pm
[…] the lot of yer! I’ll defend Badiou to the […]
June 10, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Excuse me if I misunderstand you, but Badiou treats the object as a category of appearance, i.e.–keeping with his guiding distinction–occurring on a logical and not strictly ontological register. With this in mind, he isn’t conflating epistemological and ontological questions, he’s simply not asking the ontological question. From my understanding, appearing deals with multiple-beings that have been rendered consistent (logic) rather than inconsistent multiplicity as such (ontology = mathematics). This is, of course, keeping within his definitions, but by doing so we find that a relationally-constituted object is first and foremost a concept of appearing/phenomena/existence and only secondarily (via his confusing discussion of feedback) has something to do with being and non-being. This seems to be where your stance differs?
This leaves aside your concerns about the viewing subject, which is a more salient sticking point for me. Are we supposed to assume that the transcendental operates automatically? How is a specific one specified, given that it’s also what differentiates worlds? How is its indexing structure determined? Granted, I’m only halfway through the book, but there’s a lot left unsaid on these points.
June 10, 2009 at 9:41 pm
[…] (To track the revolt against Badiou, these are the relevant posts: Alex, Reid, Dominic (and again), Levi, Mark, Ben, […]
June 10, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Dana,
You’re absolutely right concerning your points about Badiou and ontology. It’s the points in your second paragraph that I’m attacking.
June 10, 2009 at 10:24 pm
OK, here’s a question as to the absolute binary of something either being or not being: What about potentiality? In high school physics I learned that there were two kinds of energy, kinetic and potential. The kinetic energy happens when the ball is actually moving in reality, so it seems obviously like something of which you’d say “it is.” But the potential energy, it seems to me, could go either way. Is it something that is or isn’t? Does it exist or not? And can something be real if it doesn’t, properly speaking, exist? It seems like this might be a case of something that doesn’t, properly speaking, exist, but could nevertheless be real.
In that “Existentialism and Humanism” essay of Sartre’s I mentioned the other day, Sartre makes a big deal about how his existentialism does not recognize human potentiality as existing, and therefore people who screw up in life and never achieve anything can’t comfort themselves with the idea that they nevertheless have all kinds of unrealized potential that gives them some sort of intrinsic worth. So, at a very basic, emotional level, the question of whether being is really an absolute binary, and if so, how potentiality fits into it, is really a very, very important one.
June 10, 2009 at 10:28 pm
[…] toward Badiou as a possibility, and Larval Subjects (which I only now just read), finding that Badiou does not appreciate Levi’s mandatory (though inconsistent) application of epistemological and ontological […]
June 10, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Therese,
I’m actually struggling quite a bit with the category of potentiality at the moment and have not yet decided where I stand on the issue. The seeds I planted in my garden last weekend seem to have a certain potentiality in them that is activated under the right conditions (heat and moisture). Indeed, a few days later I now find that I have what looks to be a veritable army of small basil plants emerging as well as about six baby squash plants coming up (I fear I went overboard on the latter!). However, is this genuinely a matter of potentiality? Weren’t the seeds completely actual when I planted them? And isn’t the subsequent state of the seeds a transition to a new actuality as the seeds interact with other actualities (moisture, heat, the nutrients in the soil)? I don’t know. Perhaps this is a matter of potentiality, perhaps not. What bothers me about Badiou’s analysis in Logics of Worlds is the suggestion that somehow a pillar in the painting or the women among the pillars are less actual because they appear less intensely in the painting. To me this simply makes no sense. I might be able to agree with Kvond’s analysis of degrees of power among beings (follow the link below your post), but when we talk about these pillars they simply are. Even for Spinoza the issue is binary: something either is or it is not. It is only for us that they appear more or less intense. In other words, I think Badiou is illicitly entangling epistemological considerations pertaining to our relation to appearances or other beings with ontological considerations pertaining to the pillars themselves. The fact that a pillar appears less intensely to me has no bearing on the actuality of the pillar itself.
June 10, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Is it all susceptible to a Harmanesque De-Daseinefied guerilla reading?
One way to motivate Harman’s take on Being and Time is to see how much you can consistently retain in a universe with no people. And the resulting metaphysics of Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversals without Dasein is really interesting.
Could one do anything analogous with Badiou? If not, what is it about his position that prevents this, or renders the resulting view (unlike Graham’s Heidegger) uninteresting?
June 11, 2009 at 12:34 am
Still on the potentiality issue, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that the question of its existence is unanswerable enough that it actually requires a leap of faith, a real decision in the face of uncertainty, as to where one stands on it.
It’s kind of a future-being, a going-to-be, and as such it makes me think of something I read by Levinas ages ago (Time & the Other) about “futurity” being a kind of radical alterity. And there’s nothing like radical alterity to put one in the position of having to make a leap of faith.
June 11, 2009 at 1:09 am
I’m interested in how your take on modality fits into your more general Whiteheadian sympathies. Your intuitions contrast in an interesting way with the Heideggerian account.
For Heidegger, Zuhandenheit (readiness to hand) is relational and modal, an object’s readiness to hand refers to its possibilities of use.
On the other hand, Vorhandenheit (objective presence) is non-relational and non-modal. An object is a thing that retains its identity over time *to the extent that* one radically elides aspects of the relational and modal “world.”
If I understand right, your intuitions cut across this, where reality is relational (Zuhandenheit) but also non-modal (Vorhandenhit). The latter Humean intuition is what leads David Lewis to thinking that different possible worlds all exist. To be a world is to be actual (to the inhabitants in that world). So the only way to make sense of judgments about possibilia is to take them to be about actually existing entities in worlds that are not spatio-temporally accessible from ours.
June 11, 2009 at 1:21 am
Jon,
I’m still working on these issues. Based on Graham’s recommendations I’ve been reading Zubiri’s– one of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s students —On Essence, which is really a first rate work. Zubiri– and if I recall Graham develops this point as well at the end of Tool-Being –argues that Heidegger gets things backwards when he famously claims that “higher than actuality is possibility”. For Zubiri possibilities are always posterior to reality or actuality. It is because there is physicality (which Zubiri uses in a highly specific sense harking back to the Greek connotations of the term as phusis) that possibility can emerge. In my view reality is both relational and non-relational. That is, there is an identity or essence of objects that is not simply a function of the objects relation to other objects. On the other hand, objects are evoked or drawn forth in and through their relations to other objects. I don’t know that I would follow Lewis in his claims.
June 11, 2009 at 1:53 am
Yeah, Lewis is driven by a hyper Humeanism about the actual (so no actual essences), combined with the need to render true statements about the possible. For him necessary truths which one might have grounded in essence, are really just claims about what a set of “counterparts” at different possible worlds have in common. And whether something is a counterpart or not is supposed to be given in terms of similarity (it doesn’t work very well).
I really need to read Zubiri; I get the contrast with Badiou from the original post now (as well as why you Harmanizing Badiou is not an option).
June 11, 2009 at 2:03 am
Actually, I do think there are some points at which Graham and Badiou converge. Where Graham’s objects are withdrawn and enjoy a subterranian existence, Badiou’s being is pure multiplicity qua multiplicity withdrawn from all representation. Where Graham’s objects aren’t a function of their relations, Badiou’s elements in sets (the pure multiplicities) are completely independent of their relations. A major difference, I think, is that Badiou’s multiplicities are multiplicities without one, whereas Graham’s objects do have an essence or defining unity that intrinsically belongs to them. Moreover, Graham does not assert the identity of being and thought in the way declared by Badiou. Moreover, the suture of being to mathematics– Badiou argues ontology belongs to maths not philosophy –erases the singularity of objects, placing them under a representational criteria that is not that of objects themselves.
June 11, 2009 at 2:11 am
Oops, I didn’t define my technical vocabulary in the previous message.
Harmanize- V. To render a text more interesting and plausible by re-interpreting the author’s claims about mind and mind-world relations solely in terms of world and world-world relations. (ex. “Prior to throwing the book across the room in despair, Professor Bryant briefly considered Harmanizing Badiou’s *Logic of Worlds.*”)
June 11, 2009 at 11:05 am
It occurred to me this morning that if I say the existence of potentiality is an object of faith (e.g. taking a stance in the absence of certainty), we’re back at the being/non-being binary – it still either exists or doesn’t exist, it’s just that I don’t know which. And that, of course was exactly your point, that it’s a mistake to confuse epistemic difficulty with the question of being.
On the other hand, however, perhaps there are things that are uncertain enough that we can’t even presume that “out there beyond the sphere of our knowledge” they either are/aren’t and that they fit into the binary, or that the law of the excluded middle holds. So just because the question of the existence of potentiality goes beyond what I could know doesn’t necessarily mean that the true answer couldn’t be not just “it exists” or “it doesn’t exist”, but also could be “it both exists and doesn’t exist” or “it neither exists nor doesn’t exist.”
So potentiality or possible worlds could still be outside the binary terms.
But I don’t think I really get the idea of degrees of being, even after reading kvond’s posts on it. Maybe it works if you mix in temporality somehow (past-being, present-being, future-being, atemporal being)? Physical being versus ideational being (e.g., a unicorn doesn’t exist, but the idea of it might)? Imaginary numbers in mathematics, versus “real” numbers?
The Zubiri essay sounds really interesting – I’ll have to try to track it down …
June 11, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I know nothing about Badiou, so excuse my ignorance, but I was struck by this:
“From the realist standpoint something either is or is not, it is absolutely actual. I realize this sort of frustration or criticism sounds minor, but this type of conflation of reality with phenomenological appearing is pervasive throughout the text.”
From the Heideggerian perspective, and for good reason, “appearing” can be used to do ontology because in order for there to be an “appearance” of something *as* something else, there needs to be the possibility for the appearance to show itself *as* an appearance i.e. to be a primordial phenomenon. For Heidegger then, provided you don’t assume a transcendental reality “behind” the world, phenomenology can be used to do ontology.
p.s. Dr Cogburn, you should add “Harmanize” to the philosophical lexicon, that’s a good one!
June 11, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Orestes,
Heidegger is fairly clear that his work is not ontology but rather preparatory of ontology. The issue I have with Heidegger’s approach to ontology is that it requires the inclusion of humans in all relations to appearances. What we get is thus “being qua human” or “being qua Dasein” rather than “being qua being”. From a strictly ontological standpoint, in my view, whether or not something appears for humans or Dasein is irrelevant to whether something is. I’ve been toying with the idea of referring to this as the “Principle of Inhumanity”: That is, the thesis that humans are only one being among others, no more or less privileged than any other entity, whether from a methodological perspective (i.e., a necessary point of beginning) or from an ontological perspective.
June 11, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I submitted the following revised version to the Philosophical Lexicon:
harmanize- v. To render a text consistent with realism by re-interpreting the author’s claims about mind and mind-world relations solely in terms of world and world-world relations. “Prior to throwing the book across the room in despair, Professor Bryant briefly considered harmanizing Badiou’s *Logic of Worlds.*”
I’m not too optimistic though; since they already have “harmanica” (for Gilbert Harman?) they might think it confuses the issue.
“Harmanize” is much is more deserving, both because the pun is better (i.e. harmonizing with realism) and because what he does with Being and Time is an important interpretive tactic in its own right. Saying things in a tongue in cheek way (playing the “harmanica”) is neither a very good pun (if you really played a harmonica, or any musical instrument for that matter, with your tongue in your cheek maybe it would work) nor philosophically significant.
June 11, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Levi,
I don’t know, I would think he was just being humble when saying his work was “preparatory.” When he is defining phenomenology in the introduction to BT, he says very clearly in the conclusion that “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.”
As for your problem with Heidegger and appearances, I think a solution to this worry is to realize that within Heidegger’s notion of being as disclosure to human observers there is already an understanding of “being qua being.” In a way, Heidegger never really changed his analytic methodology from the analytic of Kant. He was putting a limit on our ontology, but only insofar as we realize that everything we “know” about being, truth, realism, etc comes from our interaction with a present world.
Indeed, Heidegger says in BT that we “run up against” a world that is there, present, in the Greek sense. I mean, Heidegger is not scholastic enough so as to actually say that if humans were plucked form the earth, the physical world would cease to exist. He tips his hat to realism several times in BT:
“Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed” (BT 228)
and also,
“Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand, “is there” anything ready-to-hand.” (BT 101)
He just thinks such claims are obvious, and not really in need of much argumentation. He is much more fascinated by the fact that we are able to conceptualize about such matters to begin with. That is interesting! Of course the world exists for Heidegger. This is built into our very language; the “is-structure.” “Today is windy.” “The cat is on the mat.”
So, really, Heidegger never really says that “being qua being” is in some way idealistically linked to the ontic existence of humans. He gets carried away in making his point sometimes, but he never loses sight of the absurdity of classically idealist positions. I mean, afterall, he is after the destruction of western metaphysics, something he has studied very closely, so I have to think that he realizes what he is saying. It is hard to read irony and sarcasm into the German, but it is there.
June 11, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Orestes,
I suppose that for me the issue is that in pitching the issue in terms of how entities are disclosed to us he still irrevocably sutures all beings to the human. I don’t disagree that Heidegger is doing an interesting regional ontology of the relationship of humans to the world, but still hold that he doesn’t reach the place of ontology proper by posing the question of being in terms of the analysis of Dasein. As for whether or not Heidegger is being humble in describing his work as preparatory for ontology I think this sort of maneuver renders all discussion impossible as now we’re suddenly attributing whatever motives we might like to Heidegger rather than attending to what he actually says in the letter of his text.
June 11, 2009 at 8:33 pm
[…] or not. From the realist standpoint something either is or is not, it is absolutely actual. (”On Cleaning One’s Hands” – Levi […]
June 14, 2009 at 8:53 pm
[…] clinical, abstract, sterile, pristine. Starting with a post by Alex Williams here, that led to a support, support, support, meta-analysis of the discussion, rejection of initial post, mitigating […]
June 16, 2009 at 6:38 pm
[…] in much of a position to comment on Badiou in particluar (see the posts at Splintering Bone Ashes, Larval Subjects and Object-Oriented Philosophy for a few of the criticisms), but I was engrossed when the […]
September 3, 2009 at 11:26 am
Isn’t Heidegger’s idea of the ‘style’ of a world as that which determines what and how anything shows up in that world the equivalent of Badiou’s recent ‘transcendental’?
If so (or indeed if not) what does Badiou’s mathematisation add theoretically and what is its additional explanatory or enabling power?