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The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

July 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the UniverseThe Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this amazing book, Roger Penrose looks for a very fundamental issue.

He is looking for a single metric to describe everything.

This is not a unit of reality, however, although this is how he poses the issue.

The problem with selecting a metric, as he shows us over and over, lies in how different metrics arise from localizations on various manifolds. As these metrics are extended beyond the localization, the very structure of these metrics will threaten to buckle. In many instances, the metrics (and their attendant relationships) will no longer be applicable. What this means, in the Kantian (and Badiouian sense) is that these relationships’s applicability will become “undecidable”. In some extreme cases, the relationships may even break down. For instance, black holes are a problem because the expressed relationships that emerge from physics experiments prove to be untenable in black holes (and the big bang) as these relationships decohere and infinities and zeros pop out everywhere.

This search for a metric leads Penrose to reject string theory as a viable relationship form. Each dimension is an extension of the 3 + 1 dimensions of space and time. For instance, gravity is a dimension, weak force is a dimension. Each dimension is an independent mathematical vector of a different “inertial” influence. Additionally, the mathematics of string theory, as well as other theories, proves to be too illusionary. As with post-structural critiques of modernism, Penrose points out that the consistency of string theory relies on theoretical supplements/signs that are attached onto the positions of various types in order to maintain coherency. For instance, superpartners, which have no physical correlative. In other words, the mathematical proliferation of dimensions as well as its immanent affects proves to be unweldly to Penrose because the coherence of the relationships are maintained by theoretical enforcement rather than any direct correlation of math and physical experimentation.

If Penrose was familiar with Badiou, Kant and Derrida, he would be able to recognize that the undecideability of supersymmetry and string theory result from these theoretical supplements. The supplements provide the missing pieces to cohere the theory, so physical experiments prove to be incomplete in their testing. As Penrose points out, string theorists in failing to find superpartners can always push the calibration of their theory to include these partners, just at higher energy levels, which can always lie beyond the ability of technology to generate.

In this sense, it seems to me that string theory and supersymmetry are antinomies of the Kantian variety. Penrose falls fault to this when he theorizes that Quantum Field Theory can be modified (rather than the Einstein’s general relativity) by changing the cut off metric. This is in line with all his discussions to “renormalize” the math so as to remove the variance accumulated by extending localized relations from beyond the area of origin on the manifold. We can always enforce a consistency of a given domain in two ways.

1. To provide a “superpartner” to supplement the terms, to keep phenomenon visible to one another within the domain, as a motion of immanence, as Derrida suggests.

Or.

2. To encapsulate a domain by limiting its identity to its other. From there, we can radically reduce the other to zero, thereby hiding the limitations of a domain, as with Moffe & Laulau with their Hegemony or as with Badiou with a basic atomic “cut” to center the domain as with Being and Event II.

Both of these strategies amount to the same kind of forced coherency by mapping a domain rigidly.

Penrose does offer his own favorite solution; his Twistor theory, which removes the need for extra dimensions beyond 3 + 1. Additionally, he considers this theory by collapsing all the different vector differences held cosmically in string theory into immanent relations that are founded on the very “knots” of space, so that the pre-space twistors contain the information that wider “vibrations” are meant to express. Both theories are incompatible in this regard because of their huge difference in scale.

And while Penrose admits that twistor theory adds nothing physically; that it’s just another way of viewing a situation mathematically, he also realizes the need for us to see things differently than we have.

It is this adherence to a particular view that causes all the problems in the first place. If you look at how these different views are constructed, you’ll see the mathematicians switch from one domain to another through various class equivalences whenever it suits them. When they need to express vectors they will jump to a manifold model, or a more generic (abstract) deformation of an algebra. In other words, we lack enough views. So we supplement the one we have in an attempt to normalize them.

Curiousier still is Penrose’s tiny discussion of consciousness in which he attempts to “renormalize” consciousness in terms of objective reduction. He theorizes that the waveform reduction that collapses due to quantum gravity may be at the seat of consciousness’s ability to complexly surject different sensory views into coherency. This suggestion is of the same kind as his forced synthesis of twistor theory. The satisfaction of trying to find a single metric, a single complex knot of relations that cannot be unraveled but contains all the “moves” is like a physicist trapped on a chess board recognizing the orthogonal formation of board, or as in Futurama the Professor discovering the smallest unit that constitutes the universe is the pixel.

In a real way, Penrose seeks to calibrate physics to the mathematical domain. He doesn’t want beautiful math that doesn’t apply, that is in excess of physics. This is why he creates that chart twice, in which the mathematical is the Truth of which the entirety of the physical is mapped; although mentality is generated from the physical and mathematical/Truth is generated from that.

The Platonic ideologue he insists on lies on the equivalence of function, on the purity of the sameness of process from point to point of the same type. Never-mind that the subatomic particles we find today are largely generated from artificial means. Penrose would assume as sameness of process that forces a universalization, but that is the way metaphysics and science both work, to equate different phenomenon as being identical based on narrow definitions of rational equivalence. This may work in some areas, but as we see, all relations are born locally, within a limited scope. Their extension cosmically creates the basis for which we start to see a degradation of relation qua variance (pollution, or various forces of form-fitting). After all, we can have no irrationality without first being able to posit a rational sheet of complete consistency.

Nonetheless, although this is a lengthy book it is still beautifully written. I wonder who Penrose’s audience is, for he approaches much mathematical complexity in such a short time, talking about basic principles like polynomials and trigonometry before jumping into Lagrangian manifolds and so on. Still, if you hunger for complexity and abstraction, here it is. Much of his explanations of very complex concepts are very clear, although at times we could use more handholding. His pictures are also very interesting and complement his point nicely.

Well worth the effort to read.

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Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Deleuze: The Clamor of BeingDeleuze: The Clamor of Being by Alain Badiou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book three times. As long as I’ve been reading post-structuralism, I have pursued an understanding of Deleuze’s work. But only on this last round have I really begun to grasp Badiou’s own work.

Badiou here, presents a Deleuze that is in some respects barely recognizable. Nonetheless, he is able to pull through Deleuze’s rhetorical structure in order to present how he and Deleuze differ and are the same. The obvious difference is their approaches. Badiou takes formalism to be standing on its own, that all is reducable to formalism. Deleuze would understand that content and form are the same; that a given content formulates form but that formulation is only one aspect of the virtuality of that content (this reading is available from Difference and Repetition). This is one way to specify their difference but we can talk about it geometrically.

Said another way this difference is in terms of boundaries. For example, Badiou understands events as being incompossible in terms of time. For Deleuze however, each event also is an absolute reference (a static segment) but the boundaries of that event coexist through their incompossibility. Badiou would negate all the relations that do not appear within the scope of a given event. Badiou would seal that event as an infinite extension that forms a transcendental. So for Badiou, a world qua transcendental is sealed as a complete and consistent entity. While Deleuze has this structure available as well, as seen through incompossibility, his “worlds” are not sealed. His worlds qua folds are in fact, intermixing with each, influencing one another. Given where you are locally, certain relations within the virtual become available, and you experience them in their actuality.

In this sense, what Badiou calls “logic” would be concepts that are always present for Deleuze, although they may be inexpressed. This reading is available for Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as Kant understood that concepts are only guidelines. The difference is that Kant also took his concepts seriously and tried to ground these ideas in terms of a non-idea, the thing-in-itself. He nailed the transcendental conception down and in this manner both Deleuze and Badiou would avoid Kantian noumenal/phenomenal split because it suggests a singular logic rather than a multiplicity/multitude. A thing-in-itself traps Kant within one world.

So while both Deleuze and Badiou are interested in multiple/mutiplicity the difference in their world/folds lies in how open or closed they believe those relations to be. For Badiou there is less interaction within these worlds than Deleuze. Deleuze would think the substance-relations at their contingency, in a sense, sacrificing consistency for a recognition of the virtual completeness. This is also why Badiou’s book Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II begins to recognize the need for a Deleuzeian “leakiness” between worlds, although for Badiou, the transcendental remains the limit of a worldly domain, even though he recognizes the (in)existence of relations from world to world. So from the view of a given transcendental, a certain relation may not be available.

In this sense, Badiou’s Logic presents many tiny ones, all of which share the same structure of the One. Badiou claims that the One does not exist. And certainly not as a logic nor as an ontological content — though Badiou would insist that each one amounts to the same One in terms of an empty formalism, which is why he can talk about each world’s structure by invoking any given world.

I used to be confused as to why Badiou saw Deleuze as being a philosopher who primarily invokes the univocity of the One, when that seemed to somewhat antithetical to Deleuze’s multiplicities. I see the answer now though, for Deleuze through elan vital talks about a second order of conception. By understanding Deleuzian formalism as being a kind of monad, a form that carries with it seeds of content, Badiou would read Deleuze as necessarily needing a One in order to meld a common domain. In terms of transcendental logics, it is impossible to have phenomenon within a given interaction without there being a whole, a common domain that specifies the absolute infinite totality. Because Deleuze would speak from the interstice between domain logics, Badiou assumes that Deleuze necessarily invokes a univocal One.

I am not certain how Deleuze would respond to this, but let me try. The passages that Badiou references do suggest that Deleuze may agree, although I think that Deleuze would understand the formalism of conception within the virtual as being a derivable non-world that is material process on its own, a vitality that continued chaotic mix of originary essences that contain the seeds of their own localized differentiation. Concepts here are tactical, differenciations (events) always derived from the particularity of the atoms involved.

I do not think that Deleuze would agree to an infinite extension of conception that Badiou would insist on in order to create a transcendental completeness qua world. I do believe that the insistence of a Deleuzian One is possible but gives up too much. Badiou would seek to be rid of Kantian noumenal nonsense, as an academic “left over” of Kant’s conception, when Badiou himself would posit a many worlds of “complete” consistency, a very heavy conception of infinite extension of each brand of logic. For Deleuze this is probably too much; infinite extension is not necessary when we only need to deal with tactical, localized differenciations that arise on their own. This is of course, where territorializing machines and abstract assemblages interact, in the space of many plateaus that would constantly overcode. In these there is no need of One because there is no need to guarantee that machinic assemblages are compatible with each other or that any given assemblage can interact with every other one, because they are not, and they do not need to.

In this sense, Deleuze’s philosophy is on a second order of conception, about the differences and processes inherent within concepts themselves as they self generate. Badiou seems to recognize this when he understands that for Deleuze there is no chance of chance — that Deleuzian concepts like the fold only operate as a way of interiorizing the exterior; the becoming of concepts through their own vitalism. Yet Badiou would want to extend this as another kind of ontology. This is also where I find Deleuze and Badiou differ at their very root; in terms how central they see formalism.

For Badiou class equivalence would mean ontological equivalence. After all, Badiou as a formalist understands content as only being wholly derived from form. For Deleuze, class equivalence is too controlling. He would reject formalist equivalence as he would reject Kant’s transcendental structure as a chimera. Any kind of formalism only captures one kind of plateau/consistency in logic. After all, the entire book Anti-Oedipus is an attempt to get away from the control of metaphysical consistency in psychoanalysis and social structure/planning. Thus, Badiou’s move to equate one rhetorical form with another is a falsity that Badiou himself imposes but reads onto Deleuze. As Badiou later on notes, the eternal return is not a return of the same, it cannot be. But what is it a return of?

Badiou accepts that each Event cannot be the same Event even if it meta-functionally works in a similar fashion as the last. And so it is with eternal returns; that each return is a return of pure difference. Thus, for Deleuze, such a “return” may not mean entirely different worlds, it does mean different slices (folds) that can interact but also may be varying degrees of incompossible with each other in terms of immanence, even as some interact, colliding and recoding one another. In a way, Badiou approaches Deleuzian understanding as he starts to shed the strict boundaries of his transcendental qua worlds and allow them to interact in the non-space inbetween plateaus.

Over all this book is still a good book. Badiou goes very far in grasping and concisely stating Deleuze’s words and thoughts. Badiou seeks to refract on Deleuze the way Deleuze through free and indirect speech refracted on other thinkers. Though I think in this reading there is still too much Badiou, that the torsion of a barely recognizable Deleuze is due mostly to Badiou’s appropriation of Deleuzean concepts but attempting to guide and understand Deleuze in terms of a Badiouian formalism.

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Critique of Pure Reason

May 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Critique of Pure ReasonCritique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much has been written about Kant. Yes, he’s hard. He’s rammbly. He’s overbearing. But this is due in part to the fact that written in 1781, Kant did not have anyone to talk with. He lacked the ability to find other minds and interface. So in those ten years of silence he talked to himself. And he’s a bit disorganized.

So lets not quibble with the details. Instead let me cut to the heart of what he is saying, in a way that goes beyond any reading of him that I’ve come across yet.

The one aesthetic Kant is after, that allows him to hit a home run, is simply this: All concepts are regulatory.

What Kant is after is to understand the limits of what our regulatory reason can do. This can’t be a function to decide truth. This can’t be a function to decide reality. This isn’t an effort at wisdom. We can use reason to figure out the contours of contingency, of what is given to us. But we cannot use it alone to do anything.

Kant attempts to show us the value of reason in melding together different functions (be it imaginary or understanding or reason) and in this way seeks to highlight the vehicle by which we can come to grips with phenomenon. So weaknesses?

Yes, Alan Badiou is partially correct: Kant’s system requires that he created a negated structure, the noumenal upon which to hang his phenomenon. But Badiou is also partially incorrect. Kant was the first to recognize, through the figure of the transcendental, the necessity of having an apparatus of measurement upon which to solidify a phenomenal field. That is to say, phenomenon cannot interface at a consistent level unless there was a larger field to unify them as equivalent. Hence, this transcendental. Kant laid out the form for us, to quantize, to organize whatever we apperceptive. Historically, this is how Heidigger is able to note that Kant is Modernism Part II. Descartes introduces the need the for a transcendental field (in the form of the mental realm) but Kant completes his thought. Hegel is the application for this field to surject unto Absolute Knowledge.

So we miss the point when we quibble with his mathematics or his bad physics, or how he didn’t understand quantum mechanics. None of his examples matter in their detail. What matters is the principle behind this critique, one which reveals that concepts are regulatory.

And while it’s true, as Kristeva points out, Kant did not “discover” negation (leave this to Hegel as a way for him to bind according to the dialectical-synthesis process) Kant does reach negativity. Negativity is necessary as the limits for a given concept. And if you look at towards the end of this masterful work, and ignore his annoying repetition, you come to understand the antinomies are but examples of the limits of conceptualization itself.

Yes, Dedekind’s cut of real numbers or Badiou’s theory of points belie the same “cut” as Kant’s antinomies. By injecting reason in at various arbitrary positions, we can cut a dichotomy into a mass to differentiate positions. Such positions then become expressive of the cut, which we use as an absolute reference. This reference allows us to orient ourselves. So yes, when only we do not “extend reason beyond the bounds of experience” can we avoid these antinomies, Kant highlights these antinomies as way of showing how reason provides the extension of any given cut, which are always contingent by arbitrary parameters, be they a sensuous apperception or some inherited folly of the imagination. This section following The Ideal of Pure Reason all the way to the end of the work, gives us the apex of Kant’s reach. He was articulated much, but never brought it back around to exploding the limits of concepts themselves. He could only fumble and say, well, they are regulatory.

Not only are they regulatory but they are necessary for the organization, the quantization into phenomenon, inasmuch as the sensuous, as he calls it, is necessary for logic to take a stance. We need contingency to make a mark somewhere, otherwise we get nothing but pure logical presentation without any place for differentiation into a real context. It is this dual refractory nature that presents us with agential cuts to determine the nature of what is real, a mixture of contingent sensuousness and transcendental formalism. This mixture however, isn’t stable, it belies on the context of previous cuts, usually derived from our human need to have agency in limited domains.

This is the start of post-modern fragmentation of knowledge, as each domain acquires its own organizing cut.

But this is also well beyond the context of where Kant was going.

So if you keep in mind the “regulatory” nature of conceptualization, you’ll come to a fruitation that is far more radical than any reading of Kant that I’ve ever come across. I think you’ll find as well, that this radical negativity, necessary to cut concepts out of the larger folds, is why Deleuze found himself returning to Kant towards the end of his career. In this way Kant is still more radical than most anyone gives him credit for… and in this sense, his admiration for David Hume speaks volumes about where he’s going with this critique. In fact, he exceeds Hume in this way, by abstracting Hume’s explanation of human behavior as conventional habit into the modality of regulatory concepts. Kant finds the limit of reason but in doing so he is able to demonstrate how reason is utilized to supplement understanding beyond the bounds of experience. His four antinomies are but possibilities for unfounded regulations, many of which Hume would simply call “conventions”.

To wrap. I for one, am glad to have Kant as a guide. As staunch and “joyless” as he is, there is a core of clear direction within his thought that allows him to calibrate his awareness to a finely tuned point regardless of content. Kant turns rationality in on itself and is able to note the different vectors within rationality as a manifold, a field of its own connectivity. Kant adds these various example, these vectors together, rotates rationality as a vehicle of deployment and is able to find a navel limit within rationality, negativity on the one hand, sensuous apperception on the other, and the chimera of the transcendental dialectic on the third. This groundwork of pure formalism is the striking aesthetic consistency that belies German philosophy post-Kant, while marking the groundwork for the very abstract structural formalism that is to follow in mathematics and science in the 19th century and beyond. Without having the ability to negate all that does not logically follow, or being able to create limited phenomenon within a transcendental domain, we would not have any technological or mathematical achievements today.

This isn’t to say that Kant should be given credit for this because he “invented” this. Rather, he was simply the first to stake out the parameters for the nature of these kinds of endeavors, endeavors which continue to structure human experience and behavior today. No doubt, if Kant did not do this, then someone else would have formalized this exercise, eventually. Still, to one lonely man in Königsberg, thank you.

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The Universal Exception

March 23, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Universal ExceptionThe Universal Exception by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read Zizek for over a decade, this work speaks out much more to me than it would had this been Zizek’s latest book. Here we see many figures of reason, a display of logic some of which did not make it to later works. Others of which show us how some tendencies may be further developed. The heady nature of this subject, an application of the theory of exception to politics can be summarized as the universal exception which must be removed before knowledge is generated.

This applies directly to politics as politics is nothing if not knowledge of others. Our ability to get along with them, to know them, to be able to understand (contain) large masses of people, trends and response to them with the understanding of policies and edicts that will effectively shape how we understand and get along with one another. In a way, Zizek is saying that we can understand our context but we cannot understand ourselves. Or we understand ourselves but not our context. The point of view needs a basis of comparison, even if it is about the point of view itself. This basis becomes invisible, absolute and profound as it is literally understood as its own shadow.

In a way, since this null point is still being shaped; the less interesting parts of this book are the parts where he lapses into his familiar terms, you get a sense that this exception is still new to him, a fragile point of hypnosis which captivates his full attention. As he gets into parallax gap, and then less than nothing, Zizek comes to understand that point has having any and every content possible. Never mind that he generally prefers the same hero worship. This worship, as silly as it may be can only be understood as a repetition of the difference he highlights. It works as both justification for the difference (it has appeared twice, as a repeat) but also as a tool of refinement in which Zizek can calibrate the theory, in this case to itself. A proper dialectical motion would follow in which Zizek insisted that Hegel was the first mistake, a random, chance, pure genius, whereas his repetition was a recognition of pure genius, the first true calibration point, in which a theory can be explicated and the point of split; the cut can be highlighted.

It would follow then, that our third effort, would be the chance to break free of the constraints of that cut, the chance to realize it as more than a singularity but a world logic. This would be the finding of a new transcendental model but only because its reflection requires that we jump back one step to justify Hegel, leaving the Byzantine ramblings of Kant. And from there, we can abstract to the method of Descartes and the ancient Greeks themselves, recognizing that the bridge between Descartes unnamed transcendental which affords only differences that self-evident and Kant’s Transcendental logic in which the functioning of that self evidence is made possible by the interstice view of the excess of various faculties’s interactions as these interactions are only visible outside of all these spheres of localized logics. Of course there is Understanding, which is self evident, Reason which extends itself into paradox, and Imagination which is spontaneous to be unpredictable. Each of these paradoxes wraps up the same faculties within their own immanence as to merely describe various anti-nomies themselves. These facial “black holes” that looking into another’s eyes or the unknown orifices in logic always present different realms of incoherence from the point of view of the outside looking in. We never get a full sense of our own arbitrariness without eliminating the possibility of there being strict rules. All topographies are distinguished by their handling of zeros. At first structure, then to texture. The procedure is logical but can be expressed via its own displacement, of which its kind of regularity is its logic. This then, becomes the genius of Descartes, as the first leap into dimensional mapping. To further this trend, we need to proceed into pure multiples.

If Liebniz understood that a curve was where any arbitrary measurement that was much like any other arbitrary measurement it follows that we’d have to reverse our way back out to get back to full points of content, back to ‘pataphysics and immanence. This is a move that Badiou and Deleuze do, but which I think we will find Zizek going to, but only if he is willing to give up the hero worshiping imposition of making a theoretical cut that includes too much of itself. The only point that creates this particular world as being what it is, as a limit to its maximal value (with no limit on its minimal) is the universal exception, the bulwark which we push off from, in order to jumpstart our content.

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Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

February 22, 2015 / posted in dialectics, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.

While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.

This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.

Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.

What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.

What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.

2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.

Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.

This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.

This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).

Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.

I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.

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Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

February 8, 2015 / posted in manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Tractatus Logico PhilosophicusTractatus Logico Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When asked in an interview by Clare Parnet about Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze declared that Wittgenstein was the “assassin of philosophy.” Nonetheless, between Badious’ Being and Event II and Deleuze’s work, you can see that Wittgenstein was on par — that is — he was interested in the same topics they were. While Badiou and Wittgenstein appear quite similar in many regards — both approach the presentation of sense as an order of logic — Deleuze’s relationship with Wittgenstein seems strained. After finishing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, however, it’s clear that Wittgenstein advocates stepping out of the circular logic of presentation inherent within his propositional language solely to be silent about the very thing language is meant to speak of, and for that, Wittgenstein fails. When you see that this Elan Vital is central to Deleuze’s work, that as Badiou rightly states, is in a sense, what Deleuze’s philosophy can always be reduced to as this concept is so central to Deleuze, you understand that Wittgenstein only formally approaches Deleuze: The two veer off in inseparable difference due to aesthetic reasons (inherent to Wittgenstein’s desire for a crystaline purity of logic).

Nonetheless, the two are nearly ontop one another. You could almost read Logic of Sense as a broader version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But even further still, when you recognize that Wittgenstein considered this book to be a failure, that at the very end he ends up discarding the very Spinozian-like formality of his Euclidean presentation, of top down truth that dribbles into particular branches only to lead nowhere, you’ll understand that if Wittgenstein was given a longer life with broader exposure to issues, perhaps avoiding Bertrand Russell’s poisonous influence, he might have been able to gleam the larger subliminal essence language has to offer… the very essence that he eliminated through the very rigid formality of his approach.

We all know that language can’t be reduced to logic. This is true, because language can be used to present any number of inherently contradictory hypothesises. Language has to be ambiguous in this way because if it was not, if it was 1:1 as a method of designation, we’d have to invent whole new languages each time we changed the power structure. We may not have to invent new languages for entirely new cultures, but it seems to certainly help. The multi-valence inherent in language isn’t a weakness, as Russell or Wittgenstein may have thought… it’s not an imperfection needed to be weeded out. Rather, it’s a partial resolution of an infinitely resolute difference, one that is further refined…to the point of collapse only to be refined again as needed. The very ability for language to come about, ever changing and alive reflects the totally continuous becoming of the very essence of human knowledge.

In other words, our language changes as the conditions of our knowledge change. Our language changes because our knowledge shifts as we grow and evolve. This constant shifting isn’t reflective of the imprecision of our knowing, but rather, reflective of the depths to which we continually try to know and with which the unfolding of time reveals how much more there is to know.

Given that Wittgenstein wanted only the determinacy of propositions, recognizing that the limits of truth conditions was merely a range upon which we did speak, we can become more mature when we understand that language contains within it the very seeds of indeterminacy so that truth can be presented to us. Only because the void of the indeterminate pure multiple hides within the shadows of language’s incessant murmur can a fully formed truth jump out to us. Wittgenstein definitely chased the absolute point of reflection within language but he didn’t seem to realize that such a “picture” of a logically perfect structure is only possible, albeit briefly, because language is raggedly rough. Only given the inclarity of indeterminacy, with appropriate revelations, at appropriate contexts, can we, when presented with generic knowledge, momentarily recast the whole and for one moment a concise seed can become Truth, locking and freezing us in perfect comprehension, before we realize the beyond the immanence of a particular range of truth values for that presentation, before we then continue onward to newer fuzzier skies.

In other words, we can only have the experience of an accepted truth given that we have the experience of undecided and improper truths. This experience of truth are merely the continual unfolding social contexts by which we consider different (and newer) aspects of the same. As Badiou points out using higher math that Wittgenstein was not yet (and in some cases never) exposed, with even an infinite cardinal we have an uncountable infinitely more relations of its parts, relations which given retroactive composites of other cardinals which may not even be presentable (as they are incompossible), do we continually arrive at further truths beyond our finite comprehension. It is not that we must remain silent because incompleteness is out of the picture. Rather, we are only silent so that we can speak. And in speaking, we must realize as well, that we are speaking only but a fraction of what we are silent on. All knowledge is only possible at the exclusion of other, even greater knowledge.

It’s a shame Wittgenstein stopped here. This is a mature work, but only one in which we can get but a taste of what can come further when we use his methods but discard this naive Euclidean dogmatism of absolute eternal truth.

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Being and Event

October 18, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Being and EventBeing and Event by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It’s often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don’t really “explain” in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is “illegal” because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.

In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself — in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is “made for us” by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn’t at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said

I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).

I don’t find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:

A philosophy worthy of the name–the name which began with Paramenides–is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).

And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou’s own allegiance to a very tradition topography!

I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou’s terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it’s difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it’s nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.

I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn’t simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier–but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition… that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.

Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won’t go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it’s not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He’s started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he’s hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there’s no reason not to.

In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.

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Postmodern Cities and Spaces

June 24, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Postmodern Cities and SpacesPostmodern Cities and Spaces by Sophie Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the onset, this collection of essays takes the point of postmodernism for granted, in order to avoid evaluation of the term and jump right into the meat of the matter.

Considering that people often have a difficult time discerning what postmodernism is, it comes as both no surprise that these essays approach the matter from multiple points of view, in as much as it comes as a delightful surprise.

The tactful conclusion this collection reaches is that postmodernism destroys boundaries in as much as it secures them. Sound like a contradiction? The “classical” modernist view, that things are objectively what they are no matter how you look at them, remains a ghost in postmodern studies such that we always refer to what is different in postmodernism… to find the orderless and impose order. Nonetheless, a grand narrative of sorts exist as social boundaries align along a multitude of dimensions, overcoding and re-writing each other.

In the new conceptualization of identity politics the old binary oppositions of class and gender and race are disrupted and dispersed, and new formations and alliances come together in different forms to erupt in new places and new forms. Instead of assuming single subject positions and identities which shift and change all the time.

Ultimately postmodern cities exist because people are postmodern, existing differently depending on who is looking, or what criteria is using used. Of course, this leads us directly into Badiou’s anti-philosophy or Baudrillard’s “lost referential” created by the disclosure of simulacra. In postmodern discourse, we attempt to find the metaphysics of presence, that elusive center that grounds a discourse in reality, so we can safely say, this is official: this is what something means… from this truth we can start to build an objective truth.

Of course, this central position is impossible… metaphysics of presence disappears when we examine one area, as it seems to be slightly off elsewhere… so we chase that bird and end up running in circles. Only in postmodern discourse, going in one direction doesn’t mean you can return to where you came from if you simply reverse vector, as objects of knowledge can only exist through the structured filter of the place you are currently at… other places will be structured differently; under different constraints.

I rather enjoyed the analysis of different cities, different spaces and different gazes… each of which was grounded by the authors historically, only to be partially dissolved when present day is reached. In each “microhistory” we see the effects of politics, economics and culture (among other things, like race, sex, religion and so on) overcoding various areas to question other discourses. The flux of determinable meaning becomes embedded in the everyday reality of a postmodern gaze/space/city. While the overall classical hierarchy appears to vaguely exist (rich people live here, poor people live here, industry is here or there) the overlapping sectors seem to be what determine postmodernism… the fluidity of capital (or the lack of it) within a city seems to be one of the key ways in which a city comes to unknow itself, as it constantly struggles to synthesize standard relations between its different parts. In particular, the essay on Bombay, the essays on heteropologies, discourse, the essay on walls, and the essay on flaneur and gazes seemed to tie the topics coherently for me. This isn’t to say the other essays aren’t interesting either.

All in all, this is an interesting if fragmentary look on postmodern cities. A good place to start. Of course there are plenty of other books on the subject. But if you pick a different author, from a different school, with a different view of social reality, then you will be bound to come to another specific conclusion… and it is this motley of conclusions which is rightly bundled as postmodern.

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