SNEER OF COLD COMMAND I read in Foot’s
rouged Shelley, his upstart-demotic fervour
impacting – time and again – that fist of ice.
The vision is commanding: agitation
as life’s work, as the triumph in slow-motion
of life over its least self; the once-drowned
dried and rekindled, replenishing the earth.
Shelley at full warp’s something else, though lacking
impulse control, careening off the walls
of the launch-tunnel. Not a nick on the unfazed
grimace of Westwell, even so, nor any skin
off Aberavon’s nose. The look of men
who have had others flayed is not the least
perturbed by these excoriating verses.

For a couple of years I used to joke that Being and Event ii, when finally published in its long-awaited English translation, should adopt the title everyone seemed to have been using for it anyway and call itself Logics of Worlds (Forthcoming) (it does, after all, concern the logical coming-forth of worlds…). Anyway, any readers of this blog who miss the occasional poetry – and there’s more of that on the way too – may be interested to learn that Intercapillary Editions are preparing a sumptuous print-on-demand edition of my 50-poem sequence Half Cocks, as well as a free e-book for those who don’t fancy paying just under twenty quid for a lot of overwrought nonsense in hardcover.

I also promise to pull my finger out and send Records on Ribs the sleeve notes I promised them, so there’s still a chance that Prolegomenon might make it out some time this year…

It was established earlier on that the rule of reflexivity for an equivalence relation could be derived from the rules of symmetry and transitivity. (Often it is simply stated as one of the three properties of an equivalence relation, even though it is entailed by the other two). Let’s now rewrite this derivation using the language of truth-values.

We have, already, these two statements:

Rule of symmetry: Id(a, b) ⊆ Id(b, a), which entails that Id(a, b) ≡ Id(b, a)
Rule of transitivity: Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) ⊆ Id(a, c)

If we apply these to the “path” from a to b and back again, we get:

Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, a) ⊆ Id(a, a)

but because Id(a, b) ≡ Id(b, a), Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, a) is just the same as Id(a, b), so we can simplify the above to the pair of statements:

Id(a, b) ⊆ Id(a, a)
Id(b, a) ⊆ Id(b, b)

which, taken together, give us:

Rule of Reflexivity: Id(a, b) ⊆ Id(a, a) ∩ Id(b, b)

Now let us consider the case of the completely isolated element which is not even connected to itself, e.g. where the truth-value of a ∼ a is 0. In this case, we can say that Id(a, a) = 0, and therefore Id(a, b) ⊆ 0. This re-establishes the rule that an element unconnected to itself cannot be connected to any other element: we can now say that if the truth-value of a ∼ a is 0, then so is the truth-value of any a ∼ b.

The inexistent, then, is any element that is minimally connected to any other element, including itself; and it is its minimal degree of connection to itself that prescribes its minimal degree of connection to any other element.

What about elements for which the truth-value of a ∼ a is neither 0 (minimal) nor 1 (maximal)? These elements have an intermediate degree of existence, which can be measured as the value of Id(a, a). This is just what Badiou says: for every element in the “support set” A, that element exists to precisely the extent that it is connected to itself, or to precisely the extent that it is true that a ∼ a. Moreover, no element can be more strongly connected to any other element than it is to itself: an element’s degree of existence prescribes the maximum degree to which it can be connected to any other element.

We now have the basic vocabulary of Badiou’s theory of the object; the concepts of the “phenomenal component”, “atom” and “real atom” are all built up from the foundations I’ve laid down here. At bottom, these foundations are very simple: they define a relation among elements of set governed by the rules of symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity, in which degrees of “relatedness” between pairs of elements can be logically compared and combined. What, then, is this theory for? I would suggest that it does the following:

i) It formalises some basic intuitions about the internal composition of objects: that their elements may be related to each other, and can be partitioned into discrete collections based on how they are related. Objects are not simply disparate collections of unrelated pieces: they are often internally articulated, with distinct components.
ii) It introduces a notion of logical compatibility among relationships, which shows how one set of relationships may constrain others, bringing about a kind of emergent integrity. Objects are not chaotic or random in their internal organisation: one aspect of an object’s organisation reinforces or limits another.
iii) It gives a clear sense to the concept of inexistence: an element of an object inexists relative to that object if it does not participate in any relationship with any element of that object, including itself. The inexistent is, so to speak, absolutely withdrawn: its presentation establishes that not every aspect of an object is visible or – to take it from another angle – logically consequential.
iv) The inexistent in turn provides the zero-degree of the concept of existential intensity, which enables us to speak of elements of an object having a greater or lesser degree of existence relative to the object in which they appear. An object is not an “all or nothing” proposition, immediately transparent in every respect: parts of it may veil other parts – or, alternatively, bring them into relief.

The theme of the “real atom” and the materialist postulate is more difficult (and there is worse to follow), but equally philosophically suggestive; in a (possibly much) later post, I hope to show why. Certainly some readers will wonder whether all the maths is worth it; I can only say that in my own experience so far, perseverence brings not only clarity but also the sublime feeling of having picked up and learned to use a new tool of thought – it’s not wholly unlike getting your hands on a synthesizer for the first time…

Let’s take a look now at the rule of transitivity. Consider this triangle of connected elements:

The rule of transitivity for a simple equivalence relation states that if a ∼ b and b ∼ c, then a ∼ c. We can recast this in terms of truth values as follows: it is never more true that a ∼ b and b ∼ c than it is true that a ∼ c. In other words:

Rule of transitivity: Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) ⊆ Id(a, c)

The question is, what is the meaning of “and” (∩) in this statement? The intuitive notion which I will take as my guide here is this: a chain is as strong as its weakest link. In other words, the truth-value Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) is never stronger than the weakest of the two truth-values Id(a, b) and Id(b, c). It follows, therefore, that the truth-value Id(a, c) is always at least as strong as the weakest of these two truth values.

However, as the “diamond” example with which I closed my last post shows, it is not always as simple as saying that one truth-value is stronger than another: in that example, while it’s clear that 0 ⊆ 1, there is no way to decide which of ⌊ and ⌋ is the stronger. We will shortly have need of another pair of concepts, which Badiou calls the “conjunction” and “envelope” of truth-values.

First of all, however, let’s consider the above rewritten rule of transitivity in the case where Ω = {0, 1}. Here, it’s quite simple:

i) If both Id(a, b) and Id(b, c) are 1, then it is completely true that a ∼ b ∧ b ∼ c, so the value of Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) is also 1. It then follows, since this value cannot be greater than that of Id(a, c) that Id(a, c) is also 1: it is completely true that a ∼ c.

ii) If either (or both) of Id(a, b) and Id(b, c) is 0, then it is completely false that a ∼ b ∧ b ∼ c, so the value of Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) must be 0. It does not follow that Id(a, c) must also be 0, since Id(a, c) may be greater than the conjoined values of Id(a, b) and Id(b, c).

iii) If Id(a, c) = 0 then either or both of Id(a, b) and Id(b, c) must be 0.

We can see, then, that in the simplest case, where there is never any ambiguity about which of two truth-values is the stronger, the rewritten rule of transitivity supports the transitive property of a plain equivalence relation. But we now need to give a sense to the symbol ∩ (“conjunction”) that will still be meaningful when neither Id(a, b) ⊆ Id(b, c) nor Id(b, c) ⊆ Id(a, b).

The concept we need here is that of the greatest lower bound (g.l.b) of any two (or more) values. Simply put, the g.l.b. of a set P of truth-values is the strongest truth-value x such that for all y ε P, x ⊆ y. This is the value that Badiou calls the “conjunction” of two or more truth-values.

In our previous “diamond” example, the g.l.b. of ⌊ and ⌋ is simply 0: there is no truth-value greater than 0 that is less than or equal to both ⌊ and ⌋. The “left-deviation” and “right-deviation” are thus absolutely disjunct: they have no truth in common (although the maximum truth value, 1, is the least upper bound, or “envelope” in Badiou’s terminology, of both). Moreover, the g.l.b. of 1 and ⌊ is ⌊, and the g.l.b. of 1 and ⌋ is ⌋ – generally, 1 ∩ x = x, while 0 ∩ x = 0.

We can now answer the question posed at the end of the previous post: given

Id(a, c) = ⌊
Id(b, c) = ⌋

what can be the value of Id(a, b)? It must be such that Id(a, b) ∩ ⌋ ⊆ ⌊; thus, it can be either ⌊ (in which case Id(a, b) ∩ Id(b, c) = ⌊ ∩ ⌋ = 0), or 0 (with the same result). It cannot be ⌋, because ⌋ ∩ ⌋ = ⌋, and it is not the case that ⌋ ⊆ ⌊. For the same reason, it cannot be 1.

We can see, then, that the truth-value of a ∼ c constrains the truth-values of a ∼ b and b ∼ c, according to the logic of conjunction: the nature of this constraint will depend on the order-structure of Ω. What is starting to emerge here is a sense of the logical compatibility of the connections between elements of an object, the necessity that the diagram of its interior network of relations submit to the regulation of a “transcendental” which prescribes which patterns of interconnectedness are logically compatible and which are not. It is on this basis that the entire phenomenal complexity of the object can be unfolded and analysed.

My sense of it is that “compatibility” is the successor notion to “consistency” in Badiou’s ontological thinking: that while it belongs to beings merely to “consist” as multiples, the world of objects is one of compatible (or perhaps “compossible”) appearances. When we speak in a vaguely Latourian fashion of networks of entities engaged in shifting patterns of alliance and contestation, or in a Deleuzian manner of “rhizomes” in which connections proliferate without reference to any master signifier or phallic command-centre, we have not yet begun to address the question of how such structures generate their own internal constraints, or what the logical contexture of such constraints might be. This, I think, is where Badiou’s mapping of the transcendental of appearance marks a significant “move” with respect to the philosophy of things and the worlds in which they reside and combine.

In the next post, I’ll go on to look at the rule of reflexivity, and the way in which this rule can be rewritten so as to accommodate different degrees of existence – including, crucially, the zero-degree of inexistence.

To recap: so far, we have an image of an “object” as something with an internally differentiated structure, within which elements appear as a) connected to each other and b) grouped into discrete parts based on their connections. Mathematically, this structure is like an equivalence relation, except that it also supports the presentation of “inexistent” elements that are not connected to anything, even themselves. Rather than simply listing all of the connected pairs of elements, we take all of the possible pairs of elements in the structure and assign a value to each saying whether the elements in the pair are connected or not.

The notation we use for this structure is (A, Id), where A is the set {a, b, c…} of elements in the structure (which Badiou calls the “support set” of the object), and Id is the function which assigns to each pair of elements a value representing how connected they are. This value is taken from a special set, Ω, which contains all of the “truth values” for Id. In the simplest case, the only two available values are 0 (not connected) and 1 (totally connected), and so Ω is the set {0, 1}. I will shortly be considering the more complicated case, where Ω provides a range of truth-values, which are arranged in a kind of lattice known as a Heyting algebra. First of all, however, an adjustment in terminology is needed.

In our original example, two elements could be either connected or not connected. If we see the function Id(a, b) as assigning a truth-value to the statement a ∼ b (“a is connected to b“), then this suggests another way of putting it: in our original example, the statement that two elements were connected could be either completely true (1) or completely false (0).

The rule of symmetry, for example, can then be restated as: Id(b, a), or the truth-value of b ∼ a, is equal to Id(a, b), or the truth-value of a ∼ b. In fact, we can weaken this slightly to the following:

Rule of symmetry: Id(b, a) ⊆ Id(a, b)

In other words, the truth-value of b ∼ a is less than or equal to the truth-value of a ∼ b: b is never any more connected to a than a is to b. (Note that we use the symbol ⊆ to mean “less than or equal to” when comparing truth-values, and that 0 ⊆ 1).

(It turns out that this way of stating the rule of symmetry actually entails that Id(a, b) ≡ Id(b, a), but we get this “strong” statement for free as a consequence of the “weaker” statement Id(a, b) ⊆ Id(b, a). I leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader).

What is the advantage of this restatement in terms of truth-values? It means that we can uphold the rule of symmetry even when a ∼ b is neither completely true nor completely false. Let’s take as our range of truth-values the following “diamond”:

“True” is 1 and “False” is 0; we’ll use the symbols ⌊ and ⌋ for “right deviation” and “left deviation” respectively. Here, then:

0 ⊆ ⌊
0 ⊆ ⌋
⌊ ⊆ 1
⌋ ⊆ 1

and because ⊆ is transitive, obviously 0 ⊆ 1 as well. Note however, that neither ⌊ ⊆ ⌋ nor ⌋ ⊆ ⌊ (this statement in itself probably identifies me as a right-deviationist).

Now if two elements of an object, a and b, are neither completely connected nor completely disconnected, then the strength of their association can be measured by one of these “intermediate” truth values, ⌊ and ⌋. We can also say, using our revised rule of symmetry, that if the truth-value of a ∼ b is ⌊, then so is the truth-value of b ∼ a. But what we now have to do is restate the rules of transitivity and reflexivity in terms of truth-values so that we can say for example what the value of Id(a, b) might be if:

Id(a, c) = ⌊
Id(b, c) = ⌋

This will be the subject of the next post.

In this series of posts, I’m going to have a go at “motivating” the mathematical theory of the object that Badiou develops in Book III of Logics of Worlds, and relating it to some other currents in “object-oriented” thinking. In my view, Badiou does a strangely poor job of explaining what all of the mathematical machinery in Book III is actually for: what good it might do to think of objects in the way he proposes, what the philosophical import of these proposals might be. So I’m going to try to supply some answers of my own to these questions, although of course they may not be the same answers as those Badiou himself would give.

So far as the mathematical motivation is concerned, I’m not able to give an account of the development of the theory Badiou draws on, or of the particular kinds of problems it was framed to investigate. What I want to do instead is to “remotivate” it from the outside, to bring my own (philosophical) problems to it and see what it says about those. The outcome may well strike any passing mathematicians as bizarre, and I’m obliged at the outset to issue a very firm caveat lector concerning the likelihood of errors. For the most part, though, I’m going to steer away from a kind of technical mathematical demonstration for which I have little aptitude, and concentrate on getting some of the basic concepts clear.

To begin with, then, I’d like to talk about an “object” as a network of entities, something with an internal structure that can be diagrammed. Are the entities in the network themselves objects? Well, perhaps; but for present purposes, we’re only interested in their participation in the diagram of some other object’s interior, in which capacity they appear only as “elements” or as the “support” of the network that is strung out between them. We can draw this network as a graph of connected points, for example:

figure 1

A few notes on this figure:

• Any two “elements” (the labelled circles) are either connected or not connected. (Later we will consider greater and lesser degrees of connectedness). As a shorthand, for the moment we’ll write “a is connected to b” as a ∼ b.
• Connections are bi-directional: if a is connected to b, then b is connected to a. We can express this as a rule of symmetry: a ∼ b -> b ∼ a.
• Not all connections are shown. There are some “implicit” connections, which can be inferred to exist by following some simple rules that will be discussed in a moment.
• Of the two elements that are unconnected to any other elements, one (h) is connected to itself and the other (i) is not.
• Within this graph there are four distinct parts – groups of connected elements. (In fact, i, which is not even connected to itself, does not really form a part in the same sense as the others).

In addition to the connections explicitly shown in this graph, there are some “implicit” connections. First of all, if there is a path between any two elements, then those elements are implicitly connected: if a ∼ b, and b ∼ c, then a ∼ c (this is the rule of transitivity). Secondly, if an element is connected to any other element at all, then it must be connected to itself. This is the rule of reflexivity, and it follows directly from the rules of symmetry and transitivity:

• Rule of symmetry: if a ∼ b, then b ∼ a.
• Rule of transitivity: if a ∼ b, and b ∼ c, then a ∼ c.
• Rule of reflexivity: if a ∼ b, then by the rule of symmetry we have the path a ∼ b ∼ a, and by the rule of transitivity we then have a ∼ a.

These rules can also be used to define a particular type of order relation: an equivalence relation. Given a set of elements {a, b, c…}, an equivalence relation partitions the set into subsets like the distinct groups of connected elements in the figure above: all of the elements in the same subset are equivalent to all of the other elements in that subset. In an equivalence relation, the rule of reflexivity is unconditional: for all a in the relation, a ∼ a. An element that is not connected to itself cannot participate in the relation at all: it is inexistent from the point of view of the relation.

One way to understand this is to see the equivalence relation itself as a collection of statements of the type “a is equivalent to b“. Whenever such a statement is made, it immediately follows by the rules of symmetry and transitivity that a ∼ a and that b ∼ b: there never appears in the relation any a for which the rule of reflexivity does not hold true. In the graph above, on the other hand, we have an element i that is not connected to itself (or to anything else). It belongs to no part of the object (that is, to no group of connected elements). It’s just there.

An equivalence relation can be represented as a set of ordered pairs {(a, b), (c, d)…}, where the presence of each pair (a, b) means that a ∼ b. There is no way in this representation to show an element i that is not connected to anything. We therefore need a different representation for the graph in figure 1, one which holds information about the collection of elements {a, b, c…} separately from information about which elements are connected to each other.

One way to do this is to use the notation Badiou uses for an object, (A, Id), where A is the set of elements {a, b, c…}, and Id is a function A⊗A → Ω which takes each pair (a, b) of elements in A to a value in another set, Ω. In the case that Ω is the set {0, 1}, the function Id splits A⊗A into precisely two sets of pairs of elements of A. Those where Id(a, b) = 1 are connected; those where Id(a, b) = 0 are not connected. The equivalence relation containing all of the connected elements in the graph is the preimage (under Id) of {1} in A⊗A. But the function Id can also assign the value 0 to some (a, a) without violating the rule of reflexivity in this equivalence relation, provided that Id(a, b) = 0 for all b. It thus has the power, which the equivalence relation lacks, of naming the inexistent.

We’re now coming quite close to where Badiou’s account of this “object”, (A, Id), begins. As you can see, with Ω (the codomain of Id) = {0, 1}, we are already able to partition an object into connected parts, and to say which of its elements are connected to which of its other elements. Things really start to get interesting, however, when Ω is some larger, more structured set. In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about what kind of mathematical object Ω might be, and what consequences this has for our view of the object as “internally” a network of connected entities.

Here’s a little class I’ve found useful lately:

public class MapBuilder<K , V> {
    public static <K , V> MapBuilder <K , V> mapping(K key, V value) {
        return new MapBuilder<K , V>(key, value);
    }

    private final Map<K , V> map = new HashMap<K , V>();

    private MapBuilder(K key, V value) {
        map.put(key, value);
    }

    public MapBuilder<K , V> and(K key, V value) {
        map.put(key, value);
        return this;
    }

    public Map<K , V> build() {
        return map;
    }
}

You use it like this:

private static final Map<String , String> knownUris =
    mapping("http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd", "xhtml1-transitional.dtd")
    .and("http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent", "xhtml-lat1.ent")
    .and("http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-symbol.ent", "xhtml-symbol.ent")
    .and("http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-special.ent", "xhtml-symbol.ent")
    .build();

Obviously you have to import static the mapping method for it to work.

It’s a bit annoying that even much worse languages (like PHP) have a nice built-in syntax for declaring associative arrays. But there you go.

• Ontological: Multiplicity is what is (“the One” is not)
• Ontic: Beings (multiples counted-as-one) are what there are
• Phenomenal: Objects (beings indexed on a transcendental) are what appear
• Ecological*: Difference (within and between objects) is what there is

* This is a bit of a leap, obviously. But I think it’s a better term than “intra-mundane”.

Cathal Coughlan talks about Fatima Mansions, being skint and pretending to insert a shampoo bottle in the form of the B.V.M. in one’s bottom in front of a stadium full of infuriated Milanese U2 fans.

The Adventures of Flannery from Jessica Fuller on Vimeo.

The “Picard Manoeuvre” is known to fans of Star Trek:TNG as both a novel and daring military tactic invented by the Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and a gestural tic (the Captain’s habit of adjusting his tunic by pulling down on the hem to straighten it). It’s Picard’s “signature” in both senses, as the actor Patrick Stewart found when he unconsciously reproduced the “Picard manoeuvre” onstage whilst playing Coriolanus, to knowing snickers from a section of the audience. In this post I’m going to talk about one of Graham Harman’s “signature” moves, which is both a novel and daring philosophical invention and a recurring personal motif. In homage to both Picard and Harman, I’m calling this move “The Harman Manoeuvre”.

We need to start with Heidegger, and the “tool analysis” through which Heidegger works out his account of what objects are. In human experience, objects appear as objects of experience: they have a practical relationship to our needs and projects, a sensuous relationship to our perceiving senses, and an epistemological relationship to our theories about and attitudes towards the world. Heidegger analyses these relationships with respect to our way of being in the world, our existence as knowing, perceiving and acting creatures. He also observes that the objects to which we have these relationships seem to escape from our grasp, to “withdraw” from the place they occupy in our experience: tools fall into disuse, buildings fall into ruin, and this “falling” is a kind of falling away from us, a little like the gradual estrangement of a personal acquaintance. The objects of our experience are also objects apart from our experience, but their parting is experienced by us as a kind of haunting separation: the trace, in experience, of something that has become withdrawn or subtracted from experience.

When it comes to interactions between objects of our experience, we clearly experience objects as belonging to a world of causal relationships and natural laws. We swing the hammer so that it strikes the nail, and the nail is driven into the wood. But what of the interactions between objects in their separate existence – the hammer falling off the shelf during an earthquake, and cracking the floor tile below? This is a crucial question for Harman, and it really concerns the possibility of objects relating to each other as objects separately from our relationship to them as objects of experience. In other words, the question is not so much “does the hammer exist when I’m not using it” (Heidegger would readily affirm that it does) as “does the hammer have a relationship to the nail, apart from my intention to use the one to strike the other”?

The move that I’m calling “the Harman Manoeuvre” goes like this. Harman asserts that the hammer has the same kind of relationship to the nail as I have to the hammer; the nail both offers sensuous properties and practical affordances to the hammer, and withdraws from this relationship into a separate existence, there being more to a nail than its capacity for being hammered. Even though a hammer is a rather unknowing, unfeeling sort of entity, without what might be called projects of its own, it nevertheless has its own relationship with the nail as an object for it, and it is from this relationship that the nail is simultaneously withdrawn as an object in its own right. The Harman Manoeuvre, then, is the move whereby an aspect of the human-world relationship is attributed to relationships between objects in general, such that the ability of humans to sustain such relationships with bits of the world is reframed as only a local instance of a general rule.

The most immediately controversial aspect of this move is that for Heidegger the “being” of a hammer is not Dasein, the “being-there” that characterises mortal creatures with practical goals, moods, perceptions and the ability to apprehend the inevitability of their own death. There is a whole lot of structure that the human observer instantiates – not only cognitively, but in terms of its way of being in the world – that the hammer does not, having a quite distinct structure of its own (in particular, its useful qualities of rigidity and durability mean that it does not bear a great deal of mutable state). Does it make sense to speak of the hammer’s structure as being such that it can entertain “prehensions” (to use the term Steven Shaviro has been adapting from Whitehead) of other objects around it? Does the hammer possess a frame of reference into which the nail is “translated” (while the nail itself withdraws from this translation, exempting a shadowy part of itself from the frame)?

The boundary between Harman’s object-oriented ontology and panpsychism is an unstable one; how you draw it depends on what you think the minimal structure of psychism is. If you hold that there is something proto-psychic – or already actually psychic – about “prehension”, and you are working within a Whiteheadian ontology in which objects are concrescences marked in their innermost composition by the trace of an outside (actually I might be mixing Whitehead up with Derrida there, although if so I wouldn’t be the first), then some kind of panpsychism is unavoidable; and this means that the structure of human psychism is not a transcendent (or irredeemably traumatic) exception from the state of nature, but just a particularly refined and convoluted example of the way things are all over.

What’s interesting here that Harman’s insistence on the non-relational kernel of objects, their resilient or self-concealing withdrawal from relation, actually distances him from pansychism. Harman’s account of “vacuum-sealed” objects suggests that the global order of things is more a kind of universal unconscious: objects are deeply unconscious of each other, and deeply inaccessible to any kind of consciousness, such that the “translations” or prehensions that obtain between objects are a kind of flickering of sensuous interaction in the midst of a dark and nameless void of incomprehension – like an orgy during a blackout, if I can put it that way. Another way to put this might be to say that the ways in which objects make sense together and of each other, drawing each other into networks of mutual comprehension, constitute a shifting, ultimately contingent pattern of sense against a background of fathomless non-sense.

The strange thing is that this is not so different from a position that Harman explicitly rejects: the position that says that objects are a second-order phenomenon which only exist insofar as they are coalesced – whether by an observing consciousness or by some autopoetic mode of creative individuation – out of a primal flux. Harman is adamant that objects are what there is – that our ontology must be an ontology of beings, or an “onticology” (to use Levi Bryant’s useful term) – and yet his position on the withdrawing of objects from relationship means that the way in which objects are never fully coincides with the way they are together – the “network” composed by actants moving in concert or conflict is always subject to a lack or insufficiency owing to the subtraction of objects themselves from the lattice of relationships in which they participate. At the level of sensuous interaction, then, the opposition between meaningless primal chaos and second-order meaningful structure returns – even if objects remain the indissoluble support of both sides of this divide.

Portal at the Knitting Factory, playing Larvae / Illoomorpheme.

More (“Villas Ecto! Villas Ecto!”):

In the ontology of Badiou’s Being and Event, presentation doubles up as representation, the “count of the count”. This doubling-up takes us from “the situation”, the presented multiplicity that there is, to “the state of the situation”, the secondary presentation of this multiplicity as a collection of parts. Between these two levels of structure there is a mediating term, “the encyclopedia”, which stands for the provision within a situation of a nomenclature – a set of names and rules for naming – that can be used to identify some of its parts. From the point of view of the encyclopedia only that which is nameable exists, and exists only at the level of representation (that is, as a part). But the name itself, and the power of naming which it summons, are drawn from the level of presentation: they belong to the situation. The encyclopedia thus braids the two levels of structure together, forming an infrastructure of power/knowledge: an “order of things” that is placed as a filter between presentation and re-presentation.

In Logics of Worlds, “appearance” is the name Badiou gives to the being-in-its-place of a being, and it is the “transcendental” of a world that orders the placement of everything that appears. Is there a term which might be to “appearance” as “representation” is to “presentation” – a name for the appearance of appearance? Might the transcendental indexing of a world, like the encyclopedia, act as a kind of ligament between two levels (of structure in the latter case, and of manifestation in the former)?

Let’s call the appearance of appearance “spectacle”, and define it as follows: the spectacle is the explicit manifestation, within an order of appearance, of the machinery of objectification which determines the visibility of everything within that order. In Badiou’s formulation, an “object” within a world is a Heyting-valued set (A, Id), consisting of a “support set” A and a function Id which “indexes” pairs of elements of A on the transcendental of that world. The spectacular restaging of this object may be represented in the following manner. For each (a ε A, b ε A) in AxA, construct the pair ((a, b), V) where V = Id(a, b). The set of these pairs may be considered the “graph” of the indexing function Id on the support set A, and can be written (A, Id)*. All that then remains is to “objectify” this graph, by taking it as the support set of a second object, ((A, Id)*, Id’). We call (A, Id) the “objectification of A”, and ((A, Id)*, Id’) the “spectacle of A”.

The spectacle of A is the worldly manifestation of A’s publicity, the visibility of its visibility. It is what appears when we take as an object of the world the very network of identifications through which the original being A was itself objectified. Thus, to take the obvious example of those who are “famous for being famous”, the celebrity is the spectacle of the famous person, the manifestation not of the person themselves but of their fame: the sum of their photo opportunities outside nightclubs, the degree of identity between one chatshow appearance and the next. Alternatively, we might consider the managerialist bureaucratisation of education, with its continually metastasising assessment exercises and league tables, as maintaining the spectacle of learning: the immediate (if often subtle) efficacy of teaching and research being subordinated to an apparatus for the measurement of “impact”.

The spectacle of a being gives away (some, but not all of) the secrets of its objectification, revealing (and perhaps also spoofing or exaggerating) the norms underlying its apparent consistency. Hypersexualised femininity tells us something about the primary objectification which governs the social visibility (and viability) of women qua “sex objects”. Celebrity tells us that fame is the “manufactured” product of industrialised publicity; the RAE tells us that the university is a factory. There is a kind of obscure affinity between managerialism and camp: each purports to turn a spotlight on the underlying performativity of its object, reproducing in spectacle its constitutive powers of manifestation, and in doing so robbing it of the ability to be taken at face value.

The “society of the spectacle” is a society which employs spectacularisation in defence against (or is it in defence of?) the relative weakness and mediocrity of its primary objects (the things it is ostensibly “about” as a society), dedicating more and more energy to rendering luminous and compelling the appearance of a vital “public sphere” whilst evacuating this space of anything really worth talking about. (Consider, for example, the popular science journalism which informs us breathlessly of the “significance” of discoveries without being able to render anything more than the most perfunctory caricature of what has actually been discovered. All it knows, and all it cares to report, is the impactfulness of that which is impactful).

It is misguided to try to violently puncture “the spectacle”: it is not a realm of illusion covering a more fundamental reality, but a worldly apparatus which shares its world with the very objects whose manifestation it re-objectifies. Its powers are not really so great: it flourishes where other powers wane. Finally, as a parasitic redoubling of objectification, it is unable to stand against the creative unfolding of a subject, the determined re-entanglement of formal innovation with the unobjectifiable real.

Richard Seymour’s The Meaning of David Cameron is a short and pungent apologia for the Marxist categories of class and class war, which declares early on its intention to grate against the sensibilities of readers accustomed to the euphemistic treatment of such topics. The “meaning” of David Cameron, it turns out, is much the same as the “meaning” of any party leader situated within the neo-liberal consensus that unites “left”, “right” and “centre” parliamentary persuasions; which is to say that he is a cipher performing an established function within the apparatus of ruling class power.

Cameron’s personal “fitness for purpose” as the individual selected to perform this role is at best of secondary interest; Seymour argues persuasively (and contemptuously) that the distinctive “philosophy” he brings with him (Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism”) is scarcely more than mood-music: Blond’s cranky neo-mediaevalism is merely the holy water with which Cameronism consecrates the heart-burnings of the petit bourgeois. In reality, Cameron and Blair are – to borrow a phrase from Badiou’s recent The Meaning of Sarkozy – two badgers from the same hill: a pair of trendy vicars, or fashionable proxies for the theocracy of finance capital. Fashions change, but the neo-liberal gospel remains the same.

Seymour’s book considers three euphemisms, which label the vertices of Cameron’s electoral triangulation. These are “apathy” (a euphemism for popular disempowerment), “meritocracy” (a polite name for the untrammelled reproduction of class privilege) and “progress” (a cuddly version of Thatcher’s reactionary radicalism). With respect to the last, Seymour shows that British Conservatism has a long history of ideological capture of the energies and insights of radical dissent, and that the Tories are better understood as a party of reactionary novelty than as defenders of “tradition” in any straightforward sense.

For Thatcher, as later for Sarkozy, “the sixties” named a radical moment which it was imperative to reverse, occult and erase. One wonders what radical energies Cameron’s reactionary subjectivity is feeding off: he seems, for the moment, to be a class warrior without a clearly-defined enemy. Popular anger at Tory cuts is likely to provide him with plenty of opposition; but how will that opposition be characterised ideologically? Thatcher’s government, bolstered by public choice theory, was able to slander defenders of public services as rent-seeking special interest groups, self-serving enemies of “modernisation”. Will the same trick work a second time? It depends, perhaps, on the degree of unity shown by those who protest and resist: if they allow themselves to be picked off, group by group, as “the nurses”, “the teachers’ unions” and so on, then we may be in for a re-run of the scapegoating politics of the Thatcher years, with the designated “enemy within” changing week by week. A slogan for a new united front: “we are all the enemy within”.

No-one familiar with Seymour’s blogging at Lenin’s Tomb will be surprised by the fluency, cogency and polemical bite of The Meaning of David Cameron. He has become a practised master of this form, and an accomplished phrase-maker, and I look forward to his future publications.

“Iron Galaxy” – chilling stuff from Cannibal Ox:

with thanks to China Miéville for pointing out the “cold world” sample at the start.

Lear. O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!

Fool. Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em i’ th’ paste alive. She knapp’d ‘em o’ th’ coxcombs with a stick and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!’ ‘Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.

BBC coverage (criticised for misrepresentation of the order of events) of the Battle of Orgreave:

A song about the Allendale Baal festival, which mentions some guisers:

“Guising” often traditionally involved “blacking up” with coal dust, soot or burnt cork.

“So events can slip from memory…”:

“The enemy within”:

—

In “After Slumber” I’m trying to take a transversal slice across a thirty-year period (starting with Thatcher’s election in 1979), embedding it in a longer history of confrontations between Shelley’s “anarchy” (unfettered state power) and collective uprising. There are other games afoot, but that’s the main thread. Archaisms and snatches of folk memory are very much to the purpose, which is not to wallow in nostalgia but to summon latent energies.

THE ENEMY WITHIN is occupier’s
cant for native truculence – DOWN WANTONS
DOWN, shrilled as a battle cry. Their law
is checkpoints, riot vans in trysting-places,
curfew’s stale enclosure; yet overground
the guisers swarm, chanting rebellion’s
snatches of song, the oldest catches known.
Men stand together, shirtless in the sun
at Orgreave; women crouch beside the baton-
struck and trampled. Gobbets of scrap metal
go volleying over, improvised defence
against short-shielded masters of concussion.
Some fall to savagery; some rise to courage.
The rider leans in; the cosh begins its swing.

Please read Alex Andrews on the imminent deportation of Anselme Noumbiwa, and act as your conscience directs you.

UNDERSTAND LESS almost a Dadaist
slogan, anarchist oppugnancy
voicing the truth of power. Some are left
as ghosts in their own lives, materialising
under assumed names, ventriloquised by grief.
Destruction is safer to contemplate than healing,
I find, although my appetites are strange
even to me: I cling to gallows-humour
as others cleave to the cross. Cast CRUCIATUS
and see vengeance realised, bowels frothing
with boiling lead. You understand / condemn
and either way are caught in an imposture,
scrying closed-circuit footage, hearsay’s undead
certainties; the imagined reek of blood.

(via Bat)

Disclaimer: I know nothing whatsoever about Nepalese Maoism.