May 1968 – The Postmodern Peripatetic

The English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event III: The Immance of Truths has just been published. There is not much in this book that I would recognize as philosophy; neither other philosophers nor questions of interpretation are discussed at any length. Badiou primarily wants to assert that actual infinity is established by classical set theory as an “absolute ontological referent”.

Badiou’s deepest influences are Sartrean existentialism and what at first appears to be a kind of extreme formalist view of mathematics. For Sartre, what distinguishes the human is an ability to make utterly arbitrary choices. Such views have historically been justified by appeals to human likeness to an omnipotent God that, while commonly raised by religious sectarians, actually diverge from more broadly accepted views of orthodoxy in religion, which temper appeals to raw infinite power by emphasizing that God is good and more reasonable than we are, and therefore does not act arbitrarily. Sartre and Badiou, however, are both militant atheists who aim to ground the argument for human arbitrariness in some other, nonreligious way.

I think what we need for ethics is to recognize that we are beings who partake of an active character. We do things, and along the way we make choices between alternatives, but real-world decisions — the only kind there are — are never made in a vacuum. I think activity necessarily involves purposefulness (seeking some good, i.e., something judged by someone to be good in some way, even if we would completely reject the judgment). Any kind of purpose at all is incompatible with complete arbitrariness. (See also Beings.) But Badiou would disqualify this whole line of thought, because he doesn’t believe in ethics or in purposes that are independent of arbitrary decision.

I call Badiou’s appeals to formalism in mathematics extreme because — utterly contrary to the spirit of the early 20th century program of David Hilbert, which is usually taken as the paradigm of mathematical formalism — Badiou claims that his formalist arguments directly apply to the real world. Even so-called mathematical Platonism only asserts the independence of mathematical objects, and nothing like the immediate relevance to politics claimed by Badiou. The whole point of Hilbert’s formalism is that it doesn’t care about the real world at all. For Hilbert, mathematics consisted in purely hypothetical elaboration of the consequences of arbitrary axioms and definitions. He likened this to a kind of game.

Badiou’s use of purely formal elaboration from arbitrary starting points is decidedly not hypothetical; it is combined with an extreme realism. According to Badiou, Paul Cohen’s theorems about generic subsets, for instance, are supposed to directly lead to political consequences that are supposed to be liberating. We are supposed to get some enlightenment from considering, e.g., immigrant workers as a generic subset, and this is supposed to represent a kind of unconditional or “absolute” truth that is nonetheless immanent to our concrete experience. But the treatment of arbitrary hypotheses as unconditional truths is utterly contrary to what Hegel meant by “absolute” knowledge, which I would argue is really supposed to involve the exact opposite of arbitrariness. Hegel’s “absolute” is about as far from Badiou’s “absolute ontological referent” as could be. (See also Hegelian Finitude.)

I am only a moderately well-informed mathematical layman and claim no deep understanding of Cohen’s results, but the basic idea of a generic set or subset seems to be that it is an arbitrary selection of elements from some pre-existing set. Being arbitrary, it has no definition or characteristic function (other than by sheer enumeration of its elements). But in classical set theories, new sets and subsets can be formed from an arbitrary set. Badiou relates this to Georg Cantor’s proof that any set has more subsets than elements. In itself, I find the latter unobjectionable. But Badiou likes classical set theory because it gives a putative mathematical respectability both to arbitrary beginnings and to actual infinity. (See also Categorical “Evil”; Infinity, Finitude.)

According to Badiou, belief in actual infinity is revolutionary and good, whereas disbelief in actual infinity is conservative and bad. Infinity is supposed to be revolutionary precisely because it is unbounded. This just means that it can be used as a putative license for arbitrariness. I want to insist on the contrary that there is nothing socially progressive about arbitrariness! Badiou’s recommended political models are the chaotic Maoist cultural revolution of the 1960s and the ephemeral May 1968 Paris uprising. I don’t see that the oppressed of the world gained any benefit from either.

Badiou explicitly endorses arguments of the notorious Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt that were used to justify a permanent “state of exception” in which absolute political power is asserted. This intellectual red-brown coalition is unfortunately being taken seriously by some academic leftists. The unifying theme is the claim that metaphysical support for arbitrariness is the key to achieving social justice. There are much better ways…

I remain perplexed by the place of the May 1968 spontaneous Paris worker-student uprising in French intellectual history. This was the most significant challenge to the status quo in a Western country since the aftermath of World War I, but not nearly as substantial as Paris 1870, which also did not lead to permanent change. It was the 1960s and spontaneity expressed the spirit of the time, but it also ensured the transience and superficiality of those colorful events.

I find staggering the suggestion by Badiou and others that May 1968 represented some kind of world-historic new political paradigm. People seriously concerned for social change should know better. The most important concrete social consequence of the events that I am aware of was the formation of the new experimental university of Vincennes, which eventually became much more mainstream.

Reportedly, “Structures don’t march in the streets” was grafittied onto a Paris wall (I presume by some existentialist who already had an axe to grind). Exactly what consequence was supposed to follow from this is unclear. It implies a silly, sophistical argument that should not have bothered any serious person.

The peculiar thing is that a number of leading French intellectuals who said very positive things about so-called structuralism before May 1968 and were undisturbed by previous anti-structuralist polemics suddenly wanted to rhetorically distance themselves from it afterward, when not much about their own positions had changed. (This later led comparative literature people to reify into existence a category of more-radical-than-thou “poststructuralism” unknown in the French context, and to exaggerate its difference from a by then said-to-be objectionably conservative “structuralism”.)

The important thing is not whether or not we call ourselves structuralists (or jabberwocks, or whatever). The important thing is what we actually manage to articulate, and the kind of practical doings to which we commit ourselves, and in which actually engage.

Rhetorical considerations do matter in social situations. We can also argue about more substantive questions of the status and value of particular kinds of synchronic analysis and understanding.

But given all that, no dumb event as such (and empirical events, I insist, are dumb) can refute any analysis or understanding that is valid in its own right. Only new analysis and understanding can do that. This might be stimulated by an event, but the important thing would still be the quality and content of the new analysis and understanding, which has to be shown. (See also Historiography.)