Absolute disjunctive syntheses: contemporary music, part one

In this post, I’d like to highlight one of a number of identifiable absolute, or inclusive, disjunctive syntheses in contemporary art. In the grand scheme of things, highlighting these phenomena of the new poem may point toward a kairotic moment opening an evental site, to use the language of Badiou & Derrida: Politics, Events, and Their Time author Antonio Calcagno.[*see addendum] In that sense, my conceptual matrix for this project is heavily dependent upon Badiou’s work. However, Badiou largely provides me with only formal guidance in the overall determination of this project’s direction. When I do use his concepts as tools in analysis, moreover, I will undoubtedly run up against obstacles that require extensions of these tools beyond their breaking points and have to look to other theorists, other artifacts, and conceptual invention to capture the affects generated by these disjuncts. I think my approach is more in line with Deleuze’s method than Badiou’s, for that matter.

Broadly speaking, I understand absolute or inclusive disjunctive syntheses as propulsions into a structural impasse, direct confrontations with terminal points built into the edifice of a field of praxis or discourse. Moreover, these encounters, which thus bear upon the impossible, must be conceived as productive, edifying (heightening of power), potentially transformative operations. Foreign elements with no necessary or prescribed relation come together to break apart a sedimented, totalized-totalizing scheme of behavior. And yet, any one instance is never the necessary precursor, however dark, to an opening of lines of communication between divergent series. An amorphous, vertiginous cloud accumulates differential elements (elements with no intrinsic properties whose relations are therefore wholly exterior) and relations which do not interact and determine themselves through negation, but rather do so through affirmative, symbiotic amplification or resonance. If no resonance forms between such series, which are nevertheless synthesized or brought under a sort of vinculum in the synthesis at hand, nothing (substantial) in the structure changes and the series might dissociate (de-synthesize, dissolve) or remain non-resonantly, non-communicatively, non-productively coupled, acquiring new elements (and concomitant relations) for synthesis in future encounters. An absolute or inclusive disjunctive synthesis is thus one potential “effect” of a de/reterritorialization or erasure and reinscription of relations of exteriority pertaining to some set of differential elements. As such, finer prediction is guesswork.

I would like to take the work of Einstürzende Neubauten, a group of German pioneers of sonic metallurgy, as a muse in this and follow-up posts on contemporary music. This work is marked by a series of profound reversals, foldings-back (and foldings-forth, foldings-diagonal, etc.), and errant, unpredictable reorientations over the course of several decades. This is evidenced not only in changes in raw materials (ranging from traditional musical instruments and electronic components to specially-crafted or found objects and, importantly, found phrases) and methods of composition, but also in forms of arrangement. The latter have taken traditional or “conservative” schemes, but less frequently than they have been cast in the shape of the “revolutionary” – and we shall see that this conservative-revolutionary thematic is important for understanding Neubauten’s impact on contemporary music’s structure of behavior in itself. Neubauten has, in some counter-cultural circles, become famous for the silence-noise circuits, the conservative-revolutionary zone of indistinction, and the amplifications or swellings of singularities constituting the body of work. These, for us, highlight the shifting of the virtual landscape and the rise toward crisis points of self-enveloping quanta, which promise to reshape the actual, constituted patterns of behavior in contemporary music.

Kollaps is a natural starting point for any discussion of Neubauten’s body of work, being the first official full-length work. This post discusses, however incompletely, only this project. Few subsequent projects will have the consistency of this first; or, perhaps, we might say that this first project suffers from a lack of complexity that properly embodies Neubauten’s profound inconsistency. In either case, the sonic assault that is Kollaps has, in Zizek’s language, its space curved according to a principle of pure noise. Percussion dominates on a material level; of this there is no question. As pure, concrete noise (concrete here in the sense of musique concrete, sound as material, sound disconnected from any means of production and metonymically substituted for both its process of production and itself), however, it must not be confused with destruction. As the introductory cut (“Tanz Debil”) demonstrates, it is a dance of the mad, a “body devoted to its zenith” (Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 59). It desires to rely on no criterion outside itself to determine its movement; it wills its movement alone as itself. However, a certain ambivalence remains inscribed at the heart of the work of this period. The mad dance knows, as if proprioceptively, that it is nothing but amor fati, creation of its own immanent fate, yet expresses itself as a logic of the No. This is the meaning of the title of the cut “Negative Nein”: Kollaps thinks itself as negative-no, “three times No,” but engages with itself, materially functions as affirmation of amplification.

Nevertheless, Kollaps also enacts an unrelenting critique of capitalism, perhaps to be located on a continuum somewhere between a classical Marxist / dialectical materialist approach and a Deleuzo-Guattarian (radical trans-Marxist?) political-libidinal economic approach. That is, capitalism and its overcodifications, its microfascist-engendering chains of displacement grounded upon its floating metric (capital), are subjected to a line of interrogation calculated to extract the affective kernel: namely, greed. Greed is indissolubly linked with death, a principle and practice, a culture, of death (as the opening line of “Tanz Debil” attests: stell dich tot!). Greed and death color the entirety of Kollaps, and the fascination with these themes probably played a part in its self-conception as “negative-no,” progression according to negation and self-externalization. Greed and death culminate, in Kollaps, in the conclusion that Draussen ist feindlich, outside is hostile: go and hide with me, retreat into interiority, close off all lines of flight. Such is the subjective structure produced in a capitalist social formation (microfascism, desire’s desire of its own repression, outside is hostile: synonyms); such is the object of Kollaps, however inadequately reached it might be.

The use of found objects in art is often aligned with such a (latent or manifest) critique of capitalism. The very artifacts capitalism secretes – especially in disused or abused condition – are taken up and mobilized against its operation. Hence, in Kollaps, unidentifiable metals, plates or shards of glass, hand tools, heavy springs, and running water, among other instruments, are put to use on the body of capital, tearing away at its hard surface. Capital, as we already hinted above with our brief comments on the motif of greed, is weighty, hard, insofar as it is inextricably bound up with the spirit of gravity, is this very spirit at its core. Subjects of capitalism – all of us – “tr[y] convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following level [we] actually rise[] above it…powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity” (Paul Klee, On Modern Art, 43; quoted in Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 312). The lightness of the dance of the mad gracefully – though frenetically – strives to reshape the body of the earth, make it rotate upon an axis other than that of capital, the spirit of gravity. Yet, perhaps despite Klee’s optimism, the subject of / to capitalism is always in a sense the tarantula (Nietzsche’s figure of gravity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the ideologue. Trying convulsively to flee the earth of capital and succeeding in flight requires composition with the infinite forces of the outside, those centrifugal forces to which Klee alludes; however, the subject of / to capitalism is structured according to the maxim outside is hostile, and so incipit homo, commence reactive-man. The active figure of praxis is today often thought in Nietzsche’s terms as the Übermensch, the form of life that is a zone of indistinction between life and itself, that is, between life itself and its own immanent power. “The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. … What is the [Übermensch]? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces” (Deleuze, Foucault, 131-132). Agrammaticalities superseding the signifier! If this deadlock of the regime of signs (legitimizer of the signifier) yet sounds foreign to us – how can an asignifying particle, an agrammaticality, present itself as anything other than nothing? – we remain as tarantulas, tattooed with the triangle and black symbol of capital on our backs.

Segue to the next post on contemporary music: Kollaps does not, in itself, articulate a vehement, serious critical treatment of capitalism. It lacks the anarchitectural efficacy of, e.g., Haus der Lüge, with its free-zones and perplications, that Neubauten has deployed and shown to be necessary for any sustained treatment of capitalism. That is to say, Kollaps receives its truth in subsequent projects. How Kollaps plays into the synthetic act of absolute disjunction cannot be made clearer until other works have been explored.

*Addendum: You’ll note that I merely use his language; the kairological moment, for Calcagno, is the temporality of the intervention.

Law & Event: November 11-12

What a terrible week. I’ve had little time to work on anything remotely related to proximities this week, due primarily to a family emergency. I hope you’ll bear with me.

I’m posting now to call your attention to an exciting conference to be held on Sunday, 11/11 and Monday, 11/12 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City. Its title is Law & Event and promises much productivity. As you may have guessed, the conference is organized around the work of Alain Badiou and its relevance (or not) for legal studies and social theory. Below you’ll find the list of papers to be delivered. Some of our top law & humanities scholars will be presenting, as will Badiou himself.

In case you need some more convincing, I’ll remind you that it was at just such a conference in the 1990s (hosted by Cardozo Law) that Derrida presented one of his most important pieces: “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’.”

The conference will be held at 55 Fifth Avenue (5th & 12th), and admission is free.

Sunday, November 11

10.00: Opening Remarks

10.05 – 11.15: Alain Badiou (Paris) Ambiguities of Transgression: Three Ways of Denying Law

11.30 –1.00: A: Amorous Particulars (Chair, J.Schroeder)

Jamieson Webster (N.Y. Psy.). Love and Shame: Philosopher & Analyst
David Lichtenstein (Apres Coup). Repetition and the New
Dimitra Panopoulos (Paris). The Partisan of the Universal

11.30 – 1.00: B: Set Theory and Religion (Chair, D. Carlson)

Robert Hockett (Cornell). Set Theory as Weltanschauungsform: From “the Structure of Thought” (and “World”) to the Ethos of Wise Law & Policy
Kirk Junker (Dusquene). The Mathematical Irony of the Civil Law
Bill Widen (Miami). Forcing Analogies: Badiou, Set Theory and Models

2.30 – 4.00: Negative Events (Chair, A. Sebok)

Bruce Hay (Harvard). Being 314: Ontology, Ethics, Pi
Tracy McNulty (Cornell). The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and its Real
Anton Schutz (Birkbeck). Otherwise than Negative Theology: Alain Badiou, Rudolph Sohm, and the Form « Church »

4.30 – 6.00: Late Politics, Slow Laws (Chair, J. Jenkins)

Zartaloudis (Birkbeck). Ars Inventio, Poietic Laws
Pether (Villanova). Militant judgment? Judicial ontology, constitutional poetics, and “the long war”
Salecl (LSE & Ljubljana). The nature of the “event” in late capitalism?

Monday, November 12

10.00 – 11.30: Politics and Fidelity (Chair, Panu Minkkinen)

Simon Critchley (New School). Why Badiou is a Rousseauist or, if not, why he Should Be
Adam Gearey (Birkbeck). Counting, Speaking, Hearing: Politics, Ontology, Language
Gabriel Riera (UIC). Fidelity and the Law: Politics and Ethics in Badiou’s Philosophy

11.45 – 1.15: Monsters and Others (Chair, M. Slaughter)

Alain Pottage (LSE) La bioethique monstrueuse: vital politics and juridical form
Talia Morag (Sydney) When truth do us part – Alain Badiou’s theory of Objectivity
Pierre Legrand (Paris 1). On Badiou’s Cousin (And Other Others)

2.15 – 3.45 pm: Nocturns (Chair, M. Rosenfeld)

Gabriela Basterra (NYU). Signifying and Witnessing the Event: Levinas, Badiou
Bruno Bosteels (Cornell). The Force of Non-Law: Alain Badiou’s Theory of Justice
Igor Stramignoni (LSE). Badiou’s Nocturnal Jurisprudence

4.00 — 5.30: Untimely Events (Chair, O. Pfersman)

Emily Apter (NYU). Laws of the 70’s: Badiou’s Revolutionary Untimeliness
Tatiana Flessas (LSE). Immortal Objects: The Event-Horizon of Cultural Property

Closing remarks. Alain Badiou.

Hope to see you all there!

Return of the repressed religion?

(A post in homage to Friedrich Nietzsche, born this day, 1844.)

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, in one of the earliest of his theological texts:

“The most hideous man killed God because God, who saw him with an eye that sees all, killed him with a glance. To return that glance, to see the God as such, is to kill him. For one then sees nothing but an idol. Or rather, what one sees gives rise in turn to this suspicion: ‘and what if God were not truth and it were precisely this which is proved? If he were vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror, the enraptured and fearful illusion of men?’ (Daybreak, I, § 93.) In seeing God one immediately discovers his nature, his revocation, in a word, the quotation marks that, from this point on, must frame him in our text – ‘God.’ For illusion must be understood precisely as an idol seen too close. The madman, and therefore Zarathustra, has one eye too many, provisionally. … Thus Nietzsche does not only name ‘God’: he points out his idolatrous status through the addition of an intermediary: some concept or other. Because ‘God is a conjecture’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the Afterworldly’) he can be approached, that is, attacked and sunk, only as a ‘concept of God.’ Man rejects only what he attains. … It is evident that the ‘critique of the Christian concept of God’ (Antichrist, § 16) maintains its pertinence only in being exerted on ‘God,’ the idol that it sees….”

Marion, “The Collapse of the Idols and Confrontation with the Divine: Nietzsche,” in The Idol and Distance, 30.

This maneuver – redirecting Nietzsche’s declaration away from God and toward the idol of God closest to God, “God” – has become infamous. It is the very foundation of Marion’s more famous subsequent theological work, God Without Being. The God that can be killed is the concept of God, an idolatrous double. God must be elevated out of the realm of ontic existence (where claims and predications concerning God can be made) and brought into the morphological beyond-Being of which, for instance, Lévinas will not cease speaking. In addition to supporting the later theological works, however, this central claim buttresses the much more controversial “theological turn” in phenomenology that was the subject of some debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The charges against Marion (and conspirators Michel Henry, Lévinas, Ricoeur, and so on) were that the latter had covertly or overtly reintroduced the divine into die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Dominique Janicaud was the most vociferous of critics on this end, authoring the pamphlet-essay we now know him for, in addition to a rejoinder issued just before his death, called Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’, which reiterates the central complaints of the former pamphlet and updates them in accordance with recent developments. Janicaud has a bone to pick for good reason: Marion et al. and Janicaud himself consider themselves, at least to some extent, Heideggerians. This entire scene can be understood as dramatically unfolding the tension within Heidegger’s own body of thought: the expressly theological sources (and destinies) of central concepts in Heidegger’s earliest works (too many to enumerate) create a strange friction when juxtaposed with his Nietzscheanism, his persistent claims that Being is not God and that God has no place in philosophy (recall from the 1926 lecture course, a claim to the effect that “Philosophy is necessarily atheistic,” “Christian philosophy” is a squared circle), and so on. Janicaud effectively takes up the latter end of this conflict while his theist colleagues suit up in the black and white to defend the “theiologism” of the former strand.

That obscure object of idolatry, “God” (God-objectified), then, is the subject of the proclamation “God is dead.” The God that can die is not the true God, and so we ought to celebrate Nietzsche for the favor he has done Judeo-Christian philosophy. Janicaud’s polemic inspired several conferences and many papers on the topic, and what this entire paradigm means for the future of philosophy. Janicaud was not able to neutralize the threat from above, as it were, and in fact only ended up drawing more attention to the intra-phenomenological phenomenon. I think this is partially because of the alternative he’d offered: the problem with Janicaud’s position (as laid out in Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’), in my view, is that it retains Heidegger’s spirituality, thus obliquely granting the theologico-phenomenologists quite a bit of credence, as if the matter were one of doxa, simple difference of opinion with plausible arguments on either side. Janicaud argues for a reinvigoration of the late Heidegger’s phenomenology of the inapparent, with strong emphasis on Gelassenheit (the letting-be of things in their truth) as a methodological principle. The latter was food more for theological thought than for philosophical thought in its own prime, and has only become more mystical, more otherworldly in its inertia (or legacy). Moreover, Janicaud inherits the philosophico-theological concept of finitude from Heidegger, a concept he does not seem to notice he shares with Henry, Marion, and so on.

God and the gods remain a force to be reckoned with in Heidegger’s thought. Famously, “only a god can save us.” The gods have passed over and left our world disenchanted in the Beiträge, and we await their return. This is the meaning of finitude: we require salvation, re-enchantment. Janicaud’s polemic fails in the end because of a commitment to this position; once we uncover this stake at the heart of Janicaud’s own work, we realize his true place in the entire debate – he, too, is a theologian.

Let us turn to a more satisfying approach.

“I take the formula ‘God is dead’ literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. And religion is finished, too. As Jean-Luc Nancy has strongly stated, there is something irreversible here. What is ultimately important in this is to figure out the subjective mechanism explaining how people can so easily believe that it is nothing of the sort and that religion prospers; or even, as it is so often said at this time, that religion returns. Admittedly, nothing returns, and we do not have to believe in specters. The Deceased drifts away solitary and forgotten in His anonymous, stateless tomb.”

Badiou, “God is Dead,” in Briefings on Existence, 23.

We would do well, first, to note that this “short treatise on ontology” has been translated into German as Gott ist Tot. As Badiou notes in this introductory essay, it sets the tone for the whole work, everything following it, as he puts it, operating in its clearing.

We shall put Badiou face to face with Marion. Both try to answer the question: what remains after the death of God? We’ve seen what remains for Marion: God. For Badiou, what remains is the drama of the decomposition, the theatre of the Dead God. This “ultimately bloody drama” is really an inertia, history catching up with the event. The dead God is not the God of metaphysics, or of poetry, but precisely Marion’s God, the God of religion.

Against our phenomenologists of religion, then, Badiou claims that the God of religion is the Dead God, and that the death of the God of metaphysics does not necessarily follow from this. This God is Man, the autonomous Man of secular humanisms here and abroad. This God has been deconstructed, reconstructed, and shown to have died with, alongside of, God. Against both Gods, Badiou evokes a god or divine principle more in line with Heidegger’s god or godhead, the god which alone can “save us.” This is the god of the poets, and it is not dead (but nor is it alive). This is the god of flight, the god that has taken flight and left the world in inertia, in a disenchanted state. This god offers the poet and, through the poet, us, the possibility of re-enchantment. This god of the poem – in truth, gods of the poem – must be, according to Badiou, snuffed out. These gods are the only remaining support for the philosophies of finitude, against which Badiou ceaselessly rails. Finitude as a philosophical construct operates to keep the divine door open, “the trace of an afterlife in the movement that entrusts the overcoming of the religion-God and the metaphysics-God to the poem-God” (“God is Dead,” 29). It is fitting that poetry’s task is that of putting its own God to death. Philosophy will work in a parallel manner on the concept of finitude. One is undoubtedly correct in seeing in this “mission” a military-religious charge. It is the final crusade: “troubl[ing] the real when being silent,” to pluck a line from “Here,” a poem by Guennadi Aigui that Badiou cites.

It thus appears that Nietzsche’s task has been taken up in no uncertain terms by Badiou, despite his previous claims to find in Nietzsche less of an ally that might be expected.

Small steps toward a theory of practical ensembles

The following post is the first in a rather unorganized series, an endeavor that will undoubtedly take several attempts and will certainly produce several false starts. Having just finished the recently translated lecture series on The Century by Badiou, I’m excited to put some ideas down, even in very rough fashion, regarding a development Badiou’s text produced in my thinking about such problems as community, (political, artistic, scientific, amorous) movements, and groups and the subjectivities of groups. This is something I’d been thinking about for quite some time, and so this is perhaps something I sought out in Badiou, something that many readers would find uninteresting or peripheral with respect to Badiou’s real thematic foci. Of course these readers are correct. Nevertheless.

What is a group? The aim of a micropolitical inquiry into group-formation is to propose a typology of qualitatively different groups classified by genetic history, and then to study the dynamics between the group types. Groups or we-subjects can be broadly divided into three inconsistent types on the basis of their comportment toward the real of their subjectivities: I. those that maintain a representational relation with the real (parties and states, for instance); II. those that maintain a material or presentational relation with the real (microscopic assemblages, revolutionary/inventive subjectivities); III. those that maintain an ambiguous relation with the real – and this cannot be an intermittent ambiguity, but is instead a necessary ambiguity (e.g., art movements which adhere to the principles of a manifesto or other imaginary identificatory device but at the same time continually effectuate revolutionary changes in what it is possible to do in terms of thought, praxis, etc.).

The real is inconsistent, discontinuous, fragmented multiplicity. Badiou claims that “[t]he real may be encountered, manifested, or constructed, but it is not represented.” The Century, 108. Presentational groups reflect this character of the real: they only exist in particularity, in moments of dissonance (political, artistic, etc.), leaping up from and out of the cold representationalist sea like warm-blooded, iridescent flashes. There is probably no such thing as a “presentational-group manifesto.” There is no possibility of following a pathbreaking leader, no chance of adhering to a doctrine. There is only a spark in search of a powder keg, Breton said. There where the real avails itself of an encounter stands the presentational group. The Idea itself is action, and it has, as Idea, a materiality all its own.

“A demonstration or an insurrection, and more broadly a political sequence, or even an artistic creation seized in the violence of its gesture, are in no way representable. Fraternity is not representable. As I’ve already suggested, the unwarranted appeal to large, inert, macroscopic – and therefore supposedly ‘objective’ – sets (class-in-itself, race, nation…) infects subjectivation by way of its presumed representative legitimacy. But only inertia can be represented.”

Badiou, The Century, ibid.

This is, moreover, one reason why presentational and ambiguous groups are not subject to discussion as such: by the time they’ve become “household names,” by the time it becomes possible to trade opinions about them, they’ve already become inert, qualitatively different. Deleuze, for instance, abhors discussion for this very reason.

Each typological variant has traits unique to it, insofar as some relations resist representation but acquiesce to presentation, or resist presentation but acquiesce to representation, and some cannot be pigeonholed in this way due to a constitutive ambi-valence (ambi = both, multiple; valence = capacity, power).

Badiou gives us a way of thinking about group formation, drawing from Sartre and Lacan:

“Since the being of the subject is the lack-of-being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project that exceeds him that an individual can hope to attain some subjective real. Thenceforth, the ‘we’ constructed in and by this project is the only thing that is truly real…. The individual is thus, in its very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject.”

Badiou, The Century, 100-101.

According to Badiou, a subject is such only insofar as a process of truth authorizes him to say ‘we.’ One can say ‘I’ only so long as one can say ‘we.’ The truth procedure to which the subject attaches and which constitutes the subject presents or represents some real, namely, the real of the we-subjectivity. The party, the state, the faith becomes worth dying for; indeed, it would be an honor. Can we not see in this a valuable insight for thinking about political and religious organizations and the ways in which power is inflected in their operations? Perhaps it is not, as Foucault prophesied, or not only, the law which has taken over the management of decisions over life and death (the quintessential function of biopower); perhaps, instead, the we-subjectivities of representational groups have usurped this responsibility. The legitimacy of saying ‘we’ is guaranteed in the real of the group; after this is secured, after the real has been accessed, the we-subject has a stake in Honor, in upholding the Law of the real, and its very identity is placed in peril in the slightest manifestation of doubt vis-a-vis the veracity of the real of the group; death becomes a way into immortality, a solidification of identity. (It might be possible to move this argument out of the general “ideology critiques” we’re so familiar with. The rudiments of the schema are only taking root.)

This line of inquiry has a history. Micropolitics (Deleuze & Guattari’s word in A Thousand Plateaus) or the politics of collective desire would probably be the correct moniker, though in the framework of the latter thinkers, this name is redundant. We see plenty of precedents in the history of modern thought: Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociological and -criminological inquiries; Gilbert Simondon’s notion of collective individuation, however underdeveloped; Sartre’s late investigations into the praxis of practical ensembles, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason; Foucault and the microphysics of power; Jacques Donzelot in The Policing of Families, a central micropolitical text; perhaps Bourdieu, Stiegler, and DeLanda today, not to mention Badiou’s lectures here cited and undoubtedly in Logiques des mondes (my French isn’t near strong enough, so I eagerly anticipate the translation). This is a sort of offhand list of resources; I would venture the claim that a micropolitical approach to group-formation and group-activity is not a determinative focus of any of the above figures or works.

I would like to end this rather scattered, allusive, and no doubt disappointing post with a constructive, and revealing, excerpt from Badiou, once again. He writes: “From the end of the seventies onwards, the century has bequeathed to us the following question: What is a ‘we’ that is not subject to the ideal of an ‘I,’ a ‘we’ that does not pretend to be a subject?” (Badiou, The Century, 96.) He concludes this quite central essay, “Anabasis,”:

“[T]oday, everything that is not already mired in corruption raises the question of where a ‘we’ could originate that would not be prey to the ideal of the fusional, quasi-military ‘I’ that dominated the century’s adventure; a ‘we’ that would freely convey its own immanent disparity without thereby dissolving itself. What does ‘we’ mean in times of peace rather than war? How are we to move from the fraternal ‘we’ of the epic [note: where alterity is recognized only as the alterity of the adversary] to the disparate ‘we’ of togetherness [note: in Paul Celan's sense, perhaps closer to an alterity of impossible friendship], of the set, without ever giving up on the demand that there be a ‘we’? I too exist within this question.”

Badiou, The Century, 96-97.

What is a multiplicity?

A fundamental question! Philosophies of the multiple or manifold today abound, as philosophy recovers from its linguistic detour. So much has been said on the idea of the pure multiple, and yet, it seems, what really needs to be said has not been. Far be it from me to enunciate philosophy’s subject; but I think I can put forth some suggestions, if only in clarification.

Deleuze is the first true, systematic thinker of multiplicity in the philosophical / ontological sphere. For Deleuze, everything is multiplicity. Most importantly, however, “multiplicity” usually refers to a virtual Idea or problem, the unextended, creative plenum of ideality folded into the material world as we know it in a banal sense. The notion that “everything is multiplicity,” and especially in the latter sense, is what allows Deleuze to move beyond the structuralism with which he begins. (For Deleuze’s seminal ontological works, Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense are undoubtedly attempts to provide ontological orientation to the basic operations of structural anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics; what emerges from this attempt is a theory that supersedes structuralism tout court: “post-structuralism” might be less accurate than “genetic structuralism,” however.) Though the two works just mentioned contain much more rigorous presentations of the idea of multiplicity, it is in Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy? that we obtain the most basic insights into the nature of multiplicity. One could turn to practically any page in this text and find a slightly different “definition” of multiplicity on each one. Yet there is a constancy of thought as well, as each supplementation or erasure can be assimilated with the claims put forward in Difference & Repetition concerning multiplicities as Ideas, in the discussion that begins with an analysis of Kant (“Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference”). I will quote an excerpt that is all the more revealing in that it comes at the end of Deleuze & Guattari’s brief inquiry into Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology in Being & Event:

By starting from a neutralized base, the set, which indicates any multiplicity whatever, Badiou draws up a line that is single, although it may be very complex, on which functions and concepts will be spaced out, the latter above the former: philosophy thus seems to float in an empty transcendence, as the unconditioned concept that finds the totality of its generic conditions in the functions (science, poetry, politics, and love). Is this not the return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of the higher philosophy? It seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support the hypothesis of any multiplicity whatever (even mathematics has had enough of set-theoreticism). There must be at least two multiplicities, two types, from the outset. This is not because dualism is better than unity but because the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the two. Hence, the two types will certainly not be one above the other but rather one beside the other, against the other, face to face, or back to back. Functions and concepts, actual states of affairs and virtual events, are two types of multiplicities that are not distributed on an errant line but related to two vectors that intersect, one according to which states of affairs actualize events and the other according to which events absord (or rather, adsorb) states of affairs.”

-Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 152-153. Emphasis added.

Even the One, they claim at some earlier point in this text, is a multiplicity, having multiple elements which grant it consistency (in this case, being and non-being, themselves multiplicities, and so on ad infinitum). Everything is multiplicity, but are we by that sweeping claim to understand that everything consists of smaller elements, can be broken down into component parts? Is this a new mereology? Not at all. And the reason is deceptively simple. Let us take an analytic approach and follow this thread nevertheless. Take any empirical thing or state of affairs. At the very least, it is constructed of physical components: chemical elements, protons and neutrons, etc. Now strip this physical item of all its properties, down to the single, smallest possible component particle (it does not matter what it is – quark, lepton, something smaller still). It is still a multiplicity by virtue of its relation to other quarks, leptons, whatevers. Let us take another step: strip this particle of all relation to other things. It remains a multiplicity by virtue of its genetic history and its relation to the potentials insisting in it, which are just as real as this physical particle, though non-actual, unextended. Furthermore, as any physicist will tell you, even this (purely academic) minute particle is in a state of flux, and can thereby be said to constitute a field of individuation in itself, which field can only be understood as a multiplicity in becoming (different/ciating into ever more multiplicities).

What is a multiplicity? A field of exterior relations – what I prefer to call proximities.

Deleuze & Guattari point up a competing theory of multiplicities: Badiou’s. A brief detour: Badiou takes Deleuze & Guattari’s criticism seriously, and his more recent writings on Deleuze reflect this more than does his work stamped with the proper name of his critic. The intensive, the entre-deux is appreciated as the “beyond” of the One and the Multiple: “‘[B]eyond’ clearly does not mean a synthesis or a third transcendent term. ‘Beyond’ means in the middle, wherein Being is what activates the essential falsehood of the true and virtualizes the truth of the false through the rhizomatic-network shifter between virtualization and actualization.” (Badiou, “Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology,” Briefings on Existence, 65.) In short, as Deleuze & Guattari claim, there must be at least two types of multiplicity because there is a third.

Badiou’s idea of multiplicity, the set (which, moreover, refuses definition because to define necessitates a counting procedure, where the parts or elements of a set, pure multiples or sets themselves, can only be thought as what-will-have-been-counted), always comprises the name of the void as minimum of Being, the “point of Being” of any situation. The void or multiple of nothing subtracts itself from any presentation, unpresents itself, and hangs over as remainder, “phantom of inconsistency.” In this way, all sets or multiples are themselves multiples of multiples: even the multiple of nothing is a multiple of multiples insofar as the void “insists” but resists presentation.

What is a multiplicity? Insofar as belonging, inclusion, and subtraction are relations, a field of relations.

Badiou, unlike Deleuze & Guattari, does not suggest that all relations are exterior. Indeed, for Badiou, there are intrinsic relations that, by virtue of this thesis, expose the entire ontological theory of sets as multiples of multiples to the criticism that a dialectic of negation is operative, even if synthesis cannot ever be complete (if only because there is no set of all sets). Subtraction is not negation, to be sure. But the logic of sets is indeed a logic of contraries. After all, the unpresented grounds (abyssally, it is true) the presented and reacts in relation to the presentation of the presented, precisely by a dialectical procedure of unpresentation or subtraction. Subtraction or unpresentation itself escapes the charge of dialecticism, but its relation with presentation is unquestionably dialectical, and this because of its intrinsic predisposition to negate the presented, because it includes within itself its other as itself. The same claims hold a fortiori for the presented, for every presented implies an unpresented and a process of unpresentation.