Less Deceived
Returning to Bowman’s piece, the main thrust is directed less against Badiou himself than against others’ pleasure or interest in Badiou. Those who find Badiou a rewarding read are entering into a transaction with the pleasures and rigours of his texts: they are being rewarded for something, with something else. It is the proper business of “cultural studies” to analyse the system of rewards that sustains conceptions of cultural value. This analysis will generally reach, by direct or circuitous paths, the following verdict: the reasons people give for valuing some cultural product X are in fact mystifications of their real reasons, which invariably have to do with social position on the one hand (product-affiliation as an operator of cultural distinction) and narcissistic gratification on the other.
Accordingly, for Bowman, Badiou’s cultural function is to “reassure” an anxious elite of the enduring value of their investments. “[A]rt, maths, love, militancy. Yeah, right”. He is a “conservative” philosopher insofar as he seeks to restore the waning lustre of these antique trophies, mournfully buffing them up in the desolate attic of his philosophy. One can imagine a kind of demotic inverse of Badiou, for whom the Four Discourses would be Fashion, Entertainment, Sport and Sex. In place of the forbidding “matheme” and the Pierian springs of poetry, this cheery, accessible figure would alternate between celebrity gossip and earnest exposition of the offside rule. Perhaps he would reach the same conclusions: fair-weather supporters are a bad lot, and that goal of Gascoigne’s against Scotland in ‘96 is a treasure for the ages*.
I would suggest that Bowman’s attack here is particularly focused on Badiou’s “legitimation” of “Art”, and his supposed popularity among “Art PhDs”, because of the “four discourses” art is the most easily reducible – against any pretensions to the contrary – to a cultural form amongst other cultural forms. It’s reasonably uncontroversial to say that elite notions of artistic Importance are outmoded – hardly any practising artists subscribe to such notions, although they always seem to manage to find some way of extolling the dynamism and radicality of their own practices. But “maths” really doesn’t belong on the same terrain: it simply doesn’t make sense to position mathematics as a supposedly “higher” form of culture afflicted by declining prestige as a result of the democratising proliferation of new media (or whatever the story is these days).
Because of its intrinsic formal emptiness, mathematics is very difficult to plug into the networks of signification that sustain the production of cultural “value” – arguably it only signifies at all through proxies, either philosophical (Badiou’s transliteration of axiomatic set theory as “ontology”) or pedagogical (GCSE maths textbooks, say). Cultural studies can certainly talk about mathematics through examination of these proxies, and the roles they play in – once again – formatting social hierarchies and participating in the identity-construction of cultural consumers, but maths wouldn’t be maths if it was just dressing like a schizophrenic and writing incomprehensible sequences of Greek characters in chalk on a dusty blackboard (“I’m not a number theorist, but I play one on TV”).
More seriously, while there are undoubtedly “cultures of mathematics” (and one can and should understand an enterprise like Bourbaki as involving a variation on a cultural form found in other fields – Amir Aczel’s account draws direct and convincing parallels with OuLiPo, for example), there is nevertheless a real sense in which mathematics marks the limit of the (often useful) culturalist intuition that “everything is culture”. Mathematics is not “above” or “beyond” culture, in the sense of bearing an absolute signification above the fray of contending discourses and practices, but – to use a favourite word of Badiou’s – “subtracted” from culture, in the sense that it bears, by itself, no signification at all.
Badiou’s mathematical ontology is thus a cultural artifact – a proxy – that functions as an exit from the dimension of culture, a portal to the “inhuman” domain of pure formalism. (If you aren’t visualising the engine room of the Event Horizon at this point, let me encourage you to do so. Where we’re going, you won’t need eyes to see…). This is one of the things that particularly rattles people about Badiou, because – unlike the “working” mathematician who just tends to his theorems and minds his own business philosophically speaking – Badiou explicitly (and quixotically) attempts to articulate the domains of “value” and “form”.
From the “culturalist” side, this can look very much like an attempt to secure particular cultural values by tying them to mathematical invariants. Hence Bowman’s suggestion that Badiou is especially vulnerable to the twin critical insights of “Bourdieu” (cultural value as operator of social differentiation) and “deconstruction” (contingency and constructedness of supposed invariants). I think that on the latter point, there is simply no case to answer: mathematics fully avows its own contingency and constructedness, building its empty scaffolds on axioms that are purely “chosen” for their ability to support elegant and powerful systems. (The weak norms governing axiom choice are another matter – in the spirit of Ray Brassier’s challenge to the Churchlands, I think it’s worth asking whether these norms have any metaphysical authority, or whether they’re simply projections of human cognitive – or cultural, which is close to the same thing – bias).
From the “philosophical” side, it’s evident that Badiou is a lot less interested in cultural value than in the articulation of figures: he reads poetry, for example, not for its moral signification but for its analogical structure, which is then typically abstracted in the direction of ontological “thought”. F. R. Leavis has an anecdote somewhere about Wittgenstein doing much the same thing, with a poem of Empson’s; for Leavis, this “analogical” reading is emblematic of Wittgenstein’s tendency to “understand” the poem but miss the real point (of reading poetry). The irony is the Wittgenstein is fairly obviously much more Empson’s implied reader than Leavis (and one can readily imagine a “Badiouvian” reading of “Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills”). On this particular axis, Badiou is much more a Wittgensteinian than a Leavisite; which is one reason why I think the “culturalist” reading of what he’s about misses the mark.
* It is, actually.