Alain Badiou, on the 15th of February, 2016 delivered a seminar titled 'The theory of the covering and the ethics of the idea" at The Commune National Drama Centre Aubervilliers. At the time, I was a student of sociology at Ambedkhar University Delhi; and was facing a set of antagonisms whose nomination was prohibited to me. Prohibited, inasmuch as the institution in question, through the insight of its faculty chose to conceive the problem in terms which were already constructed, and inasmuch as this choice was made, it killed the possibility of a presentation of a social formation, to place it loosely which were not immanent to terms which are mere reifications, yet as a courtesy to their efforts, I shall place them here, caste and religion.
This is not an account of my struggles during graduation, but rather a theorization of the mode of obfuscation I faced, that we face, perhaps even today. Towards these ends, and in appreciation of Badiou's work, I present the following commentary.
On reading Timothy Lavenz's translation of Badiou's seminar on covering as a concept which describes a political, or perhaps amorous - however conceited, in any case, a social order which seeks to protect its own finitude, which is always a certain finitude - were to be speaking about an order, a question which occurs to me is one regarding the means used by an order to reinforce its rule.
Here, primarily - we are speaking about interpretation and hegemony.
In recent years, Lacanian political theorists, guided by the Althusserian break have sought to position interpretation itself as an object of dispute, subject to ideologies, which when not in correspondence, which is often hard, take on the appearance of hegemonies.
Yet can an interpretation itself not be hegemonic? When for instance behaviors are codified or even pegged on a spectrum of what is and is not acceptable, we must ask 1. who is the one making such an interpretation? 2. To what sense or horizon of belonging does such an individual, body or party subscribe to? 3. And if we were to see their interpretation as criticism, what may be the praxis which informs its point of view? These three questions are essential to any constructive engagement, without which, we relegate any constructible discourse to a domain of covering.
In terms of how the category of covering is constructed, Badiou explicitly addresses conservative hegemony, even if this critique reaches us almost six years later, the translation into English took a while. However, Badiou's description is still accurate enough for extracts to be presented.
"At the most general level, it is the attempt to neutralize the possible emergence of a new infinity by covering it with preexisting significations - significations that are already given in the situation and intend to forbid its development."
& - "It is not a matter of crushing it from the outside. It is not a matter of saying it did not happen or that nothing happened, but rather that this something does not have the signification it gives itself."
The means utilized by hegemony have been a concern to philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences since Gramsci and Foucault, and today novel methods of surveillance are still being mapped, yet the description of the present methods too deserve citation. In terms of oppression ..."it is to cover in some way, like putting a bag over it, the set of whatever is said and done in the name of this novelty. It is to cover it with significations that are old, generally stereotypical, and internal to the situation, such that the very intelligibility of what has happened is covered, crumbled, annihilated. Such that even those who participate in it wind up no longer knowing if what they are doing is really what they say it is".
It is clear that we are referring to subjection here, but not subjection as such, as belonging etc. but interpellation itself, or the forms or rather modes which a subject uses to make meaning for themselves. This, most often takes the form of a discipline, like those practiced in a university for instance, under the names of sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. But, to include other examples, a discipline is essentially a form of object oriented resistance. It is resistant inasmuch as it knows what its object is. It may nonetheless have a prehistory to it's constitution which is not a part of the discipline as such, but then we are speaking strictly about the subject, and it's prehistory, and not the discipline in exercise required to arrive at it. A discipline, in these terms, at its simplest, is a means of taking or/making an object, guided by its own set of procedures, and perhaps customs. As such, it can refer to welding for instance, or cycling, but I shall cut this short before we start include all verbs.
In continuing to read Badiou's essay, we find that what is demarcated by the term covering, apart from the novel form of its conception, and the historical mode of reaction it designates; it bares marked similarities with an earlier term of ideological critique, namely obfuscation, or the representation of an antagonism in terms which mask what the central contradiction was, invisibilizing the antagonism in such a way that make retrieving the issue a task. That is, and I paraphrase - that the aim of covering is not merely to conceal a facet of human becoming, but to render it unintelligible, or to 'kill its very sense'.... it organizes the battle of signification and not simply the battle of reality". I would encourage the reader to read the transcript of Badiou's seminar, especially its ninth stanza in full to see if its theorization corresponds to their experience as the paucity of time prevents me from quoting it at length here.
Further on, we observe Alain Badiou drawing on propositional language to demarcate the relation between subjects and predicates, yet he also seeks to represent how these operations hegemonize, so to speak - any 'emergent infinity'. One may well imagine that he seems to be referring to prevalent operations in the media sphere as such; unless of course the emergent infinity has its own mode of representation, its own form of creation, etc. then we may speak of the operation which Badiou is describing in terms of 'overdetermination' as his teacher Althusser once did.
Following a few political examples where covering may be noticed; perhaps most noticeable in the Cultural Revolution in China and May 68' in France, Badiou presents the case that ultimately a covering reveals itself as covering when it seeks to do nothing other than that. Which is, it speaks in the discourse of the master, who means what he says, and nothing more. Psychoanalysis has long defined such a position, with perhaps it's most noted modern practitioner, Lacan even characterizing the discourse of the master. Its concern even for those who are disinterested in the field would concern what may the position of the other be in such a register, and almost without fail, history, not to mention the contemporary scene, provides us a strew of examples of masters, as politicians, as school teachers, and parents, and perhaps even as priests whose only resort to their position in the symbolic order, for ultimately - that is the master, is to bar the other.
Here, we would require to make a schism. The other is not merely a personification, an individual, a body, a mass, etc. the other is also, or at least potentially another way of understanding ourselves, of categorization, of uses and yes, ultimately language. The position of the master, in any discourse has been to deny this possibility, and frankly, within the conditions of capitalism, may and often is institutionalized into a job. What is at stake here is the other, not merely as an other but an another symbolic order, marking the site of Lacan's crucial break from Freud, or if you will, his sublation.
This position is symptomatic, inasmuch as its use of debt and passes seem to be overdetermined by the discourse it is situated within. This is the double bind of liberal democracy within the conditions of capitalism. A worker knows who he or she is to report to as well as who he or she borrows or depends on, and - administratively this is all that is required of a human subject. The master however, unlike the human subject (hopefully) has already identified themselves with the position they exercise within the symbolic order. If I may extend my characterization schematically. If subject P were the master in situation A, an order or injunction passed would unilaterally determine, as in characterise and represent the situation without remainder. This is not closure, much less elucidation as much as a termination.
This is why, philosophy, in the enlightenment tradition, and in the modern era, following Lacanian psychoanalysis has sought to diagnose discourses and not merely individuals. Unfortunately as a practice, this meets with greater resistance from the status quo as instead of containing the operation concerned to a clinic and a transactional correspondence between a clinician and a patient, it would involve the relinquishing of publishing rights and a place in circulation - demands which are always treated with circumspection given the consequences they may bare.
As a brief recap we thus far observed Badiou's deployment of covering. An offhand remark made by him is of singular importance here: what is it that serves covering? And might I add the conscicion of his account seemingly redeems the concept in retrospection - the locking between things and language. Within the locus of his Marxian rhetoric, we are told that a 'fixed meaning to the notion of property is necessary' for us to understand our adversaries formal operations which attempt to oppose that which is proposed by us which is in excess of the situation; that is the unmasking of the manoeuvre which resists our intervention.
The elucidation which his diagram provides may be presented as the procedure via which that which may be constructible is obfuscated via its covering with preexisting significations. Badiou's and I shall say our Platonic wager here is and remains that that which is constructible may yet be theorized and hence participate in the cognition of forms, inasmuch as we use them to make sense of the world of the sensible. The condition or qualification here should also be stated clearly, for it clarifies how Badiou is using the concept of the constructible. If that which is constructible serves an order which already overdetermines any possible construction, or presents a set which is open only at its closure, we would require to think it's externality, and this is addressed in the following sections.
Enough praise cannot be offered to Lacan for theorizing the means of differentiation, imaginary perceptions, symbolic, and the real or that which resists every symbolization, which is discernible in every symbolization. Badiou insists that the ethical choice would be to remain faithful to the re-launch point, or the point where the infinite set (one means of representing the possibility that was plastered) remains open to development.
There are a few questions which can be presented at this point. If Badiou's ontology is subtractive, as some such as George Verghese have argued - in what sense is it so? Can the possibility which was covered itself be subtracted from? These may require an explanation if we are to remain faithful to the account presented as such.
The definable, which may be a retroactive apprehension of the constructible is an ordered hierarchical process, like a document which requires inputs from various offices for instance.
In charting out of his broad manoeuver thus far, Badiou observes how a dominant ideology, or even a dominant language, in its closure, or in the face of its immanent covering is forced to confront what he names an automorphy vis-a-vis its multiplicities and the names given to them.
Scholars of the history of philosophy and those who want to re-write that history should note, paraphrasing, that what will be 'new' here, under the exercise of this closure (whether exogenous or immanent) is the combination of what is definable in a different way. I must confess; that there are cases where I do not see this being a problem, inasmuch as even a mere recombination of named elements, whatever they may be, may yet produce new connections, yet as a process, this may be closer to a form of play and hardly an exploratory or guided operandi rather and even further from a delimited investigation.
Badiou however, perhaps not unlike Hegel before him understands the necessity of sublation for thought and his sentence '...it would not be definable' does bare resonances of Zizek's ontologization of sexual reality, with nothing but the form of appearance omitted... Whether they do indeed follow Lacan here is a question which is up for debate as the master bemoaned that he fears that someone would make an ontology of his teachings.
The tragedy however, for thought at least, is that it would remain under the aegis of the dominant language, and perhaps as Badiou argues, in it's interiority. Ironically or not, he may find an ally in the early Nick Land - in this position, who I believe charts out a similar antagonism with an effectiveness which mobilises the negativity invisibilized by the gesture of covering. However, Badiou does touch, formally, upon the question of the unnameable.
It is with some sadness that I state that when Badiou writes - " It (dominant register containing constructible sets) .... is closed. - this is not a quantitative notion. It is closed according to the internal composition of what composes it", one cannot but hear the antagonism which Derrida named or rather described as the structurality of structure in his essay 'Structure sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences.' Badiou however, to his credit does provide us not a mere recombination, but a restatement of the history of philosophy oriented by its symptomal points, or those movements where it had to present a recomposition of its principles and questions so as to not relegate itself to history.
Badiou here is treading a terrain of some difficulty. Indeed, the proposition - "everything is constructible" is really not very different from 'everything is deducible' or 'everything is permitted'. Let us accept the introduction that is provided, when we read that 'all existing sets are constructible' is not contradictory, is not the same as it being true. There is a constructivist drive in Badiou, where he does not merely present the master of a situation with a precedent so to speak, which may be subject to the law of the constructible. In other words, he does not merely provide an example in accordance with the law hence reinforcing its rule.
The non-constructible set, presented as a response to such a situation, invented by Paul Cohen - is his answer, and here we may require some familiarity with the history of set theory. Without extensive reading in this domain however, I can intuitively say that Badiou's citing and use of axioms already present in set theory do show me a way out. The axiom that every set include within itself, a null set. This is later read by Badiou, in perhaps a poetic interpretation, that inasmuch as a set is not completely saturated, that is - constructed, determined, etc. it will acknowledge the presence of the set with no elements within itself.
A similar gesture is made when Badiou represents Marx's analyses of humanity in capitalist society. The sense he conveys of the faculty we perceive it through is the 'ambient definable', to represent humanity, not as it is in the terms of capitalist society, but humanity as such, expressive in ways unimaginable by the society as it is. Or, in plainer terms, that which the covering fails to conceal, a poetic derivation of Cohen's non-constructible sets it would appear.
In an aesthetic register, we can see how the existential choice Badiou leaves us with, one which will have to be made, is whether we are to remain in the covering or expose ourselves to genericity, however poorly defined.
There is something to be said of the proletariat in terms of the position it occupies in revolutionary discourse. As Badiou puts it, - the proletariat was at once the promise of a future and the phantom of society. When politics can no longer safeguard this, it loses touch with the generic as such.
The last section, titled 'ethics of the idea' by the translator Timothy Lavenz addresses the question of what may have earlier been thematised in Badiou's work as the fidelity to an idea. As it is placed in the realm of the constructible and the inconstructible we are engaging questions regarding the form, or better yet the formal conditions of its appearance.
We, from within the dominant language, which is dominant inasmuch as we use it, seek to present that which it does not have adequate terms for. This is the struggle for presenting novelty.
In our efforts we are left with a warning, that 'non-constructible' subjectivity, or generic subjectivity always assumes that you (we?) assume the existence of a non-constructible infinity. This assumption will be worked out by us in the real. The militant of this struggle holds fast to the possibility presented by such a positing, protects it, and denounces its covering which seek to obfuscate its call, or blunt its revisioning of reality.
This is how Badiou sees the idea - "as an infinite anticipation of a potentially generic universe"; something akin to Bloch's declaration of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. They both, to different degrees, insist on the possibility of the existence of something which can transgress the existence of the dominant order. In a vanguardist edge, whose novelties may be lost on one unfamiliar with Cantor's proofs of infinities with different sizes, Badiou asserts that the universe in its entirety cannot be reduced to the constructible as such, if only because infinities exist somewhere. To clarify here, constructible may be understood as where the form of expansion immanent to the set is already determined in its orientation as a series. Perhaps another way of making the same point homologously, would be to insist as Zizek does on an incompleteness in the symbolic order itself, yet this generalises this issue. Badiou's own conviction is that the affirmation of a certain type of determined infinity is adequate to make the universe tip to the side of the possibility of the non-constructible.
A comical aside regarding a mathematician named Scott is cited as an example where the existence of a single 'measurable set' can force the acceptance of the unconstructibility of the universe.
If this uncomfortable joke does nothing more than allow a moron to assert that the universe was not constructible as stated, there would have been made a chip in the order of covering, which is the exercise of domination today.
Presenting an example of something, a set, a notation, etc. as that which is not constructible, is not however the same as asserting that the universe is non-constructible. Here, commentary as a mode and its will to presentation as such may be inadequate, at least in its classical form as exegesis which hinges on canonical texts. To assert that the universe is not constructible, perhaps like how Cohen presents his proof of the inconstructible set - we require an idea. I would like to present Cohen's continuum hypothesis as one such example of an inconstructible set :- ie. the set whose cardinality, that is whose number of elements: is strictly between integers and real numbers. This of course is a formal example, and one which served as a proof of historical significance for mathematics. Its construction, the charting of the propositions and their relations to each other were guided by an idea, that such a set, inconstructible, could be shown. That requires an idea, and the search for its coherence. Our own need not be the same, as philosophers (though it may be). This ethic of the idea, it's assumption - is the proposition Alain Badiou presents, and leaves us with. As a communist I cannot but feel compelled to mention that as a will to presentation and as an ethic I would endorse Badiou's work, yet would want to add, perhaps as a footnote citation, Zizek's injunction for a political suspension of the ethical as recommended reading.
Wednesday, 18th August, 2021
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