Digifesto

Last week I saw Alain Badiou speak at NYU on “Philosophy between Mathematics and Poetry”, followed by a comment by Alexander Galloway, and then questions fielded from the audience.

It was wonderful to see Badiou speak as ever since I’ve become acquainted with his work (which was rather recently, Summer of 2016) I have seen it as a very hopeful direction for philosophy. As perhaps implied by the title of his talk, Badiou takes mathematics very seriously, perhaps more seriously than most mathematicians, and this distinguishes him from many other philosophers for whom mathematics is somewhat of an embarrassment. There are few fields more intellectually rarified than mathematics, philosophy, and poetry, and yet somehow Badiou treats each fairly in a way that reflects how broader disciplinary and cultural divisions between the humanities and technical fields may be reconciled. (This connects to some of my work on Philosophy of Computational Social Science)

I have written a bit recently about existentialism in design only to falter at the actual definition of existentialism. While it would I’m sure be incorrect to describe Badiou as an existentialist, there’s no doubt that he represents the great so-called Continental philosophical tradition, is familiar with Heidegger and Nietzsche, and so on. I see certain substantive resonances between Badiou and other existentialist writers, though I think to make the comparison now would be putting the cart before the horse.

Badiou’s position, in a nutshell, is like this:

Mathematics is a purely demonstrative form of writing and thinking. It communicates by proof, and has a special kind of audience to it. It is a science. In particular it is a science of all the possible forms of multiplicity, which is the same thing as saying as it is the science of all being, or ontology.

Poetry, on the other hand, is not about being but rather about becoming. “Becoming” for Badiou is subjective: the conscious subject encounters something new, experiences a change, sees an unrealized potential. These are events, and perhaps the greatest contribution of Badiou is his formulation and emphasis on the event as a category. In reference to earlier works, the event might be when through Hegelian dialectic a category is sublated. It could also perhaps correspond to when existence overcomes being in de Beauvoir’s ethics (hence the connection to existentialism I’m proposing). Good poetry, in Badiou’s thought, shows how the things we experience can break out of the structures that objectify them, turning the (subjectively perceived) impossible into a new reality.

Poetry, perhaps because it is connected to realizing the impossible but perhaps just because it’s nice to listen to (I’m unclear on Badiou’s position on this point) is “seductive”, encouraging psychological connections to the speaker (such as transference) whether or not it’s “true”. Classically, poetry meant epic poems and tragic theater. It could be cinema today.

Philosophy has the problem that it has historically tried to be both demonstrative, like mathematics, and seductive, like poetry. It’s this impurity or tension that defines it. Philosophers need to know mathematics because it is ontology, but have to go beyond mathematics because their mission is to create events in subjectively experienced reality, which is historically situated, and therefore not merely a matter of mathematical abstraction. Philosophers are in the business of creating new forms of subjectivity, which is not the same as creating a new form of being.

I’m fine with all this.

Galloway made some comments I’m somewhat skeptical of, though I may not have understood them since he seems to build mostly on Deleuze and Lacan, who are two intellectual sources I’ve never gotten into. But Galloway’s idea is to draw a connection between the “digital”, with all of its connections to computing technology, algorithms, the Internet, etc., with Badiou’s understanding of the mathematical, and to connect the “analog”, which is not discretized like the digital, to poetry. He suggested that Badiou’s sense of mathematics was arithmetic and excluded the geometric.

I take this interpretation of Galloway’s as clever, but incorrect and uncharitable. It’s clever because it co-opts a great thinker’s work into the sociopolitical agenda of trying to bolster the cultural capital of the humanities against the erosion of algorithmic curation and diminution relative to the fortunes of technology industries. This has been the agenda of professional humanists for a long time and it is annoying (to me) but I suppose necessary for the maintenance of the humanities, which are important.

However, I believe the interpretation is incorrect and uncharitable to Badiou because though Badiou’s paradigmatic example of mathematics is set theory, he seems to have a solid enough grasp of Kurt Godel’s main points to understand that mathematics includes the great variety of axiomatic systems and these, absolutely, indisputably, include geometry and real analysis and all the rest. The fact that logical proof is a discrete process which can be reduced to and from Boolean logic and automated in an electric circuit is, of course, the foundational science of computation that we owe to Turing, Church, Von Neumann, and others. It’s for these reasons that the potential of computation is so impressive and imposing: it potentially represents all possible forms of being. There are no limits to AI, at least none based on these mathematical foundations.

There were a number of good questions from the audience which led Badiou to clarify his position. The Real is relational, it is for a subject. This distinguishes it from Being, which is never relational (though of course, there are mathematical theories of relations, and this would seem to be a contradiction in Badiou’s thought?) He acknowledges that a difficult question is the part of Being in the the real.

Meanwhile, the Subject is always the result of an event.

Physics is a science of the existing form of the real, as opposed to the possible forms. Mathematics describes the possible forms of what exists. So empirical science can discover which mathematical form is the one that exists for us.

Another member of the audience asked about the impossibility of communism, which was on point because Badiou has at times defended communism or argued that the purpose of philosophy is to bring about communism. He made the point that one could not mathematically disprove the possibility of communism.

The real question, I may be so bold as to comment afterwards, is whether communism can exist in our reality. Suppose that economics is like physics in that it is a science of the real as it exists for us. What if economics shows that communism is impossible in our reality?

Though it wasn’t quite made explicitly, here is the subtle point of departure Badiou makes from what is otherwise conventionally unobjectionable. He would argue, I believe, that the purpose of philosophy is to create a new subjective reality where the impossible is made real, and he doesn’t see this process as necessarily bounded by, say, physics in its current manifestation. There is the possibiliity of a new event, and of seizing that event, through, for example, poetry. This is the article of faith in philosophy, and in poets, that has established them as the last bastion against dehumanization, objectification, reification, and the dangers of technique and technology since at least Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology.

Which circles us back to the productive question: how would we design a technology that furthers this objective of creating new subjective realities, new events? This is what I’m after.