John Steele: When Everything Seems to Change — Badiou and the Event

Both structure and conjuncture deeply impact politics — and the tension between them runs through revolutionary theory and debates.

How much is it the very structure of class society that gives rise to a revolutionary people, and how much is it exceptional moments and crisis within particular societies?

Why did a great eruption of consciousness and revolutionary hope break out around 1968? When does tremendous discontent jell into movements for something radically better? As revolutionaries today “hasten and await” what exactly is it we are awaiting — what are its configurations, how much can coming crises of the society be anticipated, how can we work to hasten them, and how can we transform ourselves to be nimble, perceptive, influential and revolutionary when deep social crisis emerges?

Also central to these questions: How much are the transitions here defined by continuity and how much by discontinuity? How much of what we now believe will be outdated and discarded as part of the past, and how much will be crucial for navigating and understanding the new?

The radical philosopher Alain Badiou has focused a great deal of his life’s work on understanding conjuncture, through a concept he calls “the Event.” And in the following essay, John digs into that.

by John Steele

Several times in his recent Kasama #3 essay, ‘Elements of Exhaustion, or, Rubber and Glue’, Bill Martin uses Alain Badiou’s concept of “the Event.” And that appearance gave me the impetus to try to articulate this concept, which forms such an important part of Badiou’s work and which helps, I believe, open up genuinely new philosophical territory in a way that is directly relevant to rethinking the great project of revolution and human emancipation.

What is Badiou’s conception of an Event? (I will capitalize the word when the reference is to Badiou in order to avoid confusion with “event” as used ordinarily.)

Very roughly speaking, an Event is an important sort of “eruption” in some basic field of human social activity and thinking. It is, Badiou says, something which has happened “that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’,” and “which compels us to decide a new way of being.” [1]

It is something which Badiou believes is literally unpredictable and indescribable within the situation in which it occurs. It is a thrusting forward, as it were, of something that is truly new, and the status quo, the situation of things as they are and as they are accounted to be, does not have the resources to either predict or even describe the Event.

Some examples of Events in the political sphere are, for Badiou, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the Cultural Revolution in China. He also cites, among other examples, “the appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical Tragedy; the irruption, with Galileo, of mathematical physics; an amorous encounter which changes a whole life,” [2] as well as “the creation of the Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the creation of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg….” [3]

Clearly Events occur in several areas of human endeavor. (Actually Badiou thinks there are exactly four: science, art, and love, as well as the political.)

Obviously none of these are just “things that occurred.” Not only are each of these major revolutions in their (different) areas, but they are phenomena involving human desire, work, and thinking. For Badiou, in order for Events even to exist, it is necessary that people recognize and grasp them; “only an interpretive intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation.” [4]

That recognition, in turn, means little unless it is followed by an embarkation upon a new course as a result. To recognize an Event is to recognize it as potentially life-changing (and society-changing), and to catch a glimpse of a whole line of thinking and practice that follows from it. There is thus a tight linkage between the being or existence of an Event; its being recognized as such (as the eruption of the new); and the unfolding of what are seen as the consequences of the Event.

What follows from the Event

Because the Event is not describable or knowable within the parameters of the situation-as-it-is, Badiou says that the Event is supplemental to the situation. So: In order for an Event to have occurred, it must not only have been seen and recognized, there must not only have been an interpretive intervention, but a decision must have been taken to relate to the world as it is “from the perspective of its evental supplement.” [5]

For those who recognize the Event, in other words, it is something that will shift their perspective on the world, opening up a whole new landscape, so to speak – and this begins a process of re-thinking, acting, and relating to the world in terms of this Event.

Through this process – the decisions to intervene, to think and act in the light of the new perspective offered by the recognition of the Event – there comes into existence what Badiou terms a new subject: those who make a basic decision to follow this out, to relate to the situation and live their lives with reference to the Event and to follow the consequences. (Note that the subject is social, not individual.) And the process that unfolds off of the Event, propelled by this subject, is what Badiou calls a truth-process: it is the creation of new truths. (In fact, for Badiou, who makes a sharp distinction between knowledge [roughly, the summing-up of what is] and truth [= the enunciation of something new], these truth processes, born from Events, are the only means by which truths come into the world.)

Finally, just to finish an outline of the points of Badiou’s thinking about the Event, there is the question of “fidelity.” This fideligy is simply the process, ever renewed through continuing decision, of tracing out the consequences of an Event. As such, it is necessarily oppositional: “An evental fidelity is a real break (both thought and practised) in the specific order within which the event took place.” [6]

You could say that a fidelity, then, is a process of remaining faithful to the Event, not in the sense of a reverent worship or dogged hanging-on, but in a process of ever pushing-forward development of new consequences and truths. As an example Badiou cites, for instance, “the politics of the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practise a fidelity to two entangled events: the Cultural Revolution in China, and May ‘68 in France.” [7]

No guarantees

There are no guarantees in any of this, no way of proving oneself right in terms that the world recognizes, and no assurance of success in the venture. “An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable,” says Badiou. “Take the statement: ‘This event belongs to the situation.’ If it is possible to decide, using the rules of established knowledge, whether this statement is true or false, then the so-called event is not an event….On the basis of the undecidability of an event’s belonging to a situation a wager has to be made.” [8]

Event, truth-process, subject, fidelity: all of these have to be understood together; they are co-defined and highly interdependent concepts (that form a basic framework within Badiou’s philosophy). And they are each highly subject to contingency and human choice.

Without an Event there is no truth-process; equally, without the intervention which touches off a truth-process, there is no Event. But the recognition of an Event and initiation of a truth-process is at the same time the birth of a subject. And “the procedure of fidelity” [9] is simultaneously a truth-process and constitutive of the subject of that truth-process.

None of this is necessitated or determined; it is a matter of choice and active intervention without assurance or guarantee: “The undecidability of the event induces the appearance of a subject of the event. Such a subject is constituted by an utterance in the form of a wager. The utterance is as follows: ‘The event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate, nor demonstrate, to which I shall be faithful’.” [10]

Is an Event Coming to Redefine Our Times?

Badiou’s philosophy in all its ramifications, including his theory of the Event, raises many questions for Marxism (as well as for other world-views and outlooks), and I believe it’s important – vital even – to pursue these systematically. But for now I’ll just come back to some questions about the Event, and the utility and appeal of this theory for us right now.

Bill Martin spoke, in his last post, of “the extreme ‘anti-evental’ character of postmodern capitalism.” Without knowing precisely what he meant by this phrase (and I look forward to some further discussion on this point), I think all of us who have lived through the past 25 years have a deep sense of what he is pointing to. For this has been a period in which the logic of capital, in its most savage form, has remorselessly engulfed and more deeply penetrated the globe; a period in which wars, imperial and local, raged almost without cease, virtually none with any higher reason than aggrandizement of narrow interest or group; a period in which oppositional movements popped and fizzed, none able to gain a purchase in the situation for more than a few brief years; a period which in the imperial metropoles saw new modes of thought and styles of life proliferate, opposed by reactionary counter-movements – the culture wars – in a spectacle of both thinking and popular energies mobilized in such a way as to be without effect on the functioning of capital and empire.

It has been a time, in brief, which has cried out for fundamental change, for turning the world over, for a basic redefinition of terms – without anything of the sort coming forth. It has been a time without an Event.

I think this sense of fundamental stasis, of a longing for a breakthrough, is very widespread today, and by no means only among those who see themselves as revolutionary or oppositional (in fact many “revolutionaries” underwrite their own version of stasis). This widespread sense is in effect addressed and articulated and given theoretical form by Badiou, and is I think a reason for his burgeoning popularity as a thinker over the past decade. And deservedly so, for he speaks deeply and creatively to one of the central issues of our time.

If we accept that something like this is an accurate depiction of our situation today, where does this leave us? It’s worth noting that although an Event, in Badiou’s theorization, is not predictable, its occurrence is not a miracle either, not something which comes from nowhere. As Badiou emphasizes, “what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc….an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.” [“The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98]

But nonetheless, what do you do while “waiting for the event”?

I don’t want to address this question here, so much as open it up.

* * * * * *

Notes

[1] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (originally appeared 1993), 41.

[2] Badiou, “Philosophy and Truth” in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, 62.

[3] Ethics, 41.

[4] Badiou, Being and Event, 181. This results in a paradoxical reflexivity of Event and intervention: Whereas “the event alone…founds the possibility of intervention,” it is also true that “if no intervention puts it into circulation…the event does not exist.” [Being and Event, 209]

[5] Ethics, 41.

[6] Ethics, 42.

[7] Ethics, 42.

[8] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.

[9] Being and Event, 239

[10] “Philosophy and Truth”, 62.

[11] “The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, 98.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory
2. John Steele: Is Badiou a Maoist?
3. John Steele: Revolutionary Faithfulness and the Radically New
4. John Steele: Our relation to revolutionary tradition
5. Badiou’s Logics of Worlds: notes & reflections, 1