History and Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory 9780748699001

Citation preview

History and Event

History and Event.indd 1

03/08/2015 08:39:14

Series Editors: Alex Thomson, Benjamin Arditi, Andrew Schaap International Advisory Editors: Michael Dillon, Michael J. Shapiro, Jeremy Valentine Titles in the Taking on the Political series include: Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine Cinematic Political Thought Michael Shapiro Untimely Politics Samuel A. Chambers Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation Stuart Elden Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies Paul Bowman Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau Oliver Marchart Democratic Piety: Complexity, Conflict and Violence Adrian Little Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Kate Schick Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida and Nancy Madeleine Fagan Space, Politics and Aesthetics Mustafa Dikeç History and Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory Nathan Coombs www.euppublishing.com/series/totp

History and Event.indd 2

03/08/2015 08:39:15

History and Event

From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory

Nathan Coombs

EDINBURGH University Press

History and Event.indd 3

03/08/2015 08:39:15

© Nathan Coombs, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11 on 13 Sabon by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9899 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9900 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0496 9 (epub) The right of Nathan Coombs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

History and Event.indd 4

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Contents

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction 1   History and Event in Marxist Dialectics 4   Events and Historical Judgement after Althusser 8   Chapter Abstracts 13 Part I: History and Event in Marxist Dialectics 1  Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge 19   What is the Logic in the Science Of Logic? 21   At the Limits of Pythagoreanism 25   The Uses and Abuses of Mathematics 27   Hegel contra Cantor (On the Missing Irrationals) 34 2  Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation 41   Marx contra Contradiction 44   The Non-Historicist Logic of Capital 51   A Synthesis of Evolution and Revolution (with an   Extra Element) 57   The Ends of Dialectical Materialism 64 3  Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution? 66   On the Narrative: Proponents and Objectors 69   The Famous Quotes 72   The Unity of Opposites and Self-Movement 75   Dialectics in Practice after 1914 80   From Lenin to Althusser’s Theoretical Revolution 86 Part II: Events and Historical Judgement after Althusser 4  Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break   A Marxian Epistemology of the New

History and Event.indd 5

91 93

03/08/2015 08:39:15

vi  History and Event   Theorising Marx’s Epistemological Break   Structural Causality   Whose Science?   A Materialism for Marxism, or, the Theoretical Void    of Late Althusser 5  Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat   Fleeing from and Returning to Althusser   The Subject of Mathematics and the Mathematical Subject   Being, Event, Intervention   Constructible Universes and the Vanishing Evental-Site   The Rationalist as Radical Public Intellectual 6  Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice   Digging Down to the Politics, Discovering Messianic Roots   Esotericism: The Discreet Charm of the Philosophers   After Finitude: In the Spirit of the Fossil?   From Meillassoux to . . . ?

97 102 105 109 114 117 120 124 130 134 140 142 148 152 157

Part III: Suggestions about Where this Road Might Take Us 7  Afterword: Towards a Complex Science of History   Complex Systems and Social Change   General and Restricted Complexity   Strong and Weak Emergence   The Politics of Simulation   The End of the Beginning

163 165 168 171 175 178

Notes 181 Bibliography 191 Index 207

History and Event.indd 6

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Preface and Acknowledgements

Preface and Acknowledgements The origins of this book go back to my Master’s degree. It was there that I first posed hazily a question that has occupied me ever since. What is the relation of history and event: what unites long stretches of incremental change with sudden political ruptures? Although a seemingly simple question, it took a long time to condense into this pure form. Initially, I posed it in terms of a somewhat misplaced attempt to apply Alain Badiou’s idea of the event to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I say somewhat, because it is not implausible to suggest that the revolution could support a Badiouian notion of political change. Unlike the classical Marxist image of history tending towards its secular, communist telos, the revolution’s amalgam of Islamic, anti-imperialist and Marxist currents painted a more complex picture of the direction history was heading in. Furthermore, one of its influential ideologues, Ali Shariati, a thinker deeply influenced by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, advocated a utopian rebirth for Shia Islam that at a stretch could be positioned as a theory of the event. At the same time, I was also sympathetic to reasons for not considering the Iranian Revolution through a Badiouian lens. The most widely participated-in revolution in human history soon degenerated into a vehicle for reaction. By 1982 Khomeini had crushed alternative currents within the revolution, the factory shoras had been dissolved, and women’s freedom was left greatly diminished. If the Iranian Revolution was an event, its promise seemed more fleeting than even Badiou’s theory could account for (in The Rebirth of History, Badiou (2012a: 37) declares the revolution an ‘obscure paradoxicality . . . heralding the end of the clear days of revolutions’). Despite these difficulties in applying grand theory to the

History and Event.indd 7

03/08/2015 08:39:15

viii  History and Event idiosyncrasies of real political history, Badiou’s notion of the event still appeared to reflect a sea change in how we conceive of historical change. In place of progressive notions of historical development was a new focus on unpredictable ruptures, revolutionary flashes and revolts, all of which seemed to offer little more than a contingent possibility that the political order can be refashioned. No telos, no culmination of historical tendencies, no guarantees of progress. What I took away from these early studies was therefore the need to get at what precisely distinguishes the two notions of historical change which come attached to the terms ‘history’ and ‘event’. Instead of another vain attempt to apply these categories to concrete revolutionary processes, I decided that it would be necessary to get to the nub of their theoretical differences through a thorough review of their respective theoretical literatures. Not only would I have to immerse myself in the key texts of the classical Marxist tradition, ranging through the work of such seminal thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov and Lenin; I would also have to gain a firm grasp on the work of Louis Althusser in order to get a better grip on the lineage of contemporary French theory to which Badiou is but a single, if important, contributor. This project began in London in 2008 with the commencement of my doctoral studies, and only came to a close with this book’s completion in Edinburgh in 2014 at the end of my Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.  Along the way, I have accumulated debts of gratitude to a host of institutions and people. First and foremost, I need to express my thanks to my PhD supervisor, Nathan Widder. Without Nathan’s faith in me and his open-minded approach to scholarship I would not have secured the Reid Studentship at Royal Holloway which supported me through the crucial first three years of my research. Nathan’s trust in me meant that I had the freedom to follow my instinct and to pursue some seemingly obtuse angles in approaching my research question. I am indebted too to my viva panel members, Alberto Toscano and Iain MacKenzie, for their close reading of my PhD manuscript. After hearing horror stories about doctoral examinations, it was a pleasant surprise to find my own passing by enjoyably as a consequence of their challenging, intelligent, and sharp questions – all signs that they had read the text in detail. The book you are reading departs considerably from my PhD manuscript, but their comments and criticisms provided a necessary starting point for giving shape to its final form. I also need to thank the Institute for

History and Event.indd 8

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Preface and Acknowledgements  ix Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, for supporting me with a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship which I used, in part, to write this book. I will always have warm memories of this wonderful little institution. Donald MacKenzie’s generous support for my IASH Postdoctoral Fellowship and for my successful application for a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship was also a determining factor in this project reaching fruition. Both of these positions afforded me the time to make an extensive overhaul of my PhD manuscript into a book accessible to a wider readership. Numerous other readers of my work also need to be acknowledged. I am grateful to Terrell Carver for reading my chapter on Marx and making suggestions for improvement. I thank Lars T. Lih for doing the same with my chapter on Lenin and sharing with me his database of historical research. Jeremy Dunham, with whom I shared an office at the University of Edinburgh, earns my gratitude for allowing me to bounce ideas off him while converting my PhD into this manuscript. Olivia Lucca Fraser deserves a special mention for the inexplicably generous way she guided me through Paul Cohen’s mathematics of forcing. The conclusion of this book, discussing the potential of complexity theory for reimagining a science of history, is indebted to a period of intense long-distance collaboration with Alex Williams. While the results of this enterprise remain a tentative sketching out of ideas, I hope that one day we will be able to subject these thoughts to more rigorous elaboration. In terms of editorial support, I thank Jen Daly and Michelle Houston at Edinburgh University Press for taking this book under their wing, and the editors of the Taking on the Political series, Benjamin Arditi, Jeremy Valentine, Alex Thomson and Andrew Schaap, for endorsing the scholarly contribution of this work. I am grateful to the editors of The European Legacy for permitting republication of the article ‘Did Lenin Refound Marxist Dialectics in 1914?’ as Chapter 3, and to the journal Theory & Event for permitting republication of a version of the article ‘Speculative Justice: Quentin Meillassoux and Politics’ (17:4) as Chapter 6. I also thank Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury for agreeing to parts of Chapter 4 being published simultaneously in the edited collection Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism, edited by Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik. On a more personal note, my partner Olga and our son Leo deserve an especially warm thank you for being a constant source of joy and at times consolation in the darker periods of self-doubt I encountered

History and Event.indd 9

03/08/2015 08:39:15

x  History and Event when writing this book. I need to also thank my parents, Lynne and Steven Coombs, for their tireless support of my studies. Since in their eyes my doctoral research represented the height of obscurity, they had to take on faith my claims that I had a significant scholarly contribution to make. I hope this book will go some way towards convincing them that it was a leap of faith worth making. Other names deserving mention are my friends Robert Farnan, Pepijn van Houwelingen, Amin Samman, and Nick Srnicek. There are of course many others who could be added to this list if it were not for the demands of brevity and the need to draw lines somewhere or other, no matter how arbitrary.

History and Event.indd 10

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction

Introduction In Specters of Marx, written with the dust still settling after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacques Derrida positioned Marxism as an unsurpassable horizon of emancipation. Freed of science, political programmes and painstaking organisational efforts, for Derrida what was left of Marxism after the end of really existing socialism was a crystalline utopian promise. History had little part to play in this messianic calling. It required faith in an ‘ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) [which] can exceed, at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of any history’ (Derrida 2006: 45). Attempting a rapprochement between Marxism and the new ethical sensibilities of the post-Cold War era, Derrida implores Marxism to abandon its science of history and make the leap to thinking change as the result of singular and contingent events. No meaning, no purpose, no reason should persist. History should be traded in for event, without remainder. Some readers might be persuaded to concur with Derrida. What is to be gained, it may be asked, from clinging on to the seemingly petrified idea of a science of history? Is not the notion of a science of history wedded to a totalising hubris we long ago learned to be wary of? Is not the lasting message of poststructuralist critiques of these grand narratives that they cast over us an intoxicating spell of mastery when in truth, as everyone from bond traders to philosophical savants can vouch for, history is but a meaningless jumble of capricious ‘black swan’ (Taleb 2008) events? Are not philosophies of the event precisely attuned to heightening our sensitivity to the unpredictable, irrational moments of rupture in contrast to

History and Event.indd 1

03/08/2015 08:39:15

2  History and Event the Marxist longue durée in which reason weaves its way through history on the side of the forces of emancipation? Is not, finally, the moral of this intellectual shift that we have to make a choice: either to remain committed to the untenable historicism of Marxism, sacrificing events at the altar of the historical process, or to embrace the contemporary eventalisms which alone can think singularity, contingency and genuine novelty? This book will argue otherwise, but will do so tangentially by showing that the science of history is a broader category than this string of dichotomies allows for. Indeed, we will introduce a certain amount of pluralism to the discussion by showing that different sciences of history have different political repercussions, none of which can be deduced from a generic binary that pits history against event. So what is a science of history if not merely the opposite of postmodern philosophies of the event? This book will contend that its essence lies in its ability to rationally articulate events (protests, riots, revolutions) with longer, drawn-out processes (changes in the mode of production, imperial expansions, demographic drifts). A precondition of a science of history, in other words, is the possibility of conceptualising history and event not as a stark binary but as a complementary pair. Accordingly, for such a science to prove fruitful, the analysis of history cannot be surrendered to cataloguing an arbitrary series of accidents – that way only scepticism lies. Neither can it start from assuming a smooth process without disruption – that way beckons towards Whiggish progressivism in which revolutions become aberrations from the evolutionary processes of history. In order to periodise convincingly, to discern novelty, or to follow historical trends, a science of history needs to make the meaning of events accessible to rational analysis. History does not itself have to be rational for such a science (as in Hegel). But the course of events needs to be rationally intelligible (to logic, mathematics, or epistemology). Historically, the name for this conviction has been dialectic; in the Marxist tradition, dialectical materialism. If taken in this broader sense, the science of history need not be dispensed with so urgently as postmodernists like Derrida and JeanFrançois Lyotard would have us believe. Their critiques strike well the Hegelian philosophy of history and its Enlightenment cousins, yet these historicisms do not exhaust the possibilities for thinking history rationally and scientifically. That much this book assumes

History and Event.indd 2

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction  3 from the outset. But beyond dispelling some of these postmodern prejudices, the main contribution of this book lies in telling the story of how some of the limits to the classical Marxist science of history were surpassed by the French Marxist Louis Althusser and his successors, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. After breaking free of Hegelian teleology and mounting a defence of the autonomy of science, this line of contemporary French theory ends up leaning on contingent events more than did classical Marxism. Yet pace Derrida and other postmodern sceptics, these thinkers retain rational articulations of history and event still worthy of being called sciences of history. A critical dissection of the continuities and discontinuities between classical Marxism and the Althusserian lineage will thus frame this book’s readings of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux. It will provide the backdrop to this book’s more granular interrogation of these thinkers’ ideas when we ask what scientific resources they employ; what politics come attached to their theorisations; what impasses do these theories face; and what future do these philosophies hold? The aim of this book is therefore expressly not to present Althusser and his successors as resolving the aporias of classical Marxism – that is, forging an improved science of history capturing the best of Marxism and getting rid of the dated ballast. Instead, this book aims to grasp these lineages’ progressions and regressions in equal measure. Our search for the ‘conflictual unity’1 of Marxist and postAlthusserian theory will be an attempt to grapple with their different conceptions of revolutionary change, pressing them, in contrast with one another, to reveal their theoretical and political idiosyncrasies. We will employ Althusserian analyses in diagnosing the limitations to classical Marxist dialectical materialism. But, no less, we will bring a sensitivity to what classical Marxist approaches were attempting to achieve to our readings of the Althusserian lineage. In following the order of presentation in this book, let us then begin by introducing the classical Marxist tradition and by summarising the problems associated with its indebtedness to a Hegelian science of history. For it is only by appreciating the political consequences of this science that we will be able to grasp the advances made in the Althusserian lineage as well as the problems it encounters in breaking free of the Hegelian inheritance.

History and Event.indd 3

03/08/2015 08:39:15

4  History and Event

History and Event in Marxist Dialectics What was classical Marxism? It does not seem contentious to identify it with the doctrine set in place by Engels’s late works and concluding with the irremediable divisions caused by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. This period, roughly coinciding with the Second International (1889–1916), gave shape to a coherent body of thought – and for all the heterodoxy introduced by Western Hegelian-Marxism, Maoism, and Gramscian theory, in most people’s minds Marxism continues to be identified with the core theoretical ideas put together in this period. Charting a middle way between revisionist deviations on the right and anarchist excesses on the left, the major Social Democrat thinkers of the era held to an essentially unified strategic and theoretical platform. The strategic doxa, rooted in the practice of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), insisted upon building a mass working-class party capable of, although not limited to, conquering power through building mass organisations willing to participate in Parliamentary democracy. The influential 1891 Erfurt Program, which Engels had a hand in drafting, is a key text for understanding this reformist resolution of reform and revolution (Tucker 1969: 188–98). It dictated a piecemeal programme of democratic reforms, but one that through divorcing means and ends could maintain a commitment to revolutionary change. Karl Kautsky (2007: 37) would later codify this strategic squaring in the slogan ‘neither revolution nor legality at any price’. On the level of abstract theory, likewise, the Second International’s theoretical architecture constituted, and continues to define as a measure of heterodoxy, the Marxist doctrine of historical and dialectical materialism. Engels’s Anti-Dühring (1936a) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1936b) as well as Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1975a), provided the main reference points for this grand synthesis. Marxist dialectics were Hegelian dialectics inverted from the realm of ideas to the realm of matter; the metaphor of base and superstructure was taken to imply a hierarchical causal chain, with the ideological superstructure determined by the economic base; and the Marxist conception of history was interpreted as a succession of modes of production, interrupted by revolutionary transformations induced by latency between the relations of production and the development of the productive forces. The result of this synthesis was that socialism was universally

History and Event.indd 4

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction  5 held to be inevitable sooner or later by centrist Social Democrats of the period (Lih 2006: Chap. 1). It was incumbent upon socialists to merely speed up the process, guided by the tactical insights provided by historical and dialectical materialist theory. The concept of quantity to quality leaps took classical Marxism’s scientific aspirations one step further by putting it into dialogue with Darwinian evolution, geology and mathematics. This Hegelinspired notion of transformation, identified as a key law of the dialectic by Engels in Anti-Dühring (1936a) and converted into a theoretic of the revolutionary event by Plekhanov (1974a; 1969) and Kautsky (1916), holds that gradual quantitative changes accumulate to reach a nodal point at which there is a sudden qualitative leap between different states. Hegel’s (1969: 335) classic example is of the transformation of water into ice: only at precisely zero degrees Celsius does liquid undergo a sudden qualitative transformation to a solid. Mapped onto Marx’s 1859 Preface alongside comments made in the short chapter on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’ in Capital (1976b: 927–30), the idea thus gave quasi-naturalistic support for gradualist tactics at the same time as insisting upon the necessity of a revolutionary transformation at a certain historical tipping point. In the terms in which it would be applied by Plekhanov and Kautsky, the quantitative element gave force to the idea that one could apply statistical studies to social, economic and political tendencies in order to anticipate revolution; and the qualitative element permitted faith in the novelties released by revolution, supporting the doctrine’s aversion to writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future. The quantity to quality formula would persist long after the sun had set on the golden age of classical Marxism. Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1941) provided a sense of finality to this science of history in which socialist revolutions are historically well-ordered, the productive forces are primary over the relations of production, and revolutions are as inevitable as the ubiquitous quantity-quality leaps found throughout natural processes. Western Hegelian-Marxists (Lukács 1971; Marcuse 1941; Dunayevskaya 1973; Žižek 2012) would seek to carve out an alternative Hegelian ontology for Marxism – objecting to Stalin’s excision of the ‘negation of the negation’; to the arid formalism of Engels’s three general laws of the dialectic; to the misplaced scientific positivism of a dialectical materialism; and by pledging fidelity to Lenin’s 1914

History and Event.indd 5

03/08/2015 08:39:15

6  History and Event notebooks on Hegel – but all would (directly or indirectly) affirm the idea of quantity-quality leaps as an articulation of history and event necessary to maintain the coherence of Marxist theory. The important point is that the concept of quantity-quality leaps carries with it a host of associations with the broader theoretical architecture of classical Marxism. What this also means is that if, following Althusser’s guidance, we find this concept concomitant to economistic Marxist politics, then our critique will necessarily range across the abstract-scientific-epistemological domains as well as the concrete-historical-tactical considerations of Marxist revolutionary theory. It will apply principally to classical Marxism, but also to the Hegelian Marxisms proposed by thinkers from Lukács to Dunayevskaya, who, while professing their bold departure from the Marxism of the Second International, carry across practically wholesale its Hegelian dialectical structures. The idea of quantity-quality leaps, this is to say, will need to be judged as a theory of scientific and political change. For the concept was justified by classical Marxist thinkers on both criteria, and its failure to provide a satisfactory account of change in either domain is what motivated Althusser’s searing critiques of Hegelian historicism in the mid-1960s. Given its pivotal importance in this book, a few words of clarification are needed on our application of Althusser’s term ‘historicism’. In criticising historicism Althusser did not mean to denigrate the role of history in Marxist theory, or to adopt an exclusively synchronic structural perspective on social change as critics like E. P. Thomson (1978) allege. To claim that Althusser sought to supplant diachrony with synchrony, or to irrevocably sunder them as O’Neill alleges in For Marx, Against Althusser (1982), is to mistake Althusser’s critique of a certain type of historical reasoning for a critique of historical knowledge tout court. After all, Althusser (2007a: 166) was to credit Marx’s discovery of the ‘continent of history’ as his great contribution to science in the same way that Galileo and Freud revolutionised our understandings of the world. And although many of Althusser’s most lauded works are of a philosophical inclination, there is no shortage of history in his books. In his great, unfinished 1969 manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism (Althusser 2014), for instance, whole chapters unfold of almost exclusively historical, descriptive content. Far from getting trapped in a rut of synchronic structural necessity and diachronic contingency, in which history is surrendered to

History and Event.indd 6

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction  7 the accidental and the irrational, Althusser instead proposed a ‘new history’ concerned with the ‘becoming of Reason’, ‘which is scientific but stripped of . . . idealist simplicity’ (Althusser 1998: 164). This was a conception of history that could capture its manifest complexity without descending into scepticism. It was a rationalist history, but one which rejected the specifically Hegelian structures of historical rationality. For Althusser, then, the pejorative connotation he attaches to the term historicism indicates solely his dissatisfaction with the Hegelian concept of history as linear, divided into successive epochs (expressive totalities), and unfolding in a teleological dialectic of reconciliation – a concept of history recapitulated in classical dialectical materialism. Not only did Althusser see historicism as compromised irrevocably by its complicity with Stalinist economism; he claimed that it was unfaithful to Marx’s scientific breakthrough in discovering the continent of history. Althusser’s critique of historicism is therefore connected to a particular hermeneutical approach which believes it is possible to strip Marx’s work of the theoretical accretions built up around it by his epigones. To this end, Althusser’s strategy was famously to propose an ‘epistemological break’ between Marx’s early humanist works like the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx 1975b) and the later scientific analyses of his mature political economy. With this partition in hand, Althusser defended selectively those aspects of Marx’s work that successfully wrestled free from Hegelian inhibitions and opened up a space for a new Marxist philosophy hitherto unrealised in the inadequate formulations of phenomenology, existentialism and Marxist humanism. Althusser then went further by presenting Marx’s later writings as an anticipation of the insights of French historical epistemology. He claimed that Marx’s mature political economy (in a premonition of Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology) furnishes the theoretical resources to think its own break from ideology to science – a fortuitous alignment indeed. If today this argument appears the most dated of Althusser’s contributions, the point where clinging on to liturgical orthodoxy led him to identify a fantastical exegetical origin for his heterodoxy, it was nevertheless motivated by correct intuitions of the problems with Engelsian Marxist philosophy. For Althusser was not alone in announcing these concerns, and his criticisms are consistent with those which have better stood the test of time – della Volpe (1978) and Colletti (1975a), for instance, capture convincingly why

History and Event.indd 7

03/08/2015 08:39:15

8  History and Event Marx’s thought cannot be assimilated into the joint logical and historical succession of Hegel’s dialectic. Instead of drawing the line of demarcation within Marx’s corpus, della Volpe and Colletti criticise dialectical materialism for failing to appreciate Marx’s lifelong methodology of ‘determinate’ or ‘real’ abstraction, locating the problem in Engels’s superficial materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, which failed to see the methodological chasm separating Marx from Hegel. This critique also aligns with historical scholarship that places much of the blame on Engels in instituting a Hegelianised Marxist orthodoxy (see Carver 1983) shared by classical Marxism, Soviet dialectical materialism, and the type of Western HegelianMarxism which reaches its apogee in Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941). Della Volpe, Colletti and Carver’s critiques thus complement Althusser’s in questioning orthodox conceptions of the Hegel–Marx connection and opening the door to alternative ontologies and epistemologies. Alongside Althusser’s criticisms of historicism, they allow us to ask whether the idea of quantity-quality leaps can capture genuinely revolutionary discontinuity; whether the idea has any basis within Marx’s work; whether dialectical materialism respects natural science or acts as a fetter on its development; and if the classical dialectical materialist science of history contributed to the politics of Second International Marxism, which made a fetish of the productive forces and the correct sequencing of historical stages to be passed through en route to socialism. These questions guide the chapters on Hegel, Marx and Lenin in Part I of this book. As well as being important inquiries in their own right, the intention in posing them is to tease out the problems that would underlie Althusser’s critiques of Hegelian historicism and motivate his adoption of French historical epistemology to think revolutionary discontinuity. In so doing, these chapters also set up the second part of the book, which argues that Althusser’s response to classical Marxism’s inability to think historical discontinuities can help us make sense of Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s philosophies and understand the tensions involved in proposing a new rationalist science of history divorced from teleology.

Events and Historical Judgement after Althusser The key question that runs through Part II of this book, and which goes some way towards constituting the ‘conflictual unity’ between

History and Event.indd 8

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction  9 the classical Marxist tradition and Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux, is: what happens when one seeks to retain a science of history, but places discontinuous events at the centre of history’s rational intelligibility? Crucially, to be alert to this problem is to be aware of how the new Marxist science of history Althusser founded is in close proximity to many classical dialectical materialist themes, taking inspiration from Marx’s 1859 Preface while rejecting its residual teleological structures. This question demands, moreover, our appreciation of how although Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux’s commitment to a rational theory of historical change takes them close to Hegel in some respects, their shared rejection of teleology in combination with their defence of the autonomy of science represents an insurmountable theoretical chasm separating them from Hegel.2 Althusser’s 1959 essay on Montesquieu captures well some of these affinities with and distinctions from Hegel. In this text, Althusser credits Montesquieu as being a veritable forerunner to Marx; a thinker who ‘makes intelligible the changes and revolutions in the concrete totalities of history’ by proposing ‘an inner reason, an inner unity, a fundamental primordial centre: the unity of nature and principle’ (Althusser 2007b: 50, 48). In Althusser’s reading, Montesquieu’s science of history compels the rejection of sceptical accounts of history in favour of ‘a deeper reason, which if not always reasonable, is at least always rational; by a necessity so strict that it embraces not only bizarre institutions, which last, but even the accident that produces victory or defeat in a battle and is contained in a momentary encounter’ (Althusser 2007b: 21). Most significantly for his overall project – the veritable lynchpin for distinguishing Althusser’s science of history from Hegel’s – the moving and dynamic totality Althusser discovers in Montesquieu’s work is one lacking final cause. Montesquieu’s science of history is free of any moral or transhistorical teleology that would allow history to be explained according to a single principle (a problem Althusser will diagnose adroitly in Marxist theory when it sees a single general contradiction between labour and capital as history’s motor force). Althusser’s dissatisfaction with the Hegelian dialectic also concerns its problematic relationship to natural science. In Hegel’s teleology, Althusser argues, history is imbued with a structure which collapses the distinctions between theoretical and social practices, thereby depriving scientific practice of its autonomy. In Althusser’s alternative science of history, by contrast, the absence of a teleology relating

History and Event.indd 9

03/08/2015 08:39:15

10  History and Event ends and origins is intended to prevent ideology encroaching upon science’s terrain. Althusser (2003:  4) would later name the two camps occupying either side of this line of demarcation as that of a ‘critical, rationalist idealism’ and a ‘materialist, rationalist empiricism’. The former, marked predominantly by the Hegelian influence on classical dialectical materialism and Marxist humanism, but also encompassing Husserl’s phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism, Althusser considers a marked improvement upon the spiritualist tendency in French thought. Yet only its materialist cousin fusing Marx’s science of history with French historical epistemology, Althusser believed, could prevent a reversion to pre-Marxist ideology. For the Althusser of 1967, only the movement towards a materialist rationalist empiricism would permit a new science of history divorced from teleology and able to support the autonomy of scientific practice. The pursuit of these two Althusserian desiderata are also what sunder Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s philosophies from Hegel’s dialectic. Not only do Badiou and Meillassoux reject the teleology of classical dialectical materialism (Badiou 2007c: 176; Meillassoux 2011a: 205); both also configure their philosophies to uphold the autonomy of science. In Badiou’s case, he does so by recasting Althusser’s insistence on the autonomy of social practices in the form of the four truth procedures of science, politics, art and love – notably denying philosophy a capacity to furnish truths. In Meillassoux’s After Finitude, this takes the form of a realist injunction, following Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1962), to secure the independence of the world from thought, therewith realising Althusser’s dream of a materialist rationalist empiricism (Brown 2009). Placing primacy on the radical novelties in history, both Badiou and Meillassoux follow Althusser by refusing to allow science to be pulled into the orbit of Hegel’s teleological dialectic, which in looping through the origin of classical metaphysical categories, and sublating historical novelties into its fold, has to position itself in a relation of superiority to the natural sciences. In labouring the point of the rationalist yet non-Hegelian historical sciences offered by post-Althusserian theory, I have sought to clear the ground so as to elucidate the seeming paradox that provides the critical thread tying together Part II of this book. That is, why do theorists who divest history of its Hegelian teleological structure in favour of discontinuous events not, by the same token, suppress the authority of theory? Why do their philosophies not

History and Event.indd 10

03/08/2015 08:39:15

Introduction  11 end up supporting radically democratic, horizontalist, anarchist and spontaneous politics as, for instance, does Jacques Rancière’s post-Althusserian trajectory? Why would Althusser remain within the French Communist Party and his name be irrevocably associated with disdain for the self-organising capabilities of the masses? Why would Badiou be labelled a Stalinist dinosaur by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (2011) for applying his philosophical criteria to the ‘Arab Spring’ and labelling the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt ‘historical riots’ not yet matured into a revolutionary historical movement (Badiou 2012a)? Why would Meillassoux (2011a) aim to restore the capacity of philosophy to determine an ethical political programme? To get to the rub of the problem, if the authoritativeness of Marxist theory always hinged on its purported ability to predict the future, why do these alternative historical rationalisms, articulated ex-post with respect to discontinuous events, not lead in a more populist direction? An initial indication of the answer can be found in their privileging of the most aristocratic of the sciences – mathematics. Yet this only takes us part way towards understanding the political dilemmas enjoined by affirming a muscular rationalism in historical theory. The argument that traverses these chapters is that one needs to understand how these thinkers conceptualise the truth of events in order to explore why they are dragged into troublingly Platonic depths from the perspective of Marxist materialism. In Althusser’s case, the alleged collusion of his theoretical edifice with his quietude during May ’68 and continuing membership of the French Communist Party has been pored over extensively (see for instance Connolly 1981; Thompson 1978; Rancière 2011). However, this political debate is not one that we add to, even if it provides a necessary backdrop to our discussion. Instead, the problem of authority is traced immanently to Althusser’s philosophy. We see that Althusser’s epistemology, nominating events as a break from ideology to science in the absence of the empirical criteria by which science proper can defend its theoretical revolutions, leads inexorably towards buttressing the authority of theory.3 Without being able to refer to historical teleology or to empirical trends to support its historical judgements, Althusser’s ‘theoreticist’ reimagining of the Marxist science of history ends up leaning solely on its self-consistency (and arbitrary authority). This problem also passes to Badiou’s Being and Event, which, while being a particularly sophisticated attempt to proscribe the authority of philosophers in

History and Event.indd 11

03/08/2015 08:39:15

12  History and Event response to the problems of high-Althusserian theory, harbours some of the same problems. Most significant is how in this text Badiou seeks to excise philosophers from playing a part in the nomination of political events by denying philosophy its own truth procedure, thereby attempting to live up to the demands of Althusser’s critique of his theoreticist deviation. Ultimately, however, Badiou’s demarcations are complicated by the ambiguous role of the philosopher in his system and the way this mirrors his position as an outspoken radical public intellectual. We also discern similar problems in Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. In seeking to supplant Marxist historicism with a conception of political change occurring through epochal ex-nihilo events, Meillassoux ends up positioning philosophers as the Platonic guardians of an individualistic ethical discourse pitted against collective political enthusiasm. Meillassoux’s philosophy further reinforces the point that placing contingent events at the core of historical science does not obviate the problem of theoretical authority; indeed, it can heighten it. Thus, the overarching message of Part II of this book is that while the Althusserian lineage successfully manages to overcome the historicism of Hegelian dialectics, its success in conceptualising discontinuous events does not undermine the authority of theoreticians. The more historicist articulation of history and event offered by classical Marxism, although not well equipped to think discontinuity, can at least be subjected to empirical scrutiny. In this sense, classical dialectical materialism represents a more authentically materialist science of history than those offered in the Althusserian lineage, even if its reliance on Hegelian teleology exposes it as fatally flawed. In drawing attention to the weaknesses of contemporary historical sciences, this book therefore aims to live up to its promise of avoiding a teleological reading whereby they are positioned as resolving the problems with the classical Marxist tradition. There is no resolution here; no sense that the latter line of thought decisively surpasses the former. Both classical Marxism and Althusserian theory pursue a worthy project of attempting to make sense of history, but both come with limitations. Only in the afterword will I sketch out one possible way that the impasses of both traditions might be navigated around by employing the resources of complexity science. A final note on method. This book adopts the approach of immanent critique in its readings of individual thinkers. This means that it seeks to prise out the problems with their theories through their

History and Event.indd 12

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Introduction  13 internal inconsistencies, and by taking issue with what influential secondary readings have to say about them. However, each chapter provides an abridged introduction to the theorist under scrutiny in order to make the discussion accessible to those less familiar with the material. Both parts of the book also interweave their discussion around a shared set of theoretical references, so that they develop a single line of argument. My intention in writing the book in this way was that the chapters would build upon one another thematically so that if the book is read in full the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Chapter Abstracts Chapter 1 turns to Hegel’s Science of Logic and examines Hegel’s attempted dialecticisation of the mathematical infinite on which rests the Marxist idea of leaps between quantity and quality. The chapter criticises Hegel’s historicist take on the mathematical infinite as complicit with the idea of history as a teleological succession of epochs. The removal of irrational numbers from Hegel’s reflections on the infinite is then taken as symptomatic of his occlusion of novel scientific breakthroughs, and helps us to explain why Badiou is able to think events more radically in his commitment to the historical revolution in mathematics brought about by Georg Cantor’s transfinite. While this is the most abstract chapter of the book, the following chapters on Marx and Lenin will refer back to it when exploring the implications of the idea of quantity-quality leaps for strategic and economic debates in Marxist theory. Chapter 2, on Marx’s idea of communist transformation, investigates the origins of the concept of quantity-quality leaps in the theorisations of Engels, Plekhanov, and Kautsky. In providing a reading of Marx’s methodology and of the structure of his magnum opus, Capital, the chapter questions whether the idea of communist transformation as a quantity-quality leap has any basis in Marx’s work. Concluding that it does not, the chapter shows that classical Marxism was reliant upon Engels’s hugely influential popularisations of the doctrine that positioned Marx’s work as a simplistic materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectic. In so doing, the chapter directs attention to how the Hegel–Marx connection, enshrined in classical dialectical materialism (and often passed wholesale into Western Hegelian-Marxism), is not a natural one; it is one with its

History and Event.indd 13

03/08/2015 08:39:16

14  History and Event own history, its own canonical texts, and its own key moments of theoretical elaboration. A similar approach to questioning popular narratives carries across to Chapter 3 on Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. This chapter brings the insights of the first two chapters to bear in casting a sceptical eye on the Hegelian-Marxist narrative which positions Lenin’s philosophy after 1914 as a fundamental break from Engelsian dialectical materialism. This serves to bring Althusser’s (2001) reflections on Lenin’s notebooks up to date in response to the publication of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and Kevin Anderson’s Lenin, Hegel, and the Path of Western Dialectics (1995). The chapter concludes, opposite to Dunayevskaya’s and Anderson’s narrative, that after 1914 Lenin’s dialectics of revolution remained essentially what they had been since his 1894 book What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are (Lenin 1960): a term describing an empirically oriented form of analysis merely embellished with abstract dialectical flourishes. The important point is that Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel do not furnish a philosophy allowing us to theorise the dialectics of revolution more discontinuously than his contemporaries. Chapter 4, the first chapter of Part II, presents Louis Althusser as the anti-Hegelian theorist par excellence. After crediting Althusser’s epistemological critiques with penetrating insight, the chapter shows how his appropriation of French theories of scientific discontinuity made the authority of historical judgement the Achilles’ heel of his project. The argument centres on how in equating truth with novelty/science and falsehood with repetition/ideology, Althusser lacks teleological or empirical criteria to support these judgements. The vicious circularity involved in crediting his epistemology as the theory of theoretical practice, the chapter further argues, was partly responsible for the retraction of many of his most exciting ideas of the mid-1960s and his eventual abandonment of Marxist philosophy altogether. The final section contends that while many have been quick to see in Althusser’s late writings a prototype of Badiou’s theory of the event, it is Althusser’s theories of the 1960s which inform the structural ambitions of Being and Event. Chapter 5, on Alain Badiou, continues with the theme of the authority of philosophy. Against the standard reading of Being and Event, which sees it as an exercise in systematic humility where philosophy has no place in casting judgement on events, the chapter presents Badiou’s text as having more ambiguous political implications. It

History and Event.indd 14

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Introduction  15 demonstrates that the evental-site, the ‘objective’ aspect of Badiou’s idea of the event, is strangely eclipsed in the later meditations of the book, meaning that it falls to the philosopher to propose that an event has taken place and to encourage the commencement of a truth procedure. In the final section, these insights help us reflect upon Badiou’s status as a public intellectual and how he draws upon his philosophical framework to issue judgements about real political events. Chapter 6, on Quentin Meillassoux, argues that his notion of absolute contingency can be seen as driving tendencies within Althusser’s and Badiou’s philosophies to their logical conclusion. Taking issue with the overly scientistic reading of Meillassoux’s philosophy, however, the chapter shows how it is animated by the desire to restore the sovereignty of philosophy. By drawing on the published fragments of The Divine Inexistence (Meillassoux 2011a), and his book The Number and the Siren (Meillassoux 2012a), we see that Meillassoux’s notion of absolute contingency, rather than sounding a sceptical note about the capacities of theoretical knowledge, endows it with absolute authority over political subjectivity. Chapter 7, the book’s afterword and the sole chapter of Part III, draws on the conclusions of Parts I and II to reflect upon a new approach to theorising the science of history. Positioning complexity science as a recommencement of Althusser’s project, we see how complexity avoids teleology, maintains the autonomy of science, and allows empirical verification of its analysis. The chapter then carves out an Althusserian position within the discourse by navigating between the general and restricted paradigms and by coming down on the side of weak emergence against its strong variant. This leads us to suggest a role for agent-based modelling and simulation in bridging order and disorder in the human sciences. Once configured correctly, we conclude, a science of history mediated through complexity might earn justly the title of a true materialism.

History and Event.indd 15

03/08/2015 08:39:16

History and Event.indd 16

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Chapter 1 Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge Here we have before us a genuine ‘algebra’ – and purely materialist at that – of social development. This algebra has room for ‘leaps’ (of the epoch of social revolution) and for gradual changes. Georgi Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1969: 63) With a science like Mathematics, history has, in the main, only the pleasing task of recording further additions. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1995: 10)

Hegel occupies a peculiar temporal position in Marxism. From entering as an antagonist against whom Marx theorised the state (Marx 1975c), to being presented as an ambiguous methodological ally in Marx’s Capital (Marx 1976b: 102–3), to the way he has received a full-blown resuscitation by thinkers from Georg Lukács (1971) to Slavoj Žižek (2012b), one is never sure whether to place Hegel at the origin or cutting edge of Marxist thought. To make things more difficult, the pivotal moment defining Hegel’s influence arguably lies at neither end and can be located with the publication of Engels’s AntiDühring in 1877 – the text which introduced Hegelian metaphysics to Marxist thought and which was pivotal for the interpretation of the doctrine by key theorists of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov.4 The fact that Engels borrowed directly from Hegel the idea of quantity-quality leaps therefore compels us to begin this book with Hegel’s philosophy itself. I thus save situating the idea of quantity-quality leaps with respect to the strategic and economic debates of early-twentieth-century Marxism for the following chapter. For the majority of this chapter, the focus

History and Event.indd 19

03/08/2015 08:39:16

20  History and Event is almost entirely philosophical in nature. We ask whether the idea of quantity-quality leaps escapes the philosophical commitments that Althusser (2005) and Colletti (1973) identify with the continuous, cumulative, and historicist structure of Hegel’s dialectic. In order to address this question, we turn to Hegel’s Science of Logic. In particular, we observe those chapters concerned with grounding the idea of quantity-quality leaps in an attempted dialecticisation of the mathematical infinite. Given that these sections are among the most difficult of Hegel’s already intimidatingly dense logico-ontological text, it should not come as a surprise that this transition has not been followed up systematically by Marxist thinkers.5 Nevertheless, for two reasons this chapter contends that an examination of the connection between Hegel’s mathematical infinite and his notion of quantity to quality leaps is worth the long theoretical haul it entails. The first is that it is crucial for understanding the theory of knowledge and ontological commitments upon which Hegel’s notion of quantity-quality leaps rest. The abundant use of metaphors in the Marxist tradition to explain the idea (from tectonic tremors to childbirth) can encourage a certain complacency in regard to the epistemological commitments entailed by Hegel’s notion; going back to the idea’s deduction in the Logic can unearth its deep ontological grounding. The second is that since Alain Badiou’s notion of the event is similarly rooted in the mathematical infinite – Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics – this analysis is lent significance in terms of the comparative ambition of this book. If we can understand why Hegel’s notion of leaps relies on simplifying the mathematical infinite, then we will be in a better position to understand why Badiou can think more radically the discontinuous nature of events by affirming Cantor’s revolution in mathematics. To bring these points together, this chapter will argue that a focus on Hegel’s philosophy of mathematics allows us to appreciate why a historicist theory of knowledge traverses Hegel’s Logic in a similar way to his Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977) or the Philosophy of History (Hegel 1956). Although it is well known that in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel (1995: 30, 37) maintains that ‘the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of the Notion’, this has rarely been connected to Hegel’s application of dialectical reasoning to mathematical philosophy. The crux of this chapter

History and Event.indd 20

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  21 thus rests on a demonstration of why Hegel’s classicist attempt to preserve metaphysical binaries inherited from the ancient Greeks means that his Logic is compelled to deny epistemological breaks in history. Hence Hegel has to sweep under his dialectical rug the mathematical innovations which permitted Cantor (1952; 1941) to make his breakthroughs, including the class of irrational numbers which have been known about since the late Pythagoreans. While I do not claim that Hegel’s historicist epistemology accounts directly for the inability of dialectical materialists like Kautsky and Plekhanov to think events in a discontinuous fashion, this chapter will argue that Hegel’s concept of quantity to quality leaps is complicit with a vision of history as a well-ordered succession of epochs. Or, to say the same thing a different way, the chapter will demonstrate that there is a reflexive relationship between Hegel’s history of science and his science of history. As touched upon on in the final section, this historicist theory of knowledge will be reflected in the theoretical works of classical Marxists who propounded a simplistic materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectic, and who crafted the Marxist science of history as a successive unfolding of modes of production matching the structure of Hegel’s dialectic. The chapter first recounts the philosophical stakes of The Science of Logic, clarifying its relationship to the scientific content it attempts to assimilate. Following this, we recall the development of Hegel’s reflections on mathematics, working from his early works on the subject through to a reading of the sections in the Logic concerning differential calculus. We then critically assess the legitimacy of Hegel’s dialectical mathematical infinite and contrast it with Cantor’s transfinite. The final section introduces the significance of these findings for the strategic and economic themes grappled with in the following chapters.

What is the Logic in the Science of Logic? For a book of such importance, influencing world-historical figures from Marx to Mao, the lesser prominence of Hegel’s Science of Logic in contemporary critical thought is intriguing. Partly this can be attributed to role of Alexandre Kojève (1969) in popularising Hegel in France with a near-exclusive focus on the Phenomenology of Spirit; partly it could be the legendary length and difficulty of the book, not helped by questionable translations into foreign languages

History and Event.indd 21

03/08/2015 08:39:16

22  History and Event (see Giovanni 2010). Whatever the reason, a certain mystique hangs around the Logic. If the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History are considered by many as irredeemably compromised by their apologies for Christianity and Western superiority, Marx’s (1976a: 102–3) ambiguous nod to the Hegelian logical method, as well as the interest in the book shown by Marxists, has reserved it a certain respect. This does not mean that the book is well read, though. It will therefore help to begin by laying out the broad aims of the Logic and by situating it within Hegel’s wider philosophical system. The majority of this chapter focuses on providing a primary reading of Hegel’s text, with a brief detour through Hegel’s early writing on mathematics in the second section. Only in the final section do we then return to reflect on its significance for the Marxist appropriation of quantity-quality leaps, once the philosophical groundwork has been set fully in place. The Science of Logic is a more expansive work than its name might suggest. While seemingly constrained to the rather dry topic of ‘logic’ – in its Hegelian variation, the movement of thought towards the Absolute Idea – in fact the Logic’s speculative scope goes beyond just studying the movement of abstract concepts (Winfield 2006: 11). The structure of the book gives an indication of its ambition. The Logic is divided into two volumes: the ‘Objective Logic’ (Volume I) and the ‘Subjective Logic’ (Volume II), with the aim that both volumes join up in a circular conceptual movement. As such, since the terminus of the Logic is the speculative identity of thought and being, it would be a mistake to see the book as only about ideal concepts. Because although Hegel is certainly dealing with abstract thought determinations in the absence of sensuous, mediated understanding, the book’s end point is the same Absolute Idea/Knowing as that found in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977: 479–93). Hegel means it quite literally when in the Logic he describes the Absolute as a ‘concrete totality’: concrete insofar as the realm of finite concepts gives way to the truth of the infinite in both the concept and absolute metaphysical reality (Kojève 1969: 169–70). Subjective thought captures objective logic precisely because neither represents the foundation, which, if it were the case, would imply that either logic or the real could be posited as antecedent to the other. At the start of the Subjective Logic, Hegel reflects on the question of how objective categories, which at first appear something like Platonic Forms, relate to subjective logic.

History and Event.indd 22

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  23 It might perhaps seem that, in order to state the Notion of an object, the logical element were presupposed and that therefore this could not in turn have something else for its presupposition, nor be deduced; just as in geometry logical propositions as applied to magnitude and employed in that science, are premised in the form of axioms . . . Now although it is true that the Notion is to be regarded, not merely as a subjective presupposition but as the absolute foundation, yet it can be so only in so far as it has made itself the foundation. (Hegel 1969: 577)

Hegel makes a special effort in his attempt to avoid the impression that his Logic implies recourse to a priori logical concepts, because in his view this would leave logic and reality in irresolvable opposition. ‘Consequently, the Notion has substance for its immediate presupposition; what is implicit in substance is manifested in the Notion. Thus the dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocity is the immediate genesis of the Notion, the exposition of the process of its becoming’ (Hegel 1969: 577). Does this imply that the Logic captures all of existence within its speculative purview once logical development fuses with metaphysical reality? To see why the fusion of logic with reality does not entail that one can derive all of the (finite) sciences from Hegelian logic, George di Giovanni insightfully describes the Logic as providing a hierarchy of intelligibility: a conceptual measure aiming to provide meaning, coherence, order and hierarchy to the content established by the finite intellect (Giovanni 2010: xxxv). For this reason, and despite their affinities, Hegel’s Absolute is distinguished from Hericlitean flux, which could be reduced to the maxim that everything which comes to be passes away, because Hegel’s system aims to preserve/sublate finite conceptual determinations in the totality (Hegel 1995: 279, 292–3). In order for the Absolute to express the identity of thought and being, it needs to be a differentiated whole preserving the conceptual ‘contents’ as ‘moments’ of a unitary unfolding. As Hegel’s dialectical method will throughout the Logic repeat again and again the same move of showing why all finite determinations collapse into untenable contradictions, the hard work lies in the ordering of this content. Not often remarked upon with sufficient wonder is the sheer heterogeneity of the ‘contents’ Hegel synthesises in the development of ‘concrete totality’: taking ideas from classical metaphysics, physics and mathematics, as well as ‘some almost untranslatable German expressions’ (Rinaldi 1992: 16). The act of ordering the logical

History and Event.indd 23

03/08/2015 08:39:16

24  History and Event development between such diverse content into a totality is meant to undermine any finite conception of their discrete application to separate regions of being. Thus, the real is shown to be as much a totality as the concept through the act of joining together the conceptual contents. With this in mind it is possible to appreciate why, despite already undermining the traditional distinction between logic and metaphysics in the Nürnberg Logic 1808–11 (a distinction still in place in the earlier Jena Logic of 1804–5), Hegel still continued to tinker with the ordering of the categories right up until the second edition of the Logic in 1832.6 If Hegel manages to order successfully such diverse material and supply convincing dialectical transitions, then his point is proven almost de facto, whether or not one wishes to denounce the Absolute as metaphysical nonsense, as did the majority of Marxists who endorsed a materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics. This is why mathematics plays such a crucial role in Hegel’s work. The conceptual problem of the infinitesimal (infinitely small unit) in calculus presents a supreme opportunity for Hegel, since it reflects the finite/infinite dialectic at work throughout the Logic, but in terms of a real problem confronting science’s understanding of its concepts. If Hegel can resolve the conceptual problem underlying one of the most important advances in modern mathematics, then he can prove the superiority of philosophical idealism: its necessity and worth not just for undermining the certainties of finite, scientific understanding, but also its necessity for the mathematical intellect’s understanding of its own procedures.7 Science will, in short, need philosophical idealism for a proper appreciation of its own practice. In Anti-Dühring (1936a: 151) Engels is remarkably faithful to Hegel on this point: throughout the book Engels repeatedly defends the dialectical method by reference to the supposed contradictions of the differential calculus, following the Logic practically to the letter in positioning Hegel’s demonstration as affirming the reality of contradiction in nature. Our focus on the mathematical infinite is therefore not just a crucial point for Hegel scholarship, but also assumes importance in the Marxist tradition too. But before progressing to what the Logic has to say on the subject, the next section will examine the problems faced by Hegel in his earlier works on mathematics. This allows us to appreciate in more detail the concerns animating Hegel’s engagement with mathematics before dealing with how mathematics slots into his grand logical system.

History and Event.indd 24

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  25

At the Limits of Pythagoreanism The starting point for most discussions of Hegel’s use of mathematics is his 1801 dissertation on the orbits of the planets (Hegel 1987: 269–309). Because of the justified rubbishing the thesis has received from his own contemporaries through to Karl Popper (1966: 27) in the twentieth century, it is easy to get the impression that Hegel began his philosophical career with incredibly naïve ideas about mathematical rationality. Yet Hegel’s earlier 1800 Geometrical Studies – passed down only in fragments – paints a picture of a more nuanced meeting between his philosophy and mathematics. By beginning with a discussion of Hegel’s reflections on geometry we will be able to disentangle two problems: the first being the search for conceptual necessity in mathematical practice, and the second being the question of how mathematics relates to the physical world. At the time of undertaking his study of Euclid’s Elements at the turn of the nineteenth century, Hegel was immersed in an intellectual environment where Neoplatonism was ascendant. For this reason, Alan Paterson (2004) sees close parallels between Hegel’s approach to geometry and that of Proclus Lycaeus (not for nothing, it seems, did Feuerbach once describe Hegel as the ‘German Proclus’). The difference between the two is that whereas Proclus seeks to interpret geometry as a hierarchy of its figures’ proximity to the equality of an originating One, Hegel seeks similar criteria but in terms of conceptual unity. By working with the dyad of limited/unlimited (another rendition of the finite/infinite dialectic), Hegel wishes to locate the simplest concepts intrinsic to Euclid’s development of his theorems. Hegel thus seeks to bring dialectical philosophy to bear where he perceives Euclid to lack a sufficiently rigorous conceptual underpinning, limiting himself to justifying geometrical propositions and occasionally shortening proofs. One such ‘correction’ is a critique of the superposition technique occasionally used by Euclid. The superposition technique involves a manipulation of the geometrical figure in the mind – in Proposition 4, for example, a triangle – to make a geometrical proof by imaginatively placing one triangle on top of another. Hegel considers it cheating to rely on such a sensuous understanding of geometrical objects because the concepts at work in geometry are more succinct than their visual realisation. For instance, the concept of a triangle need only pertain to two angles and the concepts of line and plane;

History and Event.indd 25

03/08/2015 08:39:16

26  History and Event the complete visualised triangle (having three lines, three angles, and three points) is superfluous for its conceptual identity. It follows that any method relying on these superfluous visualisations misses the simpler and more necessary conceptual proof. For Hegel, deriving the latter relies upon a systematic construction of the concepts of geometry out of the notions of the limited and unlimited. This begins with the simplest figures and is only completed once the major figures of geometry have been developed. What can be taken away from Hegel’s geometrical studies, then, is his attempt to bring a philosophical conceptual framework to bear in simplifying and bringing to mathematical consciousness a proper comprehension of its practice. Let us now turn to Hegel’s (1987) dissertation and his first attempt at ‘applied mathematics’. More than just proposing that the world is governed by mathematical, physical laws, Hegel here attempts to use the conceptual rationality of a mathematical number series in order to predict the distance of the planets from the sun. The thesis is thus based on a conviction that the conceptual understanding philosophy brings to mathematics can attain predictive power. To prove his point, Hegel seeks to find a rational basis for the Titius-Bode ‘law’ of the distances of the planets from the sun. The procedure entails taking a number power series from Plato’s Timaeus and correlating it to the known orbit distances of the planets, obliging Hegel, if he is to make the sixth number in the series match the orbit of Saturn, to fudge the Platonic number series (1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27) by replacing the 8 with 16 (1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 16, 27) – a substitution performed without any theoretical justification. However, Piazzi’s discovery of Ceres (nowadays considered a dwarf planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter) in the year of the defence of Hegel’s dissertation undermined the basis for this application of the number series. Hegel’s intuition of the absence of a planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was proved wrong by empirical science, resulting in contemporaries heaping scorn upon his work (Depre 1998: 257–82). After having his fingers burnt by dabbling in ‘applied mathematics’ Hegel began a career-long process of equivocation regarding the relationship between mathematics and the contingencies of physical reality: he first renounced the claims of his dissertation, but then later retracted his renunciation (Ferrini 1998: 280–310). That Hegel never gave up on the idea that the mathematics ordering the universe should conform to a higher conceptual rationality

History and Event.indd 26

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  27 is evidenced by his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In a discussion on the Pythagorean School, Hegel (1995: 228) revisits the ordering of the cosmos, commenting scornfully, ‘The Pythagoreans further constructed the heavenly bodies of the visible universe by means of numbers, and here we see at once the barrenness and abstraction present in the determination of numbers.’ Only a few pages on, polemic gives way to a more wistful reflection on the ‘grandeur of this idea of determining everything in the system of the heavenly spheres through number-relations which have a necessary connection’ (Hegel 1995: 230). The modern era, Hegel (1995: 231) recognises, has made great advances in the use of mathematical thought to understand celestial laws, yet ‘everything has the semblance of accident and not of necessity’. The Pythagoreans went astray not only by attempting to represent the speculative Idea through motionless number, but also in failing to delineate the ‘transition of qualitative into quantitative opposition’ (Hegel 1995: 219). So, Hegel concludes, we cannot rely on the naïve assumption that the universe conforms to the conceptual underpinnings of number series, as he had assumed in his dissertation. The preceding discussion shows that Hegel attached great significance to mathematics, and that his reflections on the subject were entwined intimately with his theorisation of the quantity-quality pair. In the next section we turn to the Logic and ask whether Hegel successfully rides to the rescue of mathematics’ foundations, or whether he restricts its practice by subordinating it to speculative reason. The introduction to this chapter has already indicated what the conclusion will be; but analysing the manner in which Hegel attempts to bridge his dialecticised mathematical infinite with his conception of Measure will provide crucial insights into the problematic nature of Marxists’ adoption of Hegel’s notion of leaps between quantity and quality.

The Uses and Abuses of Mathematics Commentary on Hegel’s interpretation of mathematical infinity is highly polarised. On the majority’s side you have the likes of Bertrand Russell, who dismisses all that Hegel has to say on the subject (Russell 2009: §325). On the other side, a minority stream of readers swing to the opposite extreme and defend Hegel’s speculative insights by arguing that they prefigure Georg Cantor’s discovery of

History and Event.indd 27

03/08/2015 08:39:16

28  History and Event the transfinite, mirroring the way Engels (1941) impressed upon his readers Hegel’s anticipation of later natural scientific breakthroughs.8 Rinaldi (1992:  172) states that Hegel’s dialectical mathematical infinity ‘openly foreshadows the possibility of a series of different forms and degrees of quantitative actual Infinity, which in the ambit of the mathematical sciences, will be theorized by G. Cantor . . . [proving] the perennial up-to-dateness of the Hegelian Logic’. Hegel might not have created the mathematics for the Cantorian revolution, but on the conceptual level he was, such readers argue, close enough to have made a lasting contribution to the field. Over the following sections, we side with Russell’s sceptical reading and contend that Hegel’s failure to dialecticise convincingly the mathematical infinite has ramifications for his leaps between quantity and quality. It is first necessary, however, to say a few words on Hegel’s general views on mathematics by the time of the Logic. While it is common knowledge that Hegel affirms the superiority of dialectical reasoning to mathematics in the Logic, it is also important to stress that his project is not solely critical in nature. As with his earlier work on geometry, Hegel instead insists upon a reconciliation between the two, which only dialectical philosophy can accomplish (Lacroix 2000: 299; Pinkard 1981: 453). Hegel attempted this ambitious project not out of ignorance about developments in the field; during his intellectual maturity he became conversant in the mathematical practices of his time, and even taught a course on differentiation. In an 1865 letter Engels goes so far as to claim that ‘Hegel knew so much about mathematics that none of his pupils were in a position to publish the numerous mathematical manuscripts among his papers’ (quoted in Kol’man and Yanovskaya 1983: 236). Hegel was also familiar with contemporary practitioners’ efforts to set differential calculus on more rigorous ground, such as in the work of Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) and Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857). Not unreasonably, Hegel’s concern with mathematics stemmed from a realisation that calculus had opened up a sinkhole beneath mathematics’ foundations. And at the same time, Hegel also saw the great progress made by mathematics as undermining the speculative leadership of philosophy: a field working within a similar domain of reason yet seemingly unable to deliver the same rapid advances. Hence Hegel’s challenge: to prove the necessity of philosophy for understanding developments in modern mathematics. In keeping with this project, Hegel’s central contention in the Logic

History and Event.indd 28

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  29 is that mathematics, for all its formal brilliance, remains encumbered by its own finite understanding subsumed beneath the surface of seductive symbolism. Dialectical reason, he believes, however, can prove more penetrating for exposing its deeper ground of reason. In particular, dialectical philosophy can help us understand the obscure status of the vanishing operator (the infinitesimal) used in calculus for obtaining the differential of a curve. In Leibniz’s notation, for example, the differentiation of x2 = y becomes dy x+dx2 −x2 = dx    dx which, after carrying out the required multiplications and cancelling out of redundant terms, can be reduced to: dy = 2x+dx dx  But then, given that dx represents an infinitesimal, yet dy retains its dx value as the dx required measure of the ratio, dx is cancelled out, leaving only dy = 2x dx  This approximation technique, Hegel notes, violates algebraic logic for the purpose of determining the gradient of the curve, even though it permits exactly correct results. Thus, Hegel aims to deduce the relationship of quality and quantity through deducing the relationship of the finite to the infinite. This entails a dialectical derivation that provides order to a series of categories – Quality, Quantity, Measure – and seeks to resolve the bad ‘spurious infinite’ of mathematics into the ‘good’, dialecticised mathematical infinite. We take these ‘moments’ in the order given them in Hegel’s presentation.

Quality Hegel (1969: 111) defines Quality as Being, wholly simple and immediate. In order for reality to take on a determinate, qualitative being, however, it is necessary that it be something (Hegel 1969: 115).

History and Event.indd 29

03/08/2015 08:39:16

30  History and Event A something must possess a limit internal to itself, and this ‘is the mediation through which something and other each as well is, as is not’ (Hegel 1969: 127). For Hegel, the finitude of qualitative things follows from the fact that ‘finite things are not merely limited; on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being’ (Hegel 1969: 129). What Hegel (1969: 129) describes as the sadness of this realisation follows from the fact that finite things ‘are, but the truth of this being is their end’. Critically, Hegel stresses that the finite and the infinite should not be thought apart from each other; the latter should not be treated as the ‘beyond’ of the finite – a conception which he derides as ‘spurious infinity’. To treat the infinite as being in opposition to the finite would imply a limitation within the infinite, rendering it another finite something. Instead, ‘the infinite only emerges in the finite and the finite in the infinite’ (Hegel 1969: 141). And insofar as they can be thought apart from each other, Hegel insists that we conceptualise their relationship as one of ‘the alternation of the two determinations, of the unity and of the separation of both moments’ (Hegel 1969: 151; see also Lacroix 2000: 304). This does not, however, imply putting the finite and infinite on the same footing; only in the infinite is there ‘a purely self-related, wholly affirmative being. In infinity we have the satisfaction that all determinateness, alteration, all limitation and with it thought itself, are posited as vanished’ (Hegel 1969: 139). Yet progress to infinity proves problematic in Hegel’s analysis of quantitative infinity. The notion of ‘spurious infinity’ that he derides in the qualitative field (but that can be relatively easily surpassed through dialectical interrogation), he finds to be a consequence of the being of Quantum as it progresses to infinity without ever reaching it, leaving the finite and the infinite torn asunder.

Quantity In order for dialectical movement in Quantity to take hold, it requires determination as quantum: the discrete something of pure quantity. Hegel (1969: 200–1) argues that continuity and discreteness are but two moments; and consequently, ‘continuous magnitude’ and ‘discrete magnitude’ are inseparable conceptually other than as ‘species’ of the same concept. In other words, the discreteness of quantum cannot be held in opposition to pure, continuous quantity. Quantum attains its determinate being as a discreteness in which its limit is

History and Event.indd 30

03/08/2015 08:39:16

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  31 no real limit because of the continuous repetition of the series of ones. Nonetheless, at this point, a qualitative difference emerges in the differentiation of unit and amount within the idea of number. Because the determination of the units in a continuous sequence of ones is indifferent, the plurality of the amount is irreducible to any of these units. In Lacroix’s (2000: 305) words, ‘number attests to a first form of resurgence of qualitative difference in the heart of quantitative homogeneity’. The resurgence of qualitative distinction within number becomes more pronounced in the categories of extensive and intensive quantum. In the form of number, quantum is ‘in its own self’ an extensive magnitude. By contrast, intensive quantum – degree – represents the difference between two numbers. Hegel is also keen to impute that degree is not a category introduced externally from empirical measurement. For instance, even though temperature is normally thought in terms of intensive quantum (degrees Celsius), it is equally an extensive quantum that can be measured by the sliding scale of a thermometer. Extensive and intensive quanta are thus ‘moments’ of the same concept; both are contained within the concept of number. In Hegel’s (1969: 222) words, ‘Number itself necessarily has this double form immediately within it.’ Extensive quantum is therefore never negated into intensive quantum, preventing a direct passage to qualitative infinity. And for Hegel, therein lies the problem: ‘the increase of quantum brings it no nearer to the infinite; for the difference between quantum and its infinity is essentially not a quantitative difference.’ As a result, the ‘infinity which is perpetually determined as the beyond of the finite is to be described as the spurious quantitative infinite’ (1969: 228). The antinomy between finite quantum and quantitative infinity Hegel describes as an impotence of the negative. ‘This alone is a bad state of affairs; such a procedure is unscientific. But it also involves the drawback that mathematics, being unaware of the nature of its instrument because it has not mastered the metaphysics and critique of the infinite, is unable to determine the scope of its application and to secure itself against the misuse of it’ (Hegel 1969: 241). Over the following pages Hegel then repudiates Lagrange’s attempt to ground calculus intra-mathematically. Hegel (1969: 273) argues that the reason why this cannot be achieved intra-mathematically is because the calculus is a formalisation based upon experimental physics. By attempting to resolve the problem internally to its practice,

History and Event.indd 31

03/08/2015 08:39:16

32  History and Event mathematics is in effect trying to purge the qualitative moment from formal analysis (Engels (1941: 161, 313–19) would stress the supposedly materialist implications of this argument.) One of Hegel’s most ingenious moves, however, is to not leave his discussion on this critical note, but instead to attempt to rescue the seemingly hopeless quantitative ‘spurious infinite’ from ceaseless repetition, and to do so by locating the necessary concepts within mathematics. This requires two moves: first, identifying a ratio (a qualitative moment) with an infinite quantitative series (e.g. = 0.28571 . . .); second, by demonstrating how the power of a ratio prevents the quantitative from lapsing into spurious infinity. Returning to the qualitative determinations of number and intensive quantum, Hegel extends this to the notion of fraction. A fraction such as ¼ is related to its ‘exponent’ (Hegel means the right-hand side of the equation) 0.25 as unit is to amount. With a fraction, no matter how large the numbers become, for example 1000 , the amount is not 4000 altered; it remains 0.25. Because the fraction represents a relation, it constitutes a quantum determined qualitatively. Even the series, in the form of an inverse ratio, when varied (for instance to 0.35) generates the structure of ratio out of this difference. Therefore, the two sides of the equation are dependent upon each other and cannot be taken individually: ‘consequently, according to the specific nature of their Notion, they themselves are not complete quanta’ (Hegel 1969: 316). The upshot is that Hegel interiorises quantitative infinity through a dialectical sublation of quantum into a qualitative ratio. The antinomy between ratio (qualitative unit) and exponent (quantitative amount) Hegel (1969: 319) describes as a ‘contradiction between its determination as the in-itself, i.e. as unity of the whole, which is the exponent, and its determination as moment of the ratio; this contradiction is infinity again in a fresh, peculiar form’. The ratio of powers (e.g. x2 = y) goes one step further in completing the conceptual arc of the discussion. Insofar as the ‘exponent’ of a ratio of powers produces only another ratio, there is a complete sublation of the quantitative into the qualitative. Therefore, ‘in the determinate being into which it has developed in the ratio of powers, quantum has reached its Notion and has completely realised it’ (Hegel 1969: 322). Quantum initially conceived as an indifferent series of ones tending to infinity, yet never reaching it, is thereby sublated into Hegel’s true quantitative infinity. In a dialectical twist, quantity has not just come to be determined as quality. Rather, ‘[quantity] is the

History and Event.indd 32

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  33 truth of quality itself, the latter having exhibited its own transition into quantity . . . This observation on the necessity of the double transition is of great importance throughout the whole compass of scientific method . . . this is the truth of quantum, to be Measure’ (Hegel 1969: 323–4).

Measure At the start of the section on Measure, Hegel (1969: 331) warns that the ‘development of measure which has been attempted in the following chapters is extremely difficult’. Some commentators go further. In Erol Harris’s estimation, this section is ‘extraordinarily difficult . . . so obscure as to be hardly intelligible’ (Harris quoted in Carlson 2003: 2). For the sake of brevity, let us then just sketch the key moments in Hegel’s concept of Measure. The purpose of Hegel’s concept of Measure is to think how empirical measurements of things are possible while avoiding the idea that numerical quanta exist alongside, or worse are imposed by a measurer upon, an object’s qualitative characteristics (Hegel 1969: 336). Measure is also where Hegel’s famous theorisation of quantity-quality leaps first rears its head as an attempt to ensure that the essential character of a thing does not change with every minor quantitative change, which would result in a permanent flux. In this respect, Hegel takes quite seriously the ancient paradoxes: ‘does the pulling out of a single hair from the head or from a horse’s tail produce baldness, or does a heap cease to be a heap if a grain is removed?’ (Hegel 1969: 335). The resilience of things is cast by Hegel as a qualitative resilience to quantitative change. His famous example is water: its qualitative nature as liquid only changes to solid at precisely 0 degrees Celsius; and this transformation cannot be conceived as a gradual, imperceptible transition. Hegel (1969: 335) writes: ‘The reason why such ready use is made of this category [of imperceptible change] to render conceivable or to explain the disappearance of a quality or of something, is that it seems to make it possible almost to watch the disappearing with one’s own eyes, because quantum is posited as the external limit which is by its nature alterable, and so alteration (of quantum only) requires no explanation.’ Or to paraphrase Hegel, the confusion of the finite understanding in taking quantum as an external determination (tending towards a ‘spurious infinite’) results in a misconception of the nature of the change in things themselves; it cannot understand

History and Event.indd 33

03/08/2015 08:39:17

34  History and Event the sudden breaks necessitated by a conception of the double relation between quality and quantity. At some point in the quantitative scale, there needs to be a leap in quality: the same leap hidden by the calculus when, in attempting to find a curve’s differential, it violates algebraic logic in the cancellation of the infinitesimal unit. Thus, for Hegel, his notion of ‘good’ mathematical infinity explains why Measure occurs autonomously of a measuring subject and why there are leaps between quantity and quality. The reason why mathematics struggles so hard to understand what is going on when its infinitesimal operator disappears in a differentiation procedure is because mathematics touches upon metaphysical truth, whereupon at some point there needs to be a leap between qualities that is not captured by the quantitative determination of objects. This, in a nutshell, is the foundational ontology of Hegel’s quantity to quality leaps.

Hegel contra Cantor (On the Missing Irrationals) There is no denying how impressive Hegel’s dialectical exposition is. By managing to incorporate even relatively basic mathematical conceptual issues within dialectical philosophy, Hegel achieves more than might be expected of an approach oriented around a reconciliation of mathematics with the higher truths of speculative thought. Yet precisely at the point where we are most likely to be seduced by Hegel’s dialectic, it is necessary to step back and to consider what has been lost as well as retained in this analysis. For only through an appreciation of what Hegel excises in order to make his exposition hold will we be in a position to determine why Hegel cannot be said to anticipate Cantor’s transfinite. Moreover, in unlocking the reasons for Hegel’s circumscription of his mathematical philosophy we will see why his notion of quantity-quality leaps is implicated in a historicist theory of knowledge foreclosing the possibility of discontinuous revolutions in the sciences. The crux of the matter is as follows: when Hegel discusses ratios of whole numbers on the left hand side of the equation equalling an infinite string of numbers on the right hand side, although it might seem like he has brought irrational numbers into his system, in fact the opposite is true. In contrast to the ratios dealt with in Hegel’s exposition, the definition of an irrational number is that it is not the ratio of a pair of integers. Only by ignoring irrational numbers can Hegel claim to dialecticise the mathematical infinite

History and Event.indd 34

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  35 and to domesticate it within his philosophy. Far from this being a mere pedantic observation, the poking of a single hole in an otherwise fine edifice, this point is crucial when assessing claims that Hegel anticipates Cantor or provides a philosophical exposition on a par with the mathematical practices of his era. Once we realise that Hegel excludes the irrationals from the Logic, Hegel’s mathematical infinite is revealed as infinite only insofar as it applies to the rational subset of the reals: a rather impoverished conception of the mathematical infinite, given that the irrationals have been known about since the late Pythagoreans. This observation also runs directly counter to arguments that position Hegel in the conceptual development of mathematics culminating in Cantor’s transfinite revolution. For if there is one thing that defines Cantor’s contribution to mathematical infinity, it is his hypothesis of the existence of at least two powers of infinity: the first composed of rationals, the second composed of the whole set of the reals (including the irrationals). Indeed, Cantor’s continuum hypothesis – the attempt to provide ordinal measure to the first two powers of infinity – loses its sense without considering Cantor’s central innovation as the pluralisation of the infinite founded on the curious properties of the irrationals. Cantor’s article ‘On Infinite, Linear Point-Manifolds’ (1941) is particularly clear on the matter. Here Cantor describes the infinite of the rational integers as a mere ‘ideal-infinite’ which he contrasts to his discovery of the ‘actual-infinite’. In regard to the former, the infinite of the infinitely small and infinitely large, what Cantor (1941: 94) calls the ‘bad infinity’ of the rational integers, Cantor writes that these ‘can only be looked upon in fact as veiled interrelations of the finite or of such quantities as can be directly referred to the finite’. Addressing the partisans of an impoverished conception of infinity denying the irrationals an ontological status, Cantor (1941: 103) writes that for such thinkers: At least a certain reality is granted the rational numbers which proceed so directly from the integers. But as for the irrationals they are to be assigned a merely formal meaning in pure mathematics. The actual material of analysis is composed, in this opinion, exclusively of finite, real integers and all truths in arithmetic and analysis already discovered or still to be discovered must be looked upon as relationships of the finite integers to each other; the infinitesimal and with it the theory of functions are considered to be legalised only in so far as their theorems are demonstrable through laws holding for the finite integers.

History and Event.indd 35

03/08/2015 08:39:17

36  History and Event Cantor (1941: 104) continues to demarcate clearly his own position from the above, writing that ‘we owe to these principles no true advances and if their recommendation had been fully observed science would have been retarded or at least hemmed by the narrowest of limits’. This goes some way to explaining why Cantor’s antagonist, Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891), was a fastidious reader of Hegel, as well as the fact that Cantor negatively characterised Hegel’s philosophy as part of a ‘popular and thriving academic-positivistic scepticism’ (Cantor quoted in Dauben 1990: n. 23). And although Cantor may have used terms like ‘dialectic generation’ in his expositions (Dauben 1990: 81–2), these bear only a superficial resemblance to Hegel’s use of the term. Hegel’s conception of the mathematical infinite, deeply classicist in its exclusive focus on the rational numbers, therefore deprives mathematics of the class of numbers that are a precondition for transfinite mathematics. This is not a book of mathematical philosophy, so we will not probe further into the role of irrational numbers in the advancement of modern mathematics to the contemporary. Let us be content to observe that underlying Hegel’s dubious exclusion of the irrationals is a need to maintain a synchronous logical and historical succession of concepts in the Logic, this providing a glimpse into why Hegel’s dialectic precludes epistemological breaks in the sciences. The rub of the matter is that Hegel’s classicist notion of scientific development relies on a historicist theory of knowledge that orders categories in line with their sequential chronological emergence. This compels Hegel to sequence his logical categories in the historical order in which they were introduced to Western philosophy (as Hegel himself observes in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy). Although the structure of the entire Science of Logic does not conform to a historical format, the opening sections of The Objective Logic are clearly intended to reflect broadly the historical emergence of the categories. Hegel’s binary of Being and non-Being reflects the disputation between the Eleatic stranger and Theaetetus in Plato’s Sophist (1997b); the opening dialectical movement of the Objective Logic matches the notion of becoming in Hericlitus’s (2011) philosophical fragments; Hegel’s binary of quality and quantity was first conceptualised in Aristotle’s Categories (2001); the notion of pure quality matches Kant’s conception of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason (2007: 59–84); and his reflections on the calculus finish by engaging with the work of his contemporary Joseph-Louis Lagrange (if only to

History and Event.indd 36

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  37 reject it). The upshot is that Hegel’s logical succession prohibits new insights from upsetting his historical-chronological schema: epistemological breaks are disallowed by the very nature of his project. One can make an unfavourable comparison with Alain Badiou’s philosophy to press the point. Because though Being and Event (Badiou 2007c) commences from Plato’s Parmenides – a chronologicalhistorical vector that continues to order the rest of the treatise – Badiou aims to demonstrate that Parmenides reaches an impasse in the dialectic of the One and the Many that only the insights of Cantorian mathematics allows us to surpass. For Badiou, the historicity of ‘truth procedures’ is one full of breaks, ruptures, scissions and novel creations incommensurable with what preceded them: a commitment reflected in how Badiou reads the history of philosophy. One can also compare Hegel unfavourably to Badiou’s predecessor, Albert Lautman. While Lautman’s work adopts a superficially similar approach to Hegel’s, insofar as he stresses the ‘dialectical’ interplay of metaphysical questions and mathematical exploration (for more on this, see Chapter 5), this is a dynamic process in which metaphysical categories are revised by mathematical breakthroughs and vice versa (Zalamea 2011). By contrast, Hegel’s historicist resolution of the quantitative and qualitative forecloses the possibility of such revisions. The Hegelian imperative to order metaphysical categories historically and successively ends up in the systematic elimination of novelties which upset continuity in the order of knowledge. Hegel’s procedure incessantly drives us back to the origin of philosophy: the teleological nature of the dialectic pointing backwards as much as it does forwards. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels admits as much, indeed fully recommends Hegel’s preference for the timeless truths of Greek philosophy. Although he credits the advances of modern science as having gained ‘in knowledge and even in the sifting of its material’, Engels (1941: 6–7) also writes that it ‘stood just as deeply below Greek antiquity in the theoretical mastery of this material, in the general outlook on nature’. If there is a guiding motif to Engels’s book, it is the foundational superiority of classical Greek thought to modern science, and of new developments such as Darwinian evolution which supposedly point towards their unification. This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere reestablishment of the old, but adds to the permanent foundations of this old materialism the whole thought content of two thousand years of the

History and Event.indd 37

03/08/2015 08:39:17

38  History and Event development of philosophy and natural science, as well as the historical development of these two thousand years. It is in fact no longer a philosophy, but a simple world outlook which has to establish its validity and be applied not in a science of sciences stranding apart, but within the positive sciences. (Engels 1936a: 155)

Or in short, only by understanding modern scientific developments through historically sublated metaphysical categories does Engels, following Hegel, consider the theoretical ground of scientific innovation put on a secure footing. Scientific knowledge has to continually loop back through the origin of classical Greek philosophy in order to justify its innovations.9 Hegel’s idea of leaps between quantity and quality, then, far from signalling a sharp diremption in the order of knowledge, is epistemologically complicit in smothering over cracks in historical discontinuity. Hegel’s notion of leaps seems to imply sudden jumps, scissions and a certain incommensurability when taken at face value; yet on close inspection it collapses epistemological breaks within the cumulative, teleological structure of the dialectic. The embeddedness of Hegelian quantity-quality leaps within a historicist dialectic also has repercussions for how classical Marxists conceptualised political and economic transformation. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, these problems have never been systematically followed up in terms of the relationship between Hegel’s mathematical infinite with his notion of quantity-quality leaps. Fortunately, however, these problems have been diagnosed on a more general philosophical level by both the Althusserian and della Volpean schools of Marxist thought. Colletti, for instance, argues that the result of dialectical materialism’s adoption of Hegelian logic has been Marxists’ confusion that modes of production are historically sequential in the sense of the Logic’s dialectical Aufhebung. ‘It is no accident’, Colletti (1973: 132) writes, that the root of these errors lies in their mistaking the logical process for the process of reality, or, in other words, in an abstract dialectization of the finite . . . Consequently, the categories (in this case, the commodity, money, and capital), rather than being grasped in the relations and meaning they have within modern bourgeois society, are instead conceived in accordance with the place and meaning they have in the succession of the various forms of society – in other words, according to that succession which is more or less recapitulated in the logico-deductive movement of the ‘succession “in the Idea” . . .’

History and Event.indd 38

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Hegel’s Leaps and the Historicist Theory of Knowledge  39 The way Engels’s interpretation of Marx’s political economy conforms to Hegelian logic will be expanded upon in the next chapter. For the time being, it is sufficient to note how the main exponents of quantity-quality leaps in early-twentieth-century Marxism – Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky – fall prey to these errors in the broadest sense. Their principal philosophical works – Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Plekhanov 1969) and Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Kautsky 1918a) – preserve the historicist core of Hegel’s philosophy by transposing the Hegelian dialectical succession to the development of the productive forces. For Kautsky and Plekhanov, the notion of quantity-quality leaps thus serves merely to shuttle history forward along its tracks and provide a jolt at the intersections on its single route forward. Kautsky’s book exemplifies the problem. It begins with ancient Greek ethics, moves forward to Christian ethics, then to the Enlightenment, Kant, Darwin, and, finally, Marxism. Despite claiming that his is a materialist history, the structure of Kautsky’s book and its manner of presentation has the form of a successive Hegelian dialectic of concepts. For Kautsky, need it be said, there is no contradiction between this reductionist conception of history and upholding quantity-quality leaps as a model of revolutionary change. The productive forces develop seemingly of their own accord, as if driven by a deus ex machina of inevitable progress, and at a certain tipping point the inertial drag of the relations of production induces history to leap forward to the next epoch. In Marxism and Hegel Colletti (1973) gets to the root of this problem. Colletti forcefully argues that the errors of Marxists who followed the Hegelian route, reaching an apogee with Stalin in the Soviet Union and the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno in the West, was the result of a project which was deeply problematic from the very start. When Engels, Plekhanov, and Hegelian-Marxists after Lukács claimed dialectical materialism had inverted Hegel’s Logic, prising its materialist core away from its idealism, in fact their supposed ‘inversions’ only served to perpetuate the ‘speculative nucleus’ of Hegel’s philosophy. The historicist core of Hegel’s philosophy was thereby transmutated into only a superficially materialist form by the classical Marxist and Hegelian-Marxist traditions, adopting Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history practically in its entirety. History was divided into discrete, successive stages bridged by leaps from one mode of production to the next, copying the structure of Hegel’s

History and Event.indd 39

03/08/2015 08:39:17

40  History and Event Logic. The Marxist notion of quantity-quality leaps, insofar as it derives epistemological support from Hegel’s historicist theory of knowledge, thus does little more than affirm the basic structure of Hegelian logic and graft it onto a superficially materialist mirror image of the Hegelian philosophy of history. In a certain sense, then, the idea of quantity-quality leaps perhaps does no more wrong than any other aspect of Hegel’s system when superimposed upon Marx’s thought. However, the pains I have taken in this chapter to show how this problem affects Hegel’s dialectical mathematical infinite was crucial for demonstrating that the Science of Logic provides no alternative to Hegelian historicism, even if this work is not ostensibly one of historical dialectics as is the Philosophy of History or Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s notion of leaps, we saw, adheres to a historicist theory of knowledge as deeply ingrained as that throughout the rest of his system. And the notion of quantity-quality leaps implies a conceptual structure in which logic and history evolve synchronously along a single pathway. Over the next two chapters we explore the effects of this historicist horizon as it bears upon concrete strategic and economic problems within Marxism. The next chapter does so by asking whether the idea of quantity-quality leaps has any basis within Marx’s own writings and by examining the idea’s implications for how early communist thinkers conceived of communist transformation. The dialectical ontology underlying the notion of quantity-quality leaps criticised philosophically in this chapter will be shown to have analogues in how Marx’s method was interpreted by Engels and the thinkers of the Second International. The seemingly obscure abode of Hegel’s mathematical philosophy, from which the Engelsian idea of revolution as a quantity-quality leap draws its sustenance, will lead us towards foundational questions regarding Marx’s methodology; how faithful classical dialectical materialism was to Marx’s method; and the implications of Marx’s Capital for how communist transition can be achieved. Here we step out from the austere province of mathematics into the fertile lands of ideology critique and political economy.

History and Event.indd 40

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Chapter 2 Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation It will be mankind’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1936: 312) How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another? Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1975d: 103)

The previous chapter examined philosophically the idea of quantityquality leaps, showing the notion to be implicated in the idea of history as a sequence of successive epochs matching the ordering of the categories in Hegel’s Logic. In this chapter, we turn to Marx’s idea of the transformation from capitalism to communism and ask whether it is compatible with this Hegelian-inspired metaphysics. As already intimated in the introduction to this book, to ascribe the notion of revolution as a quantity-quality leap directly to Marx is to tend towards wilful anachronism. Marx (1976b: 423) makes only a passing reference to the transformation when describing how at a quantitative tipping point the accumulation of capital can convert a master of trade into a capitalist – and this was perhaps just to placate Engels’s desire to see more Hegelian flourishes in Capital.10 Furthermore, in Anti-Dühring (1936) and Dialectics of Nature (1941), Engels’s concern is more to establish quantity to quality leaps as a general law of the dialectic dispelling static philosophies of nature than to present it as a way of thinking political events.11 Why then did the idea end up becoming the exemplary Marxist model of revolutionary change?

History and Event.indd 41

03/08/2015 08:39:17

42  History and Event The answers to this question follow naturally from one another: the first being contingent on the strategic debates of early-twentiethcentury social democracy; the second reflecting the dialectical materialist vision of history given sanction by Engels’s imprimatur. In the era of classical Marxism, the deployment of Hegel’s notion fulfilled the goal of defending the compatibility of revolution and evolution against the gradualism advocated by Eduard Bernstein (1961). When Bernstein sought to emphasise the slow evolution of the socialist movement, condemning Marx’s and Engels’s revolutionism as a Blanquist throwback out of step with the practice of the German Social Democratic Party, Kautsky and Plekhanov defended the revolutionary imperative by reference to the Hegelian metaphysics of quantity-quality leaps. In their twentieth-century works, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Plekhanov 1969) and The Social Revolution (Kautsky 1916), they connect the idea of quantity to quality leaps to the famous ‘fetters hypothesis’ set out in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx 1975a). As Plekhanov (1974a: 366) puts it: ‘[Marx] was the first to show that economic evolution leads to political revolutions’ in much the same way that geologists seek to explain earthquakes as a result of gradual changes occurring on the earth’s crust. Kautsky (1916: 17) uses the metaphor of childbirth to convey the gist of the concept, describing how ‘organs develop slowly, and must reach a certain stage of development before that leap is possible, which suddenly gives them their new function’. The notion of revolution as a quantity-quality leap also chimed with the idea of using ‘mathematical mass observation of social phenomena’ (Kautsky 1916: 32) in order to anticipate revolutionary events. In Plekhanov’s (1969: 47) words, following a turn of phrase coined by the Russian insurrectionist Alexander Herzen, the idea provides an ‘algebra of revolution’ permitting us to understand the ‘arithmetic of development’. Hegelian-Marxists were to dramatically reverse classical Marxism’s reverence for science, but to go further in seeing the quantity-quality binary traversing Marx’s critique of political economy. Describing Marx’s method in his introduction to Capital, Ernest Mandel (1976: 18) writes that the ‘(quantitative) changes which constantly occur in the given mode of production, through adaptation, integration of reforms and self-defence (evolution), are distinguished from those (qualitative) changes which, by sudden leaps, produce a different structure, a new mode of production (revolution)’. In Fredric

History and Event.indd 42

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  43 Jameson’s book Representing Capital, the binary assumes a baroque, existentialist dimension pregnant with a utopian imaginary: Quality is human time itself, whether in labor or in the life outside of labor; and it is this deep existential constant that justifies that Utopian strain in Marxism . . . This indissoluble relationship between Quality and the body will then make more vivid and sinister everything about the ‘fetishism of commodities’ that smacks of spiritualism and of the abstractions of capitalism as such, which are now to be accounted for by Quantity, here identified, as in Hegel, with mind and ‘theory’ as such. (Jameson 2011: 19–20)

Or, to paraphrase, only by appreciating how Marx’s analysis compels a qualitative break from the capitalist commodity economy can the utopian (Hegelian) import of Marx’s revolutionary theory be appreciated. Thus, whether it is the dialectical materialism of Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky or the Western Hegelian-Marxist tradition we have in mind, the question of the supposed provenance of quantity-quality leaps in Marx’s intellectual corpus is entwined with our appraisal of the Hegel–Marx connection. There is already a vast scholarly literature on the relationship between Marx’s theories and Hegel’s (see Burns and Fraser 2000), but in this chapter I claim that looking at Marx’s conceptualisation of the break from capitalism to communism can shed new light on Marx’s philosophical commitments and how faithful (or unfaithful) Engelsian dialectical materialism and its neo-dialectical successors are to Marx’s ideas.12 The intentions in doing so are twofold: first, to present an interpretation of Marx’s work that prises it away from the Hegelian and historicist reading where Marx is said to advance an historicist schema where modes of production evolve in a line of successive epochs; second, to show that while it is true that Marx’s political thought advances a fusion of evolution and revolution with affinities to the idea of quantity-quality leaps, Marx’s notion of communist transformation cannot be contained within its historicist logic. Marx’s insistence on a transitional labour token scheme in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1951), we will see, reveals his sensitivity to the need for a conscious break from capitalism resting upon knowledge of the system’s functioning; communism does not just evolve out of capitalism with the force of natural necessity as it was construed by revolutionary Social Democrats in the early twentieth century.

History and Event.indd 43

03/08/2015 08:39:17

44  History and Event These findings will serve to deepen the conclusions of Chapter 1 and to demonstrate the importance of our interrogation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks in the following chapter. This chapter proceeds in four sections. The first section lays the groundwork by examining Marx’s critique of Hegel’s speculative reasoning and classical political economy. The second section ascertains whether Marx’s political economy conforms to the Hegelian logic attributed to it by Engels and ‘new dialectics’ thinkers. The third section examines Marx’s political works, arguing that Marx’s insistence upon adopting transitional measures in lower communism is not compatible within the idea of communist transformation as a quantity-quality leap. A short final section then reflects on the implications of Hegel’s dialectic for Marxist thought by drawing on the findings of the previous chapter.

Marx contra Contradiction Given that the compatibility of Marx’s idea of communist transformation with the concept of quantity-quality leaps is intimately connected with the Hegel–Marx connection, it is necessary to begin this chapter by addressing this controversial theoretical relationship. The nature of the connection pivots on the following question: when in the Postface to the Second Edition of Capital Marx declared himself a ‘pupil of that mighty thinker [Hegel]’ and confessed that he ‘coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him’ (Marx 1976b: 103), was he rescinding his earlier criticism of the Hegelian dialectic of the 1840s and coming to rely on it in a fairly straightforward sense? Or is there an irreconcilable difference between Marx’s method and Hegel’s that underlies all Marx’s work, from his earliest to his last? These alternative options have oriented two important interpretative tendencies in Marxist thought: the first being the Hegelian-Marxist tradition which locates Marxism’s origins in German idealist philosophy and maintains the importance of dialectical contradiction for opposing capitalism (Engels 1936; Lukács 1971; 1975; Dunayevskaya 1973); the second being the attempt to shore up Marx’s scientific credentials by establishing his adherence to the principle of non-contradiction (Della Volpe 1978, 1980; Colletti 1972, 1975a, 1975b) or by understanding his innovations through rationalist epistemologies of scientific discontinuity (Althusser 2005; Althusser and Balibar 2009).

History and Event.indd 44

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  45 As we shall see, this methodological distinction is of the utmost importance in understanding Marx’s theorisation of communist transformation and its relationship to the idea of quantity-quality leaps. Indeed, it is a vital distinction: for if Marx was just taking over the Hegelian dialectic in a superficially materialist guise then there would be no problem in need of being addressed in this chapter. Marx would adhere to a Hegel-inspired theory of historical change and the idea of quantity-quality leaps would be entirely in keeping with his philosophy. If, on the other hand, Marx’s methodology is incommensurable with a simplistic materialistic inversion of Hegel’s dialectic, then a vexing set of questions demands our attention: what is Marx’s method?; what implications can be drawn from his critique of political economy for how communist transformation can be achieved?; and how is it possible that Marx’s idea of such a transformation can seem so similar to the idea of quantity-quality leaps if it is philosophically incommensurable with it? Since Althusser’s reading of Marx’s epistemological break has lost much of its textual credibility over time, della Volpe and Colletti provide us with a more compelling reconstruction of Marx’s method better suited for addressing these questions. Della Volpe’s interpretation of Marx’s methodology as one of ‘determinate abstraction’ not only explains Marx’s critique of aprioristic reasoning while lending historical determination its due importance; it also defends Marx’s approach as a form of positive scientific methodology consistent with that of Enlightenment natural science – ‘moral Galileanism’, della Volpe (1980) calls it. Just as Aristotle improved upon Plato by increasing philosophy’s sensitivity to empirical determinacy, so too does della Volpe position Marx’s advance beyond Hegel as a fundamental methodological break from Hegel’s speculative dialectic that cannot be reconciled with Engels’s (1936b) idea of a simple materialist inversion. The crux of della Volpe’s argument lies in his discernment of the essential logic of the Hegelian dialectic as the movement abstract-concrete-abstract which he counterpoises against Marx’s concrete-abstract-concrete. The former, della Volpe contends, commences from a hypostatised conceptual and empirical given, offering little more than generic abstractions of increasing simplicity, the obverse of which is a crude empiricism that equates historical-chronological succession with explanation. Marx’s materialist procedure, by contrast, proposes the necessity of beginning with real, discrete problems that compel a mediated

History and Event.indd 45

03/08/2015 08:39:17

46  History and Event conceptual understanding of history, preserving the principle of noncontradiction in thought. Colletti (1975b; 1972) adds to this account by positioning Marx’s method of ‘real abstraction’ squarely against Engelsian dialectical materialism, amplifying the point that Marx’s method avoids conflating historical-chronological succession with scientific explanation. Perhaps most significantly, Colletti moves the emphasis from della Volpe’s focus on the methodological logics of Marx’s scientific analysis to the historical genesis of real abstractions and the necessity of upholding the principle of non-contradiction in the real. Real abstraction for Colletti, then, fills out the empirically substantiated meaning of Marx’s notion of real abstraction as the separation of elements of society. As Colletti (1975a: 33) puts it: ‘The mystification [of speculative ideology] does not primarily concern the way in which philosophy reflects reality, but reality itself.’ There are, admittedly, still a number of unresolved issues for the Italians’ account of real abstraction pertaining to how logic can ground scientific method without descending into idealism (see Fraser 1977), or how the overcoming of capitalism can be conceived within a non-contradictory logic (this possibly explaining the paucity of della Volpe’s and Colletti’s writing on revolution). But as a methodological description of Marx’s critique of Hegel and classical political economy, it is extremely insightful. The principal aim of this section is to establish that Marx consistently adheres to real abstraction as both a methodological formula and materialist epistemology,13 preventing his analysis from becoming ensnared in Hegel’s historicism. This also sets up the next section, where we will apply these insights in seeing why Capital does not conform to a historicist structure. Let us begin with a text crucial for the understanding of Marx’s method according to della Volpe and Colletti: Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. In this book, written at the age of only twenty-five, Marx criticises Hegel’s spiritualist obfuscations as an attempt to confer universal necessity on the contingency of the Prussian state. Throughout the 1843 Critique, Marx presents Hegel’s claims to discover the logical necessity of the modern state as simply a crude transposition of logic onto empirical reality (Marx 1975c: 73), resulting in at best meagre speculative insights, and at worst outright sophism. His point is that when Hegel performs a subject-predicate inversion (Marx 1975c: 65), replacing the historicity of real, material agents with the development of the Idea, all that

History and Event.indd 46

03/08/2015 08:39:17

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  47 results is tautologies affirming the existing relationships between the empirical givens of the Prussian state. The ‘whole critical failure’ of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx writes, comes down to: ‘the fact that Hegel has analysed the fundamental idea of these presuppositions does not mean that he has demonstrated their validity’ (Marx 1975c: 96). In his own analysis, Marx avoids Hegel’s reversal of ideas and matter, wherein the Prussian state comes to represent the outcome of a necessary development of social forms, by establishing its real (particular) historical determinations. Marx argues that whereas in medieval times there was a corporate fusion of politics with the complete organism of the state, the distinction of the modern era is the real abstraction of the political state from civil society. In the medieval state there was a ‘substantial unity between people and state’; in the modern state, ‘the constitution develops a particular reality alongside the real life of the people’ (Marx 1975c: 91). Modern constitutional monarchy takes this abstraction to its extreme. For unlike medieval feudalism, where the power of the sovereign ‘looks as if it were the power of private property’ and thus ‘became the repository of the secret of universal power, the power of all the elements in the state’, a constitutional monarch is a mere figment of the imagination: a separation of the ‘political person from the real one, the formal from the material, the universal from the particular, of man from social man . . . expressed in its most contradictory form’ (Marx 1975c: 178). ‘The Middle Ages were an age of real dualism; the modern world is the age of abstract dualism’ (Marx 1975c: 90). Marx’s attention to social abstractions/separations allows him to turn his historically determinate insights against the misdemeanours of Hegel’s speculative apologetics. To Hegel’s attempt to refute the need for democracy by insisting upon the abstraction of the notion of ‘being a member of a state’, Marx (1975c: 185) responds that ‘if “being a member of a state” is an “abstraction” this is not the fault of thought but of Hegel’s theories and the realities of the modern world, in which the separation of real life from political life is presupposed and political attributes are held to be “abstract” determinations of the real member of the state.’ On the role of the estates in the Prussian government, Marx also sees in Hegel’s flawed attempt to confer upon them necessity a troubling truth about modern society. For Marx, the contradictions engendered by Hegel’s analysis do not reveal the identity of identity and difference thrusting its way into

History and Event.indd 47

03/08/2015 08:39:18

48  History and Event political life. Rather, such analytic contradictions represent a loose patch of ideological soil that points us towards the roots of a real abstraction: The deeper truth is that Hegel experiences the separation of the state from civil society as a contradiction. The mistake he makes is to rest content with the semblance of a resolution which he declares to be the real thing. By contrast, he treats with contempt the ‘so-called theories’ which call for the ‘separation’ of the classes and Estates. These theories, however, are right in that they express a consequence of modern society, for here the Estates are nothing more than the factual expression of the real relationship between the state and civil society, namely one of separation. (Marx 1975c: 141)

Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, an extended response to Proudhon’s attempted Hegelisation of political economy, is equally explicit in diagnosing how an uncritical acceptance of the empirical and conceptual given defaults to an explanatory hypostatisation of historicalchronological order. Beyond the well-deserved jibes Marx directs against Proudhon’s attempt to understand economic categories through etymological rumination and by ordering them according to a spurious dialectical logic, particularly damning is Marx’s observation that Proudhon’s discernment of contradictions and the ideal to which they point is no more than tautological artifice. Proudhon’s truths are ‘incomplete, insufficient, and consequently contradictory. Hence economic categories, being themselves truths discovered, revealed by human reason, by social genius, are equally incomplete and contain with themselves the germ of contradiction’ (Marx 1975d: 109). The upshot is that Proudhon manages to construct a historical dialectic out of the contradictions of his own thought: the contradiction between real history and his speculative fiction, for which only social genius, his genius, can provide the solution. Thus, Marx mockingly quotes Proudhon’s suggestion that the ‘progress of social genius’ can ‘return in one leap to all its former positions and in a single formula solves all its problems’ (Marx 1975d: 110). This criticism runs deeper than merely casting a sceptical eye on Proudhon’s speculative tautologies. Marx infers how Proudhon’s simplification of political economy, whereby its categories are no longer differentiated in its categorical Aufhebung, ‘has done away with both the shadow of movement and the movement of shadows, by means of which one could still have created a semblance of

History and Event.indd 48

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  49 history’ (Marx 1975d: 108). Marx provides a criticism of the way Proudhon’s historicism dissolves both the real synchronic relation of the categories of political economy and real diachronic causal explanation: In constructing the edifice of the ideological system by means of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated. The different limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another? (Marx 1975d: 103)

Although Marx gives more credit to the political economists, they also receive criticism for accepting the empirical given of bourgeois society and naturalising it into a dogmatic faith that the logics of capitalism represent eternal laws (Marx 1975b: 322). Nevertheless, the work of the political economists, encumbered by bourgeois bias rather than by being set into motion by a speculative dialectic, lends them greater usefulness as an initial, albeit flawed, conceptual starting point. For example, the division of Marx’s Grundrisse into two discreet chapters – money and capital – is in keeping with a dualism native to Ricardo and Smith. Marx maintains these categories’ separation in order to draw attention to their merely abstract reconciliation at the ideological limits of bourgeois political economy. Political economists, he writes, ‘assert all at once that there is no distinction between money and commodities. They take refuge in this abstraction because in the real development of money there are contradictions which are unpleasant for the apologetics of bourgeois common sense, and hence must be covered up’ (Marx 1973: 198). Marx also attempts to prise apart the political economists’ identity between production and consumption, elided in the term ‘productive consumption’. Marx argues that ‘consumption ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of production in a still subjective form’ (Marx 1973: 92). He then claims that there is nothing simpler than positing ‘production and consumption as identical’ (Marx 1973: 93). The synthesis is invalid since it has no empirical ground; improving upon it requires a division in thought informed by knowledge of a real social separation/abstraction. Such knowledge, however, can only be acquired upon the full

History and Event.indd 49

03/08/2015 08:39:18

50  History and Event development of the social abstraction. For this reason, Marx’s criticism of Aristotle is softer than that which he directs at his contemporaries, since Marx argues that Aristotle was unable to derive the equality of labour lying behind the equivalence of goods ‘because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers’ (Marx 1976a: 142). Only when the equality of labour acquires a permanent place in popular opinion with the predominance of the commodity form do the categories become available to crack the social hieroglyph. Until such a point, rational interrogation of the categories can provide order and presentational clarity, but not genuine scientific insight. Regarding the abstract manipulation of economic categories, Marx even applies his critique reflexively.14 In the chapter on money, he remarks apropos his own work: ‘It will be necessary later, before this question is dropped, to correct the idealist manner of this presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts’ (Marx 1973: 151). A similar concern animates Marx’s 1881 mathematical manuscripts. In particular, the way in which during the course of the differential procedure the symbol dy comes to stand in for a difference dx reducing to 0. Marx’s aim is to understand how from premises that seem to imply nothing, a transformative mathematical procedure is performed, leading to new results.15 Using elementary algebra to unpack the process, Marx attempts to demonstrate that without any vanishing quantities or abstract notions of infinitesimals it is possible to see how the mathematical transformation takes place.16 Even if one then replaces the ratio of variable quantities ∆∆yx with the more illusive symbol of the differential ratio dy , Marx (1983a: 8) argues dx that the ‘transcendental or symbolic mistake’ has ‘lost its terror’ since it now appears only the result of establishing ‘real content’. So despite the seeming proximity of Marx’s view on the calculus to Hegel’s, Marx’s reconstruction of the procedure’s logic is quite distinct. When Hegel warns of the flight into excessive abstraction (see Chapter 1), this is oriented around fitting the procedure into the totality of his metaphysical-logical schema. Whereas Marx’s aim is solely to restore the temporal logic of the procedure. There is no attempt, as per Engels, to represent the abstractions underlying the calculus as indicative of contradictions permeating nature ontologically.

History and Event.indd 50

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  51 Marx’s criticism of political economy and mathematical formalism, then, does not quite have the same bite as that which he directs against Hegel and Proudhon, since he judges these errors not to be of such a systematic nature. Political economists remain enthralled to ideology, but their methodology is not ideological in its very nature, as is Hegel’s and Proudhon’s dialectic. The focus of Marx’s criticism is consistently ‘abstract forms of abstraction which fit every content and are therefore indifferent to all content’ (Marx 1975b: 397). Hegelian-Marxists are wont to point to the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and especially to Marx’s comment that Hegel’s Phenomenology has a ‘thoroughly negative and critical appearance’ (Marx 1975b: 384–5), as evidence that Marx moves away from his 1843 position and thereafter appropriates methodologically the Hegelian dialectic (Lukács 1975; Dunayevskaya 1973; Anderson 1995). Yet the context of this cherry-picked quote needs to be restored by noting how Marx concludes his sentence: ‘[that] the uncritical positivism and equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works, the philosophical dissolution and restoration of the empirical world, is already found in latent form, in embryo, as a potentiality and a secret’ (Marx 1975b: 385). In other words, Hegelian-Marxist readings omit to acknowledge that Marx is here reaffirming his epistemological critique of Hegelian hypostatisation, described by della Volpe as an incommensurable break from Hegel’s abstractconcrete-abstract to Marx’s concrete-abstract-concrete. If Marx is occasionally given to making use of Hegelian logical formalisms, it is therefore only in order to bring clarity to the point in question before tracing its roots back to a real abstraction. This is an important point to stress, since the next section will argue that we need to appreciate Marx’s Capital as structured around two forms of real abstraction. The articulation of Marx’s categories is historically determinate in nature, but it does not identify the chronological emergence of the categories as a materialist explanation for the genesis of capitalism.

The Non-Historicist Logic of Capital Marx’s preference for a materialist epistemology of real abstraction over a Hegelian ontology of contradiction has important implications for how we interpret Marx’s economic analysis. In this section, we demonstrate that Marx’s categories in Capital neither conform to the idea of history as a line of successive epochs, nor convey an

History and Event.indd 51

03/08/2015 08:39:18

52  History and Event automatic quality upon communist transformation. Significantly, though the matter of whether Marx sees communist transformation as inevitable crosses paths with debates about whether Marx prophesies capitalism’s collapse in his analyses of underconsumption crises (see Mandel 1976: 80–6), these questions are distinct. Here we interrogate only the former question: whether Marx considered communist transformation the outcome of an inevitable evolutionary logic unfolding after revolution. Despite recognising the persistence of speculative flourishes in certain chapters and sections of Capital, this section will argue that taken as a whole the text does not support such an evolutionary notion of communist transformation. Informed by our reading of the book’s methodological commitments, these fragmentary passages will emerge more as a hangover from the 1859 Preface than as an accurate reflection of the implications of Marx’s critique of political economy. To make this argument entails settling accounts with the relationship between Marx’s two central categories: value and the separation of workers from the means of production. The historical ordering of these real abstractions has given rise to the idea that Marx’s categories are, in Engels’s words of 1859, ‘nothing but the historical method, stripped of its historical form and its disturbing fortuities’.17 These comments have enjoined great controversy, but resulted in limited insights on the part of those who wish to refute Engels’s interpretation at the same time as refusing to acknowledge della Volpe and Colletti’s insights. Though ‘new dialecticians’ (Arthur 2004; Finelli 2007) generally agree that Engels’s formulation is unsatisfactory, they do not provide an adequate response as to how they avoid historicism while remaining faithful to Hegel’s dialectic. New dialecticians seek to differentiate their approach from Engels’s ‘historical dialectics’, stipulating that they treat Marx’s Capital as concerned solely with a given social form – capitalism – and are applying purely logical analysis to Marx’s categories (trading in Hegelian historicism for Hegelian logic, so to speak). Yet as we saw in Chapter 1, not only does the Science of Logic assume the historical development taking place in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but the ordering of its categories also corresponds to the sequence in which philosophical ideas emerged historically. In other words, it is not possible to parcel off Hegelian logic from ‘historical dialectics’; for Hegel, dialectics are always historical. Taking a different approach, we will see that Marx’s methodology in Capital is incommensurable with Hegel’s

History and Event.indd 52

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  53 historicism. We do so first by demonstrating that Marx’s articulation of value with the separation of workers from the means of production rejects the explanatory primacy of historical-chronological order; second, by arguing that these categories are not bound together in an undifferentiated Hegelian totality, but are held together as a ‘unity of heterogeneous parts’ (Colletti 1972: 14) or as a ‘complex whole’ (Althusser 2005). It is important to begin this discussion by conceding a difficulty in extending the analysis of the previous section to Marx’s mature political economy. For while value is presented in Capital as an abstract social relation produced by a separation between use value and exchange value, it is also different from Marx’s other analyses in that it does not confer to a historically determinate root – it is transhistorical in nature. As Rosenthal (1998: 52–3) states, Marx’s ‘treatment of the division of labour and related categories as transhistorical is perfectly legitimate . . . They are valid rather for every phase in the historical development of the specific object of enquiry.’ Rosenthal continues to suggest that for Marx, value should be understood as a Kantian practical postulate: that is, justified by its use rather than by apodictic certainty. Insofar as Rosenthal wishes to provide an alternative to the more speculative Hegelian spin on Marx’s derivation of value, this provides an acceptable theoretical perspective. Nonetheless, the way Marx details how value emerges through spontaneous social processes could possibly better be described as a form of Humean conventionalism. Just as in Hume’s account of how coordination is generated spontaneously – how, for example, two rowers come into sync non-verbally through the act of rowing – for Marx the emergence of value is engendered spontaneously by exchange processes, creating a real abstraction between use value and exchange value and giving rise to money’s appearance as a measure of socially necessary labour time.18 This process occurs without any conscious decision on the part of those engaging in the process of exchange. Instead, ‘by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it’ (Marx 1976a: 166). The labour determination of exchange value thereby arises as the result of solely structural social forces, with the necessity of a ‘regulative law of nature’ (Marx 1976a: 168). Commodity owners, when taking their wares to market, ‘have therefore already acted before thinking. The natural laws

History and Event.indd 53

03/08/2015 08:39:18

54  History and Event of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instincts of the owners of commodities’ (Marx 1976a: 166). The real abstraction of value therefore emerges through incessant repetition where goods are exchanged under a social division of labour of a certain complexity. Marx insists that the commodity form only reaches maturity under capitalism once production becomes driven by the valorisation process under the conditions of real subsumption (where the division of labour has attained a specifically capitalist form). But what distinguishes the commodity abstraction from the capitalist valorisation circuit (Money–Commodity–Increased Money) is that the former is a process arising in any exchange economy under a division of labour, whereas the latter is dominant only in the capitalist mode of production. And consequently, if the determination of value by labour time precedes capitalist production, then money can also play an important role in pre-capitalist modes of production.19 It follows that the difference between the commodity form and the separation of workers from the means of production should be identified with the historical contingency of the latter. The existence of a large mass of propertyless wage labourers is historically specific because it ‘has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history’ (Marx 1976a: 273). Marx explains the situation as the result of the primitive accumulation necessary to supply the nascent English capitalists of the sixteenth century with dispossessed labourers having nothing but their labour-power to sell. This comes about as a result of the Protestant reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the enclosures of the commons, and the disciplining of a workforce for factory wagelabour (Marx 1976a: 873–95). Accordingly, the difference between value determination of commodities in general and the value determination of the labour-power commodity is also demarcated historically.20 The value of labour-power is determined by whether workers have access to any other means of subsistence, and what conventional minimum expectations prevail for reproduction conditions (this could range from mere subsistence goods like food and shelter to needs including a share of ‘non-essential’ commodities). ‘In contrast, therefore, with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element’ (Marx 1976a: 275). We thereby arrive at the thorny question of whether Marx’s two central categories – value and the separation of workers from the

History and Event.indd 54

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  55 means of production – are ordered according to historicist logic. No doubt owing to the orthodox status of Engels’s (1981: 103) view on the synchrony of Marx’s categories with historical stages, some contemporary Marxists divorce Marx’s categories from historical periodisation (‘new dialecticians’, for instance, would seem to tend in this direction). Are then interpretations of the connection between Marx’s categories stuck between a historicist form of explanation on the one side and an ahistorical model on the other? The great virtue of della Volpe and Colletti’s notion of ‘real abstraction’ is that it allows us to reject this dichotomy. As shown in the previous section, these authors convincingly demonstrate the problem with this interpretative dichotomy as its inability to put together logic and history without defaulting to Hegelian historicism. The speculativelogical model, since it provides an abstract division of given categories, is unmediated by real historicity and as a consequence defaults to a crude form of empiricism conflating historical-chronological succession with explanation. For Marx, by contrast, only by beginning from the present and establishing the historical determinations underlying his categories is it possible to avoid these methodological pitfalls. Considered in this light, we can make sense of Marx’s famous reflections in his 1857 Introduction, where he repeats in the form of a positive methodological statement the crux of his critique of Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy: It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. (Marx 1973: 107)

Similarly, in his mathematical essay ‘On the Differential’, Marx (1983b: 54) stresses the fact that the methodological inversion he has inferred does not correspond to a historically ordered inversion: ‘I do not believe any mathematician has proved or rather even noticed this necessary reversal from the first method of algebraic derivation (historically the second) whether for so elementary a function as uz or any other.’ Where a dialectics of contradiction necessarily ends up placing primacy on chronological-historical order, or else avoiding

History and Event.indd 55

03/08/2015 08:39:18

56  History and Event engagement with historical determination altogether, Marx allows us to appreciate the real historicity of his categories. The crucial difference between Marx’s categories therefore lies in the forms of the value abstraction and the separation of workers from the means of production: the former universal and transhistorical; the latter historically specific and contingent. The value abstraction can precede the separation of workers from the means of production, and indeed must in order for capitalism to emerge. Yet this historical ordering does not ground the identity of the abstractions, but is rather a consequence of their contingent articulation.21 For this reason, one should also distinguish Capital’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production from a Hegelian totality. If the real abstractions articulated in capitalism do not conform to a historicist ordering, then even though Marx conceives of capitalism as a totality its essential characteristics are not Hegelian. Marx’s notion of totality cannot be consistent with the Hegelian notion that ‘capital exists in the identity-in-difference of all its functional forms’ (Arthur and Reuten 1998: 11–12) – that is, as a homogeneous totality – nor with its related notion of change – that in a given historical era there is a single general contradiction responsible for pushing it forward to its subsequent stage. As Reuten (1998: 220–1) has shown, even Marx’s reproduction schemes in Capital Volume II do not conform to such a dialectical structure: they lack the positing or transcendence of contradictions, two key signatures of the Hegelian dialectic. More suitable ways to interpret Marx’s notion of capitalist totality include that of a ‘macroeconomic model’ (Reuten 1998) in contemporary economic parlance, the notion of a ‘complex whole’ (Althusser 2005), or the ‘unity of heterogeneous parts’ (Colletti 1972: 14). Whichever one of these alternatives one prefers, there is no question that Marx wishes to consider the dynamic interrelationship of social, political, historical and economic abstractions, bound together within a unified whole. Yet, it is possible to affirm that in Capital Marx conceives of capitalism as a totality without presuming that Hegel has a monopoly over the concept, or that Marx may have taken inspiration from Hegel but still established significant differences in his theorisation. This subtlety helps account for why Marx’s analysis in the second and third volumes of Capital conforms to the syllogistic framework of classical political economy (Harvey 2013: 25), eschewing the attempt to make every category sublate dialectically into every other. As Marx’s analysis gained in complexity

History and Event.indd 56

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  57 it is credible to suppose that it could no longer be shoehorned into a recognisably Hegelian form of presentation, as in the first chapter of Volume I of Capital. To bring together our findings thus far, we have argued that Capital’s structure does not support how it is presented by Engels – that is, as a set of logical categories gnoseologically isomorphic with the chronological emergence of the elements of capitalism. We have also seen that in Capital Marx does not conceive capitalism as a Hegelian totality. There is, consequently, no methodological necessity in Capital that dictates an inevitable evolutionary passage beyond capitalism after revolution. In his chapter on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’, Marx does revive something like the evolutionary logic of his 1859 Preface when he writes that the ‘centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument . . . The expropriators are expropriators’ (Marx 1971: 929). Yet this chapter remains relatively disconnected from the main body of Marx’s text (it is positioned as the second to last chapter of Volume I, and is only four pages long). Such speculative flourishes appear more as a rhetorical gesture inserted to instil revolutionary confidence in his readership than as conclusions following logically from his scientific analysis of capitalism. The next section burrows deeper into the reasons why Marx’s idea of communist transformation cannot be seen as a materialist twist on Hegel’s idealist notion of historical change as a simple dialectical inversion. Marx’s advocacy of transitional measures to keep value at bay under lower communism will indicate his awareness of the need for an ideological engineering of communist transformation at odds with the evolutionary logic of Hegelian quantity-quality leaps. Importantly, these extra elements foreclose the possibility that Marx viewed communist transformation as a mere dialectical switch in an inevitable succession of historical forms. They bar – methodologically, tactically, and ideologically – the idea of communist transformation as a mere quantity-quality leap.

A Synthesis of Evolution and Revolution (with an Extra Element) Having presented a reading of Marx’s work that pulls it away from Hegelian dialectics, we now ask whether Marx’s fusion of historical

History and Event.indd 57

03/08/2015 08:39:18

58  History and Event evolution with revolution is compatible with the quantity-quality schema when it comes to his thinking about communist transformation. This involves posing the question of whether Marx’s political thought propounds a fusion of evolution and revolution in keeping the notion of a quantitative accumulation that gives way to a qualitative break, or whether there are additional elements to Marx’s thought obscured by reading it through the lens of the quantityquality schema. To ask this question therefore involves enquiring into the manner in which Marx stakes the revolutionary potential of communist politics on strategic knowledge of the historical evolution of capitalism and the organised labour movement. Was Marx’s evolutionary-revolutionary fusion a concomitant of the Hegelian historicism that would later be enshrined within classical dialectical materialism? Or was it underwritten by an attempt to position communist politics against utopian socialism, and wagered on an empirically informed scientific hypothesis about developments in nineteenth-century capitalism? There is reason to think that for Marx, at least by the time of writing Capital, the fusion of evolution and revolution in his political vision was an empirical (if optimistic) inference based upon what he saw as the facts on the ground. While throughout Marx’s works one can find reductionist historical schematics, as in The Communist Manifesto, the ‘fetters hypothesis’ of the 1859 Preface, and in Chapter 32 of Capital, Marx’s great optimism in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat was not ultimately ‘a general historicophilosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical’ (Marx 1953: 379). Rather, Marx’s fusion of evolution and revolution is better seen as a hypothesis based on his involvement in the working-class political movement, his analysis of political events, and his amassing of empirical data about the capitalist economy. When Marx sees the evolutionary growth of the organised labour movement and a socialised economy being potentiated by the concentration of capital in large joint-stock companies, there is surely a residual speculative moment supporting his confidence in its revolutionary potential. But the speculative element here is decisively subordinated to his desire to think through how lasting radical change could be accomplished. Marx’s political thought fuses evolution and revolution, yet only to think through in a non-utopian way how maximal revolutionary change can best be actualised.22 His polemical retorts to all suggestions that his value theory could

History and Event.indd 58

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  59 serve to help regulate production relations (Marx 1996), as well as his strong ideological advocacy for a maximum break from capitalism, suggest that he was well aware that there was no guarantee of a spontaneous evolutionary development to a socialised economy after revolution. In contrast, we shall see, the dialectical materialist idea of quantity-quality leaps implies that mere intensification of production will at a certain tipping point transform capitalism into communism. To grasp the anti-speculative nature of Marx’s idea of communist transformation requires an appreciation of how classical Marxist thought attempts to surpass utopian socialism. Importantly, Marx, Engels and their Marxist successors never aimed simply to negate the contributions of utopian socialists. They rather position these thinkers as limited by their historical epoch, which, predating the growth of a politically ambitious labour movement and the concentration of capital in joint stock companies, could only take the form of well-intentioned plans or belief in a distant paradisiacal future. In Anti-Dühring Engels (1936a: 292) provides a generous appraisal of the ideological limits of the utopian socialists by conceding that they ‘were utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed’. Kautsky (1927) goes so far as to extend this argument back to Thomas More, who he positions as a far-sighted sage of socialism limited by the economic backwardness of his era. Scientific socialism is thus defined by recognition of the evolutionary tendencies in capitalism that, for the first time in history, provide reason to believe in the possibility of truly revolutionary social change. Beyond the utopians’ inability to recognise emancipatory possibilities in capitalism, another problem identified by Marxists was their aversion to revolution. As detailed by Plekhanov (1976a), French utopian socialism was oriented around avoiding another repeat of the French revolution, explaining why the Fourierists and Saint-Simonists addressed their demands to the highest echelons of society as a way to militate against class struggle. Robert Owen and the British utopian socialists similarly sought to alleviate the worst conditions of capitalist exploitation by setting up islands of improved conditions, stopping short of advocating the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. These thinkers’ utopianism was therefore predicated on bourgeois benevolence: the attempt to realise a more equitable and rational world by leaning on intellectual

History and Event.indd 59

03/08/2015 08:39:18

60  History and Event intuitions of justice and injustice. This leads Plekhanov (1976b: 529) to define ‘the utopian [as] one who endeavours to construct a perfect social system on the basis of some abstract principle’. In Marx and Engels’s view, these utopian socialisms may be more radical than mere parliamentary reformism, but they remain committed to leaving existing power relations intact and not challenging systematically the dominion of impersonal free market logics. By endorsing an alternative centred on discerning the historical evolution of the labour movement and tendencies towards conscious economic planning, Marx and Engels aimed to encourage the workers’ movement to press for a maximum break from free-market capitalism. In so doing, they sought to resolve what Kautsky (1927: 189) later described as the ‘great antagonism which runs through the entire history of Socialism . . . the antagonism between Utopianism and the Labour Movement’. For Marx and Engels, only historical social evolution, tending towards an irreconcilable revolutionary contest between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, can deliver the conditions for emancipation. Hence the well-known formula that while the bourgeoisie lays the groundwork for a socialised economy, this can only be realised by the organised, revolutionary activities of the proletariat.23 What, however, determines a revolution as communist in nature: what is its differentia specifica so that a revolution can be considered politically faithful to its proletarian constituency upon consummation? This, Marx and Engels answer, is the abolition of private property. The expropriation of private property will ultimately undermine class distinctions and the so-called economic laws on which they depend. They write that with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again. (Marx and Engels 1998: 55)

Nevertheless, how private property will be abolished and what will replace it was always a more vexed set of questions. Near the end of the Manifesto a programme is laid out including measures such as progressive taxation and centralisation of credit in the hands of the state (Marx and Engels 2002a: 194). Far from being ends in

History and Event.indd 60

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  61 themselves, these policies were believed to create the conditions whereby class distinctions can disappear after production has been concentrated in the hands of a ‘vast association of the whole nation’ (Marx and Engels 2002a: 244). Marx’s flexibility about the means to this ultimate end, however, is evidenced by his frequent adaptations to changing political circumstances. For instance, the Manifesto’s authors included the disclaimer in the 1872 Preface that in view of the experiences of the Paris Commune, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’ (Marx and Engels 2002b: 243–4). And near the end of his life, increasingly animated by the revolutionary stirrings in the Russian countryside, Marx backed away from the view of communism being solely a result of the social relations brought into being by modern capitalist industry. ‘Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian ‘rural commune’ may preserve its own land . . . It may become a direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending . . . But it is necessary to descend from pure theory to Russian reality’ (Marx 1983c: 112). The important thing to note is that Marx never adhered to a set formula. Marx was consistent in identifying communism with the abolition of property and the transcendence of free-market capitalism. At no point, however, did this lead him to believe that the communist mode of production would simply evolve out of its successor following political revolution. Indeed, after undertaking his intricate analysis of the role of value in spontaneously regulating the economy in Capital, Marx was even less predisposed to see communism as evolving spontaneously from the capitalist mode of production. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx insists on transitional measures in the period of lower communism, such as measurement by an ‘equal standard, labour’ (Marx 1951: 22), with the aim to socialise immediately the labour time invested in production. Although Marx (1951: 21) also cautions that what ‘we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society’, this qualification does not extend as far as allowing exchange or commodity production. As reiterated in his ‘Notes’ on Adolf Wagner (Marx 1996), Marx’s notion of lower communism rather assumes a decisive break from the capitalist mode of production, which requires the conscious implementation of transitional schemes. There was always the threat, Marx recognised,

History and Event.indd 61

03/08/2015 08:39:18

62  History and Event of a misguided outcome of proletariat revolution if a full break from capitalism was not consciously pressed for. What all these observations add up to – his opposition to utopianism; the lack of a set plan for abolishing private property; and the need for transitional measures – is that Marx’s idea of communist transformation is not consistent with its conceptualisation as a mere quantity to quality leap. Marx’s emphasis on transitional measures shows that he had a better grasp of the unprecedented upheaval required for transcending capitalist value production than many of his Social Democrat successors recognised. For if Marx believed that communism would naturally emerge from highly concentrated forms of capitalism, then advocating for transitional measures would be prima facie redundant. Marx saw communism as enabled by the evolution of capitalist organisation and the labour movement, but this conviction was supplemented by the belief that value needed to be consciously transcended in a decisive break from capitalism – a distinction that Marx made allowance for when he envisaged his labour-token scheme. It is insightful to contrast this with how Kautsky and Lenin subsequently imagined communist transformation through the prism of the quantity to quality concept. In ‘The Day after the Revolution’, Kautsky paints an especially gradualist and evolutionary picture of how communism will emerge from capitalism. After political revolution, Kautsky (1916: 112) writes, capitalists ‘could then perhaps continue to be the directors of the factories’ if they were ‘the very first ones to renounce the further extension of capitalist production and to demand that their undertakings be purchased because they could no longer carry them on with any advantage’. For Kautsky (1916: 113), the gradual relinquishing of control by capitalist managers occurs practically without any conscious communist intentions, since it would occur ‘even if this regime was not dominated by socialist theories and did not proceed directly from the point of view of bringing the capitalist means of production into social possession’. In Kautsky’s (1916: 20) words, whilst a socialist revolution ‘can at a single stroke transfer a factory from capitalist to social property . . . it is only gradually, through a course of slow evolution’ that it can be transformed into a ‘spot for the joyful activity of human beings’. On a structural level, communist transformation lies in increasing production by the adoption of economies of scale in large factories. ‘One might call this a bourgeois programme of reform and not a workers’

History and Event.indd 62

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  63 programme of revolution. Whether it is one or the other depends on quantity. Here too, when quantity is increased accordingly, it must transform into a new quality’ (Kautsky, quoted in Lih 2010). Lenin would repeat much the same idea. In his idea of communist transformation, Taylorist production processes needed merely to be quantitatively intensified in order to induce their transformation into a communist mode of production. This idea assumes an almost complete form in his 1894 book What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are (Lenin 1960: 175–6), where he associates the socialisation of labour under communism with an increase in the number of branches of industry, accelerating existing evolutionary tendencies in capitalist production. Lenin (1964a: 106) remains loyal to this conception in 1918 when he also applies it to finance: The big banks are the ‘state apparatus’ which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single state bank, the biggest of the big, with branches in every rural district, in every factory, will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus.

The point is that the quantity-quality schema, although seeming to support a revolutionary notion of change, subsumes the break from capitalism to communism within a historicist dialectic assuring an easy transition to the communist mode of production after political revolution. It misses the need for a dramatic change in production relations and for the conscious implementation of transitional measures designed to prevent the restoration of capitalism. Marx, by contrast, in stressing the need for immediately overcoming value in lower communism and in proposing the necessity of transitional measures, provides a more conscious take on how communist social relations can be realised. It is unlikely that Marx would ever have referred to communist transition as a mere quantityquality leap. Marx rejected methodologically the Hegelian dialectic for reducing the explanation of social structures to the order of their elements’ historical-chronological emergence. In Capital, Marx explained capitalism as an articulation of value with the contingent separation of workers from the means of production, not as part of a necessary historical dialectic transiting inexorably towards communism. And in seeing the great theoretical advance of communist

History and Event.indd 63

03/08/2015 08:39:18

64  History and Event politics being grounded in the fusion of historical evolution with proletarian revolution, this did not support a belief that capitalism would of necessity transform into communism after revolution. While avoiding writing cookbooks for the future, Marx discerned the need for implementing transitional measures in order to ensure that no dynamics might encourage capitalism’s restoration. In short, Marx’s view on communist transformation is not compatible with the idea of quantity-quality leaps.

The Ends of Dialectical Materialism It remains common for Marx to be associated with the idea of quantity-quality leaps. This is the result of the painstaking efforts throughout Marxist intellectual history to establish an unbroken continuity between Marx and Engelsian dialectical materialism. As we have seen in this chapter, however, not only does this narrative jar with an analysis of Marx’s methodology of real abstraction and his criticisms of Hegelian dialectics, but it also finds scant textual evidence in Marx’s works. A reading sensitive to what Marx actually had to say about Hegel, his criticism of Proudhon and the political economists, and the logical implications of his major text, Capital, should inject a healthy dose of scepticism about this narrative. Still, the point of this chapter was not restricted to making a plea for greater philological discernment in our readings of Marx. Drawing on the insights of Chapter 1, the aim was to show that the idea of quantity-quality leaps comes attached to the teleological structure of Hegel’s dialectic, grounded in a science of history in which historical epochs are ordered sequentially and evolve necessarily out of one another. The conclusion which followed in Chapter 1 was that these philosophical imperatives result in Hegel’s reflections on the mathematical infinite being out of step with the intellectual movement of his period (his dialectic necessitating the preservation of classical metaphysical binaries at the expense of scientific novelties). In this chapter, we have seen that this ontology also had political and economic consequences in the hands of Marxist dialectical materialists. The notion of quantity-quality leaps gave support to revolutionary Social Democrats’ conception of communist transformation as an inevitable, evolutionary process which would unfold after political revolution. For thinkers like Kautsky and Lenin, all that was necessary to achieve communist economic transformation

History and Event.indd 64

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Marx’s Idea of Communist Transformation  65 was the intensification of Taylorist production processes. In contrast to Marx’s emphasis on the need for transitional measures, predicated on acknowledgement of the need for a systematic break from value production, the evolutionism of quantity-quantity leaps, masquerading behind the connotations of radical rupture, promoted a seductive fatalism. If these chapters’ diagnosis of classical Marxism’s inability to think revolutionary discontinuity seems rather definitive, it still remains necessary to address the most recent attempt to salvage a positive Hegelian provenance within the classical Marxist tradition. In recognition of the fact that Lenin was man of orthodoxy in economic matters, Hegelian-Marxists have turned to his 1914 Philosophical Notebooks to extract a dialectics of revolution that supposedly transcends the evolutionism of Engelsian dialectical materialism. Hegelian-Marxists contend that Hegel’s philosophy was mutilated in the hands of Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky, and even Lenin before 1914. It was only with Lenin’s reading of Hegel in the years before the Russian Revolution, they claim, that a Marxist theorist truly captured the revolutionary meaning of Hegel’s dialectic. Whether or not this narrative stands up to close scrutiny is the subject of the next chapter.

History and Event.indd 65

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Chapter 3 Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution? In a word, not only do oats grow according to Hegel, but the Russian Social-Democrats war among themselves according to Hegel. V. I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1961a [1904]: 409) Leaps! Breaks in Gradualness Leaps! Leaps! V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks (1961a [1914]: 123)

Lenin’s study of Hegel’s Science of Logic in late 1914 is a pivotal episode for contemporary Marxist theory. In the years that followed, Lenin would not only write such iconic works as Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the April Theses, and State and Revolution, he would also lead the Bolsheviks to victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, this confluence of events has been shaped into an arresting narrative concerning Lenin’s philosophical contribution in his notebooks on Hegel. Lenin’s heightened sensitivity to ‘self-movement’ and for the ‘unity of opposites’ is credited as ‘the philosophic foundation for all serious writing that Lenin was to do during the rest of his life’ (Dunayevskaya 1973: 97). Lenin’s notebooks laid the groundwork for all his major innovations on imperialism and war, since ‘his Hegel studies and his writings on national liberation were of a piece’ (Anderson 2007: 132). And Lenin’s refashioning of Marxist dialectics was an attempt to ‘destroy theoretically the matrix of the Second International’ by ‘destroying the metaphysics that presided over the technics of workers’ organization’ (Kouvelakis 2007: 173). At the core of this purported theoretical breakthrough is Lenin’s supposedly newfound appreciation of the potential for historical

History and Event.indd 66

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  67 leaps forward from 1914. Unlike the Social Democrats – who capitulated to the nationalist war effort, denounced the new Soviet regime as premature (Kautsky 1918b), and were enthralled to an evolutionary conception of necessary stages to be passed through en route to socialism – after his reading of the Logic, so the story goes, Lenin was able to embrace a more radical dialectics of revolution. Commenting on the effect of Lenin’s encounter with Hegel, Anderson (1995: 25) writes that thereafter Lenin’s dialectics ‘is a theory of development through leaps, breaks, and negations rather than a variety of scientific evolutionism, as Engels’s writings had suggested’. Kouvelakis (2007: 174) agrees when he argues that Lenin is concerned to distinguish ‘between “evolution” according to Marx and the “current idea of evolution”, the Marxian idea being one of evolution “by leaps, catastrophes, revolutions”’. Even scholars outside of the HegelianMarxist tradition, influenced by the repetition of the motif, have absorbed it into their appraisal of Lenin’s intellectual development. Antonio Negri (2014: 161–2) writes on ‘the tremendous importance that the theoretical consciousness of the dialectical leap had taken on in Lenin’ after his reading of Hegel’s Logic, with the result that it is ‘impossible to read The State and Revolution without thinking of Lenin’s study of Hegel’s thought’. While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of such readers, there is more going on here than simply an attempt to set the historical record straight. In placing such heavy stress on Lenin’s 1914 notebooks, the ambition of Hegelian-Marxists seems to be to demonstrate that there is a viable alternative to the Hegelian dialectics offered by classical dialectical materialism (and converted into state orthodoxy in the Soviet Union) as well as to the relatively apolitical strand of Western Hegelian-Marxism exemplified by Adorno and Horkheimer. Hegelian-Marxists aim to drive a wedge into classical Marxist theory by locating in Lenin’s notebooks a discontinuous dialectics of revolution transcending the rigid, teleological science of history inspired by Engels. It is therefore essential for the proponents of this narrative that they present convincingly a sharp discontinuity between Lenin’s 1914 writings on dialectics with those of Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky, and also with Lenin’s pre-1914 texts. This chapter calls into question the ability of this narrative’s proponents to satisfy these criteria. By engaging the two most serious attempts to prove the originality of Lenin’s notebooks, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and

History and Event.indd 67

03/08/2015 08:39:18

68  History and Event Kevin Anderson’s Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), the chapter seeks to demonstrate that these Hegelian-Marxists’ claims do not stand up to close scrutiny. Quite the contrary. This chapter argues that rather than fundamentally rethinking the dialectics of revolution in 1914, Lenin was instead attempting to deepen his understanding of classical dialectical materialism, grappling with its finer points in order to uphold its central revolutionary concept: the idea of leaps between quantity and quality. We shall see that the emphasis placed on quantity-quality leaps in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks has been deliberately minimised in Dunayevskaya and Anderson’s accounts, and also that the concept’s emergence in Lenin’s political writings after 1914 is the most pronounced dialectical flourish Lenin brings to his works in this period. These findings lead us to the conclusion that for all Lenin’s undoubted achievements as a Marxist leader, tactician and theorist of the concrete political conjuncture, he does not arrive at a new dialectics of revolution transcending the Hegelian historicism criticised in the previous chapters. This lends further weight to the conclusions of the previous chapter where we saw Lenin picturing communist transformation as the mere intensification of Taylorist work practices. An examination of Lenin’s philosophical contribution to Marxism, and of his putative gesture towards a radical HegelianMarxism, thus serves to bring Part I of this book to its logical conclusion. In finding little evidence to support a fundamental difference between classical dialectical materialist and HegelianMarxist notions of historical change, this chapter justifies the ‘leap’ forward to Althusser in Part II of the book. The chapter proceeds in five sections, the first of which discusses the methodological difficulties involved in assessing the HegelianMarxist narrative. The second section addresses the famous quotes associated with Lenin’s alleged break from Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectical materialism. The next section examines the concepts of the ‘unity of opposites’ and ‘self-movement’ and asks whether Lenin’s commentary on them really represents a radical departure from classical dialectical materialism. The fourth section then addresses Lenin’s comments about dialectics made after 1914. The fifth and final section reflects on these findings in light of the previous two chapters, bringing to a close Part I of this book.

History and Event.indd 68

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  69

On the Narrative: Proponents and Objectors Hegelian-Marxists attribute great importance to Lenin’s 1914/15 Philosophical Notebooks, finding in Lenin’s commentary upon Hegel’s The Science of Logic, Lectures on the History of Philosophy and other related works on dialectics signs of numerous revisions of his previous positions. The essential thrust of their narrative is that after breaking with the Second International in 1914, Lenin retreats from political activity and conducts his in-depth study of Hegel in Switzerland in order to return to the origins of Marxism and to re-establish dialectics as a genuinely revolutionary theory against its degeneration into gradualism, reformism and opportunism in the hands of Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky. After successfully completing his Hegel studies, Lenin then goes on to write his texts of 1915–17, which defend national liberation movements as the bacilli of communist revolution, argue for smashing the bourgeois state, and cast aside the idea that Russia needs to undergo a liberal, constitutional revolution in order to lay the groundwork for a socialist revolution. When combined, it is claimed that these innovations show that Lenin decisively abandons both the theoretical and strategic evolutionism of Second International Marxism. Although Hegelian-Marxists do not credit these advances solely to Lenin’s studies of Hegel, the implication is that Hegel’s philosophy was pivotal for their realisation. It was a ‘totally new departure’, writes Dunayevskaya (1973: 100–1), that ‘subsequently permeated Lenin’s post-1915 writings in philosophy, politics, economics, and organization’. In Anderson’s (1995: 134) words, ‘The path of Lenin’s theoretical writings in 1914–17 – from notes on Hegel, to writings on imperialism and the self-determination of nations, and finally, to his theorizing on the state and revolution – was a very new one.’ In discovering in Hegel the centrality of subjectivity, humanist reason, self-movement, the unity of opposites, and the laws of cognition, Lenin’s dialectics of revolution thereafter supposedly bears little in common with the dialectical materialism which preceded him. Though this narrative has proved a popular one, critical perspectives have been brought to bear in assessing whether Lenin’s reading of Hegel was really responsible for any such shift. The first insists on the primacy Lenin accorded to practical wisdom over abstract conceptions of the dialectic. Althusser (2001) provides a classic formulation of this perspective when he points to how Lenin’s understanding of

History and Event.indd 69

03/08/2015 08:39:18

70  History and Event dialectics, from his 1894 book What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are to his 1914/15 Philosophical Notebooks, consistently emphasises the decisive advances Marx took towards a genuine science of society by going beyond the abstract formulas of Hegelian dialectics. Robert Mayer (1999) similarly questions the significance of Lenin’s reading of Hegel and contends that Lenin was solely concerned with studying concrete political conjunctions and holding to tactical flexibility at all times. Referring us to Lenin’s (1961c: 407–13) section on dialectics in his 1904 book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Mayer sees a fundamental continuity in how Lenin approached dialectics pre- and post-1914. What is more, Mayer (1999: 43) observes, ‘the rhetoric of the dialectic actually became less frequent in Lenin’s tactical writings after he studied Hegel’. The second critical response, in line with increasing interest in the diversity of currents within Second International Marxism, has been to question the claim that Lenin puts forward a new political platform after 1914. Lars T. Lih (2014) argues that rather than forging a novel platform influenced by his reading of Hegel, Lenin’s emphasis on the revolutionary potential of national selfdetermination movements was derived from the revolutionary wing of social democracy and Karl Kautsky’s (1916; 2007; 2009a; 2009b) writings in particular. For Lih, it is Lenin’s aggressive defence of the 1912 Basle Manifesto and Kautsky’s works such as his 1909 The Road to Power that provide the basis of Lenin’s wartime political platform, not a newfound appreciation of Hegelian dialectics. If it seems that in late 1914 Lenin retreated from political involvement to embark on a lonely philosophical odyssey, this was far from the case. Lenin in fact launched himself into political activity during this time; and if the written record seems to indicate a lull in political activity, Lih concludes, this was only due to a temporary problem in getting access to a printing press in Switzerland. Both perspectives provide valuable historical nuance that is often lacking in Hegelian-Marxist writing about Lenin’s philosophical studies of 1914. One shortcoming of this counter-literature, however, is that it tends to surrender the philosophical ground too easily. Althusser provides only a relatively superficial skim of the notebooks in his essays on Lenin and Philosophy; Mayer (1999: 50) contends that even if Lenin’s ontology changed after reading Hegel, it had little discernible effect on his political thinking, not ruling out the possibility that Lenin made a sharp philosophical break from Engels

History and Event.indd 70

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  71 and Plekhanov; and Lih also does not debate the philosophical claims of Hegelian-Marxists, relying on a conviction that the proof lies in the eating: that the effects of Lenin’s study of Hegel should be expected to provide clear evidence of a change of course in Lenin’s political works after 1914. Since Lih finds little evidence to support this claim, for him speculation about the possible significance of Lenin’s philosophical studies is rendered superfluous. In spite of the rich insights offered by Althusser, Mayer and Lih, then, their philosophical ambivalence about the contents of Lenin’s notebooks makes it too easy for Hegelian-Marxists to dismiss their arguments. Dunayevskaya (1973: 103) makes clear that her account will remain inaccessible to those with a duff, empiricist ear, unable to hear the inner voice of Lenin’s notebooks. Anderson’s (1995) account, resting on the contention that Lenin advanced an ‘ambivalent, secretive’ Hegelianism from 1914 to his death, is also hard to respond to convincingly if one does not attend to the philosophical arguments Anderson puts forward regarding the novelties evinced by the notebooks. Hence the intention of this chapter to fill in the philosophical lacunae in Althusser’s, Mayer’s and Lih’s accounts by interrogating immanently the claims put forward by Hegelian-Marxists. However, given that Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks were not intended for publication and consist solely of a running commentary on Hegel’s text, there are serious methodological difficulties which are worth acknowledging from the outset. Since the implicit criteria of Hegelian-Marxism in the lineage of Lukács (1971; 1975) and Marcuse (1941) is that the closer to Hegel one moves, the more one frees oneself from reductive materialism and scientism, then a close commentary on Hegel’s Logic is always going to appear to represent an improvement upon works that retain a critical disposition towards Hegel and extract certain elements considered of lasting value. It follows that for Hegelian-Marxists, every sign of Lenin affirming Hegel in his line-by-line reading of the Logic can be presented as an affirmation of Hegel, making the domain of Hegelian concepts feeding into Lenin’s supposed break from Engels and Plekhanov extremely wide-ranging. Accordingly, in order to proscribe the scope of the material covered, in this chapter we focus solely on evaluating the claim that Lenin’s ‘discovery’ of breaks in gradualness in Hegel’s text and his focus on the ‘unity of opposites’ and ‘self-movement’ represents a significant advance in the formal theorisation of Marxist dialectics. Although it might be argued that this runs against the

History and Event.indd 71

03/08/2015 08:39:18

72  History and Event spirit of Hegel – inasmuch as Hegel’s philosophy insists on the interconnection of all concepts – unless one surrenders the attempt to pin down precisely how Lenin’s dialectics are supposed to transcend the evolutionism of classical dialectical materialism, then a certain thematic curtailment is unavoidable. This will prove especially so when we see how Hegelian-Marxists engage in a thematic curtailment of their own, systematically downplaying the centrality of the idea of quantity-quality leaps in Lenin’s notebooks. When approached in this way, the Hegelian-Marxist argument can be seen as resting on three pillars. The first concerns Lenin’s alleged intention to accomplish ‘a theoretical refoundation of Marxism’ (Kouvelakis 2007: 168) and hinges on negative references to Engels and Plekhanov made by Lenin in his notebooks. The second is the emphasis Lenin places on the ‘unity of opposites’ and ‘self-movement’ in his notebooks, which Hegelian-Marxists represent as a substantive break from Engels and Plekhanov. The third concerns Lenin’s comments on dialectics in his texts written after 1914. Hegelian-Marxists are forced to explain away Lenin’s muted discussion of Hegel as the result of an ‘ambivalent, secretive Hegelianism’ (Anderson 1995: 98) withheld for purely strategic reasons. We deal first with the famous quotes, since they lie at the very foundations of the narrative.

The Famous Quotes For a thesis positing a radical break between Lenin’s dialectics and those of classical Marxism, the Hegelian-Marxists’ case relies on a slim collection of quotes. In spite of their far-reaching conclusions they rely principally on just three comments where Lenin refers negatively to Plekhanov and Engels. The first is an aphorism where Lenin writes that Plekhanov’s criticism of Kantianism was conducted ‘more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint’ in failing to match Hegel’s correction of Kant by ‘showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept’ (Lenin 1961b:  179). Anderson connects this comment to Lenin’s increasingly nuanced conception of the relationship between idealism and materialism, and represents it as a move away from Lenin’s previously strict demarcation of the two camps. We are then led to accept that this quote singles out Lenin as the first Hegelian-Marxist of the twentieth century: a forerunner to Lukács and Marcuse. Anderson claims that the structure of Lenin’s encyclopaedia entry on Marx (Lenin 1964b),

History and Event.indd 72

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  73 beginning with a discussion of philosophical dialectics and only then moving on to more concrete matters, marks a radical break with the theoretical modus operandi of the Second International (in fact, it repeats the structure of Engels’s Anti-Dühring). He also claims that Lenin’s request to make revisions to the entry, if the publisher had accepted it, would have shown evidence of a radical move towards endorsing philosophical idealism. The problem is that Anderson’s contentions rest on speculation about changes that Lenin might have wanted to make to his encyclopaedia entry on Marx and a critique of his position in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Lenin 1962) which in both cases Lenin did not actually carry out. Counterfactuals predominate. The second famous quote is in Lenin’s conspectus of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where in a critical note nested in the section on the Socratics Lenin criticises the fact that amongst the immense collection of Plekhanov’s writings on dialectics ‘about the large Logic, in connection with it, its thought (i.e., dialectics proper, as philosophical science) nil!!’ (Lenin 1961c: 277). This Dunayevskaya (1973: 105) describes as the moment when Lenin ‘completed the break with Plekhanov’. Anderson (1995: 103) concurs and ties it to a critique of revisionism and evolutionism: ‘These statements show the extent to which Lenin was breaking with the foundation of his early philosophic concepts, the concepts of both mainstream Bolshevism and Menshevism: Plekhanovite philosophical materialism.’ Yet it is far from clear why the quote warrants such a sweeping conclusion. Read literally, Lenin is merely reflecting with surprise that Plekhanov had failed to comment on the Logic and feels that his engagement with the book makes his comprehension of dialectics deeper than Plekhanov’s. It is a big leap to go from Lenin’s apprehension of the limits of Plekhanov’s philosophical education to arguing that this marks a break from the tactical evolutionism of revolutionary social democracy. Such speculative short-circuits lie at the heart of the Hegelian-Marxist narrative. The necessary mediations are missing. The third quote is near the start of Lenin’s 1915 short essay ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, in which he defines dialectics as the splitting of the whole into contradictory parts in thought. Lenin (1961d: 359) writes: The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics must be tested by the history of science. This aspect of dialectics (e.g., in Plekhanov)

History and Event.indd 73

10/08/2015 12:01:52

74  History and Event usually receives inadequate attention: the identity of opposites is taken as the sum-total of examples [“for example, a seed,”] “for example, primitive communism.” The same is true of Engels. But it is “in the interests of popularisation . . .”] and not as a law of cognition (and as a law of the objective world).

According to Anderson (1995: 105), Lenin is here advancing the heretical suggestion that even Engels had ‘vulgarized dialectics similar to the way in which Plekhanov had’ and ‘it is clear that Lenin sees a need for Marxists to go more deeply into the Hegelian notion of contradiction than did Engels’. Given the importance of Engels’s interpretation of dialectics for classical Marxism, this would be a radical assessment on Lenin’s part indeed. But the strongly pejorative characterisation of Lenin’s comment is Anderson’s own, since nowhere does Lenin himself accuse Engels of having vulgarised dialectics. Elsewhere in the notebooks, for instance, Lenin comments on Hegel’s development of the Notion as ‘Quite right and important – it is precisely this that Engels repeated in popular form’ (Lenin 1961c: 264), not holding popularisation and vulgarisation to be equivalent value judgements. When considering the many comments Lenin makes affirming Engels throughout his notebooks, the idea that Lenin repudiates Engels appears even more fanciful. At the start of his notes on the Doctrine of Being, for example, Lenin writes that: ‘I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically: Hegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to Engels).’ And in contrast to Anderson’s (1995: 59) view that only at the start of his conspectus is Lenin ‘relying in important ways on Engels’s truncated view of the Hegel–Marx relationship’, by its close Lenin appears to remain satisfied with his earlier characterisation of his project, concluding that ‘Engels was right when he said that Hegel’s system was materialism turned upside down’ (Lenin 1961b: 234). Indeed, where Lenin struggles to follow Hegel’s exposition, sees it as mired in obscurantism, or wishes to relate what he is reading to dialectical materialism, he repeatedly refers to Engels for guidance in his conspectus of Hegel’s Logic (Lenin 1961b: 108, 109, 118, 141, 169, 214, 234) and in his conspectus of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Lenin 1961c: 253, 259, 264, 285, 308). Lenin continued to see Engels’s work as the best guide he had to Hegel’s dialectic. What emerges from taking these quotes on their own terms,

History and Event.indd 74

10/08/2015 12:02:27

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  75 removed from the framing given them by Dunayevskaya and Anderson, is that not only do they struggle to support the heavy claims resting upon them, but also that they do not even directly address the dialectics of revolution. In order to read into these quotes the significance Dunayevskaya and Anderson attribute to them, additional mediations are needed. They do so by proposing that Lenin discovered new concepts wrestling Hegel’s thought from the hands of Engels and Plekhanov: the unity of opposites and self-movement.

The Unity of Opposites and Self-Movement Before addressing the significance of Lenin’s take on these concepts it is worth recalling the main points advanced by Engels’s books Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring. Since neither of the Hegelian-Marxist texts on Lenin provide a reading of Engels’s books, presenting Engels’s attempt to build rapport between scientific and dialectical reasoning as the sine qua non of their ‘scientism’, ‘positivism’ and so forth, it is necessary to recall Engels’s key concepts in order to contrast them insightfully with Lenin’s works. Dialectics of Nature, although never finished and unpublished in Lenin’s lifetime, is particularly helpful in this respect since it presents Engels’s ideas in a positive form and brings clarity to the arguments made in a more polemical fashion in Anti-Dühring. To adumbrate Engels’s main points: first, the scientific advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, albeit comprising a significant advance in our comprehension of nature, have also given rise to a vulgarly mechanical metaphysics. Only by interpreting scientific developments through the categories forged by Western philosophy can science be set on a sound footing (Engels 1941: 7). Second, three general laws of Hegel’s dialectic are of the utmost importance for disinterring Hegel’s revolutionary dialectical method from its conservative content: the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation (Engels 1941: 26). These laws allow Marxist materialism to extract what is of lasting value from the Hegelian dialectic and to invert the primacy of ideas in Hegel to the primacy of matter in the development of dialectical cognition. Third, contradiction is omnipresent in nature and history. For Engels, even movement is a contradiction, as is the relationship between lower and higher mathematics (see Chapter 1 of this book).

History and Event.indd 75

03/08/2015 08:39:18

76  History and Event Hegelian-Marxists do not deny that Engels’s three laws of the dialectic are the same as those that Lenin also stresses in his reading of Hegel. Instead, they seek to find ways to differentiate Lenin’s interpretation of these Hegelian concepts from Engels’s in order to argue that Lenin’s reading harbours more revolutionary potential. Lenin’s interpretation of the concept of the ‘unity of opposites’ assumes an especially important place in this argument. Insofar as this is a fundamental axiom of Hegel’s dialectic (the identity of identity and difference) and one of Engels’s three general laws of the Marxist dialectic, it is obviously not possible to see Lenin’s identification of the importance of this concept as indicative of a break with Engels. At stake is not the existence of the concept itself, then, but the supposedly new accent given it by Lenin. Dunayevskaya (1973: 99) explains the difference in the following way: ‘his [Lenin’s] stress was not so much on the identity of opposites as on the transition from one to the other and the sharpening of the contradiction’. Dunayevskaya (1973: 105) then relates the new inflection given to this concept to Lenin’s writings on imperialism and Lenin’s desire to harness national liberation movements as a route to socialism. We return to this point in the following section. For the time being, it is enough to note some facts that undermine the putative novelty of Lenin’s reading of the ‘unity of opposites’ as a sharpening of contradictions. The first is that Chernyshevsky and Plekhanov already laid emphasis on the notion of the unity of opposites and their transformation into one another (Mayer 1999). Perhaps these thinkers did not stress the sharpening of contradiction to the extent that Lenin did, but it is hard to tell since no evidence is presented by Dunayevskaya or Anderson to support the claim that Lenin’s reading of Hegel led him to imbue the concept with a sharper sense of dialectical contradiction. The second point is that Lenin had in fact already discussed the unity of opposites as the sharpening of contradictions. In his 1904 book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, when discussing the split of the party into opposing factions, Lenin (1961a: 409) writes that we see clearly that development does indeed proceed dialectically, by way of contradictions: the minority becomes the majority, and the majority becomes the minority; each side passes from the offensive to the defensive; the starting-point of ideological struggle . . . is ‘negated’ and gives place to an all-pervading squabble; but then begins ‘the negation of the

History and Event.indd 76

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  77 negation’ . . . but by now this ‘thesis’ has become enriched by the results of the antithesis and has become a higher synthesis . . . In a word, not only do oats grow according to Hegel, but the Russian Social-Democrats war among themselves according to Hegel.

Lenin’s framing of the events in a Hegelian turn of phrase is a little playful here. Nonetheless, all the elements that Dunayevskaya and Anderson attribute to Lenin’s 1914 interpretation of the concept are plain to see: the unity of opposites; the sharpening of contradictions; and the role of this process in moving forward the historical dialectic. The unity of opposites and their inversion into one another is also connected by Lenin to the Hegelian idea perhaps most important to Engels: quantity to quality leaps. Lenin’s proximity to Engels can be seen in Lenin’s sixteen-point summary of the dialectical method in his ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic’. Points nine, fifteen and sixteen are of particular significance since they refer specifically to dialectical transformation. Nine states: ‘Not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into its opposite?]’; fifteen states: ‘The struggle of content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content’; and sixteen states: ‘The transition of quantity into quality and vice versa. ((15 and 16 are examples of 9))’ (Lenin 1961b: 221–2). The way Lenin links these ideas together has a more synthetic quality than Engels’s expositions, but then again, Lenin’s intentions are different to Engels’s. In his works Engels is seeking to defend the compatibility of dialectics with science against philosophies that deny contradiction in nature. Lenin, in his notebooks, is concerned solely with extracting the essence of dialectic as such. Or as Engels puts it in his Ludwig Feuerbach, Hegel’s ‘dialectical method . . . smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side’ (Engels 1936: 23). Moreover, it would be remarkable that Lenin, if he really were intending to make a radical break from Engels, would place such importance on the leaps between quantity and quality. As we saw in Chapter 1, although this transition is an important one for Hegel in reconciling his idealism with realism, nowhere does Hegel emphasise it as a fundamental law of his dialectic. Retooled as a concept of the revolutionary event, it was introduced implicitly by Engels and only assumed a central place in Marxist theory in Plekhanov’s (1974a; 1974b; 1969) and Kautsky’s (1916) works. Unsurprisingly,

History and Event.indd 77

03/08/2015 08:39:18

78  History and Event therefore, Dunayevskaya remains silent on the quantity-quality transformation, not mentioning it once in her chapter devoted to Lenin’s philosophical notebooks. Anderson (1995: 91) concedes Lenin’s continuity with Engels on the quantity-quality transformation, but seeks to account for Lenin’s summation as a lapse of mind, since there ‘is no evidence that this summation is the product of his [Lenin] having reviewed all his notes up to that point’. I would argue precisely oppositely that taken as a whole, Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks support the idea that Lenin’s summation, and the priority it affords to quantity-quality leaps, is an accurate reflection of his reading of Hegel. In his commentary on the Book on Being, Lenin (1961a: 117) writes: ‘Further the transition of quantity into quality in the abstract-theoretical exposition is so obscure that nothing can be understood. Return to it!!’, to which he adds on the next page, ‘[it] is a question of higher mathematics; cf. Engels on the differential and integral calculus’. When Lenin annotates in the margin to his page, ‘Leaps! Breaks in Gradualness Leaps! Leaps!’ (Lenin 1971: 42), he is referring to the same sections of Hegel’s Logic that Engels, Plekhanov and all subsequent dialectical materialists drew their inspiration from. Nonetheless, Anderson (1995: 42) still argues that in appropriating this passage from Hegel, Lenin is separating himself from ‘Plekhanov’s more evolutionist interpretation. In Lenin’s reading of Hegel, the stress is on breaks, leaps and discontinuities rather than on evolutionary historical stages.’ Yet this statement is accompanied by no evidence that Plekhanov stressed the evolutionary compartment over the revolutionary, or that Lenin did vice versa. It is well known that Plekhanov (1974b: 699) was given to promoting an excessively reductionist and mechanistic interpretation of Marxism, when, for instance, he wrote that ‘Modern dialectical materialism cannot discover the mechanical explanation of history. That is, if you like, its weakness.’ In itself, however, this tells us little about Plekhanov’s interpretation of the quantity-quality leap. When Lenin (1961b: 284) observes in his notes on Hegel’s History of Philosophy that ‘what distinguishes the dialectical transition from the undialectical transition’ is ‘The leap. The contradiction. The interruption of gradualness’, this is an orthodox restatement of classical dialectical materialism. What of the idea of ‘self-movement’, attributed so much importance? As Anderson (1995: 45) puts it, for Lenin the ‘key has become self-movement and not merely movement’. It is true that Engels and

History and Event.indd 78

03/08/2015 08:39:18

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  79 Plekhanov talk of movement and not of self-movement and that Lenin (1961a: 141, 209, 229) emphasises the word ‘self’ in some passages, seeming to attribute importance to the nuance. However, the significance accorded the distinction by Hegelian-Marxists is speculative indeed. Dunayevskaya (1973: 13) relates it to the ‘movement from the abstract to the concrete’; to Hegel’s Absolute Idea wherein restless negativity overcomes all sense of historical completion by transforming into revolutionary praxis (1973: 33, 115). Anderson (1995: 333) mines a similarly speculative vein when he claims that Lenin’s stress on ‘self’ upholds the spontaneity of the masses against economic determinism reliant upon maintaining ‘rigid stages in concepts or in history’. There are reasons, however, to doubt whether these allusions between self-movement and self-organisation really possess the significance for Lenin that Dunayevskaya and Anderson would have us believe. For one thing, nowhere in Lenin’s notebooks does he present the idea in such a way. In Lenin’s essay ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, for instance, self-movement is linked to the unity of opposites in contradistinction to philosophies that attribute movement in nature and history to the ‘external – God, subject etc.’ The ‘living’ dialectical conception, Lenin writes, ‘furnishes the key to the “leaps”, to the “break in continuity”, to the “transformation into the opposite”, to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new’ (Lenin 1972: 360). Or, put differently, only dialectical self-movement explains the leaps between quantity and quality. The stress on ‘self’ in this passage appears less to point in the direction of Hegel’s Absolute or to combat Engel’s alleged evolutionist dialectics, than it does to reiterate the immanence of dialectical movement compared with static metaphysical and theological alternatives – the programmatic centre of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Indeed, in a number of the philosophical conspectuses Lenin wrote after his conspectus of Hegel’s Logic, Lenin shows that for him there is no great distinction between movement and self-movement. For instance, in his notes on Lassalle’s Philosophy of Hericlitus, Lenin (1961e: 346) writes that the basic law of the world for Hericulitus is ‘the law of transformation into the opposite’. Lenin (1961e: 349) then relates this to Hericlitus’s anti-theological theory of flux, which he describes as a ‘very good exposition of the principles of dialectical materialism’. Elsewhere, in the section on Plato in his conspectus of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Lenin (1961b: 280) writes that nodal

History and Event.indd 79

03/08/2015 08:39:18

80  History and Event points, ‘the practice of mankind and human history’, represent a ‘unity of contradictions, when Being and not-Being, as vanishing moments, coincide for a moment in the given moments of the movement (= of technique, of history, etc.)’. In a comment nested in Hegel’s commentary on the Eleatic School, Lenin (1961b: 259) also defends Engels’s insistence on understanding movement as a dialectical contradiction. Nowhere, let it be stressed, does Lenin repudiate Engels’s presentation of movement as a contradiction in favour of self-movement, or chide Engels for failing to capture the importance of self-movement as opposed to mere movement. In short, there simply is no evidence to support the claim that Lenin’s description of dialectics as selfmovement is radically different to movement in Engels’s work. In fact, Lenin (1961: 141) says so himself: ‘Movement and “self-movement” . . . who would believe that this is the core of “Hegelianism” . . . This core had to be discovered, understood, hinüberretten [rescued], laid bare, refined, which is precisely what Marx and Engels did.’

Dialectics in Practice after 1914 We have seen that the philosophical case for Lenin’s break from Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics relies on a meagre collection of quotes and on questionable inferences about the significance of Lenin’s interpretation of the ‘unity of opposites’ and ‘self-movement’. One would therefore expect that if the notebooks themselves do not provide clear evidence of a radical philosophical break, then Lenin’s more concrete theoretical writings on imperialism, Soviet democracy, and the transition from capitalism to communism would fill in the gap. However, not only are Lenin’s references to dialectics rather thin on the ground from 1915 onwards, but where dialectical flourishes embellish Lenin’s political works it is precisely the orthodox Engelsian concept of the quantity-quality transformation that Dunayevskaya and Anderson do their best to minimise in their accounts. Accordingly, in order to assess these thinkers’ claims that Lenin harbours a ‘private’ or ‘secretive Hegelianism’ we turn first to the instances where Lenin refers to Hegel and dialectics, judging whether they can support this interpretation. We then address Lenin’s use of the quantity-quality concept in his writings after 1914 and ask what implications it has for the Hegelian-Marxist narrative. Although Hegelian-Marxists tend to associate practically all of Lenin’s political positions after 1914 with his studies of Hegel – from

History and Event.indd 80

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  81 Lenin’s policy of revolutionary defeatism to his writings on imperialism and national liberation – much of this evidence is circumstantial, relying on the fact that these texts were written after 1914 as prima facie evidence for their connection to the Hegel notebook. Since the credibility one affords these claims relies almost entirely on whether or not one accepts the Hegelian-Marxist narrative, we focus only on the examples where Lenin refers explicitly to dialectics and Hegel. The four main instances include Lenin’s comments made about the capitulation of Kautsky and Plekhanov to nationalist chauvinism in the 1915 text The Collapse of the Second International; Lenin’s review of Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Junius Pamphlet’ in 1916; a critique of Bukharin’s ‘eclecticism’ in his 1921 pamphlet ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’; and his letter to the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma, encouraging its contributors and editors to become a ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics’, devoted to the ‘systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint’ (Lenin 1966: 234, 233). Let us take them in turn. The Collapse of the Second International, a critique of Plekhanov and Kautsky’s promotion of national-chauvinism with the onset of war, is concerned principally with a defence of the ideals of the 1912 Basle Manifesto which Lenin held these thinkers to have betrayed. But buried in the text there are also passing comments about Hegel and dialectics. This includes a line when Lenin criticises Plekhanov’s justification for war as setting ‘a new record in the noble sport of substituting sophistry for dialectics’, since it was ‘Hegel who long ago very properly observed that “arguments” can be found to prove anything in the world’. Lenin also credits Clausewitz’s insights on the nature of war as being ‘stimulated by Hegel’ (Lenin 1964c: 218–19). Anderson does not relate these comments to specific passages in the Logic, but he contends that such an ‘explicit and uncritical’ reference to Hegelian dialectics ‘was unprecedented not only for Lenin but for the whole tradition of Marxism out of which Bolshevism emerged’ (Anderson 1995: 110). This is a problematic inference, to say the least. Other than the fact that the contention is not true, as we saw in the excerpt from One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, even more contentious is the question of whether there are any Hegelian dialectics here which go beyond classical dialectical materialism. For instance, when Lenin (1964c: 218) insists on reducing ‘the seeming . . . to the fundamental motive forces, to the development of the productive forces and to the class struggle’, he is providing a restatement of

History and Event.indd 81

03/08/2015 08:39:19

82  History and Event dialectical materialist orthodoxy. Moreover, Lenin’s critique of Plekhanov’s sophistry does not rest on any particular failing in abstract reasoning, but in Plekhanov’s failure to study the ‘economic and diplomatic history of at least the past three decades’ and the sophistical ‘habit of citing instances that refer to situations that are dissimilar in principle’ (Lenin 1964c: 218, 220). Lenin objects to Plekhanov and Kautsky’s erroneous comparisons with Marx and Engels’s support for certain sides in the wars of the nineteenth century, which had a historical context different to the imperialist bellicosity of the early twentieth century. Where, we might ask, are the Hegelian dialectics in this critique? Anderson provides a similarly one-sided reading of Lenin’s review of Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Junius Pamphlet’ when he homes in on the more abstract aspects of Lenin’s discussion and ignores those parts where Lenin insists on concrete analysis. Anderson quotes Lenin’s (1964d: 309) comment that ‘all dividing lines, both in nature and society, are conventional and dynamic, and that every phenomenon might, under certain conditions, be transformed into its opposite’, relating this to Hegel’s Logic as an explanation of why Luxemburg applies Marxist dialectics ‘only halfway’. Yet he neglects Lenin’s (1964d: 309) positive description of dialectical practice, which maintains that ‘we remain dialecticians and we combat sophistry not by denying the possibility of all transformations in general, but by analysing the given phenomenon in its concrete setting and development’. The section on dialectics near the end of Lenin’s 1921 ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’ is more obviously influenced by his reading of the Logic. Here Lenin criticises Bukharin’s recommendation of installing a buffer group between Lenin and Trotsky’s factions: two groups at loggerheads over how much freedom should be granted to the trade unions in the new Soviet state. Lenin criticises Bukharin for holding to an eclectic position of ‘on the one hand, and on the other’ (Lenin 1965:  91) in his refusal to interrogate the merits of either side’s arguments, and relates this to Bukharin’s arid adherence to formal logic. These comments provide a clear sign of Lenin’s reading of the Logic making an impact on his political critique, especially Hegel’s critique of syllogistic judgement. Lenin insists that an attempt be made to examine all the many interconnections between objects; that the object should be taken in its state of constant change; and that the object’s definition ‘must include the whole of human experience’ (Lenin 1965: 94). Problematically for Anderson’s argument,

History and Event.indd 82

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  83 however, Lenin (1965: 94) then positions this insight as affirming the profundity of Plekhanov’s work, insisting that ‘nothing better has been written on Marxism anywhere in the world’. Finally, possibly the most significant sign of Lenin’s newfound appreciation of Hegelian dialectics lies in his comments in ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’. In this text, Lenin advises a ‘systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint’ by taking as ‘our basis Marx’s method of applying materialistically conceived Hegelian dialectics’ (Lenin 1966: 233–4). Although this quote does appear to evince a newfound interest in Hegel, it is not sufficient to evince a radical break from existing dialectical materialism. Elsewhere in the letter, Lenin also advocates the propagation of knowledge about the work of eighteenth-century materialists: not to endorse their arguments but to insist upon promoting a well-rounded knowledge of materialist and atheist thought amongst the masses. The problem is that when it comes to Lenin’s post-1914 writings, for Hegelian-Marxists the mere mention of Hegel suffices as proof of Lenin reaching towards the Hegelian-Marxist paradigm. As stressed throughout this chapter, however, the Hegelian-Marxist narrative rests on proving Lenin’s break from the dialectical materialism of Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky as well as Lenin’s own writings before 1914. Since Lenin’s actual writing on dialectics shows no such thing, force of assertion and allusion take the place of firm evidence. Dunayevskaya and Anderson even lean towards the conspiratorial when accounting for Lenin’s insubstantial theoretical reflections about dialectics after 1914, attributing this to a ‘private’ or ‘ambivalent, secretive Hegelianism’ on Lenin’s part. In this account, Lenin, lacking the time and strategic need to spread the good word of his conversion of Hegelian idealism, is forced to keep his newfound convictions to himself. Dunayevskaya (1973: 117) writes on the ‘privacy’ of Lenin’s embrace of Hegel that its lies deep in the recesses of time, revolution, and counter-revolution. Too short were the years between 1914 and 1917, between 1917 and 1923. Too daring was the November Revolution in Russia, and too many the aborted and missed revolutions elsewhere. Too overwhelming were the concrete problems of this great historic event, objective and subjective, including what Lenin called cultural backwardness.

Which could be paraphrased: Lenin did not have the time to discuss Hegel. For his part, Anderson speculates that Lenin might have been

History and Event.indd 83

03/08/2015 08:39:19

84  History and Event wary of the ideological resistance he would encounter in coming out as a Hegelian; that he may have forgotten parts of his reading of Hegel; and that he may have been personally ambivalent about the extent of his own philosophical breakthrough. The upshot of both accounts is that we are left with an excess of reasons to explain the absence of the phenomenon in question. Lih (2014) gets to the bottom of this problem when he writes that the problem with such accounts is that they provide ‘an ingenious explanation for something that needs no explanation, because it didn’t happen’. The reason why Lenin did not make more of his reading of Hegel was that it was not intended to be, nor did it result in, a radical break from Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics. If we run with the hypothesis that rather than seeking to refound Marxist dialectics, Lenin was instead seeking to deepen his understanding of classical dialectical materialism, then the story becomes much simpler. As we have seen, both Dunayevskaya and Anderson downplay the idea of quantity-quality leaps in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, no doubt due to the importance of the idea for Engels, Plekhanov and Kautsky. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Dunayevskaya and Anderson also have little to say about the novel appearance of this concept in Lenin’s theoretical writing after 1914. One notable example is in Imperialism where Lenin (1964e: 267) conceptualises the transformation of stagnant capitalism into imperialism: I have quoted detailed statistics which enable one to see to what degree bank capital, etc., has grown, in what precisely the transformation of quantity into quality, of developed capitalism into imperialism, was expressed. Needless to say, of course, all boundaries in nature and in society are conventional and changeable, and it would be absurd to argue, for example, about the particular year or decade in which imperialism ‘definitely’ became established.

This is not the only example of the idea of quantity-quality leaps making its entry into Lenin’s theoretical work during this time. In State and Revolution, when explaining the difference between Soviet democracy and democracy under liberal Parliamentarianism, Lenin also draws on the concept: Thus the [Paris] Commune appears to have substituted ‘only’ fuller democracy for the smashed state machine . . . But as a matter of fact this

History and Event.indd 84

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  85 ‘only’ signifies the very important substitution of one type of institution for others of a fundamentally different order. This is a case of ‘quantity becoming transformed into quality’: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is generally conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois democracy into proletarian democracy. (Lenin 1987: 301)

Or consider the way that Lenin conceptualised economic transformation from 1914. As discussed in the previous chapter, Lenin advocated a quantitative intensification of Taylorist production methods and of the banking system as a way to induce a quantity-quality transformation towards communism. Like his analysis in Imperialism and State and Revolution, Lenin had not conceptualised transformation in this way before. Yet neither, let it be repeated, was there anything particularly exceptional about his employment of this concept. The idea of the quantity-quality leap had been enshrined as a key law of Marxist dialectics since Engels, and had been marshalled as a defence of the necessity of revolution by Kautsky in The Social Revolution and by Plekhanov in Fundamental Problems of Marxism. These examples thus give further weight to our critical take on Hegelian-Marxist readings of the Philosophical Notebooks. If there is a broad conceptual continuity between Lenin’s writings on dialectics before and after 1914; if Lenin continued to praise Plekhanov’s dialectical materialism; and if the Engelsian dialectical law of the quantity-quality leap is stressed in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks and begins to embellish his theoretical writings after 1914, then a lot of tortuous reasoning can be dispensed with by affirming this chapter’s essential proposition: Lenin neither broke from classical dialectical materialism nor attempted to rethink its premises. Lenin’s reading deepened his comprehension of Hegel and he took with him some of its conceptual tools, but these were integrated into a relatively orthodox account of Marxist dialectics. Lenin’s return to Hegel to enrich his understanding of dialectical materialism is best understood as an attempt to master the art of dialectical reasoning held up under the false flag of opportunism by Plekhanov and Kautsky. That Lenin did not innovate a new form of Marxist dialectics, but instead defended the tradition, is no smear against his reputation. Just because his philosophy does not correspond to the HegelianMarxist representation of Lenin prefiguring Lukács and Marcuse does nothing to diminish Lenin’s reputation as a shrewd Marxist

History and Event.indd 85

03/08/2015 08:39:19

86  History and Event strategist. The fact that Lenin did not refound Marxist dialectics does nothing to lessen the brilliance of his concrete analyses and the political acumen of his interventions (a discrepancy, we will see in the next chapter, that Althusser takes advantage of when he elevates Lenin’s concrete practice to the formal, philosophical level).

From Lenin to Althusser’s Theoretical Revolution This chapter has argued that the Hegelian-Marxist narrative on Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks does not hold water. Instead, on close inspection, Lenin’s notebooks show his continuing adherence to the conceptual repertoire of classical dialectical materialism. This chapter has therefore bolstered a critical point animating this book: namely, that Hegelian-Marxism and classical dialectical materialism share more in common than widely believed. Both subscribe to a teleological science of history grounded ontologically in Hegel’s dialectic; both endorse the idea of historical transformation as a quantity to quality leap; and both philosophies subtend to the broad theoretical architecture of classical Marxism. The balance between materialism and idealism/subjectivity may show discrepancies between these schools, but their articulations of history and event are of a kind. The reader may still object that compared with the previous chapters this chapter was a little too dry, a little too textual, a little too prosaic in aiming to do no more than refute the Hegelian-Marxist narrative about Lenin’s philosophical awakening in 1914. Whereas Chapter 1 of this book took us through Hegel’s reflections on the mathematical infinite and Chapter 2 provided a reading of Marx’s methodology of real abstraction, this chapter would not seem to have advanced the discussion forward to an appreciable extent. Let me respond to this hypothetical objection in two ways. The first is that though this book’s concern with theories of historical change is guided to some extent by contemporary debates, it is equally committed to uncovering the truth of primary texts. We should, I believe, reject the perspectivism involved in appropriating classical texts for the political expediencies of the present and demands to bring them in line with theoretical fashion. For this reason, the Hegelian-Marxist narrative just begged to be addressed. It jumped out as a distortion of the historical record, and as such there should be no need to make apologies about the desire to set the record straight.

History and Event.indd 86

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Lenin’s Philosophy: A New Dialectics of Revolution?  87 The second response is more structural. Since we leap over a considerable number of thinkers in the passage to Part II of this book, it seemed necessary to provide a justification for this leap; for excluded from this book are no lesser figures than Trotsky, Stalin and Gramsci; and this is not to mention the entire Western Marxist lineage running through Lukács, Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer. How to explain their absence? In important respects, the reading of Lenin is decisive here. Insofar as this chapter has cast doubt on the existence of two distinctive Hegelianisms – Engelsian dialectical materialism and Hegelian-Marxism – their many shared commitments render superfluous further elaboration of their genealogies. In grouping Lenin with the classical Marxist articulation of history and event introduced by Engels to Marxism, this chapter aimed to show that Lenin’s philosophy can no more think true revolutionary discontinuity in science and politics than can any of the other great classical Marxist thinkers or their twentieth-century successors. If we really wish to understand the limitations to the classical Marxist science of history, and indeed some of its benefits, it is therefore not enough to continue charting further minor modifications to this philosophy. So that said, let us recapitulate the findings of the last three chapters in order to get a sense of what is at stake in the leap to Part II of this book. Chapter 1 delved deeply into the Marxist notion of quantityquality leaps by following the idea back to its source in Hegel’s Science of Logic. We saw that the idea rests on Hegel’s attempted dialecticisation of the mathematic infinite which excises irrational numbers from its logic. In so doing, we cast doubt on those readings of the Logic which position it as anticipating Georg Cantor’s transfinite. We argued that Hegel is compelled to excise the irrational number class owing to his teleological commitments which sublate classical metaphysical binaries and maintain epistemic continuity throughout history. Insofar as the theory of knowledge underlying the idea of quantity-quality leaps is one of historical continuity and of sequential order, we argued that it is complicit with the evolutionism of classical dialectical materialists. Chapter 2 then brought these philosophical insights to bear in reading Marx. Against assertions by Hegelian-Marxists that Marx conceptualises communist transformation as a quantity to quality leap, we followed della Volpe and Colletti’s description of Marx’s method as ‘real abstraction’, pitting it against the ontology of Hegel’s dialectic. We also provided a reading of Marx’s Capital at odds with the assumption that Marx

History and Event.indd 87

03/08/2015 08:39:19

88  History and Event considered communist transformation the outcome of an evolutionary process unfolding after revolution. Thus, we concluded, when the revolutionary Social Democrats of the Second International envisaged communist transformation as a quantity to quality leap induced by the intensification of Taylorist work practices, they had fallen deleteriously under the influence of Engels’s Hegelianisation of Marxism. Finally, in the present chapter, we appraised the HegelianMarxist narrative about Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks in order to see if the notebooks innovate beyond classical dialectical materialism and harbour a more discontinuous conceptualisation of the dialectics of revolution. In concluding that they do not, we were able to understand why Lenin remained within the parameters of classical dialectical materialism when thinking communist transformation as a quantity to quality leap. The upshot of all three chapters is that although classical Marxism offers a rational articulation of the relation of history and event, it does not capture discontinuous events. Furthermore, this philosophy’s loyalty to Hegelian ontology means that it has to position its dialectical laws in a relation of superiority to natural science and mathematics, something that Althusser will object pointedly to in the wake of the disastrous Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union. In light of these findings, it is now possible to frame the contribution of the second part of this book. Beginning with Althusser and moving forward though Badiou and Meillassoux, we will see that these thinkers overcome Hegel’s teleological dialectic in proposing a new science of history centred on the novelties produced in rare events. In so doing, Althusser’s theoretical revolution will prove the boldest and most fecund refoundation of the science of history in Marxism’s history. Nothing that Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao or any Western Hegelian-Marxist thinker proposed comes close to Althusser’s radicality. Yet we also see that Althusserian theory is not without problems. In divesting history of its teleological structure and denying it any possibility of empirical verification, Althusserian thinkers struggle to supress the authority of theorists to issue judgements on historical events. The speculative-rationalist science of history set in motion by Althusser will depart dramatically from one able to claim the mantle of materialism and will lead inexorably towards a Platonism maintaining a pivotal role for philosophers in politics. This is the story followed in the next part of the book.

History and Event.indd 88

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Chapter 4 Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break In truth, this new epistemology and the new history of science that is its basis are the scientific form of a truly rational conception of their object. Louis Althusser, Preface to ‘Georges Canguilhem’ (1998: 164–5) Philosophically speaking, I had to become my own father. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time (1993: 171)

Much water passes under the bridge between Lenin’s death in 1924 and Althusser’s rise to theoretical prominence in the late 1950s. The Soviet Union is passed to Stalin’s control; Gramsci is imprisoned in Regina Coeli in 1926; Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico in 1940; Heidegger is recuperated by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943; Mao defeats Chiang Kai-Shek in China’s communist revolution of 1949; Stalin dies in 1953; and in 1956, on one side of the world, the Algerian War of Independence begins, while on the other Nikita Khrushchev announces a programme of de-Stalinisation. Given the tumultuous decades separating Lenin’s death from Althusser’s rising star, what can possibly justify leaping over these events? A clue lies in Althusser’s persistently liminal status in the history of twentiethcentury philosophy – too Marxist for the new poststructuralist generation, too close to poststructuralism for orthodox Marxists to accept. Althusser remains an oddity in mediating these two visions of historical change: on the one side, classical Marxism, which subsumes events into a succession of necessary historical stages; and on the other, the postmodern emphasis on contingent and singular events, disarticulated from historical processes. The reason for carving this book around Althusser’s theoretical persona is to make a case, for better and for worse, about the importance of his mediating role.24

History and Event.indd 91

03/08/2015 08:39:19

92  History and Event The chapters on Hegel, Marx and Lenin in Part I of this book concluded that classical Marxism’s teleological notion of quantityquality leaps cannot think discontinuous events. The chapters on Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux grapple with a different problem. Although sharing a rejection of the Hegelian dialectic and grasping the discontinuous nature of events, we see that these thinkers are led (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously) towards shoring up the authority of theory. The speculative-rationalist excesses of this genealogy, present in classical dialectical materialism though tempered by the conviction that its historical schemas should stand up to empirical verification, are thereby shown to point in a troublingly Platonic direction. Yet as well as diagnosing how Althusser was responsible for setting in motion certain tendencies in Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s philosophies, this chapter also aims to impart a sense of the boldness and fecundity of Althusser’s reinvention of the science of history. In the introduction to this book we saw how in the 1950s Althusser endorsed aspects of Montesquieu’s non-teleological decipherment of history. And in the previous chapter, we confirmed the essentials of Althusser’s 1968 reading of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (hinting that Althusser would transform Lenin’s concrete dialectical practice into new formal concepts). In this chapter, we engage Althusser’s positive project to free Marxism of teleology and maintain the autonomy of science. This requires an appreciation of the complex and often astoundingly insightful conceptual elaborations offered by his epistemological programme of the mid-1960s.25 For it is to this period that we owe the wealth of concepts – the epistemological break, over-determination, ruptural unity, and the complex whole – all of which called into question the Hegelian ontology shared by classical dialectical materialism and HegelianMarxism. Althusser’s innovative epistemology, building upon the historical epistemology of Koyré, Bachelard and Canguilhem, should therefore be recognised as a valiant attempt to reconstruct the science of history knowing no precedent in Marxist intellectual history. Other Marxist schools like della Volpe’s may have also sought to undermine the Hegelian ontology of classical dialectical materialism (see Chapter 2), but they did not innovate new concepts within Marxist theory or inspire creative philosophical work. The aim of this chapter is thus to demonstrate how Althusser’s interventions had both positive and negative consequences. In its positive dimension, this will entail establishing how Althusser’s

History and Event.indd 92

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  93 critique of Hegel diagnosed adroitly Marxism’s ensnarement within the teleology of classical dialectical materialism – Hegelianism being locked into an illusory quest for origins and essences, unable to grasp the discontinuous nature of scientific knowledge. In its negative dimension, this involves examining the authoritative implications of Althusser’s epistemology. We will see that the vicious circularity enjoined by Althusser’s epistemological project, being shorn of both scientific-empirical and Hegelian-teleological justifications, beckons towards a decisionistic ontology upholding philosophy’s authority to issue judgements on the novelty of rare events: a problem which will be only unsuccessfully warded against by Badiou’s meta-ontological stipulations (Chapter 5) and will reach its apogee in Meillassoux’s speculative ethics (Chapter 6). The first section of this chapter begins by providing some brief historical background to Althusser’s project and situates his theory of the epistemological break with respect to Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the ‘epistemological obstacle’. The second section shows how Althusser accounts for Marx’s scientific discovery of the continent of history. The third section presents Althusser’s fusion of French historical epistemology with an anti-Hegelian take on the over-determination of social practices. The fourth section examines the vicious circularity involved in Althusser’s identification of science with discontinuous epistemological breaks. The fifth and final section argues that despite the similar vocabularies of Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter and Badiou’s Being and Event, it is the unresolved issues of Althusser’s 1960s research programme which underlie the intricacies and difficulties faced by Badiou’s philosophy.

A Marxian Epistemology of the New To begin by providing just a sketch of a well-rehearsed intellectual biography (for the best account, see Elliott 1987), Althusser was a theorist operating in the philosophical fringe of the French Communist Party (PCF), which dominated Marxist politics in post-war France. The decisive events animating Althusser’s groundbreaking philosophical work were Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation program, announced at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, and its culmination in the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. Althusser’s response to these events was a scathing criticism of the humanist critique of Stalinism. In Althusser’s view, the elevation of ‘humanity’

History and Event.indd 93

03/08/2015 08:39:19

94  History and Event as the central term of Marxist discourse was an attempt to displace antagonistic class struggle in favour of woolly liberal maxims. Humanism, in this guise, he saw as woefully inadequate for a critique of Stalinism, in that the humanist schema simply inverts Stalinist economism by replacing the economy with the figure of man as the teleological end of history. Humanist pieties about the becoming of man for man were, Althusser tirelessly insisted, entirely insufficient to constitute anything resembling the science of history necessary to guide revolutionary political practice. Lenin’s motto ‘Without Revolutionary Theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement’ provided the source of Althusser’s disquiet with this trend. Only by refusing the reduction of Marxist theory to humanist invocations of praxis could the PCF’s slide towards pragmatism and reformist compromise be resisted theoretically. On another, closely related front, Althusser’s project was also lent urgency by the need to uphold the relative autonomy of science in the wake of the Lysenko affair (see Pollock 2006: Chap. 3). The disastrous application of political criteria to Soviet agricultural projects – justified by reference to Engelsian dialectical materialism under the pretext of Stalinist-Zhadanovian ‘proletarian science’ – far from compelling the abandonment of Marxist science, in Althusser’s estimation, required its thoroughgoing renewal. Any Marxist dialectical materialism worth its salt would, he adduced, have to maintain its own scientific status at the same time as carefully demarcating the proper domains of scientific theoretical knowledge. The ironical result of Althusser’s hard-line position, resisting both humanist and Stalinist deviations by affirming the autonomy of science, would be the most remarkably heterodox synthesis of intellectual traditions. Althusser would partition Marx’s early works from the scientific analysis of his mature political economy by emphasising the structural determinations of Marx’s scientific breakthrough (hence the temporary alliance with the anthropological structuralism of LeviStrauss), as well as thinking the rupture between ideology and science as an epistemological break. Knox Peden (2014) has elegantly documented how this project was given support by a Spinozist rationalism mediated via the mathematician Jean Cavaillès. Nonetheless, Althusser pursued his project of Marxist theoretical renewal principally by mining his theoretical raw materials from French philosophy of science. His main influences came from a historical epistemological school represented by the

History and Event.indd 94

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  95 work of Alexandre Koyré (1957), Georges Canguilhem (1991) and Gaston Bachelard (2002). Influenced by Husserlian phenomenology, a rival tendency to Althusser’s anti-humanist project, this strand of critical rationalist idealism could not be employed as Marxist science as it was found. Rather, French historical epistemology would have to be infused by concepts sourced from Marx and Lenin in order to undergo a transformative procedure capable of delivering what Althusser (2003: 4) later labelled a ‘materialist, rationalist empiricism’. Although Althusser’s debts to French historical epistemology would be owed in seemingly equal measure to Koyré and Canguilhem, the similarities between Bachelard’s notion of the ‘epistemological obstacle’ and Althusser’s ‘epistemological break’ make it the easiest concept through which to trace a line of continuity through this transformative procedure.26 A key text for understanding Bachelard’s influence is The Formation of the Scientific Mind, which employs psychoanalysis in order to diagnose the impedimenta to scientific progress. For Bachelard, inferring the ‘epistemological obstacles’ in scientific pedagogy and persisting in the minds of scientists is a matter of grasping the invariant errors of pre-scientific thought, a claim he illustrates by drawing on examples from a wealth of eighteenth-century scientific texts which revel in spectacle and awe at the expense of the sober elaboration of the abstract laws underpinning phenomena. The lesson Bachelard (2002: 18) draws from this is that standing between pre-scientific thought and real science is ‘experience that is ostensibly concrete and real, natural and immediate present[ing] us with an obstacle’. The search for the science of reality as ‘the mathematical why’ thus entails resistance against ‘obvious and deep-seated empiricism’ because ‘[n]othing is given. Everything is constructed’ (Bachelard 2002: 17, 39, 25). The process of science, where an initial generality about an object can be flawed in the extreme, implies ‘a very real break between sensory knowledge and scientific knowledge’ (Bachelard 2002: 237). The conclusion Bachelard draws from this flies in the face of a deeply ingrained empiricist image of science as a method concerned with uncovering the secrets of the object, believed to be there just waiting to be discovered. In his words, ‘the twentieth century has seen the beginning of scientific thought against sensations . . . we need to construct a theory of the objective against the object’ (Bachelard 2002: 248). The science is not already out there; it has to be constructed.

History and Event.indd 95

03/08/2015 08:39:19

96  History and Event Appraising Bachelard’s achievements, Canguilhem confirms that his ‘discovery is precisely to have recognized and then to have theoretically reflected the fact that science has no object outside its own activity; that it is in itself, in its practice, productive of its own norms and of the criterion of its existence’. Adding to this assessment, Canguilhem (1975: 26) writes that Bachelard’s project ‘is all organized around a reflection on Mathematical-Physics’. Science, as befits the ideal model Bachelard finds in the most mathematised of its branches, is an enterprise concerned with the efficaciousness of conceptual mediation, taking us away from the blooming, buzzing confusion of the subjective phenomenological world. The points below therefore allow us to describe Bachelard’s epistemology of science without making reference to the subject of scientific practice, or to the specifically psychoanalytic impediments to the advancement of science (this nuance being important when we consider Althusser’s appropriation). 1. Discontinuity in scientific practice; 2. A strong divide between the pre-scientific (errors) and scientific approach (correction); 3. Science as the realm of mathematical abstraction, against the diverse, sensuous concrete; 4. Development in science as proceeding from a first, overgeneralisation and proceeding with caution in the increasing particularisation of analysis; 5. The objective of science distinguished from the object of scientific investigation. Bachelard’s characterisation of scientific process exerted an overwhelming influence on Althusser’s epistemology, especially the conception of scientific process as the rational elaboration of abstractions based upon initial, flawed generalities. Yet given that Bachelard’s historical epistemology would bring with it its own concept of historical change, and given that Althusser would credit Marx’s scientific breakthrough as the discovery of the ‘continent of history’, two questions would need to be settled in order to ensure their compatibility: the first, an account of Marx’s epistemological break leaning on the Bachelardian model of scientific process, and the second, the question of how Marx anticipates and points beyond the limits of French historical epistemology. It is by beginning with

History and Event.indd 96

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  97 Althusser’s response to the first question that we will be able to grasp the anti-Hegelian import of his response to the second.

Theorising Marx’s Epistemological Break It is important to emphasise that in bringing together Marxism and French historical epistemology Althusser is not simply applying the latter to the former in order to stress the incommensurability of Marx’s innovations with the philosophies of history that preceded him. Since Althusser wants to claim that only a Marxist science of history can make sense of such historical events, a direct application of French historical epistemology would render superfluous Marx’s own putative discovery of the continent of history and call into question the need for Marxist dialectical materialism. Accordingly, in order to infer the ‘double break’ from ideological philosophies of history Althusser positions Marx’s science of history as a theory of ‘epistemological history’ enriching French historical epistemology. This procedure implies an ‘indispensable circle in which the application of Marxist theory to Marx himself appears to be the absolute precondition of an understanding of Marx’ (Althusser 2005: 38). It creates space for ‘the theory which makes possible an understanding of its [Marxism’s] own genesis as of any other historical process’ (Althusser 2005: 63). Given this reflexive approach, what explains Marx’s theoretical breakthrough? This question provides the crux for many of the most difficult aspects of Althusser’s philosophical writings. With his anti-humanist insistence on history as a ‘process without a subject’ (Althusser 2001: 81), there can be no recourse to the category of genius, or to the world-historical individual gifted by nature to see what others could not. The problem thus posed is of ‘the relation between the events of . . . thought and the one but double history which was its true subject’ (Althusser 2005: 71). Notwithstanding Althusser’s (2005: 71) admission of Marx’s ‘extraordinary theoretical temperament, animated by insatiable critical passion’, refusing Marx the status of a subject of history requires an alternative account of where his innovations came from. In order to understand how Althusser grasps Marx’s break from an ideological to a scientific conception of history it is therefore necessary to survey Althusser’s prohibitions against three interconnected accounts of knowledge formation:

History and Event.indd 97

03/08/2015 08:39:19

98  History and Event 1. A subjective, psychological explanation; 2. An empiricist account of grasping the essence of objects, where knowledge is believed to be waiting to be discovered within objects; 3. A teleological disclosure of the concept, whereby the original separation of man from scientific knowledge of the world is restored in the end. We take them in turn. To emphasise the difficulties faced by Althusser’s anti-subjectivist account of epistemological ruptures, his theory can be profitably contrasted with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), also inspired by Koyré’s work.27 In Structure Kuhn famously likens scientific revolutions to a gestalt switch, where our mind reassembles patterns into new forms previously unrecognisable due to our cognitive biases. After a scientific revolution, for Kuhn scientific practitioners thus live in a different world of meaning psychologically incommensurable with the previous world. And the initiation of paradigm-shifting science originates in an experience akin to religious revelation. As Kuhn (1996: 122–3) describes: . . . normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ . . . On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep. No ordinary sense of the term illumination fits these flashes of intuition.

As should be clear, Kuhn’s recourse to subjectivist metaphors for explaining the origins of scientific revolutions would find little sympathy from Althusser. Indeed, the passage below from Reading Capital could not read more at odds with Kuhn’s allusions to religious revelation: To see the invisible . . . we need an informed gaze, a new gaze, itself produced by a reflection of the ‘change of terrain’ on the exercise of vision . . . The fact that this change in terrain, which produces as its effect this metamorphosis in the gaze, was itself only produced in very specific, complex and often very dramatic conditions; that it is absolutely irreducible to the idealist myth of a mental decision to change ‘view-points’; that

History and Event.indd 98

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  99 it brings into play a whole process that the subject’s sighting, far from producing, merely reflects in its own place; that in this process of real transformation of the means of production of knowledge, the claims of a ‘constitutive subject’ are as vain as are the claims of the subject of vision in the production of the visible . . . (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 28)

Althusser also rejects ‘subjective empiricism’ (Reed 2005: 213). Following Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Althusser sees a Humean empiricism, in which all knowledge derives from empirical impressions tied together solely by subjective ideas, as opening the door to agnosticism about the independence of objective world within neo-Kantian philosophy (we see the same concern re-emerge in Chapter 6 on Meillassoux). Like Bachelard, Althusser sees the scientific object as a constructed, qualitatively new object irreducible to the real object; a novelty empiricist epistemology cannot account for. Althusser also prosecutes empiricist epistemology through a critique of the Hegelian notion of contradiction within the real. In this conception, the object is considered the source of all knowledge, and science succeeds only insofar as it extracts the essence of the object. On the empiricist account there are thus essential and inessential qualities to all objects: the former falling under the purview of science, extracting it from the barriers imposed by the latter (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 36–40). This is because in order for empiricism to maintain its realist credentials, knowledge has to pre-exist within the internal relations between the object’s essential and inessential traits. Scientific cognition merely takes hold of the essential by way of a relation already lying within the object itself. Science does not construct its scientific object by way of creative mathematical abstractions; it grasps the abstraction within the empirical object itself (it is not hard to see the congruence of this critique with Althusser’s (2006a: 134) dissatisfaction with Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, where the commodity is internally split between its use value and exchange value). To summarise the above using Althusser’s (2005: 41) words, ‘For the empiricist conception of knowledge, the whole of knowledge is invested in the real, and knowledge never arises except as a relation inside its real object between the really distinct parts of that real object.’ Consequently, ‘Empiricist abstraction, which abstracts from the given real object its essence, is a real abstraction, leaving the subject in possession of the real essence’ (Althusser 2005: 38).

History and Event.indd 99

03/08/2015 08:39:19

100  History and Event Empiricism thereby falls foul of Althusser’s anti-subjectivist stipulation by enjoining the metaphor of the invisible (essential) being covered up by the visible (inessential), therewith consecrating the conception of the special individual who can peer through the inessential fog into the essential heart of the object. Vice versa, ‘an empiricism of the subject always corresponds to an idealism of the essence (or an empiricism of the essence to an idealism of the subject)’ (Althusser 2005: 228). The empiricist conception of knowledge, he writes, is ‘the twin brother of the problematic of the religious vision of the essence in the transparency of existence’ (Althusser 2005: 40). Empiricism is represented as a philosophical (ideological) incursion in the realm of science, embroidering the mobile scientific process into a philosophical tapestry of stable objects. On this point Althusser again repeats Bachelard. For cutting across Bachelard’s writings lies a critique of the way philosophy lags behind science: a concomitant of philosophy’s attempt to assure or dissuade its readers of science’s truth claims. Bachelard observes that the vessels of seemingly innocent words like ‘object’ shared by science and philosophy provide a site in which philosophy must reflexively criticise its parlous drag. Lecourt (1975: 53) gets to the crux of Bachelard’s concerns: What Bachelard is revealing here is the fact that when a scientist and a philosopher pronounce the word object, when they introduce it into their discourse, they are not discussing the same thing, or, rather: philosophy is discussing a thing and the scientist is discussing a result. We understand why Bachelard wrote in Rational Materialism: ‘The object is only instituted at the end of a long process of rational objectivity.’ A proposition is strictly impossible for a Philosopher. On this point the ‘work’ of philosophy can be characterised as follows: it takes as its theme the object-result, a scientific concept, and inserts it in the philosophical couple subject/object. What it says about it is still valid only for the object-thing of philosophical discourse.

It follows that Althusser could be citing Bachelard verbatim when in Reading Capital he declares ‘I am interested in the play on words itself’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 42). For Althusser, the word ‘object’ is the rug under which empiricism’s ideological manoeuvres are swept; the word ‘real’ provides the decoy. Attributing his counterinsight to Marx and Spinoza, Althusser claims that ‘the production of knowledge which is peculiar to theoretical practice constitutes a process that takes place entirely in thought’ (Althusser and Balibar

History and Event.indd 100

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  101 2009: 45). Far from simply extracting the real essences of stable real objects, science, according to Althusser, is precisely the process of the transformation (as in Bachelard science is associated with mobilism against ideology as repetition). A proper appreciation of this process, however, Althusser argues, requires our liberation from ideological conceptions of history. Indeed, if it is possible to isolate a single point at which Althusser transcends Bachelard, it is by establishing a novel Marxist science of history on this basis. In Resch’s (1992: 181) incisive words, ‘Althusser forces French historical epistemology beyond the limits of its own self-understanding.’ The problem, Althusser argues, rests with ‘the traditional concept of the history of the sciences, which today is still profoundly steeped in the ideology of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, i.e. in a teleological and therefore idealist rationalism’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 47). Since for Althusser science is associated with discontinuous breaks producing novel ‘knowledge effects’, then Hegel’s teleological philosophy is cast as absolute ideology. Rescuing epistemological breaks from the overbearing weight of teleology therefore demands their extrication from ideologies of history carried over into empiricism. Althusser recognises in the empiricist schema an originary mythos, whereby knowledge is excavated from the relation of real objects’ essential and inessential features. It is a ‘myth of the origin; from an original unity undivided between subject and object, between the real and its knowledge’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 68). What Althusser calls an ‘idealism of the antepredicative’ throws into suspicion typical philosophical terminology for the production of the new. Origin, genesis and mediation – all these terms are infected by teleological ideology; and empiricist epistemology is on this basis isomorphic with political ideology. When Althusser rejects empiricism’s conception of an original separation of subject and object heading towards ultimate reconciliation, he is equally rejecting the humanist idea of man’s necessary alienation in history to be reconciled with the realisation of man’s essence as man. Althusser’s unsparing criticisms of subjectivism, empiricism, and teleology therefore sit at the foundations of his new Marxist epistemology. It follows that theorisation of social causality must be rescued from the Hegelian conception of totality insofar as the latter is also implicated in teleology and empiricism. As Balibar stresses, there is ‘a rigorous and necessary correlation between the structure of the concept of history peculiar to that theory [empiricism] (a

History and Event.indd 101

03/08/2015 08:39:19

102  History and Event structure itself dependent on the structure of the concept of the social totality peculiar to that theory) . . . and the concept of temporality in which that theory of history thinks the “changes”, “movements”, “events”’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 328). Delineating divisions within the whole entails resistance against two equally ruinous conceptions: on the one side, the ‘simple whole’ of the Hegelian totality in which everything is reflected in and determined by the totality, and on the other side an irrational multiplicity of elements prohibiting any stable order against which novelty can be discerned. As we will see in the next section, Althusser manages to find a middle path between both extremes with his concept of the ‘complex whole’, thus allowing for rare historical breaks brought about by the vanishing cause of structural causality. Yet the idea of the vanishing cause will also create problems for understanding breaks from ideology to science. It will pose most acutely the question of how – or more importantly, on whose authority – historical change is to be judged.

Structural Causality Examining the notion of structural causality marks our entrance into the more famous parts of Althusser’s philosophical system concerning over-determination and economic determination in the ‘final instance’. After the disasters of Stalin’s ‘proletarian science’ – most spectacularly, the failure of Trofim Lysenko’s Lamarkian agricultural projects of the 1930s – Althusser affirms the autonomy of theoretical (scientific) practice by combating the Hegelian conception of totality. To make clear the concepts implicated in Althusser’s retheorisation of totality, Table 4.1 matches on the left side the Hegelian (and Hegelian-Marxist) conceptions with Althusser’s alternative concepts on the right. The notion of the ‘general contradiction’ is a particularly problematic one for Marxism. As we saw in Part I of this book, classical dialectical materialism relies upon the notion of revolutionary change as a quantity-quality leap embedded in a teleological science of history. Building upon Lenin’s theorisation of the revolutionary conjunction, the essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ shows Althusser, by contrast, at pains to emphasise the multiplicity of circumstances permitting the revolutionary seizure of 1917. In so doing, Althusser draws inspiration from Lenin’s theorisations of concrete political practice, but elevates its insights to the formal philosophical level

History and Event.indd 102

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  103 by removing them from their framing within classical dialectical materialism (see Chapter 3). For Althusser, Lenin’s tactical theorisations imply that ‘we can no longer talk of the sole, unique power of the general “contradiction”’. The unity of elements comprising a revolutionary rupture instead needs to be thought in terms of levels and instances of effect which ‘might be called over-determined in its principle’ (Althusser 2005: 100–1). Althusser’s notion of overdetermination therefore upends the classical Marxist belief in history being motored solely by the contradiction between labour and capital. And as such, it also requires a reconceptualisation of totality that does not collapse into the single principle dominating a simple whole. Hegelian concepts

Althusser’s alternatives

General contradiction

Ruptural unity

Simple whole/totality

Complex whole/totality

Infinite One of practice

Finite relation of practices

Table 4.1  Hegelian concepts of totality, and Althusser’s alternatives. In Althusser’s (2005: 102) view, despite the appearance of the development of complexity within the Hegelian dialectical totality, it is fraudulent, since ‘it only has one centre, the centre of all the past worlds conserved in its memory; that is why it is simple’. The reduction of all the elements that comprise a specific situation – ‘economic, social, political and legal institutions, customs, ethics art, religion, philosophy, and even historical events’ – to an historical epoch’s unity ‘is only possible on the absolute condition of taking the whole concrete life of a people for the externalization-alienation . . . of an internal spiritual principle . . . moved by the simple play of a principle of simple contradiction’ (Althusser 2005: 103). The vulgar Marxist inversion of this principle suffers from the same problem when it posits the economic as the general contradiction (base) underlying the disparate phenomenon of the political, ideological and scientific (superstructure). In this false intellection, ‘[t]he political and the ideological will therefore be the pure phenomenon of the economic which will be their “truth”’ (Althusser 2005: 108). Althusser argues for a finite number

History and Event.indd 103

03/08/2015 08:39:19

104  History and Event of discrete practices of production – material, political, ideological and theoretical – held together in a complex unity. If the notion of over-determination seems to prefigure a poststructuralist or even post-Marxist pluralism, what distinguishes it as Marxist materialism? This is typically ascribed to Althusser’s (2005: 112) assertion, after Engels, that ‘the economy is determinant, but only in the last instance’ – an orthodox caveat which some have seen as only introduced to the analytic on the force of assertion. In addition to the seeming arbitrariness of Althusser’s insistence on ultimate economic determination, his concession that from ‘the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes’ (Althusser 2005: 113) could be seen as providing a tacit acknowledgement of the impotence of the Marxist axiomatic in the face of plural reality. Yet whilst there might be a sense in which in laying out his opposition to overly simplistic conceptions of the base-superstructure relation Althusser fails to defend adequately why the economic is determinant in the final instance, this does not necessarily mean that the concept of over-determination points towards a rootless pluralism. As Althusser insists, ‘the fact that the Hegelian type of necessity and the Hegelian essence of development should be rejected does not mean at all that we are in the theoretical void of subjectivity, of “pluralism” or of contingency’ (Althusser 2005: 215). The appendix to ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ goes some way towards explaining why. In the Appendix, Althusser discusses a letter written by Engels in which he attempts to impress on the recipient, Bloch, that the superstructure is the realm of infinite accidents underwritten by the necessities of the economic base. Althusser chastises Engels for failing to present any intelligible reason why economic necessity underlies the accidental multiplicity of events. Particularly interesting are his remarks on Engels’s ‘second level’ of analysis, where Engels remarks how many individual wills intersect to give rise to an event. Althusser (2005: 120) quotes Engels: ‘there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event’. In response to Engels’s conceptualisation, Althusser notes how it involves changing the object of analysis to the transcendent product of a convergence of individual wills. And in line with Althusser’s conception of determinate, finite practices, this involves deferring to a speculative object which is not a real object of knowledge. ‘The transparency of content which strikes us when we imagine the parallelogram of forces (of individual wills)

History and Event.indd 104

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  105 disappears once we ask (as Engels does himself) about the origin (and therefore about the cause) of the determinations of these individual wills. For we are referred to infinity’ (Althusser 2005: 122). This ‘non-Marxist’ explanation ‘puts forward an infinity without content, an abstract and hardly even programmatic generalization’ (Althusser 2005: 123). It falls outside theoretical practice; it produces no object. Engels’s notion demands that ‘we trust to the infinite (that is, the indeterminate, epistemological void) for the production in the final resultant of the resultant we are hoping to deduce: the one that will coincide with economic determination in the last instance, etc., that is, we trust a void to produce a fullness’ (Althusser 2005: 123). This underdetermined notion cannot produce a satisfactory account of the historical event, which instead requires ‘insertion into forms which are themselves historical’; forms which are ‘perfectly definable and knowable’ (Althusser 2005: 126). The upshot is that for Althusser no Marxist conception of historical change should surrender itself to ‘sliding into the empiricism or the irrationality of “that’s how it is” and of “chance”’ (Althusser 2005: 207). On the contrary, Althusser wants to maintain that his array of concepts is sufficient to grant history its rational intelligibility, and his philosophy a privileged role in adjudicating the truth of epistemological breaks.

Whose Science? The previous sections reconstructed the main elements of Althusser’s epistemology and showed how they offer an alternative science of history to the Hegelian mainstream of Marxist theory. The question not yet satisfactorily addressed is how the concept of the ‘absent cause’ can make sense of the relation between history and event in a way deserving the title of a science of history. It is worth conceding that there are no easy answers to this question provided by Althusser. His notion of the complex whole seems to preclude a method which would allow the specific causes of an epistemological break to be determined. Resch (1992: 50–4) succinctly captures the consequences: ‘The whole becomes what Althusser calls an “absent cause” because it is present only in and through the reciprocal effectivity of its elements . . . structural forces or laws are at work in social formations, but unlike the natural sciences, historical science can never experimentally isolate them from one another.’ Beyond these critical realist filiations, however, there are even more fundamental

History and Event.indd 105

03/08/2015 08:39:19

106  History and Event problems with Althusser’s epistemological apparatus. For in severing all links with empiricism and teleology, Althusser forgoes all criteria on which epistemological breaks could be defended as a rupture from ideology or science or by which a true historical event could be distinguished from the merely accidental. To take the problem of empirical verification first, the rub of the matter comes down to whether Althusser’s humble claim he ‘take[s] this transformation [the epistemological break] for a fact, without any claim to analyse the mechanism that unleashed it and completed it’ is a defensible proposition. Althusser famously leaves the question unanswered when he asks ‘by what mechanism does the production of the object of knowledge produce the cognitive appropriation of the real object which exists outside thought in the real world? . . . The reader will understand that I can only claim, with the most explicit reservations, to give the arguments towards a sharpening of the question we have posed, and not an answer to it’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 56). Callinicos (1996: 76–7) takes the consequences of this evasion to their logical conclusion: ‘if theoretical practice [for Althusser] can cognitively appropriate its real object despite the fact that it takes place completely in thought it is because thought and the real are homologous’, to which he continues, ‘to employ an asserted homology between thought and the real as the foundation for an epistemological position, is to fall into the empiricist problematic’. The damning conclusion in Callinicos’s eyes is that ‘Above all, it becomes impossible to avoid idealism.’ Indeed, in the 1966 text, ‘The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research’, Althusser (2003) conceded how the desire to combat empiricism led him to bend the stick too far against the empirical and to foment a phony war with sociology. The problem is exemplified by how Althusser earlier appraised Marx’s scientific contribution. ‘No mathematician in the world’, says Althusser, ‘waits until physics has verified a theorem to declare it proved . . . the truth of his theorem is a hundred per cent provided by criteria purely internal to the practice of mathematical proof.’ What goes for mathematics goes for Marx: ‘It has been possible to apply Marx’s theory with success because it is “true”; it is not true because it has been applied with success’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 64). In light of our reading of Marx’s methodology in C ­ hapter 2, Althusser’s assessment cannot but seem a serious distortion of the historic import of Marx’s analysis. For if Marx’s discovery of the continent of

History and Event.indd 106

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  107 history is a merely rational transformation of philosophies of history and political economy preceding him, with no need for empirical verification of its results, then Marxism retreats into a hermetically self-referential rationalism (or even irrationalism, one could argue). How are we to know that Marx discovered anything if his theory only serves to reflexively legitimate its novelty? Just as the absence of a theory of empirical correspondence deprives Althusser of verificationist criteria to demonstrate that an epistemological break has taken place, his refusal of Hegelian teleology also deprives him of rationalist resources for grounding his Marxist science of history. In contrast to how the cumulative structure of Hegel’s dialectic allows the evolution of its stages to be judged according to their immanent necessity in realising history’s end – the end looping through the origin and endowing a rational structure on the historical dialectic – Althusser’s identification of truth with the novelty of epistemological breaks lacks a dialectic between particularity and universality through which historical judgements might be justified. Unlike Hegel’s teleological philosophy, which furnishes categories to make judgements about whether an event marks a new epoch or not, Althusser’s epistemology lacks the conceptual extensions which would allow it to go beyond being a formal and self-referential analytic of historical breaks. Provoking a vicious circularity, the procedure of nominating an epistemological break places the Althusserian epistemologist in the unique position of being able to make these calls. This helps explain why, in part, Althusser would later retract these epistemological concepts as elements of an illegitimate attempt to found ‘Theory of theoretical practice’ and would label them as a wrongheaded theoreticist deviation. In his 1974 ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, Althusser wishes to correct this earlier enmeshment in theoreticism, which he defines as a ‘speculative-rationalist’ deviation within Marxist theory. He presents the deviation as resulting from the identification of science with truth and ideology with error, permitting a representation of Marx’s break in entirely rationalist terms, wherein ‘the class struggle was practically absent’ (Althusser 1976: 106). The speculative rationalist tendency is defined by Althusser (1976: 123–4) as: 1. A (speculative) sketch of the theory of the difference between science (in the singular) and ideology (in the singular) in general;

History and Event.indd 107

03/08/2015 08:39:19

108  History and Event 2. The category of ‘theoretical practice’ (in so far as, in the existing context it tended to reduce philosophical practice to scientific practice); 3. The (speculative) thesis of philosophy as ‘Theory of theoretical practice’ – which represented the highest point of this theoreticist tendency.

Divesting philosophy of its pretensions thus entails a re-evaluation of his earlier identification of philosophy with epistemology. A footnote to the text argues that his speculative-rationalist deviation was organized, as is often the case, around the manifest form of a word, whose credentials seemed beyond doubt: Epistemology . . . the theory of the conditions and forms of scientific practice and of its history in the different concrete sciences [which can lead to] a speculative way, according to which Epistemology could lead us to form and develop the theory of scientific practice (in the singular) in distinction to other practices: but how did it now differ from philosophy, also defined as ‘Theory of theoretical practice’? . . . If epistemology is philosophy itself, their speculative unity can only reinforce theoreticism . . . one must give up this project, and criticize the idealism or idealist connotations of all Epistemology. (Althusser 1976: 124)

Althusser’s self-criticism amounts to the charge that his epistemology does little more than invest itself with the theoretical authority to make judgements demarcating ideology and science. In his revisionary self-criticisms, Althusser was responding to serious problems with his theory that could not be ignored. Yet, in that from here onwards he accords philosophy only a subordinate role in engaging in ideological warfare in defence of science (class struggle in theory), there is a sense that he throws the baby out with the bathwater and dispenses with the most promising and exciting innovations he pioneered within Marxist theory. Resch (1992: 163) astutely observes that what is ‘missing from Althusser’s elliptic self-criticism, then, is a re-evaluation of his philosophical defence of scientific realism in light of his rejection of theoreticism and, even more important, an elaboration of scientific concepts of ideological, scientific and philosophical practices as historical-social activities’. When, after his 1968 texts Lenin and Philosophy (Althusser 2001) and Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (Althusser 2011), Althusser disassociates philosophy and epistemology, he therefore

History and Event.indd 108

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  109 also forgoes any attempt to discern truly historical events from the merely accidental. If his earlier texts were flawed, albeit possibly remediably, his revisions marked the death knell for his project. After the philosophy-epistemology couplet is abandoned, all that is left is a philosophical battle of ideas in defence of the autonomy of science – ideas just presumed to be favourable to working-class struggle.28 The concepts Althusser generated in the mid-1960s thenceforth crumble throughout the 1970s owing to overly zealous revision. To sum up, the lack of a satisfactory account of why Althusser’s epistemology is entitled to make judgements on the ideology/science distinction meant that it could only refer self-referentially to its purported scientific status. This realisation must have come as a major blow to Althusser, since throughout his career he was always sensitive to the need for an adequate theory of historical judgement. In his 1949 ‘Letter to Jean Lacroix’, for instance, it is precisely Lacroix’s lack of a ‘real theory of historical judgement’ (Althusser 2006b: 201) to which Althusser takes objection. Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, Badiou’s attempt to prevent philosophy from playing a role in the nomination of events can be seen as navigating the problems raised by Althusser’s theory of the epistemological break: an attempt to square the spirit of the mid-1960s Althusserian texts with the stipulations against philosophical knowledge creation offered in Lenin and Philosophy. Although the philosophy of the encounter Althusser developed in the 1980s might bear superficial resemblances to Badiou’s idea of the event, then, the aim of the next section is to show that in abandoning the task of historical judgement, Althusser’s late period signals the final degeneration of his philosophy.

A Materialism for Marxism, or, the Theoretical Void of Late Althusser It is legitimate to identify Althusser’s late period as beginning in the 1980s. Although by the mid-1970s Althusser was beginning to offer criticisms of Marx and to break further from conventional Marxist theory, the divergent content and style of his fragmentary writings of the 1980s mark them out as a late period proper. They signal a final shift away from Althusser’s identification of philosophy with epistemology in the mid-1960s towards a position where philosophy is demoted to the role of affirming the ‘necessity of contingency’. In

History and Event.indd 109

03/08/2015 08:39:19

110  History and Event this section, we argue that when Althusser gives up attempting to elaborate a Marxist theory of historical change he regresses to what he earlier identified as Engels’s ‘non-Marxist’ theorising of historical events. Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter culminates in valorising contingency at the expense of articulating historical processes and events. And for this reason, we conclude, these writings have had much less influence on the work of Alain Badiou than might be expected. In the course of an interview stretching between 1984 and 1987 with Fernanda Navarro, Althusser decries the excesses of his old theories. He writes that a materialist philosopher is ‘not that horror, a dialectical materialist, but an aleatory materialist’ (Althusser 2006c: 291) – signifying the shift from Marxist philosophy to a ‘philosophy for Marxism’ (Althusser 2006d:  259). Althusser then goes on to admonish his earlier works for investing Marx with ‘a philosophy dominated by “the spirit of the times” . . . a philosophy of Bachelardian and structuralist inspiration, which . . . cannot, in my opinion, be called Marxist philosophy’ (Althusser 2006d:  257). For the Althusser of the 1980s, materialist philosophy does not ‘consider itself to be a science, and still less the Science of sciences . . . it renounces the idea that it possesses truth’ (Althusser 2006d: 274). Conversely, his new aleatory materialism is required ‘to think the openness of the world towards the event, the as-yet-unimaginable, and also all living practice, politics included’ (Althusser 2006d: 264). In disowning his previous aspirations to craft a science of history informed by French philosophy of science, Althusser thus drifts towards poetic musings on the contingent event substantively in keeping with Derrida. Not only does Althusser dispense with his project of developing Marxist philosophy; it is identified as a dangerous deviation demanding correction by non-Marxist philosophy. To account for the centrality of chance in his new ontology, Althusser introduces the idea of the void: an ontological (non)object permitting unstructured movement and a practice of philosophy wherein philosophy empties itself of all grounding. This aleatory ‘underground current’ to philosophy he then traces through Epicurus, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and, only to a very qualified extent, Marx. Unfortunately, from the perspective of his earlier work, this aleatory ontology licences an abandonment of thinking both order and change; the articulation of history’s longue durée with its sudden ruptures and novelties. Moreover, if such a philosophy of contingency is to replace Marxist philosophy

History and Event.indd 110

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  111 in thinking the nature of historical events, it will do so without the slightest attempt to understand such processes as embedded in real social practices situated in historical time. This is an especially disheartening move in light of the shrewdness of Althusser’s earlier criticisms of historical philosophies resting on an epistemological void. For instance, in his 1963 Preface to History of Madness Althusser (quoted in Montag 2005) criticises Foucault’s account of the origin of the dichotomy of reason and madness for precisely this reason: ‘This border freely constituted is haunted by the temptation of being an original abyss, a verticality that is no longer a break in history but the originary rupture of time.’ Althusser’s point here is that when Foucault fails to furnish an account of where the binary comes from grounded in specific practices, and instead opts for a transcendental account of its genesis, he steps out of historical time altogether (this is much the same as Althusser’s reproof to Engels’s parallelogram conception of the event). Warren Montag (2005) observes that Althusser’s late philosophy of the encounter thereby appears to have ‘returned to the very notion of a transcendental abyss that he so effectively criticised in Foucault’. This is also the reason why, despite the terminological parallels one can find between Althusser’s aleatory materialism and Badiou’s notion of the event, Badiou’s work is much better understood in respect to Althusser’s earlier epistemological programme. For while Badiou follows Althusser’s move towards ontology in his late period writings, he nonetheless remains more faithful to Althusser’s original project of developing a new Marxist science of history. As Badiou (2011a: 304) puts it in an interview with Bruno Bosteels, although in his later period Althusser realised that ‘an ontological framework was needed and that materialism could not simply be an epistemological category’, Althusser’s later writings nonetheless failed to ‘submit his intuitions in this regard to the final test’ which would have involved posing them with ‘the ensemble of his previous framings’. Before wrapping up this chapter, let us retread our steps in order to draw out the most significant conclusions. The opening section provided a concise exposition of Althusser’s attempted transformation of French historical epistemology into a Marxist science of history. The next two sections then looked at Althusser’s host of innovative epistemological concepts for thinking structural causality and revolutionary ruptures. The fourth section showed how, in lacking either empirical or teleological criteria supporting his theory’s historical

History and Event.indd 111

03/08/2015 08:39:19

112  History and Event judgements, Althusser enjoined a vicious circularity endowing an arbitrary authority upon his theoretical system. And the fifth section, although concurring that many of Althusser’s self-criticisms were well founded, sought to convey why his self-critique was overzealous in its prosecution and why it led inexorably towards the abandonment of many of his most interesting and original concepts of the 1960s. In this sense, Althusser’s aleatory materialism of the 1980s simply brings the degenerative process to its nadir. If we wish to understand Althusser’s influence on Badiou and Meillassoux, then, it is to Althusser’s earlier period which we should turn. Over the coming chapters we will see how these thinkers take advantage of the interstices between Althusser’s epistemological programme of the mid-1960s and his revisions of ’67–’68: a fleeting moment before Althusser abandoned his project to refound the Marxist science of history. One final point deserves to be addressed before moving on. Given the emphasis in this chapter on how Althusser’s refoundation of dialectical materialism served to heighten the authority of theory, some readers might be surprised by the absence of commentary on Althusser’s political manoeuvrings within the PCF or his quietude during the events of May 1968. How do I excuse the somewhat scientistic orientation of this chapter? Other than the fact that there is not much to add to existing historical commentaries on Althusser’s political engagements, the purpose of this chapter was to show that the problem of authority can be traced immanently to Althusser’s philosophical project. This chapter’s reading of Althusser’s epistemological programme of the mid-1960s is thus complementary to historical critiques of Althusser’s political practice, but not reducible to them. Against the often sweeping dismissals of Althusser’s work that come attached to such political critiques, this chapter sought to emphasise its positive aspects even as it slid towards detrimental theoretical outcomes. In replacing the Hegelian dialectic with a hybrid form of French historical epistemology, Althusser, we saw, was able to think discontinuous events without relinquishing the Marxist conviction that history is rationally intelligible. Yet in doing so, we also saw, he was led towards a speculative rationalism lacking an account of empirical correspondence or teleological justifications for judging historical events. Whatever Althusser’s personal or political failings, the authoritative implications of his philosophy are therefore fully explicable in terms of his attempted overcoming of classical Marxist

History and Event.indd 112

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Althusser’s Science: Naming the Epistemological Break  113 orthodoxies – and this, we argued, was a necessary project. Indeed, the animating conviction of this chapter is that aspects of Althusser’s programme point towards a possible recuperation of his project, but that these can only be discerned by ignoring the mudslinging that often accompanies a focus on his political career (we return to this point in the book’s afterword). On the other hand, to understand how and why Althusser and Badiou parted ways does mean returning to the political events of 1968. For these events represented a point of no return for Althusser’s project: the point at which it could never recover its innocence. The dramatic loss of credibility Althusser suffered during this period and the theoretical animosities he earned from some of his former collaborators have left a lasting mark on contemporary French theory. We begin the next chapter in the aftermath of this great theoretical-political maelstrom.

History and Event.indd 113

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Chapter 5 Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat ‘My clothes, my Nikes, and my hash,’ says the would-be (or perhaps ‘wannabe’) rebel from France’s problem suburbs. Alain Badiou, ‘The Democratic Emblem’ (2011b: 10) . . . what deserves to be called real politics begins with a conviction. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (2010: 67)

After the events of May ’68 Alain Badiou launched himself into the wave of Maoist activism which engulfed France. Like many of his generation, disillusioned with the role of scholarly discourses in propping up the status quo, Badiou derided Althusser’s Marxism as fit only for the seminar room (Badiou, Bellassen, and Mossot 2011: 14). Though not as harsh a criticism as those which Rancière (2011) put into print after also abandoning the Althusserian inner circle, Badiou’s (2009a) turn towards Hegelian dialectics and to theorising the subject in the 1970s signalled a clear rejection of his mentor’s paradigm. Decades later, however, Badiou conceded the lasting influence of Althusser’s project for his mature oeuvre. As he generously maintains in Metapolitics: ‘Every truly contemporary philosophy must set out from the singular theses according to which Althusser identifies philosophy’ (Badiou 2006a: 63). Addressing Althusser’s legacy, Badiou (2007a: 80) now concedes the role of changing historical conditions in its assessment: Evidently the question of theoreticism does not have the same importance today, but I would say that the relation between philosophy and politics today, or the question of the role of theory has once again become very

History and Event.indd 114

03/08/2015 08:39:19

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  115 important because the concrete situation has become very difficult and mixed. In those years [after 1968] we had great hope, truly massive, in the situation.

These somewhat elusive remarks about the changing relationship between philosophy and politics should give us pause to think about the political import of Badiou’s mature philosophy. After all, it is well known that in Being and Event Badiou restricts philosophy to providing a site of compossibility for truth procedures in art, love, science and politics – as humble a vocation for philosophy as any. Bosteels (2011: 18–19) surmises the implications: ‘[for Badiou] political events have no need for the philosopher to transmit from the outside what they themselves, as events, produce in terms of thinking or truth, or to judge which of them qualify as properly political events.’ Indeed, it is on these grounds that Badiou has been positioned as a thinker of praxis (Paul, Bartlett, and Clemens 2006) and put into dialogue with Laclau’s notion of ‘radical democracy’ (Bosteels 2011: Chap. 8); these positions downplaying the autonomy of theory and its role in guiding political practice. If, however, Badiou has come to reappraise the relation of philosophy and politics in the decades since the publication of Being and Event then this should lead us to question how accurate the modest praxological representation of his philosophy remains. In the interpretation of Badiou as a mere philosophical underlabourer to political movements, how, for instance, are we to make sense of the way he positions Logics of Worlds (Badiou 2009b: 3) as motivated by the need to combat the ideology of ‘democratic materialism’ which traverses contemporary activist movements? How are we to make sense of the imperative of The Communist Hypothesis (Badiou 2010) which asserts that the historic mission of revolutionary movements is nothing less than to realise the Idea of communism? How are we to account for Badiou’s propensity to issue judgement on real political events such as those of the Arab Spring, which he considers examples of ‘historical riots’ (Badiou 2012a) not yet matured into proper revolutionary movements – this provoking the criticism that Badiou is a Stalinist dinosaur of a bureaucratic leftist type (Kacem 2011)? How, finally, are we to interpret Badiou’s (2012b: 21) recent comments that ‘politics itself stands by and large in a kind of night of thought . . . The philosopher must try to discern far into the future, towards the horizon, whatever the glowing lights announce.’ Although this

History and Event.indd 115

03/08/2015 08:39:19

116  History and Event newly prescriptive emphasis by no means indicates that Badiou has renounced his belief in the impossibility of philosophy to furnish truths, it does seem to indicate a willingness to issue judgements qua philosopher on the ideological struggles of the present. Badiou has of course never been shy about making political interventions lambasting human rights, Western military interventions, turncoat ‘new philosophers’, or the Pétainism of French right-wing politicians (Badiou 2001; 2006b; 2008). The novelty of some of his more recent interventions lies in the way he has also turned his attention towards radical political movements, exhorting the need for specific subjective and political orientations. There are two explanations which might account for this apparent change of heart. The first is that Badiou has shifted his position in a way that renders Being and Event an insufficient guide to how he now conceives the relation between philosophy and politics. The second is that despite all the formal safeguards in Being and Event designed to prevent philosophy assuming a determining role in politics, on close inspection the book evinces a more ambiguous message. In this chapter I do not discount the first argument but intend to demonstrate that the second explanation suffices to account for Badiou’s ambivalence about the relationship between philosophy and politics. To do so this chapter examines how Being and Event’s delicate categories and choice of mathematical models aim to (and fall short of) imposing limits on philosophical authority.29 The odd fact that in Badiou’s use of Paul Cohen’s semantic forcing technique there is no evental-site to be affirmed an ‘inhabitant’ of Cohen’s ground model will expose a revealing breach in the architectural scaffolding of Badiou’s system. It will provide a window into the difficulties involved in attempting to think historical change scientifically while also seeking to proscribe knowledge of the form of change from effecting how politics is conducted. To point to this problem in Badiou’s book is therefore not merely to act the pedant pointing out gaps in an otherwise solid philosophical edifice. Rather, it sheds necessary light on the problems involved in Badiou’s attempt to further Althusser’s mid-1960s programme of founding a new rationalist science of history at the same time as squaring this with Althusser’s anti-theoreticist stipulations announced in his 1968 texts. The chapter’s conclusion, that Badiou fails to escape from the circularities involved in Althusser’s project, will ramify some of the conclusions of the previous chapter and will anticipate problems

History and Event.indd 116

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  117 with the philosophy of Badiou’s protégé, Quentin Meillassoux. This chapter unfolds in five sections. The first demonstrates how Being and Event’s philosophical structure owes much to Althusser’s inspiration. The next section concerns Badiou’s view on the relationship between philosophy and mathematics and puts his reflections on the subject into dialogue with those of Albert Lautman. The third section provides a concise summary of the principal ‘moments’ of Being and Event: being, event, intervention. The fourth section focuses on Badiou’s use of Paul Cohen’s semantic forcing technique and how it breaches Badiou’s demarcation of ontological and nonontological situations. The fifth section argues that these philosophical difficulties can help make sense of Badiou’s paradoxical role as a public intellectual.

Fleeing from and Returning to Althusser There is no need to repeat at length the story of Badiou’s political and theoretical evolution from May ’68 through the Maoist red years of the 1970s. These developments have already been narrated extensively by the scholars who have done the most to introduce Badiou’s work to the Anglophone academy (see Bosteels 2001; Hallward 2003: Chap. 2). For the purposes of unlocking Badiou’s Althusserianism we need only note that in the two decades separating his contribution to Althusser’s ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ (Badiou 2007b)30 and the publication of Being and Event in 1988, Badiou’s relationship to Althusser follows something of a circular trajectory. Coinciding with a partial break from his Maoist commitments with the formation of L’Organisation Politique in 1985 – a group established with former comrades in order to pursue politics without a party – Badiou’s magnum opus revives a series of themes harking back to Althusser’s epistemological programme of the 1960s (Fraser 2007). Notwithstanding the importance of the category of the subject for Badiou’s mature philosophy, as well as his preference for ontology over epistemology – both seeming to put him at a distance to Althusser – Being and Event takes elements of Althusser’s mid-1960s programme and attempts to square them with Althusser’s (2001; 2011) self-critique of ’67–’68. In Being and Event Badiou: 1. Asserts the autonomy of his four truth procedures from one another. In so doing he brings his philosophical framework

History and Event.indd 117

03/08/2015 08:39:20

118  History and Event into line with Althusser’s insistence in the mid-1960s on an historical epistemology grounded in a finite number of discrete practices. 2. Denies philosophy its own truth procedure, attempting to live up to Althusser’s anti-theoreticist stipulations from ’67–’68. In making philosophy subordinate to mathematical ontology and to the truth procedures of love, art, science and politics, philosophy becomes a mere site of compossibility for truths produced externally to its practice. 3. Divides his framework into ontological and non-ontological situations. This distinction helps Badiou to secure his philosophy’s merely meta-ontological role while still granting it a global reach to think scientifically processes of historical change. Let us see how these elements slot together. One of the most important ways in which Badiou repeats Althusser is his insistence on the discreteness of the different types of truth procedure. In contrast to Badiou’s (2009a; Badiou et al. 2011) works of the 1970s and early 1980s (which drew upon Hegelian dialectics and accorded politics primary determination), in an easily discernible echo of Althusser’s notion of discrete practices, Being and Event sets in place four distinct truth procedures: art, love, science and politics. What ontological status do these categories have for Badiou? None, seemingly. Badiou insists that they did not all always exist as discrete fields of knowledge; they are not transcendental categories. Events were required in order to give rise to the separation of these domains (Badiou 1990: 34). In Second Manifesto for Philosophy Badiou concedes that his insistence on there being just four domains is a relatively arbitrary judgement. ‘Are there yet other things, other types of things? Perhaps. I do not know of any but would be happy, if these things exist, to let myself be convinced of their existence’ (Badiou 2011c: 21). To make things more complicated, these truth procedures also have different modes of social dissemination. Love involves only two people; art and science are aristocratic practices which speak only to the select few; politics alone is immediately universal owing to its intrinsic egalitarianism (Badiou 2006c: 163). Politics is thus the purest of the truth procedures for Badiou: the one most capable of incorporating a collective body into a universal process.

History and Event.indd 118

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  119 Why does Badiou deny philosophy its own truth procedure? In the previous chapter we argued that Althusser’s revisionary texts represented a right turn in the wrong direction. Right, insofar as it was a necessary critique of the vicious epistemological circularity he enjoined; wrong, inasmuch as Althusser’s demotion of philosophy to class struggle in theory led to the collapse of the most exciting concepts he innovated in the mid-1960s. What is most remarkable about Badiou’s Being and Event, then, is its revival of Althusser’s project of refounding a rationalist science of history precisely by attempting to accommodate the lessons of Althusser’s self-critique. And Badiou does so principally by putting philosophy’s conceptual tools in a form of qualified subservience to mathematics. Philosophy’s meta-ontological role, as Badiou terms this second order status, is to appropriate mathematics’ insights for thinking subjective truth procedures drawing out the consequences of events. In so doing, Badiou attempts to preserve a role for philosophy without it emerging as an Althusserian ‘theory of theory’. Third and finally, the demarcation of ontological and non-ontological situations is also of pivotal importance for holding together Badiou’s edifice. Given that Badiou’s ontology of the multiple traverses even his own theoretical construction, for Badiou ontology is just one situation amongst many; mathematics is a discourse which ‘presents nothing . . . besides presentation itself’ (Badiou 2007c: 7). His four truth procedures are therefore grouped as non-ontological situations, with the exception of mathematics, which is accorded the exceptional status of the ontological situation. What role does philosophy play in unifying this fragmented set of situations/categories? Badiou’s meta-ontology operates from something of a privileged position insofar as it can draw upon the mathematical ontological situation in order to furnish itself with concepts for interpreting processes of historical change in all situations. Badiou’s philosophy is thereby granted a global reach for deploying the resources of the ontological situation, and is also permitted to supplement ontology with non-ontological ideas such as the event. As with Althusser’s idea of the epistemological break as a break from ideology to science legislated on solely by Althusser’s epistemology, does not Badiou’s meta-ontology also commit an error when he ties his philosophy to mathematics even though many of its core concepts cannot be located in the mathematical-ontological situation? This seems to be the thrust of Ray Brassier’s (2007: 108) criticism when he writes that Badiou’s

History and Event.indd 119

03/08/2015 08:39:20

120  History and Event ‘metaontological discourse seems to enjoy a condition of transcendent exception vis-à-vis the immanence of non-ontological situations’. To which Brassier (2007: 109) adds the following remarks: But given that philosophy itself is not a truth procedure, there can be no subject of philosophy strictly speaking for Badiou and thus he is at pains to explain how the metaontological discourse which conditions his entire philosophy (and from which he draws all the conceptual details for his theory of evental truth) is able to exempt itself from the immanent conditions of knowledge governed by the norm of the One . . . The a-specificity of metaontological discourse in Being and Event and the anomalous status of philosophical thought invite the impression that Badiou’s metaontological theses float between re-representation of the mathematical presentation of being, and a presentation of the imaginary re-presentation of ordinary knowledge.

Brassier’s criticism is that Badiou’s meta-ontology grants itself an unjustified capacity to peer through the re-presentations of nonontological situations. While Brassier hits upon a vitally important point, discerning the seemingly transcendent status occupied by Badiou’s philosophy, he nonetheless operates from a high level of abstraction which considers the entire architectonic of Badiou’s text suspect. Yet if we grant that there is some value in Badiou’s attempt to respect the autonomy of science from within systematic philosophy, bringing the granular detail of mathematical set theory to bear in the process, it is insufficient to judge Badiou’s success or failure without also working through his use of mathematics. It follows that Badiou’s success in squaring the demands of his Althusserian desiderata, culminating in his appropriation of Paul Cohen’s forcing technique, should be judged according to whether he maintains its coherence with its mathematical source material. First, however, we need to pin down the exact relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event.

The Subject of Mathematics and the Mathematical Subject Of the three conditions Badiou lists in Being and Event’s introduction as pivotal for his project, arguably the most significant is his announcement of a ‘third epoch of science’: an epoch which reveals ‘a split, through which the very nature of the base of mathematical

History and Event.indd 120

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  121 rationality reveals itself, as does the character of the decision of thought which establishes it’ (Badiou 2007c: 3). In combination with the desire to rethink the subject in terms of a process submitted to rational constraints, this leads Badiou to the question: ‘pure mathematics being the science of the being, how is a subject possible?’ Accordingly, Badiou emphasises that the philosophical decision to identify mathematics with ontology is in no way the book’s main goal. Instead, he insists, ‘this book founds a doctrine [that] institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as a fragment of the process of a truth’ (Badiou 2007c: 15). Before working through the mathematically oriented meditations of Being and Event, it is therefore necessary to grasp precisely how Badiou conceives the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. This will involve putting Badiou’s reflections on the matter into dialogue with those of his foremost inspiration, Albert Lautman. A necessary qualification about the status of mathematics for Badiou – one which separates him from the Pythagoreanism of his protégé Quentin Meillassoux – is that it is ‘not a thesis about the world but about discourse’ (Badiou 2007c: 8). As a second order discourse about discourse, Badiou’s philosophical meta-ontology is therefore imbricated with the historicity of philosophy and mathematics in a way theorised by Albert Lautman (1908–1944). ‘Lautman’s writings are nothing less than admirable and what I owe to them,’ Badiou (2007c: 483) writes, ‘even in the very foundational intuitions for this book, is immeasurable.’ Indeed, the parallels between Badiou’s and Lautman’s approach are in evidence as far back as Badiou’s The Concept of Model. By placing logic on the same level as mathematics in the genesis of new structures within mathematics, Zalamea (2011: xxxii) observes how Lautman ‘prefigures . . . our conception of logic as it arises from model theory, in which a “logic” is not only determined, but even defined . . . by an adequate collection of structures’. In response to the logicist idea that a rich enough logical or axiomatic ‘essence’ can account for the entire ‘existence’ of mathematical structure, Lautman (2011: 29) responds – in a way strikingly similar to Badiou – that ‘we always see a mode of structuration of a basic domain interpretable in terms of existence for certain new entities, functions, transformations, numbers, that the structure of a domain thus appears to perform’. Yet as Badiou (2007a: 82) recalls, at the time of writing The Concept of Model he had not yet encountered Lautman’s works. Only after he gained contact with them in the

History and Event.indd 121

03/08/2015 08:39:20

122  History and Event 1970s did Lautman’s philosophy come to inform Badiou’s decision to identify mathematics with ontology through a conception of the ongoing dialectic between the fields. Lautman’s participatory Platonism conceives mathematics in relation to philosophical metaphysics within a tripartite scheme. Dialectical questions – for example, whole/part, continuity/discontinuity – give rise to questions of the ‘why’; ideas serve to form connections in an attempt to answer such questions; mathematics then fills in these ideas with more concrete and precise ideas. The anteriority of dialectical questions to mathematical developments permits the posterior recovery of ideas from their mathematical exploration. While the mathematical relations describe the connections that in fact exist between distinct mathematical entities, the Ideas of dialectical relations are not assertive of any connection whatsoever that in fact exists between notions. Insofar as ‘posed questions’, they only constitute a problematic relative to the possible situations of entities . . . the Ideas that constitute this problematic are characterized by an essential insufficiency, and it is yet once again in this effort to complete understanding of the Idea, that more concrete notions are seen to appear relative to the entity, that is, true mathematical theories. (Lautman 2011: 204)

Discernible here are similarities with Badiou’s mathematical Platonism, where all ‘that we can know, and can ever know of being qua being, is set out, through the meditation of a theory of pure multiplicity by the historical discursively of mathematics’ (Badiou 2007c: 8). For Badiou, this does not imply that ‘mathematics here simply represents a particular instance of a ready-made philosophical question’. Rather, mathematics is ‘capable of challenging or undermining that question’ (Badiou 2006c: 4). The idea that all mathematics does is throw light on eternal metaphysical quandaries, Badiou associates with the ‘little style’ of academic philosophy of mathematics, dwarfed by the ‘grand style’ of his own, which ‘stipulates that mathematics provides a direct illumination of philosophy, rather than the opposite’ (Badiou 2006c: 7). In Badiou’s view, there is a Lautmanian historical dialectic between philosophy and mathematics, a give and take from either side, and under current circumstances mathematics should take the ontological driving seat. This observation helps clarify the relationship of Badiou’s meta-ontology to the work of practising mathematicians. For Badiou, there is no spontaneous philosophy of the mathematicians worth guarding in the same way

History and Event.indd 122

10/08/2015 12:03:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  123 that Althusser insisted that scientists need to be protected against idealist incursions into their practice. As Badiou (2006d: 48–9) carefully delineates the point: although ‘mathematicians’ spontaneous philosophy is Platonism’, unlike his own Platonism it is an erroneous conception based on Aristotelian tenets, whereby the ‘ideal spectacle of its results’ follows from ‘fictive activation’. At the other extreme, Platonism of the Gödelian kind Badiou (2007a: 93) believes is ‘a bit too dogmatic’ when contrasted against Lautmanian Platonism: ‘a Platonism of participation’ of the sensible in the ideal, centred on ‘the dialectic of ideas in the history of mathematics’. If mathematicians’ philosophising about their practice is not to be trusted, by the same token neither should their practice be credited automatically with philosophical insight. On the contrary, the trust that working mathematicians place in solving specific problems ‘is in principle unproductive when it comes to any rigorous description of the generic essence of their operations’ (Badiou 2007c: 11). In this regard, a mathematician like Paul Cohen (who discovered the forcing technique) assumes heroic stature for Badiou insofar as he gained his advances in the field of independence proofs by releasing set theory from the inhibitions of Gödelian Platonism. In Cohen’s words (quoted in Kanamori 2008: 360), this allowed him to see how ‘ideas which at first seemed merely philosophical could actually be made into precise mathematics’. Cohen’s (2002: 1080) scathing comments on those rare moments in history where philosophers seek to insert themselves directly within mathematical practice would also probably gain Badiou’s approval. It follows that Badiou’s focus on set theory as an ontological discourse is not reducible to the act of locating the cutting edge of mathematical practice. Badiou readily admits that by the time of his writing Being and Event, set theory was no longer considered the most fundamental or exciting field for practising mathematicians. Although the imperative is for philosophy to stay up to date with the mathematics it draws upon, there is room for manoeuvre depending upon the philosophical questions at hand. Admittedly, Badiou’s own shift away from meta-ontological theorising in his more recent books has lent the impression that implicit foundational commitments lie behind his allegiance to set theory’s articulation of being qua being. Badiou occasionally seems to slide towards this position when he admits that he had to come to terms with category theory’s greater contemporary claim to be the foundational mathematical framework

History and Event.indd 123

03/08/2015 08:39:20

124  History and Event (Badiou 2006d: x). But at least in terms of Being and Event’s use of mathematics, it is unambiguously directed towards a new theory of the subject traversing the development of twentieth-century set theory. Badiou’s philosophy therefore stands or falls on whether his mathematically informed idea of the subject maintains or undermines philosophy’s role in merely drawing concepts from mathematics without lending it the capacity to shape truth procedures. Before approaching Badiou’s use of Paul Cohen’s forcing technique, however, where his system will be stressed to near breaking point, the next section outlines the core concepts of Being and Event.

Being, Event, Intervention For Badiou, the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory provide the tripartite specification of Being, Event and Subjective Intervention. Being is understood by drawing upon relatively uncontroversial early-twentieth-century axioms, whereas the event and subjective intervention find support in more controversial additions such as the axiom of choice, Gödel’s proof of the consistency of constructible universes, and Cohen’s method of forcing. Given the limited space in this chapter to present Being and Event’s meta-ontological reading of ZF set theory, Table 5.1 summarises its axioms and the philosophical ideas they embody for Badiou (divided in this way to reflect how his take on the relation between philosophy and mathematics reflects Lautman’s). The paragraphs which follow then abridge the main sections of the book in order to take us as quickly as possible to Cohen’s forcing technique.

Being The absence of a definition of an individual set within the ZF axioms is an important starting point for understanding Badiou’s metaontology since it immediately rules out any primordial definition of Being (Badiou 2007c: 42–4). Axiomatic set theory thinks solely structured presentation and prohibits the presentation of Being directly so to not fall to pieces under the weight of its own inconsistencies (‘large’ paradoxical sets, such as those exposed by Russell’s paradox). There is a double move involved in Badiou’s conception of Being. On the one hand, the axiom of separation, whereby all sets are constructed out of other sets, prescribes a mathematical language

History and Event.indd 124

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  125

Being

Axiom

Mathematical Idea

Philosophical Idea

Separation

The existence of sets is given. Language separates sets’ relations.

No direct access to Being.

Power-set

The power-set p(a) of any set (a) has more ‘parts’: its cardinality is greater.

Theorem of excess: there is at least one element included in a situation that does not belong according to the ‘state’.

Foundation

Sets cannot belong to themselves: ~ (a ∈ a).

The event is nonontological. Its selfbelonging is prohibited by set theory, hence it is only applicable to non-ontological historical situations.

Constructability

All of set theory can be All excess banished. proved consistent in a Constructability is the constructible universe. form of knowledge.

Infinity

There exist infinite sets.

The actual infinite is decided. Its existence rests on a voluntary decision – freedom.

Choice

The function of the element of any set can be decided to represent it.

Form of intervention. Arbitrary choice of an unnameable element – more freedom.

[Forcing technique]

Forcing constructs the generic set as an extension of the ‘ground model’. It allows theorems about the indiscernible to be proved consistent.

Form of the generic ♀. Theory of the Subject to truth. An analogical model of how new truths are produced in historical situations.

Event

Intervention

Table 5.1  The axioms of Badiou’s Being and Event, and the philosophical ideas they embody.

History and Event.indd 125

03/08/2015 08:39:20

126  History and Event foreclosing direct access to Being (the language of presentation can only separate out existents and structure their relations). On the other hand, in any situation other than ontology the inconsistent multiple (the paradoxes axiomatic set theory is designed to suppress) may provide a fleeting glance at Being, because they are ruled out from presentation within any structure by the law of the ‘count as one’. However, in a more systematic sense, the operation by which structure renders inconsistency unpresentable is graspable by ontology. Being’s outlawed inconsistency may nothing within any situation, but for ontology it is not a non-being (Badiou 2007c: 53). The imperceptible, inconsistent nothing within any situation Badiou terms the void, and following set theorists’ inscription of the empty set he represents it with the symbol Ø. Ontology, it follows, is only a theory of the void. For if ontology presented the other terms in its ‘presentation of presentation’ it would put the void on the same level as every other inscription; ontology would collapse to mere presentation of structure rather than delving deeper into the inconsistent Being lurking within structure (Badiou 2007c: 57). Nevertheless, the axiom of the power-set, by prescribing the excess between inclusion ⊂ and belonging ∈, opens up a distinction allowing ontology to intuit the non-presentable existence of the void. Belonging is the count forming the structure of the presentation of a situation, whereas inclusion operates as the meta-structure, or the ‘state’ of the situation – the count of the multiples of the multiples (or sets of sets) forming a re-presentation greater than the ‘initial’ multiples. Badiou (2007c: 105) here offers a play on words designed to establish an affinity with the Marxist revolutionary tradition: ‘Marxist thought relates the State directly to sub-multiples rather than to terms of the situation . . . By consequence, as a political programme, the Marxist proposes the revolutionary suppression of the State; thus the end of representation and the universality of simple presentation.’ The excess of presentational belonging over representational inclusion also lays the road to Badiou’s new theory of the subject. Since the void is universally included its presence as an empty set is implicated in the cardinal excess of the sets included in a situation, posing a source of perpetual instability. Thus, what could have been a potentially static juxtaposition between inconsistent multiplicity and structured, consistent presentation possesses a dialectical inflection from ZF’s initial axioms onwards. Badiou’s distinction between nature and historical events clarifies the above point in his

History and Event.indd 126

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  127 assertion – grounded in a very classical philosophical Idea of Nature – that ‘natural’ multiples are ordinals (Badiou 2007c: 131). These natural sets’ transitivity from one to the other implies a coincidence of belonging and inclusion. With the atomism ensured by the transitivity of nature’s ordinals, the void is universally included but has no dynamic by which to leave a mark in the gap between inclusion and belonging. Nature is in static equilibrium and has no room for events and subjects. Badiou therefore concludes that it is ‘true that “nature” and “number” are substitutable’ (Badiou 2007c: 140). Solely by historical events can the natural order be unsettled. Such events happen at evental-sites in historical situations where an errant multiple asserts itself: a multiple in which its elements are not presented in a situation.

Event Crucial for comprehending Badiou’s theory of the event is the duality of evental-sites and events. The evental-site produces the conditions for an event, yet does not necessitate an event (Badiou 2007c: 202). In what appears to be a rather redundant prohibition given that natural multiples are positioned by Badiou as transitive ordinals preventing an evental-site forming, Badiou (2007c: 178) confirms that ‘there are no natural events, nor are there neutral events. In natural or neutral situations, there are solely facts.’ Badiou does not waver in insisting that the existence of the event is predicated on the thinking being making it so. Significantly, the event is also the first non-ontological concept introduced by his text. Violating the axiom of foundation, the event both belongs as a nomination of itself (ex) and of its site within a situation (X): ex = [x ∈ X, ex]

The event, an unpredictable eruption in a historical situation, demands subjective intervention because of the undecidable matter of whether it belongs to the situation. It is not enough to say ‘there has been an event’. For Badiou, the wager of the event is to affirm that it belongs to a situation when nothing of the event is presented in the situation. At the same time, neither should the event be thought of as an absolute commencement. If one removes the event from its situation in a sequence of preceding events then one will be committing the

History and Event.indd 127

03/08/2015 08:39:20

128  History and Event ‘speculative leftist’ sin of proposing ‘a primal event’, ‘a radical beginning’, or an ‘absolute commencement’ (Badiou 2007c: 210). The Two of the event – the event and its site – are equally important to affirm to avoid a slide into static, undialectical Manicheism. It might, however, appear that Badiou’s procedure of faithful evental nomination has settled into another comfortable binary: a taut mathematics of structure versus a romantically inexplicable subjectivity. The ZF axioms’ most controversial supplement – the axiom of choice – will allow Badiou to argue otherwise.

Intervention The Idea of subjective intervention is supported in Badiou’s metaontology by the axiom of choice. A controversial addition to ZF set theory in the early twentieth century, the axiom pertains to the application of functions in infinite sets. A few preliminary words on the axiom of infinity are therefore required to make sense of the axiom of choice. The axiom of infinity may be approached by posing a naïve question: why accept infinity? The infinite’s existence remains an open question, dividing mathematicians, physicists and philosophers alike. Philosophical speculation, scientific process, or mathematical foundationalism cannot legislate adequately on the matter. Indeed, for Badiou the lack of definitive criteria for making a decision on the existence of the actual infinite is central to his decisionistic theory of the subject. Badiou (2007c: 314) may appeal to the richness of the mathematical domain permitted by transfinite set theory against the barrenness of their denumerable alternatives, yet in no sense does this pragmatist criteria represent for him an adequate resolution of the matter. The decision to affirm the infinite has to remain a voluntary act of free will. The decision to axiomatically affirm the infinite’s existence is of vital importance for the axiom of choice too. For in the case of finite sets, finding a representative element of a set’s multiples poses few problems because there is a minimal (non-void) element available to perform the role. The function of choice needs no axiomatic prescription in a finite universe, since the representative element can be procedurally derived. In an infinite set, on the other hand, defining the function is problematic because a single element has to represent an infinite number of elements: an operation with no definable rules given the cardinal excess of the infinite over the finite, with no halting

History and Event.indd 128

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  129 point of minimality other than the universal inclusion of the void (see Potter 2004: Chap. 14). The axiom of choice therefore maintains the existence of a selection set on the force of sheer assertion. Hence the function’s existence is not prescribed by the set, its uniqueness to perform the function is not assured, and it is impossible to know which element the representative set is supposed to be representing. In Badiou’s philosophical interpretation, insofar as the axiom of choice ‘is subtracted from the count’ (it cannot be presented in the language of set theory) it is thus ‘an Idea which is fundamentally different from all those in which we have recognized the laws of presentation’, and thus ‘within ontology, the axiom of choice formalizes the predicates of intervention. It is a question of thinking intervention in its being; that is, without the event’ (Badiou 2007c: 226–7). Or, put differently, the axiom’s unpresentable operation affirms the form of intervention. In dividing early-twentieth-century mathematicians, Zermelo’s axiomatic intervention was in essence ‘a political conflict, because its stakes were those of admitting a being of intervention; something that no known procedure or intuition justified’ (Badiou 2007c: 228). To bring this discussion to its crux, for Badiou the event prevents his meta-ontology from shaping historical situations, therewith preserving the truth-bearing role solely for non-philosophical subjects. Badiou’s notion of the event renders philosophy reactive to nonphilosophical truths while allowing it to think schematically these subjective procedures. Yet in the following section we will see that in grounding these commitments in Cohen’s forcing technique Badiou undermines the basis of the evental-site, permitting the philosopher meta-ontologist to nominate an event for the situation’s inhabitants. To get to this point, however, it is necessary to first pass through Gödel’s constructible universe and Paul Cohen’s focusing technique. In terms of technical barriers to entry, these are the most formidable sections of Badiou’s text and I realise that my reading will be insufficient to convey much of their technical nuance. For this reason, I plead for the patience of my readers over the following section and ask that they just follow the gist of how the mathematics relates to Badiou’s categories.

History and Event.indd 129

03/08/2015 08:39:20

130  History and Event

Constructible Universes and the Vanishing Evental-Site Gödel’s proof of the consistency of a constructible inner model of set theory established the existence of a model in which Cantor’s continuum hypothesis could be proven. Cantor’s hypothesis concerns whether the powers of infinity can be given ordinal measure: that is, whether the size of infinity between the totality of the integers and that of the complete set of the reals marks a well-ordered succession (there are no infinite sets of intermediate size). Although Cantor failed to prove his hypothesis, tackling this question provided the impetus for many of the most creative achievements in set theory in the twentieth century. Gödel’s proof of the consistency of a constructible universe is one of them, and Cohen’s proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis is something of a natural successor, expanding upon, deepening and transforming its results. It is thus necessary to begin with the former approach in order to understand the implications of the latter. Gödel’s constructible model of set theory is created through an iterative process wherein only the parts of a set which can be assigned properties through formulas are permitted: no indeterminate or unnameable parts are allowed entry. The process of hierarchically ascending up levels of construction along a denumerable ordinal index retains only those parts which formulas can assign properties to. Consequently, in a constructible universe there is an equivalence between the class of constructible sets (L) and the universal class (V), or V=L (Cohen 2008: 88). Within this model of ZF set theory, its quasi-completeness – quasi, because Gödel’s incompleteness theorem establishes the impossibility of the completion of a denumerable model – means that it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of sets which are not constructible. The immeasurable cardinality of the transfinite in a non-constructed universe is thereby converted in a constructible universe into a well-ordered succession leaping over the non-constructible, immeasurable sets. So in Gödel’s constructible model the axiom of choice is provable, but also curtailed to the level of a theorem which can be derived from the other axioms. This is possible because the axiomatic prescription of a choice function is proved unnecessary by the ordered hierarchy of the cardinals in a constructible universe. In Badiou’s estimation, the result is a ‘flattened and correct universe in which excess is reduced to the strictest of measures, and in which situations persevere indefinitely in their

History and Event.indd 130

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  131 regulated being’ (Badiou 2007c: 304). It is also a universe prohibiting the possibility of an evental-site forming: a point to which we soon return. Paul Cohen’s forcing procedure can be grasped intuitively as a generalisation and foundational transformation of Gödel’s proof. Whereas Gödel shows that an axiomatically prescribed model of set-theory limited to constructible sets is consistent with Cantor’s continuum hypothesis, Cohen’s technique demonstrates that from within such a model it is still possible to prove the independence of the hypothesis. The forcing method by which he does so involves constructing via generic sets an extension of the ground model conserving its axioms and theorems. The generic set is important for this task because it is constructed out of the fixation of sequences of compatible conditions permitting veridical statements consistent with the ground model. Thus, if an infinite number of generic integers can be paired with the natural numbers through these forcing conditions then Cantor’s continuum hypothesis can be refuted.31 In applying this method Cohen’s aim is therefore expressly not to simply add ordinals to the model from the outside. Rather, the intention is to show how by only using sets already present within the model, one can still construct an extension of the model which forces certain statements to be true or false. In Cohen’s (2008: 111) description of how forcing conditions reveal the internal possibilities of the model, the ‘chief point is that we do not wish a to contain “special” information about M [the ground model], which can only be seen from the outside, such as the countability of α0 [the highest ordinal], and will imply that the model containing a must contain more ordinals than those in M’. The stipulation against measuring the highest ordinal is required because simply adding ordinals to the model from the ‘outside’ would result in a collapse of the model. Peter Hallward (2003: 347) insightfully describes the approach as drawing out the tacitly included non-constructible sets in the ground model to force their belonging in the extended model. The point is to ‘seed’ the ground model with a non-constructible generic set containing the requisite information to create a one-to-one correspondence between the ordinals and the desired cardinality of the continuum. However, the method of putting together such forcing conditions implies that one is only ever ‘reading off’ a limited, finite part of the generic set. In Badiou’s philosophical interpretation of Cohen’s forcing procedure, its open-ended nature demonstrates how the infinity of truths

History and Event.indd 131

03/08/2015 08:39:20

132  History and Event are mediated by the finite processes of the subject. The subject is no longer presumed ubiquitous; the forcing procedure rather supports ‘a hypothesis of the rarity of the subject, which suspends its occurrence from the event, from the intervention, and from the generic paths of fidelity’ (Badiou 2007c: 432). Giving birth to truths by forcing compatible connections for Badiou redefines a notion of truth as an ‘indiscernible multiple whose finite approximation is supported by the subject, such that its ideality-to-come, nameless correlate of the naming of the event’ (Badiou 2007c: 433). Nonetheless, despite the appeal of Cohen’s forcing procedure for fusing voluntarism and methodological rigour, the question of how it slots into Badiou’s philosophical architecture is more problematic. Because these meditations are conducted within Cohen’s denumerable, transitive ground model, in Badiou’s system they necessarily take place solely within mathematics’ ontological situation, which proscribes the event. To circumvent this problem, Badiou maintains a parallel with the ontological/non-ontological distinction in the demarcation between the ontologist ‘outside’ the model and the inhabitant ‘internal’ to Cohen’s transitive model. Yet Badiou is also well aware that this represents a merely metaphorical transposition from ontology to non-ontological historical situations. Accordingly, since Badiou’s notion of the event is prohibited in ontology by the axiom of foundation and the eventalsite is impossible within Cohen’s transitive model, Badiou replaces the event with a surrogate notion in the form of the new symbol ♀ used to denote the generic, indiscernible set. Badiou’s idea of the indiscernible therewith transcribes the idea of the event from nonontological situations to ontology – it is ‘an event-without-event’ in Badiou’s (2007c: 356) words. Importantly, whatever these notions’ affinities, the indiscernible lacks any corresponding equivalent to an evental-site. Only the affirmative, constructive part of an event is reflected in the indiscernible, because in Cohen’s transitive ‘ground model’ the gap between inclusion and belonging necessary for an evental-site is prohibited (Badiou 2007c: 361). Or, put another way, thinking analogically with the historical situation, an ‘inhabitant’ of Cohen’s ground model could never witness the fleeting rupture of an evental-site; only the ontologist (or philosopher meta-ontologist) can see the potential in teasing out novelties from within the ground model. In the hiatus between the ontological situation which will think subjective processes and the historical situation in which they actually

History and Event.indd 132

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  133 unfold, Badiou’s science of history thus ends up ensnared in a similar vicious circularity to that enjoined by Althusser’s epistemology. Where Althusser attempted to legislate on epistemological breaks as a rupture from ideology to science from a rationalist elevation above real scientific practice, Badiou’s meta-ontological framework also allows philosophers a way of thinking historical processes not available to those involved in such procedures. In the earlier meditations of Being and Event this is not such a problem, as Badiou insists that events can take place only in the truth procedures of love, art, science and politics, meaning that philosophy is prevented from interfering in their operation. In the later meditations on Paul Cohen’s method of forcing, by contrast, we are transported into an ontological situation in which events are impossible. If, for Badiou, Cohen’s forcing technique is to serve as an analogy for how subjective processes unfold within historical situations, it is thus a world without events. The true subject of historical change, it transpires, is one who possesses an intuition of the necessity of teasing out the internal possibilities of a situation in the rational construction of novelties. That is, the philosophical meta-ontologist informed by Cohen’s method. That is, Badiou himself. The authoritative consequences of this circularity for Badiou’s philosophy are all the more perplexing when one considers that certain variations on the forcing technique might have allowed him to avoid this problem to a certain extent.32 In particular, the syntactical method of forcing, not dependent upon assuming a transitive model in set theory proscribing evental-sites, would have lessened the strains placed on Badiou’s philosophical architecture by these later meditations. The problems associated with how the subjective form of truth procedures are demonstrated in the ontological situation would still remain – it would still imply a privileged role for mathematicians and philosophers in understanding ‘what is to be done’ in teasing out novelties rationally from a situation. Yet, in that the syntactical method would have not prohibited evental-sites, it could have endowed greater analogical valency to these meditations and maintained their consistency with the earlier mediations’ prohibition on philosophy playing a role in historical truth procedures. As things stand, however, Badiou’s use of the semantic method gives force to Ray Brassier’s critique quoted earlier in this chapter. Not only does Badiou’s philosophy occupy a seemingly transcendent status with respect to the historical processes it rationalises, when examining

History and Event.indd 133

03/08/2015 08:39:20

134  History and Event the fine grain of how Badiou thinks historical truth procedures this takes place in an ontological situation bereft of events. In this eventless ontological situation the only subject who knows ‘what is to be done’ is the theorist armed with knowledge of how a forcing procedure can tease out novelties from the world. If Badiou has until these later meditations gone to extra-special lengths to ensure a strictly egalitarian division of labour where non-philosophical procedures unilaterally condition philosophical meta-ontology, in these final chapters of the book a more classical hierarchy asserts itself. Althusser’s theoreticism returns with a vengeance, and the role of philosophical guidance in politics is restored.

The Rationalist as Radical Public Intellectual The upshot of the previous section is that on close inspection there seems little to stop Badiou’s meta-ontological conceptual discourse endowing philosophy with the capacity to initiate, issue judgements on, and shape political procedures. Partly, this is for the reason diagnosed by Brassier at a high level of abstraction: namely, that Badiou’s philosophy enjoys a de facto transcendent status with respect to the historical processes it thinks. But the fact that the final meditations of Being and Event on Paul Cohen’s forcing method push Badiou’s philosophy in an even more authoritative direction adds to the impression that his system is riven with tensions at a more granular level too. If it was not for the fact that Badiou has in recent years proven an outspoken critic of many activist ideologies and radical political movements, then this might be taken as symptomatic of little more than the difficulties involved in rendering such a systematic text consistent. In light of Badiou’s political trajectory, however, these philosophical problems cross paths substantively with how Badiou inveighs qua philosopher into contemporary ideological and political struggles. First, in how Badiou makes use of his own framework in order to make judgements about political events and to make recommendations about what is to be done. Second, in that Badiou provides no account of the problem of reflexivity: that is, how his position as an influential intellectual can influence the political procedures in a way in which his system in Being and Event aims ostensibly to militate against. Badiou’s recent critical interventions on the lack of vision amongst contemporary radicals, from urban rioters to the revolutionaries

History and Event.indd 134

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  135 of the Arab Spring, are organised principally around the vicissitudes of the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. In Badiou’s view, though these terms express an admirably egalitarian commitment, their abasement in the service of releasing desire and entrenching formal liberties requires the establishment of a philosophical counter-tendency. Philosophy, for Badiou, cannot accede to the democratic imperative when politics comes to stand for the free reign of opinion contra truth. For this reason, Badiou (2012b: 28) writes that ‘the knot of the three terms – philosophy, democracy and politics – remains an obscure one’. In opposing contemporary ‘democratic materialism’ with his ‘materialist dialectic’, Badiou (2009b: 35) therewith positions his work against the activist left today, who are drawn in ‘by the doxa of the body, desire, affect, networks, the multitude, nomadism and enjoyment into which a whole contemporary “politics” sinks, as if into a poor man’s Spinozism’. Badiou (2009b: 62) notably refuses to concede anything to the ‘left wing’ tradition which believes that a progressive politics ‘fights against oppression’. But we also eliminate, for example, a certain modernist tradition which believes that the criterion for art is the ‘subversion’ of established forms, to say nothing of those who wish to articulate amorous truth onto the fantasy of a sexual emancipation (against ‘taboos’, patriarchy, etc.)

Philosophy is especially important for addressing the misadventures of the young. ‘In our zone, the supremacy of youth gives the search for pleasure the force of a social imperative. “Have fun” is the universal maxim’ (Badiou 2011b: 12). Hence Badiou’s views on the limitations of the uprisings in Paris’s banlieues and the London riots. Undisciplined by organisational demands and lacking an animating idea, for Badiou such rebellions are driven by a vulgar consumerist desire redolent of the ‘juvenilism’ of the ‘Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge’ (Badiou 2011b: 12). Accordingly, the task for philosophy is to propose a new normative orientation for the youth: Philosophy is the act of reorganising all theoretical and practical experiments by proposing a great new normative division . . . The form all this takes is of a more or less free address to each and every one, but first and foremost to the youth, because a philosopher knows perfectly well that

History and Event.indd 135

03/08/2015 08:39:20

136  History and Event young people are the ones who must make decisions about their lives and who are most often ready to accept the risks of a logical revolt. (Badiou 2012b: 19)

A similarly prescriptive dimension infuses Badiou’s reflections on the Arab Spring. While crediting the events in Tunisia and Egypt as a possible Rebirth of History Badiou sees these movements’ demands for formal liberties and representative democracy as indicating that they have not yet matured from a ‘historical riot’ into an authentically revolutionary process orientated towards the Idea of communism. Such remarks provoked outrage from Badiou’s former student, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. Kacem (2011) linked Badiou’s Marxist-Leninist judgements about the events to his exteriority to the realities of oppression in Tunisia as a comfortably secure French intellectual, and charged him with indifference to cruelty. Putting aside the Oedipal dynamic underlying Kacem’s outrage, the important point here is that it is true that when addressing the Arab Spring Badiou does not hesitate to draw upon his philosophical system in offering judgements about the merits and demerits of political events. Badiou does not restrict his interventions to the role of a humble underlabourer merely absorbing the political conditions of the day and retooling his philosophy accordingly. What is more, the global audience for Badiou’s views today poses the problem of reflexivity. Addressing the ambiguous relationship between Badiou’s philosophy and real political processes, Adrian Johnston has questioned the credibility of Badiou’s repeated assertions that his philosophy cannot influence political reality. Johnston (2009: 38) argues that if Badiou gains a sufficient audience amongst political practitioners then it will be ‘reasonable to anticipate that there will be extra-philosophical repercussions generated by a reciprocal counter-conditioning of politics by (Badiouian) metapolitics’. This ambiguity is exemplified by Badiou’s description of himself, alongside Slavoj Žižek, as forming a philosophic ‘politburo’ whom many on the left look to for guidance. Certainly, the sell-out conferences spearheaded by Badiou and Žižek on the ‘Idea of Communism’ throw into doubt the division between the intellectual projects of these philosophers and the activist communities who comprise their audience. After all, Badiou has always insisted that ideas can move mountains (or encircle cities). Is it really implausible, as Johnston speculates, that Badiou’s meta-ontology of historical change could become a framework around which radical

History and Event.indd 136

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  137 politics is conducted? Do not Badiou’s recent political interventions and willingness to cultivate a community of activists devoted to the Idea of communism indicate a contradiction between the demarcations offered in Being and Event and his political practice as a public intellectual? At stake here, ultimately, in the complex and ambivalent relationship between Badiou’s philosophy and his role as a public intellectual, is whether Badiou has fallen prey to exactly the same problem that cast a shadow over Althusser’s enterprise. The introduction to this chapter offered two possible explanations for Badiou’s reorientation towards offering radical political prescriptions. The first stresses his changing inclinations in the almost three decades separating the publication of Being and Event and the present. Are we not all entitled to reappraise our perspectives on things, as Badiou himself did in coming to terms with Althusser’s legacy and accommodating it in his own theoretical enterprise? Without doubt it would be unwise to claim otherwise. Any philosophy that remains static and insensitive to changing personal convictions would almost certainly be one denuded of political import. At the same time, this chapter sought to mount the case that Being and Event indicates foundational ambiguities in how Badiou conceptualises the relationship between philosophy and political practice. In seeking to square Althusser’s mid-1960s project of refounding the Marxist science of history with Althusser’s anti-theoreticist stipulations from ’67–’68, Badiou’s text puts in place a baroquely complex web of overlapping categories and demarcations. He theorises a sophisticated dialectic between mathematics and philosophy which retains a certain flexibility on the part of philosophy to supplement mathematics with non-ontological concepts like the event for thinking processes of historical change. However, in the final reckoning, Badiou’s architectural vacillations in the later mediations of Being and Event point towards his inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to resolve fully these tensions. That Badiou’s crowning theory of the subject ends up conducted in the ontological situation of Cohen’s transitive ground model only serves to reinforce the difficulties intrinsic to Badiou’s enterprise. As with Althusser’s idea of the epistemological break, in which only his epistemological discourse can legislate on the break from ideology to science, Badiou’s theory of the subject is only accessible to the mathematical ontologist and philosopher meta-ontologist. One can neither appeal to empirical

History and Event.indd 137

03/08/2015 08:39:20

138  History and Event science to verify Badiou’s science of history, nor refer to a broader set of concepts able to periodise history, chart its immanence, and grant further credibility to Badiou’s historical judgements. For all its elegance and formal beauty, then, Badiou’s new science of history, like Althusser’s, is a self-referential rationalism that cannot transcend the arbitrariness of its construction. Apropos the classical Marxist science of history it seeks to surpass, and succeeds in doing so to the extent that both Badiou and Althusser can theorise better discontinuous events, these thinkers heighten the authority of theory by taking it in a thoroughgoing Platonic direction: a closed, rationalist direction that cannot seriously be considered a materialism. To bring this chapter to a close, we have seen that Badiou’s extra-philosophical truth procedures, while seeming to resolve the problem of theoretical authority in politics, in fact leave unresolved a number of questions. To avoid undue repetition, these can be distilled to the following: how can philosophy avoid positioning itself in an authoritative role when making historical judgements about events? Particularly, as is the case with Althusser and Badiou, when they draw upon the sciences to create models of historical processes requiring a high degree of intellectual mastery to deploy, while lacking the standard scientific and historiographic criteria that might open up their judgements to procedures of empirical verification and conceptual contestation? What we are hinting at here is a possible transcendental condition at work: one where creating rationalist models of historical change hinged on the novelties of discontinuous events necessarily endows philosophers with authority over political processes. Without a materialist correlate to such rationalist edifices, under this condition there will always be a tendency for philosophy to assume an authoritative role. The next chapter looks at the ideas of Badiou’s renowned protégé, Quentin Meillassoux. As he is somewhat of an outlier in the genealogies presented in this book, lacking Marxist convictions and not overtly involved in theorising the political, the purpose in turning to Meillassoux’s philosophy is to see how it takes some of the implications implicit in Althusser’s and Badiou’s philosophies to their explicit logical conclusion. In proposing an extreme form of the event, an unsettling cosmic contingency with the power to unravel every law of the universe, we will see that Meillassoux aims to re-establish the sovereignty of philosophy in the form of a normative speculative

History and Event.indd 138

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Badiou’s Decision: To Give Up Leadership, Somewhat  139 ethics. Positioning his work as a successor to the ‘historical symbol’ of Hegel and classical Marxism, Meillassoux uses this as the basis on which to oppose the collective politics and mass revolutionary enthusiasm of the twentieth century. This final chapter, then, will put us in a position to draw some bold conclusions about the trajectory taken by post-Althusserian sciences of history.

History and Event.indd 139

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Chapter 6 Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice For no one dares even now to defend philosophy in the full scope of its ambition: the absolute intelligibility of being qua being and the conceptual apprehension of our immortality. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘L’inexistence divine’ (2011a: 182)

The previous chapters examined Althusser’s and Badiou’s attempts to refound the science of history. For the former, this took the form of an innovative programme in the mid-1960s drawing on French philosophy of science to theorise epistemological breaks. For the latter, this results in a complex meta-ontological system which appropriates mathematical set theory in order to establish a new theory of the subject as a rational process. In both cases the animating commitment to breaking free of the Hegelian dialectic, and to thinking events discontinuously, takes them towards self-referential rationalisms. This Platonic trajectory eventually led Althusser to renounce his project as a theoreticist deviation laden with speciously scientific pretensions, and it continues to allow Badiou to act as an influential intellectual on the left issuing judgements on political events, forms of organisation, and the ends of political practice. Although tied genealogically to these thinkers, Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy might not, however, seem propitious for advancing this theme. In that Meillassoux’s most famous book, After Finitude, has become a landmark text of the speculative realism on account of its desire to free thought from the correlation between mind and world, it seems to take us some distance from illuminating further the political consequences of post-Althusserian sciences of history. A certain Marxist provenance to Meillassoux’s text may have been identified in its repetition of Lenin’s injunction in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to

History and Event.indd 140

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  141 think the independence of the world from cognition and the way it consummates Althusser’s desire for a ‘materialist, rationalist empiricism’ (Brown 2009; 2011). Surely, however, Meillassoux’s attempt to gain rational ingress on the contingency of nature’s laws takes us away from anything resembling a science of history, never mind an object lesson in the political pitfalls of post-Althusserian rationalism? This chapter does not seek to downplay the cosmic scope of After Finitude but argues that the overly scientistic reception of Meillassoux’s philosophy (see for example Squibb 2010) has obscured its political intentions and consequences. Indeed, despite the generally apolitical nature of After Finitude, if we look to the published fragments of The Divine Inexistence, his book The Number and the Siren (Meillassoux 2012a), and comments made in interviews, the political commitments shaping Meillassoux’s philosophy become clearer. These include his opposition to historical teleology, collective political mobilisation, and religious and secular political fanaticism. Most significant in this respect is how The Divine Inexistence is positioned as primed to take over from the ‘historical symbol’ of Hegel and Marx, both of whom Meillassoux considers responsible for the twentieth century’s totalitarian excesses. In recognising philosophy’s sole capacity to cognise the absoluteness of contingency, Meillassoux implores us to adopt a more contemplative relationship with the existing order. The fanatical excesses of the past century will be replaced with an individualistic desire for justice guided by the insights of speculative philosophy. The claim advanced by this chapter is that Meillassoux’s argument represents a conservative politics. In keeping with the overarching aim of Part II of this book, this chapter shows why this conservative dimension follows from the way Meillassoux endows history with a rationally intelligible structure – the convergence between reasonless cosmic advents and the history of ‘symbolisation’ by which humankind reconciles its norms with the cosmic real. This rational historical structure, pivoting on discontinuous ex-nihilo events, points to the continuity of Meillassoux’s philosophy with the authoritative implications of Althusser’s and Badiou’s sciences of history. We then conclude that Meillassoux takes the implicit logical trajectory of these thinkers’ rationalisms to their extreme in attempting to restore the sovereignty of philosophy in politics. The chapter proceeds in four sections. The first section argues that Meillassoux’s philosophy is principally a response to Marxism’s

History and Event.indd 141

03/08/2015 08:39:20

142  History and Event ‘historical symbol’. The second section addresses his book on the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, contending that Meillassoux’s notion of ‘infinitisation’ advanced in this text grants philosophers esoteric privileges. The third section draws upon these findings to provide an alternative interpretation of After Finitude. Rather than seeing the book principally as a defence of scientific realism, we see its failure to prove the grasp of mathematics on the real as evidence that the text’s motivations lie with shoring up philosophy’s speculative sovereignty. The fourth section reflects on these findings in light of the conclusions of Part I of the book and the chapters on Althusser and Badiou in Part II.

Digging Down to the Politics, Discovering Messianic Roots The English translation of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude arrived in 2008, following the inaugural speculative realist workshop held at Goldsmiths College in April, 2007. This event, bringing together Meillassoux with Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Graham Harman, has proved pivotal to the continued reception of his work. Since this time there has been a drifting apart of these thinkers’ intellectual trajectories (with a hostile rift forming between Harman and Brassier). Nevertheless, attached to the speculative realist ‘movement’ in the minds of most, Meillassoux’s philosophy continues to be interpreted first and foremost as a defence of scientific realism. This interpretation stresses Meillassoux’s argument against neo-Kantianism’s agnosticism about the objective world and his realist defence of mathematics’ capacity to gain an absolute hold on objects’ primary qualities. Both Meillassoux’s admirers and detractors tend to agree on the scientistic interpretation of his work (an interpretation that reaches an apogee in Matt Spencer’s [2013] argument that After Finitude can support climate science). The flip side of the coin is that Meillassoux’s philosophy has been treated to scarcely any attention from a political perspective. Since part of the appeal of speculative realism derives from its promise to disentangle metaphysics from the political determinations of much continental philosophy, to read politics into Meillassoux’s work seems to run counter to the whole spirit of the enterprise. It follows that even where Meillassoux’s philosophy has become the subject of political discussion, as for instance in the debate between Peter Hallward

History and Event.indd 142

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  143 (2011) and Nathan Brown (2011), this has tended to be at a high level of abstraction concerning whether speculation assists or detracts from concrete political theorising. Only Alberto Toscano (2011) has offered a critique addressing the political motivations underlying After Finitude, including the book’s assault on fideistic agnosticism and religious ‘fanaticism’. This Enlightenment redux approach, Toscano (2011: 86) claims, harbours suspiciously Christian-centric sympathies, animating the treatise in the ‘terms of the French lumières, especially of Voltaire’. The result is that it is underwritten by a worryingly ‘conservative thesis that a relativistic proliferation of beliefs, beyond any horizon of legitimacy, is a form of de-Christianization, the obverse of [an] equally questionable conviction that critical Western rationality is a “progressive rationalization of Judeo-Christianity under the influence of Greek philosophy”’. These concerns are well placed. Yet Toscano’s critique, penned not long after the release of After Finitude, does not address the wider body of Meillassoux’s work that has since come to light. This includes the publication of fragments of The Divine Inexistence and his book on Mallarmé, The Number and the Siren. Christopher Watkin (2011: 132–68) has addressed the former, but with his focus squarely on the philosophy of religion he does not engage with the political commitments of the text. For two reasons, these works help us dig down to the political commitments shaping Meillassoux’s philosophy. First, they broaden out the thematic scope beyond that of After Finitude, treating the reader to a great number of remarks which help position Meillassoux’s philosophy within the history of political thought. Second, The Divine Inexistence, dating back to the 1990s, allows us to chart the evolution of Meillassoux’s ideas and infer some of the motivations less evident in After Finitude. Before moving on to The Divine Inexistence, some biographical details will help contextualise the book’s authorship and demonstrate its response to Marxist historicism and the philosophical legacy of Hegel. Meillassoux’s intellectual upbringing was immersed in Marxist philosophy. He remarks on his father, Claude Meillassoux (a famous intellectual influential amongst Althusserian anthropologists),33 that he was ‘quite a remarkable Marxist, inventive and individualistic (distant from every party, very anti-Stalinist, very anti-Maoist)’ (Meillassoux 2011b: 160). It is also worth drawing attention to the anti-historicist current of thought influential in the French post-war

History and Event.indd 143

03/08/2015 08:39:20

144  History and Event intellectual scene which Claude Meillassoux inhabited. This was a period in which Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, Bachelard and Canguilhem’s epistemology of science, and Althusser’s reimagining of dialectical materialism through French historical epistemology were all undermining the philosophy of history associated with the Hegel and the German historical school (see Chapter 4 of this book). Although the influence of these authors on Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy remains opaque, it is an important context to bear in mind when considering Meillassoux’s (2011b: 168) remarks that ‘Hegel, along with Marx, was my only true master: the one on whom I had to depend in order to achieve my own thinking.’ That Hegel and Marx are not names preponderant in Meillassoux’s work should not lead us to underappreciate their influence. Moving forward to the beginning of Meillassoux’s academic career, another important piece of context is the period in which he worked on his doctorate. This was completed in 1997, forming the basis of the endlessly reworked and perpetually delayed text, The Divine Inexistence. Significantly, Meillassoux started to elaborate his distinctive philosophical ideas from the early 1990s, a period marked by a sense of fin de siècle after the fall of the Soviet Union, and placing the maturation of his ideas broadly synchronous with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (2006). By his own testimony we know that Meillassoux’s formative influences were Hegel, Marx and Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, and not the deconstructive and poststructuralist canon. Yet the comparison with Derrida is still insightful in that both philosophers capture something of the spirit of the age.34 For the manner in which Derrida’s Specters of Marx offers to hold on to the messianic promise of Marxism in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, attempting to salvage a messianic impulse shorn of political and economic forces, is in a number of senses repeated by Meillassoux. Although their normative prescriptions will vary greatly, like Derrida, for Meillassoux negating historicist ‘metaphysics’ goes in hand in hand with ontological speculation about the contingent event. Indeed, the central theme of The Divine Inexistence is precisely to respond to the question of how philosophy can relate values to the real in the aftermath of Marxism’s failed ‘historical symbol’. The theme of reconciling philosophy and the real, one permeating After Finitude only in a more scientistic guise, animates explicitly Meillassoux’s project in The Divine Inexistence. In Meillassoux’s

History and Event.indd 144

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  145 (2011a: 198) words, philosophy ‘is meaningful only once we have a scientific rupture of the religious link between reality and norms’. Accordingly, he sees philosophy’s perennial task as sealing the wound opened up by science between value and being, navigating between the poles of the priest who would drag us towards transcendence, and the sophist who, like Thrasymachus, Socrates’ antagonist in Plato’s The Republic (1997b), declares justice is only a profitable convention (Meillassoux 2011a: 199). What Meillassoux calls ‘symbolisation’ is the conjoining of these two spheres: the human value of justice and the cosmic real. The programme set out by The Divine Inexistence is to provide a new philosophical symbolisation of the relationship between values and the real through knowledge of the necessity of contingency. Meillassoux claims that the history of symbolisation has passed through three stages: the cosmological, the romantic, and the historical. First was the regime of the cosmological symbol where, after the dissolution of myth by early natural philosophy, Plato tried to reconcile values and being by inscribing justice into the eternal Ideas. Second was the birth of the romantic symbol in response to the blow dealt to the cosmological symbol by Newton with his description of planetary orbits in a linear, clockwork motion. Here, with the birth of Enlightenment scepticism, Meillassoux (2011a: 200) also sees the replacement of the figure of the sophist with his potentially more destructive modern equivalent, so that ‘this splendid liberation of fanaticism is accompanied once more by a cynicism that renews the habitual categories of despair’. With the romantic symbol – responding to the break between nature and the social of which Rousseau would become the most famous advocate – the natural order is associated with the good, and the social with the corrupt. But this symbolisation rapidly breaks down under its own indefensible conception of natural good. Meillassoux (2011a: 201) draws upon a Hobbesian subtext by arguing that the pity of Rousseau’s noble savage ‘is no more common in the living than are war, violence and cruelty’. As such, the romantic symbol is but a transitional symbol quickly giving way to the ‘authentic symbol of modernity’: ‘the historic Symbol through whose culmination we are still living today’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 201). For two reasons, it is plausible to consider the breakdown of the historical symbol the most important for Meillassoux’s philosophy. First, because it is the last of our inherited symbols: the one Meillassoux sees his own philosophy as replacing in order to recommence

History and Event.indd 145

03/08/2015 08:39:20

146  History and Event the fusion of values and the real. Second, because it is here that the political motivations of his project become most evident and his rhetoric most barbed. In his depiction of the historical symbol, Meillassoux gives a straightforward representation of historicist Marxism, one essentially interchangeable with Hegel. On this reading, the ‘ruse of history’ finds its way through the disorganised jumble of individual actions to secure ‘economism’: an ‘ultra-objective principle of a teleology of the Good, whether in its liberal or Marxist version’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 202). Perhaps with the likes of Francis Fukuyama in mind, for Meillassoux (2011a: 201), Marxism and liberalism share the same teleology where ‘every economic reverse amounts to a transient retreat amidst a larger movement towards a necessarily positive outcome’. The reduction of Marxism to its historicist variants supports Meillassoux’s cynicism about mass political mobilisation. As he describes its inevitable degradation into political oppression: ‘The romantic gives way to the Robespierrist cult of the supreme Being. The historical is degraded into the dogma of infallibility, whether of the Party or of the Invisible Hand’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 202). Despite also referring to Smith’s metaphysics of the free market, the critical force of Meillassoux’s argument is clearly directed at the damage caused by Stalin’s teleological dialectical materialism. This was a philosophy ‘promoting generalized falsehood in the name of the proletarian Good to come’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 205). In a discussion on ‘Promethean humanism’, such scepticism about political metaphysics converts into a more general argument against the disastrous consequences of political power. In particular, Meillassoux (2011a: 213) seeks to overturn young Marx’s humanist critique of religion: ‘What humans transpose into the religious God is not their own essence, as Feuerbach and the young Marx claimed, but rather their degradation of their own essence. For what humans see in God is the possibility of their own omnipotence: the accomplishment of their inhumanity rather than their humanity.’ Humanity having lost its belief in the real movement of history being on the side of emancipation: Justice deserts being once more, even once we have arrived in the innermost recess of History. We now live the death of the Symbol of modernity, just as the eighteenth century lived the death of the Greek Symbol. The Symbol is lacking once more, and now as ever we confront the alternative nightmares reborn from the ashes: traditionalism and sophistical immoralism. (Meillassoux 2011a: 202)

History and Event.indd 146

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  147 In the wake of the eclipse of the symbol of modernity we are thus faced by the spectre of the religious fanatic and the atheist nihilist. To avoid these equally undesirable figures, Meillassoux’s ‘factical symbol’, centred on avoiding the worst excesses of human violence, aims to replace Marxism’s historical symbol. However, this new symbolisation will not by itself accomplish anything unless it is wedded to anticipation of a new advent, by which Meillassoux means an ex-nihilo event inaugurating a new cosmic-scale World of Justice. Thus, in order to understand the purpose of Meillassoux’s new symbol, one also has to appreciate its convergence with previous World-changing advents: those of matter, life and thought. In these advents, no principle, cause, or agent can account for them; their origin is solely the unreasonable hyper-chaos underlying the seeming stability of natural laws. This should be put in contrast to intra-Worldly modifications, which are changes possible within the probabilistic distribution of what already exists in a World. Meillassoux (2011a: 189) insists that the distinction is necessary in order to show why rebirth would constitute a new World and could not be ‘an advent internal to the creative activities of humans’. The Fourth World of Justice is out of the hands of humans to realise themselves even though the immortality it bestows would provide ‘the sole life worthy of their [humans’] condition’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 189). In order to identify a universal principle of justice, Meillassoux fixes on a Hobbesian axiomatic relating all species of injustice to the ethical genus of human mortality. ‘And of all these injustices the most extreme is still death: absurd death, early death, death inflicted by those unconcerned with equality’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 191). The axiomatic of death as the ‘factical’ limit to any intra-Worldly attempt to realise justice imposes a condition which humans, he believes, could never realise themselves through their rational volition. Let us pause to consider these political prescriptions. Despite the appeal of ‘absurd death’ as the horizon of injustice, especially for a generation sensitive to human rights, it is really the case that death is the genus of all injustice? What about poverty, inequality, exploitation? All these would be more conventional candidates for occupying the category of injustice. Isolating death as the horizon of injustice serves to place justice out of reach of any political movement. Lesser intra-Worldly injustices are thereby eclipsed by the horizon of the injustice of our present world of injustice. Placing ethical primacy on death, a condition we can only hope will be overcome by a contingent

History and Event.indd 147

03/08/2015 08:39:20

148  History and Event advent, has the effect of allowing humankind to hope for the new World of Justice whilst recognising its own impotence to instrumentally realise justice. Yet attempting to militate against the fatalism this might seem to imply, Meillassoux also contends that just because we cannot effect this change ourselves does not mean its anticipation is irrelevant. Quite the contrary, by anticipating the new world of justice, he claims that humanity ‘can be unified by intensively lived values, because they are founded on the active expectation of an ontologically remarkable event that is accessible to every thinking being’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 191). Meillassoux (2011a: 214) seeks to correct the impression of a prescription for passivity, or of a ‘lazy fatalism under the pretext that the advent of the world of justice does not depend on the power of humans’. This point also indicates where Meillassoux’s speculative ethics provides the clearest sign of how we should act within our existing World. It is to such intra-Worldly ethics which we now turn.

Esotericism: The Discreet Charm of the Philosophers In order to understand how Meillassoux’s world of justice can come into being, one needs to distinguish between its contingent advent and the subjectivity that would make it truly a new world. To this end, Meillassoux stresses the necessity of its intra-Worldly anticipation. If such a World-change is to take place we need to be able to be surprised by the beauty of the contingent alignment of our desire for concord between our values and the real. Why intra-Worldly action is necessary to go beyond just an ‘improved third World’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 217) is explained by the cumulative nature of advents. Meillassoux depicts our present ‘third World’, after the discoveries set out by his own philosophy, as one where ‘the ultimate has in fact taken place’ in which ‘the contingent being that knows the absoluteness of contingency’ (Meillassoux 2011a: 212). Since we have already reached the ultimate qua rational being, we need to maintain the capacity to surprise ourselves with the novelty of the new World when it arrives. How can such surprise be maintained? In The Divine Inexistence Meillassoux gives no details of practices of anticipation. Yet if the realisation of justice depends upon our ability to long for uniting values with the real, it would make sense that these practices are ones which can, to the greatest extent possible within an intra-Worldly situation, bring subjectivity into line with

History and Event.indd 148

03/08/2015 08:39:20

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  149 an ontology of contingency. An idea of what this might involve can be found in Meillassoux’s book on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, ‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard’ (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). As Meillassoux (2011a: 216) hints, awaiting justice can be compared to ‘the free act of the throw of the dice’ – a throw, perhaps, like the Master of the ship in Mallarmé’s poem? Meillassoux’s book, The Number and the Siren, aims to show that Mallarmé’s poem is coded with a message – and what is more, that it is possible to decipher this code in order to reveal the way its cryptic repetition of ‘The Number’ stands for a wager that a precise number represents chance itself. Part Two of Meillassoux’s book is particularly interesting since he provides a speculative reading of the poem in order to draw out the consequences of what he calls the ‘infinitisation’ of Mallarmé’s encryption. What Meillassoux means by this is the way the poem is ambiguously coded so as to perpetuate chance. The paradox grappled with is as follows: how can a single number, a most finite determination, represent the undecidability of chance? Let us consider an example to demonstrate the difficulty. If one throws the dice, as the Master of the ship in Mallarmé’s poem prevaricates about, chance will dictate which number is rolled. But as soon as the resulting number of the throw is revealed – in other words, it is fixed – then it is no longer chance, but the result of chance: chance finitised. Is infinitisation then best represented as a withdrawal from deciding to throwing the dice, suspending the actualisation of the virtual possibilities and preserving all possible results? If so, then a unique number cannot be chance, since infinitisation demands that all possible outcomes be preserved. Deadlock? ‘The solution’, Meillassoux (2012a: 138) speculates, ‘consists in displacing the demand that the gesture [of throwing or not throwing] be infinite, onto the Number itself. In other words, to throw the dice, to produce a Number – but a “unique Number” supporting in itself the virtually contradictory structure of Chance.’ Meillassoux seeks to show how indeterminacy is built into the deployment of a specific number, and how this indeterminacy so deeply traverses Mallarmé’s act of encrypting the poem that we cannot even be certain that ­Mallarmé did in fact code his poem. Although Mallarmé comes close to enumerating his poem with precisely 707 words, Meillassoux claims that he built in enough ambiguity so that we can never be sure if the poem has in fact been encoded. This Meillassoux

History and Event.indd 149

03/08/2015 08:39:21

150  History and Event interprets as a deliberate act of infinitisation on Mallarmé’s part, setting the procedure apart from the progressive motion of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. ‘“Fixing the infinite” is indeed the fundamental programme of Mallarméan poetics, a programme that renders it a stranger to those notions, so valorized by modernity, of “becoming” and “dynamism” . . . What is required is to capture a sudden modification, a transfiguration, a fulguration . . . a passed movement annulled as soon it is initiated’ (Meillassoux 2012a: 140). As Meillassoux sees it, Mallarmé created enough ambiguity so that it would never be certain if the poem would be deciphered: the poem being a wager cast out to sea like a message in a bottle. Thus both author and reader are locked into the same uncertainty: an uncertainty ‘quavering’ around a determinate number. ‘For the code was discovered, and, if we succeed at demonstrating that it is affected by a slight uncertainty, we will have established that Mallarmé’s Number and his gesture have indeed been infinitized in the eyes of his readers’ (Meillassoux 2012a: 150). The notion of infinitisation can thus be read as Meillassoux’s first intervention into theorising the subjectivity appropriate to intra-Worldly chance. In the remarkably compressed prose of the conclusion to his book, Meillassoux frames his discussion of Mallarmé as an alternative to modernist views of historical progress. Mallarmé’s act allows us to once more vectorize the subject with meaning, with a direction freed from ancient eschatology; all that our masters have instructed us to regard as outmoded par excellence – those dead Grand Narratives, at best obsolete when fermented by solitary researchers, at worst criminal when clothed in the statist finery of Progress or Revolution; all this would nevertheless have succeeded in making one breakthrough up to our time, one only, and at a precise point – a unique Poem that would traverse the twentieth century like a hidden gem, finally to reveal itself, in the following century, as the strangely successful defense of an epoch we had buried under our disenchantments. (Meillassoux 2012a: 221–2)

As opposed to modernist narratives of historical progress, inevitably giving rise to ‘criminal’ revolutions, Mallarmé alone stands out as a shining example of the type of subject fit for an ontology of contingency. In Mallarmé’s refusal to give away the secrets of his poem easily, forever imprinting it with a mark of undecidability, he becomes a prophetic subject: one whose ideas speak across the ages from poet to philosopher. For Meillassoux, Mallarmé therefore

History and Event.indd 150

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  151 exemplifies the praxis fit for an intra-Worldly ethics cognisant of an ontology of absolute contingency. There is, in my opinion, a name for this: esotericism. Against mass mobilisation conjoined to a historical vision that would be rationally contestable and capable of being submitted to empirical verification, Meillassoux’s subject of change, the subject who knows the ultimate, is one who keeps their dice close to their chest and who talks in encoded prose only capable of being deciphered by the finest minds of an age. In an interview, Meillassoux revealingly reflects upon the human losses of the twentieth century and their role in motivating his theories. With the contingency of nature’s laws being ‘outside the grasp of our action’ the positive result of this political impotence is that the ‘eternal possible’ frees me from suffering over the appalling misfortune of those who have experienced atrocious deaths, allows me to escape being paralyzed by an impossible mourning for the atrocities of the twentieth century, and also permits me to invest energy in an egalitarian politics that has become conscious of its limits. Indeed, politics is delivered from all charges of messianism, since eschatological awaiting is entirely recuperated by individual subjectivity. This partition of tasks (individual messianism, political finitude) allows us to avoid the totalitarian temptation of collective action. We can efficiently expel the eschatological desire from politics only by allowing this desire to be unfolded openly in another sphere of existence (such as private life or philosophy). (Meillassoux 2011b: 163)

What is most remarkable here for an author of a text named After Finitude and whose intellectual background includes the influence of Badiou’s Being and Event, where political truths are sustained through a collective, infinite truth procedure, is the desire to impose limits upon political thought, effectively cutting politics down to size and transferring those desires into the realm of individual subjectivity informed by speculative philosophy. If Marx’s early innovation can be identified as channelling the misguided need for spiritual reconciliation of man with his essence into the political movement capable of realising the real conditions for emancipation, Meillassoux’s move can be read as a restoration of the ethical orientation of pre-Marxist critical idealism.

History and Event.indd 151

03/08/2015 08:39:21

152  History and Event

After Finitude: In the Spirit of the Fossil? We are now in a position to return to Meillassoux’s most famous text, After Finitude. As stated in this chapter’s introduction, our aim was to undermine the overly scientistic reading that would grant little credence to a political reading of Meillassoux’s book. The preceding sections have gone some way towards fulfilling this ambition. But if we can also demonstrate that the scientistic reading fails to account for the argument of After Finitude, and show that the text reflects the normative commitments set out in The Divine Inexistence, then the scientistic reading will be further weakened. To do so, this section will demonstrate that one of oddities of the scientistic reception of After Finitude is that the key argument on which it rests – Meillassoux’s attempt to speculatively secure objects’ primary, mathematical qualities – is never actually resolved. We begin with an abridged reading of the text and end by pointing to how it fails in its goal to secure mathematics’ absolute hold on the real. We then reflect on the significance of this failure for how we should interpret Meillassoux’s philosophy. Meillassoux opens After Finitude by presenting its purpose as concerned with making sense of ancestral statements: how can philosophy interpret the meaning of mathematical, scientific claims such as ‘the accretion of the earth occurred 4.56 billion years ago’? Although a seemingly obscure topic, Meillassoux imbues it with an unexpected urgency for drawing a line of demarcation between scientific reasoning and the unreason promoted by post-Kantian philosophies. While the ancestral statement poses no mysteries for the spontaneously realist modern scientist, or for the non-creationist general public, Meillassoux claims that for many post-Kantians such statements are deeply paradoxical. Meillassoux’s aim is to show why ancestral statements – regarding a world before a thinking conscience existed to cognise it – would be for the line of post-Kantian thought he terms ‘correlationism’, only a statement for thinking subjects or else strictly senseless. Owing to the respect for science expected of modern philosophy and the coyness of correlationists in admitting their anti-scientific bias, Meillassoux wants to show why the problem with interpreting ancestral statements holds with cast-iron necessity for philosophies accepting the correlationist imperative of Kant’s critical revolution. Crucially, this demonstration is not made for the purpose of advising a retreat to dogmatic, pre-critical philosophy.

History and Event.indd 152

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  153 Meillassoux seeks to show why only the passage through ‘correlationism’ can deliver a speculative materialism certain and able to discourse about an objective world existing before our species and long after we have passed away. To prove why no dogmatic or naïve realism is sufficient to shore up scientific realism, Meillassoux holds firm to the rupture of Kant’s critical revolution. His intention is to persuade us that, whatever its faults, there is no turning back to pre-critical ignorant bliss. When abjuring metaphysics by establishing science as the primary source of knowledge, Kant made the right choice in Meillassoux’s view. But Kant’s peculiar response, involving a recentring of knowledge on the side of the subject contrary to the advances made by Galilean mathematical science, was nothing less than a ‘catastrophe’ inaugurating a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’ (Meillassoux 2008: 118–20). Meillassoux’s speculative materialism therefore has to show the possibility of an alternative path in order to demonstrate why we can neither retreat to dogmatic metaphysics nor rest content with Kantianism without sliding towards the ‘strong correlationism’ of his successors. Meillassoux has to show why, in leaving an inaccessible noumenal realm, the Kantian ‘weak correlationist’ limitation on knowing the real necessarily has to give way to the closed circle of ‘strong correlationism’ (Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein) where world and subject are always co-constitutive. That is, where a world is always a world for-us, sealing off the possibility of a straightforward interpretation of mathematical ancestral statements. The lynchpin for resolving both criteria is Meillassoux’s isolation of the root of the problem in Kant’s unexamined acceptance of facticity (Heidegger’s term for describing the way the world reveals itself to us through categories of the understanding, seemingly without any rational explanation). Facticity opens the door for absolutising what Meillassoux calls his anhypothetically derived ‘principle of unreason’ (a principle that cannot be deduced from any other, but is provable through inconsistencies in all attempts to refute it). The reason why this is possible is because in the face of facticity, and if wishing to hold on to the existence of the in-itself, the Kantian faces two choices. The Kantian either has to absolutise facticity against idealism, or absolutise correlation against realism. Since the decision to absolutise one of the terms is logically impressed upon weak correlationism, post-Kantianism, when choosing the latter option – as in the case with German idealism – has to adopt the pernicious strong

History and Event.indd 153

03/08/2015 08:39:21

154  History and Event variety. As Meillassoux argues, this inevitably transits in the direction of Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism where to even talk of a thing-in-itself beyond thought becomes a contradiction. The idealist dictum that every X is always a posited X, where thought always returns to itself even whilst trying to escape itself, becomes the logical trajectory of Kant’s critical revolution unless one finds another way through the impasse. Meillassoux’s imperative is therefore to overturn strong correlationism from within by absolutising facticity. This is not on the grounds that there is an absolute reason why things are how they are, but because, precisely oppositely, there is absolutely no reason why things are as they are. Once the only option left is to absolutise the principle of unreason, then the hyper-chaos and ever-possible instability of the laws of the universe is revealed to intellectual intuition. The laws of the universe are shown to rest on nothing but reasonless contingency. Once reaching this point in his text, Meillassoux admits that the menacing force of hyper-chaos he has unleashed seems to have taken the demonstration far from its aim of securing mathematical access to primary qualities. Indeed, it appears that his principle of unreason has undermined the capacity for positive knowledge of the objective world now unsettled by the radical contingency lurking beneath the seeming stability of nature’s laws. However, Meillassoux seeks to offset this impression by showing how certain conditions of positive knowledge can be derived from the principle of unreason. As he maintains, ‘the whole interest of the thesis lies therein – that to be contingent, an entity (be it a thing, event, law or structure) cannot be just “anything whatsoever”, with no constraints’ (Meillassoux 2012b: 10). Foremost amongst these constraints is the principle of non-contradiction, which Kant assumed but never attempted to derive. In endeavouring to show that a contradictory entity would be a necessary entity, Meillassoux seeks to disqualify contradiction in the real by reference to the principle of unreason – no entity can be necessary, thus no entity can be contradictory – so that they become two sides of the same anhypothetically derived principle. Meillassoux’s absolutisation procedure therewith rationally secures the law of non-contradiction by passing it through a speculative conversion rendering all things, and all laws, contingent. Yet if the treatise is to live up to the critique of correlationism, a derivation of the law of non-contradiction is not enough to pass from the Kantian in-itself to the Cartesian in-itself.

History and Event.indd 154

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  155 This requires a proof of the capacity for mathematics to gain a firm grasp upon nature’s objective properties. Meillassoux’s response to Hume’s problem in Chapter 4 of After Finitude is the closest he gets to an ontological argument securing the mathematical in-itself. Hume’s problem concerns the illusive necessary connection between events: the problem of proving laws of causality. Although Hume was to abandon the search and switch the focus of the question to human habitual patterns, others have sought to address the problem through probabilistic reasoning. These attempts, Meillassoux argues, all revolve around variations of the same assumption: given the totality of all possible conceivable events and the sum total of events that take place in accordance with physical laws, is it not improbable that laws would not change regularly if there were no underlying reason for their apparent constancy? Drawing upon the same Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory axioms as Badiou (see Chapter 5), Meillassoux seeks to show how these probabilistic arguments all rely on an idea, problematised since Georg Cantor, of forming such a totality of possibilities. And if we concede that the transfinite forecloses the formation of a countable totality due to the uncountable chasms between the transfinite cardinals, then the whole idea of a probabilistic resolution to Hume’s problem loses its credibility. Still, Meillassoux concedes that this only takes us as far as an ontological hypothesis. The interesting thing is that as close as Meillassoux gets to pulling together the threads, he falls short in his final attempt to tie his anhypothetical derivation of the principle of unreason with the Cantorian transfinite. The transfer from an ontological proof of the law of non-contradiction to an ontological proof of mathematics’ grip on primary qualities is left incomplete: the Kantian in-itself is not traversed to the Cartesian in-itself. In his more recent work on the subject, investigating the connection between the meaningless signs of mathematics, Meillassoux (2012b: 37) writes that ‘we have not at all shown that the empty sign allows . . . the description of a world independent of thought’. After Finitude therefore leaves unresolved two absolutisations necessary for securing the realist truth of the ancestral statement: the first being mathematics; the second being the Cantorian transfinite qua the ontological ‘structure of the possible as such’ (Meillassoux 2008: 127). Given this conspicuous argumentative failure, let us recall that this proof was necessary to give sense to the ‘ancestral statement’. Only in reference

History and Event.indd 155

03/08/2015 08:39:21

156  History and Event to Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism’s inability to grant the full realist sense of the statement, has he made a splash as a scientific realist in a continental tradition frequently harbouring suspicions of an objective ‘outside’. Consequently, the overly scientistic reading of Meillassoux’s work runs aground on Meillassoux’s lack of proof for the point which would secure his reputation as a stalwart of scientific realism. What is worse for our scientistic reader, by the close of the book we discover that ‘our goal here was not to tackle this resolution as such’ (Meillassoux 2008: 128). The focus of the task lies not so much with securing scientific realism, but instead in the imperative to ‘reconcile thought and [the] absolute’ (Meillassoux 2008: 128). Combating the correlationist scourge is a justification for the task, not its goal; its goal is nothing less than elaborating the new factical symbol advocated in The Divine Inexistence. Meillassoux’s normative commitment to fusing values and the real is most evident in Chapter 2 on ‘Metaphysics, Fideism, Speculation’. Here he addresses the importance of his challenge for undermining what he calls the sceptical-fideist alliance. By this he means to implicate trends within philosophy with the revival of religion in the late twentieth century. As Meillassoux sees it, the critique of metaphysics, presumed for so long to be complementary with the critique of religion, has resulted in a pyrrhic victory. By conflating the critique of metaphysics with a solemn censorship on thinking absolutes all philosophy has succeeded in doing is enjoining a suspicion of rational absolutes. Philosophy has acted as a handmaiden for religious obscurantism by affirming that there is no sense in attempting to ground the absolute in reason. Interestingly, however, Meillassoux does not use this move to conduct a classical rationalist critique of religious faith, but to criticise the specifically de-Christianising tendencies this gives rise to, positioning his intellectual battle against the obscurantist fanatic doling out the ‘worst forms of violence’ (Meillassoux 2008: 57). He thus seeks to defend the rational kernel of Christian theology from assailment by scepticism to the point where the contemporary philosopher is rendered a sad ‘liberal servant of any theology whatsoever’ (Meillassoux 2008: 47). This is because abjuring reason’s role in adjudicating on the validity of absolutes ‘establishes how any piety whatsoever enjoys an equal and exclusive right to grasp the ultimate truth’ (Meillassoux 2008: 47). According to Meillassoux, the inevitable consequence of the particular conjunction of modern, secular thought with philosophical correlationism is

History and Event.indd 156

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  157 that ‘the modern man is he who has been re-ligionized precisely to the extent that he has been de-Christianized’ (Meillassoux 2008: 48). The critique of the de-absolutisation of thought therefore ‘goes beyond that of the legitimation of ancestral statements. What is urgently required, in effect, is that we re-think what could be called “the prejudices of critical sense”; viz., critical potency is not necessarily on the side of those who would undermine the validity of absolute truths, but rather on the side of those who would succeed in criticizing both ideological dogmatism and sceptical fanaticism’ (Meillassoux 2008: 49). The contention of this chapter is that these remarks provide an essential subtext to After Finitude. They represent not merely ad hoc ideological justifications grafted on to the scientistic core of the text; they are consistent with the normative commitments set out in The Divine Inexistence. These stipulate the necessity of fusing values with the real, for which speculative philosophy can stake an exclusive claim. Decades have now passed since combating Marxist revolutionary movements has seemed an urgent task. For this reason, the political force of Meillassoux’s argument has seemingly shifted over time towards the resurgence of religious fanaticism. Nevertheless, the same commitments underlie the battle waged against both targets. This is a battle to restore to speculative philosophy its guiding role, and to direct discontent towards individual ethical introspection, removing the pursuit of justice from the spheres of collective political contestation. Whichever way one looks at it this represents a conservative politics. It is consistent, at best, with a mild reformist politics; one which refracts politics through individual ethical subjectivity. At worst, it is consistent with an authoritative Platonism issuing directives from on high.

From Meillassoux to . . . ? This chapter has demonstrated the conservative political side to Meillassoux’s philosophy. For Meillassoux, twentieth-century totalitarianism was caused at least in part by misguided historicist convictions rooted in Hegel and Marx that drove collective political projects inexorably towards fanaticism. Meillassoux sees his argument for the necessity of contingency as providing a new ‘factical symbol’ well suited for replacing the historical teleology and collective politics of modernity with an individual ethical orientation.

History and Event.indd 157

03/08/2015 08:39:21

158  History and Event Accordingly, Meillassoux’s philosophy aims to cut politics down to size and let reflection on injustice unfold in the sphere of private life. Fanaticism, both religious and secular, should be replaced by contemplation. Graham Harman (2011: 153–4) asks us to imagine ‘the absolute triumph of the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux by the year 2050’, a world where ‘[a] survey done of Le Monde in a feature on Meillassoux reveals that 80 per cent of European academics now literally hope for the rebirth of humans who have died atrocious deaths’. Is this a world really worth anticipating? Or are there, perhaps, more pressing concerns to which our attention should be directed? It would be easy to see Meillassoux as a peculiar outlier with little substantive relation to Althusser’s and Badiou’s projects. I certainly do not wish to overplay their continuities. These thinkers’ philosophical projects and political commitments take them in idiosyncratic directions which are not reducible to their genealogical connections as an informal teacher-student lineage. At the same time, Part II of this book has sought to infer consequences of Althusser’s interventions ramified in the work of Badiou and Meillassoux. The most significant of these is their shared refusal of Hegelian teleology and their attempt to innovate a new rationalist science of history anchored to the novelties released by events. It is in this sense, and not due to any forced genealogical elisions, that Meillassoux’s philosophy can illuminate further the discussion in the previous two chapters. Because Althusser and Badiou remained sensitive to the potentially authoritative direction taken by their rationalist sciences of history, they took measures to militate against these implications. As we have seen, this was not always successful. Althusser’s zealous self-criticisms of his theoreticism may have been apposite, but their result was that he ending up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, leading to a theoretical degeneration of his work. Badiou, in Being and Event, constructs a complex system of categories aiming to accommodate Althusser’s self-critique. But in the final reckoning, we also saw, Badiou leaves enough ambiguities in his system for philosophy to maintain a role in judging historical events and intervening into political practice with recommendations about what is to be done. From this perspective, Meillassoux is so interesting because he carries with him some of the same philosophical commitments as Althusser and Badiou, yet casts aside their desire to avoid granting philosophy a role in legislating on proper scientific and political practice.

History and Event.indd 158

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Meillassoux’s Politics: Speculative Justice  159 In this chapter we did not have the space to comment on how Meillassoux’s philosophy also runs against the grain of some of the fundamental commitments of real scientific practice.35 But we did see that once Althusser’s and Badiou’s attempts to temper the authoritative excesses of their theories are relinquished by Meillassoux the result is a thoroughgoing Platonism. In this sense, Meillassoux simply strips this intellectual trajectory of its theoretical inhibitions and realises its authoritative implications unencumbered by Marxist political commitments. As with Althusser and Badiou, the speculative-rationalist science of history, anchored to the novelties of discontinuous events, entails abandoning any materialist correlate to the science of history which would permit its structure to be submitted to empirical verification. In denying history a teleological structure, this move also curtails the scope for rational contestation of their sciences of history. The result is a vicious circularity in which philosophy is granted an arbitrary authority to make historical judgements. From a Marxist perspective rightly averse to ceding authority to self-referential rationalisms, this Platonic move marks a step back from classical dialectical materialism and its notion of quantity to quality leaps. In contrast to the way that classical dialectical materialism overlaps with measurable trends discernible from analysis of productive industries, class and demographics, the way these thinkers position history’s rationality as a post-evental procedure grants speculative philosophy an arbitrary authority in the act of historical judgement. It takes these post-Althusserian thinkers away from materialism and towards idealism. The afterword of this book takes stock of these findings. In recognition of the exhaustion of speculative-rationalist approaches as well as the impossibility of turning back the clock to the era of classical Marxist philosophy, it looks for a way to preserve the project of a science of history. For if we are to maintain that history can be thought scientifically and a role maintained for such grand theorising, any new science of history will have to be free of teleology, think the discontinuous nature of events, respect the autonomy of science, and be empirically verifiable. The science of complexity will provide our guide for meeting these criteria in Part III.

History and Event.indd 159

03/08/2015 08:39:21

History and Event.indd 160

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Chapter 7 Afterword: Towards a Complex Science of History

Afterword The point is that chaos remains deterministic – we are not, necessarily, dealing with a scientific pessimism equivalent to the abandonment of rationalism by postmodernists. David Byrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences (1998: 16) Simulations are partly responsible for the restoration of the legitimacy of the concept of emergence . . . Manuel De Landa, Philosophy and Simulation (2012: 6)

‘There is no royal road to science,’ Marx (1976a: 104) once famously wrote, ‘and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.’ Marx’s lesson should be heeded here too. For to pose effectively the question of what a new science of history might look like is to deliberate judiciously on the hand intellectual history has dealt us. This book has examined the attempts of classical dialectical materialism and the line of contemporary French theory inspired by Louis Althusser. As we saw in Part I, the lasting appeal of the Marxist science is that though beholden to Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and at odds with Marx’s own methodology, it held out the possibility of an interface between the rational and the empirical worthy of the name materialism. This philosophy may have been derived from a teleological framework that has lost all credibility, but in practice its defensibility rested on Marxists’ ability to discern historical trends supporting their dialectical prophesies. At the very least, the wealth of statistics deployed in the early-twentieth-century debates between Bernstein, Kautsky and Lenin illustrates this philosophy’s openness to standing

History and Event.indd 163

03/08/2015 08:39:21

164  History and Event the test of empirical correspondence. For the same reason, despite my sympathies with Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux’s refusal of teleology and their attempt to grant science autonomy, Part II of the book concluded that they fall short of the name materialism. These thinkers are to be commended for capturing the importance of discontinuous events without providing a sceptical view of history as a meaningless string of accidents. Yet they do so by turning their back on the empirical in favour of closed, rationalist and idealist edifices. Both routes, then – classical Marxist and Althusserian – come with advantages matched by equally formidable disadvantages. Could there be a way through this impasse? In making Althusser the keystone which holds together both parts of this book, the intention was to signal that he occupies a special place in this story. As we saw in Chapter 4, between his mid-1960s research programme and his overzealous self-criticisms of the late 1960s and 1970s, Althusser took a wrong turn in the right direction. In 1966 he offered more tempered criticisms of the rationalist excesses of his project, evincing an awareness of the need for an empirical interface in his epistemology without abandoning the science of history. Of course, this was a path only opened up tentatively by Althusser and never travelled down. As things actually transpired, Althusser’s decision to deny philosophy the capacity to furnish knowledge set in motion the degeneration of his work throughout the 1970s, reaching a sad climax in his unsystematic reflections on aleatory materialism in the 1980s. If today we wish to imagine where the path fleetingly opened up by Althusser might take us, we therefore cannot simply reopen the file on French historical epistemology in search of inspiration. We might, however, wish to consider an alternative move. This would involve undertaking not a return to but a repetition of Althusser’s bold epistemological gesture of the mid-1960s. In keeping with this book’s conclusions, we might ask which contemporary scientific resources allow us to capture the novelties of events without succumbing to historical teleology or retreating into hermetic rationalist edifices. I understand that the solution sketched out here may be received incredulously given the hostility to Althusser amongst highprofile theorists in the field,36 but I believe that complexity theory is well suited to assist in a recommencement of Althusser’s project. This final chapter to the book will argue that – in contrast to the way postmodernists position complexity as the final nail in the coffin of the science of history – when seen through the prism of rigorous

History and Event.indd 164

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  165 philosophy of science (and with a little imagination), complexity offers a quite different promise. However, to stake a claim to the potential of complexity means to navigate a route within the vast body of literature on the subject. For while there is agreement on a set of basic commitments, rival tendencies contest most of the fine and not so fine detail. Even the meaning of ‘complexity’ is contested. For some, it announces a new existential paradigm breaking from modernity’s quest for nomothetic coveringlaws (Cilliers 1998; Morin 2008); for others, it involves discovering the law-like relations between a system’s macro-level behaviour and the rules governing its micro-constituents (Axelrod 1997; Holland 1998; Sawyer 2003); for yet another group, it builds upon and complements the critical realist orientation towards the causal powers of social structure (Byrne 1998; Byrne and Callaghan 2013). This chapter cannot possibly do justice to all the nuances attached to these differing interpretations. Nevertheless, it will attempt to provide a flavour of these debates, outline the key positions taken by these rival tendencies, and show how they revive long-standing methodological and political debates. In navigating between the ‘general’ and ‘restricted’ complexity paradigms, stating reasons for why weak emergence is a more convincing account than the strong variant, and defending the potential role of multi-scale agent-based models and simulations in a new science of history, I argue that complexity can preserve the best aspects of classical Marxist and post-Althusserian theory: providing a scientific interface between the rational and the empirical, to which only the name materialism does justice. This discussion also serves to foreground the conclusions of the main body of the book.

Complex Systems and Social Change The roots of social complexity theory are generally traced back to the social systems theories of Talcott Parsons and Norbert Weiner in the 1950s (Castellani and Hafferty 2009). Offering a top-down view of society addressing the needs of the expanding bureaucracies of the post-war era, these functionalist accounts of social systems gained considerable popularity for a time. Eventually, however, criticisms of their approaches compounded to devastating effect. Not only was structural-functionalist social ontology charged with an inherent conservatism on account of its inability to think change beyond

History and Event.indd 165

03/08/2015 08:39:21

166  History and Event incremental, evolutionary steps, but it also lacked an account of reflexivity: it reduced people to cogs in a well-oiled social machine. Thenceforth systems thinking, along with most forms of structuralism, was generally shunned within academic sociology. Nonetheless, it continued to be explored fruitfully within the physical sciences and would later make its way back into the human sciences through this side door. One important development was the Catastrophe theory of French mathematician René Thom, elaborated in the 1960s. Taking inspiration from Bourbaki’s mathematical structuralism and theoretical biology, Thom prefigured chaos theory in proposing the notion of the attractor (see Aubin 2004). Thom’s main innovation was to take imprecise biological theorisations about the role of the chemical gradient in converting the genotype into the phenotype, and to introduce the morphological notion of multiple attractors shaping the outcome of the process. From this mathematical perspective, the notion of the attractor helps to explain the DNA-to-protein transformation by making sense of how trajectories tend towards a limited number of singularities – catastrophes. And crucially, in contrast to overly mechanical models of the process, the exact attractor basin ‘chosen’ by the trajectory is subject to minor fluctuations at bifurcation points in the structural morphology. In proposing a mathematical formalism of the structural dynamics governing biological and chemical and, later, linguistic processes, Thom’s catastrophe theory served to support an anti-reductionist, systemic philosophy traversing the physical and human sciences. This approach received a further boost in the 1970s with chemist Ilya Prigogine’s (1981) landmark reflections on the implications of the second law of thermodynamics. Seeking to understand how certain physical systems counteract the tendency towards entropy and disorder prescribed by the second law, Prigogine conceptualised them as ‘dissipative systems’ in a state ‘far-from-equilibrium’. Dissipative systems, for Prigogine, being open to energy and matter and in necessary disequilibrium, counteract the second law by expelling entropy beyond their boundaries. The result is that when focusing on the dynamics of such systems, a new philosophy of nature emerges quite different to that taking its inspiration from Newtonian mechanics. Unlike Newton’s laws, such complex systems support a unidirectional arrow of time: irreversible processes become as real as the reversible. And in contrast to the common scientific predilection

History and Event.indd 166

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  167 to explain systems by attending to their smallest observable components, complexity, for Prigogine, directs attention to the behaviour of macro-level dynamics as something worthy of study in its own right. These observations combined point ‘not to some supplementary approximation introduced into the laws of dynamics but to an embedding of dynamics within a vaster formalism’ (Prigogine 1981: xiii). Another important dimension to complexity theory is how it conceptualises systemic change. Thom’s bifurcation theory, where a system ‘chooses’ between two or more attractors, provides many complexity theorists with their central understanding of non-linearity. It demonstrates not only that the future is open to a number of different yet finite possibilities, but also that relatively minor changes in a system’s control parameters can lead to disproportionate results. Long periods of relative stability can be followed by quick, sharp and discontinuous shifts; and interventions in processes of transformation can result in substantively differing outcomes. Byrne (1998: 31) draws a direct parallel between bifurcation processes and classical Marxism: ‘This way of thinking is very close to the classic Marxist account of such transformational changes. Indeed, it is identical to it. It is absolutely a matter of the transformation of quantity into quality.’ As Chapter 1 on the ontology of quantity-quality leaps showed, this is overstating the case. Although the classical Marxist notion is similarly non-linear, it is tied to a teleological notion of history finding no parallel in bifurcation theory. Indeed, if anything, bifurcation theory’s focus on non-linearity, self-organisation and emergent properties is more in step with the direction taken by Althusserian theory. How do these formal perspectives on complex physical systems relate to social systems? On one level, their intention to think invariant structural dynamics means that they are not tied solely to physical systems and can be extended to the social domain relatively easily (as did Thom and Prigogine in their late career work). Byrne (1998: 52) terms this extension ‘heterologous’ in nature: an analogical similarity in the form of complex systems transcending different contexts. Yet on another level, complexity requires a complementary social ontology able to specify precisely the nature of its application of ideas from the physical sciences. This is because although complexity can inform long-standing questions of structure/agency, the micro/macro link, synchronic/diachronic causality, it does not resolve them in one

History and Event.indd 167

03/08/2015 08:39:21

168  History and Event fell swoop. Quite the contrary: complexity sharpens long-standing philosophical, political and methodological differences in the social sciences. Hence the paradigmatic divides within the field. On the one hand there is the school aligned closely with Prigogine and the philosopher Edgar Morin, who position their work in proximity to poststructuralism and critical realism (and under which we can also group poststructuralist political theorists drawing on complexity). On the other is a more conventionally scientistic group of thinkers concerned with theorising analytically emergence and who align with agent-based modelling and simulation.37 Since the latter tend to have little to say about the former, we follow Morin (2006) and Byrne and Callaghan (2013) in classifying the divide as that between ‘general’ and ‘restricted’ complexity paradigms. Despite the fact that we will disagree with the motivation for the coining of these terms, the demarcation will prove enormously useful for thinking through the implications of complexity science and how it is represented within social theory. In specifying what these differences entail, we shall see that many poststructuralist political thinkers aligning with the general complexity platform tie a knot between their normative orientation towards disorder and their disdain for scientific method. Then, in the following section, we see that some of these thinkers offer an endorsement of the strong emergence hypothesis in which events become impervious to scientific explanation.

General and Restricted Complexity During the late 1990s, social complexity theory started to split into two broad camps as it incorporated methodologies associated with computer simulation. Byrne (2005) was the first to mount a critique of this new tendency by drawing a line of demarcation between what Morin (2006) later called ‘general’ and ‘restricted’ complexity. Siding with general complexity, Byrne offers a strongly worded argument against the US school of complexity’s focus on agent-based modelling and simulation. In Byrne’s estimation, this form of ‘scientistic complexity’ ‘would replicate the worst technocratic elitism of early attempts to inform policy through systems-theory-based approaches’ (Byrne 2005: 100–1). For Morin, likewise, restricted complexity, in seeking the laws of emergence lying behind the complexity of reality, runs counter to the philosophic spirit of thinkers like Thom and Prigogine. Restricted approaches represent an unsatisfying halfway

History and Event.indd 168

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  169 house between classical scientific epistemology and the new complex thought which abandons truth-seeking ambitions. Why does restricted complexity provoke such hostility? ‘Restricted’ complexity is concerned with modelling the emergence of macro-laws from the interaction of micro-constituents. The key difference between this approach and most of those grouped under the general complexity umbrella is that it models emergent order as the result of a simple number of rules operating at the microlevel (Schelling 1971; Axelrod 1997; Holland 1998; Epstein 2007). Whether the object under consideration is cellular automata or collective human behaviour, the procedure followed by these methodologies is to ascribe a relatively simple set of rules governing their agents’ behaviour and then run computer simulations experimentally to see what happens. For agent-based modellers, this provides the closest thing social science has to a traditional experimental method where it is possible to isolate fundamental mechanisms at work. It allows social scientists to test whether phenomena such as unequal wealth distribution, group pressures on the individual, or the formation of communities of certain sizes represent immutable laws of nature or not (Epstein and Axtell 1996: 7; Sawyer 2003: 328). In addition to this approach’s micro-emergentist preference (which stresses micro to macro causation over the macro to the micro), it also holds a commitment to the explanatory purchase of simplifying models of reality. Complexity, in this guise, is therefore less about making an all-encompassing break from scientific reductionism and more about a qualified revival of reductionist methodologies taking into account processes of emergence. A further important line of demarcation is related to the way that agent-based modellers usually seek to identify the processes allowing order to emerge. In contrast to general complexity’s focus on the disruptive transformations theorised by Thom’s bifurcation theory, agent-based simulations hunt the stabilising mechanisms which traverse different historical contexts. As opposed to historicist contextualism or eventalist transformationalism, agent-based models generally seek the transcendental logics arising in processes of emergence which constrain historical contingencies. The rules ascribed to the agents of such models are thus frequently methodologically individualist, derived from game theory or neuroscience, and evince a preference for ahistorical abstraction. Although some forms of agent-based modelling are more localised in their orientation and

History and Event.indd 169

03/08/2015 08:39:21

170  History and Event have empirically calibrated models, these approaches count in the minority (Byrne and Callaghan 2013: 53). Given the conservative bias of much agent-based modelling, it is therefore unsurprising that this form of complexity has found little sympathy amongst critical thinkers. Byrne and Callaghan (2013: Chap. 2) see these modelling attempts as conflating fictitious assumptions with reality, refusing an ontological account of the causal powers of social structure and denying any role for transformative agency. In short, these restricted complexities are normatively and methodologically hard-wired to shore up the status quo. They cannot understand dramatic historical events like revolutions; they assume a positivist distinction between the scientist who knows and the social actors who just respond to their environment; and they cannot serve as knowledge informing a collective political project for human emancipation. Many of these concerns are well founded, and we return to them below. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to see how poststructuralist political thought aligning with the general complexity paradigm can lead towards equally undesirable excesses at the opposite extreme. Whereas for restricted complexity the hunt for order and transhistorical social logics represents a normative commitment, these thinkers, vice versa, adopt disorder and contingency as the regulative ideal guiding their engagement with complexity. Complexity, from this perspective, enjoins us to relinquish our hubris and to recognise the irreducibility of error in politics (Little 2012); to acknowledge the capricious events permeating our globally imbricated lives (Urry 2003); and to let go of our failed attempts at prediction, foresight and mastery of our historical destiny (Cilliers 1998). These recommendations should sound familiar. Indeed, the parallels with poststructuralism and postmodernism are not coincidental. There has been a concerted push to frame complexity as the scientific complement to Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives, Derrida’s anti-representational linguistics, and Foucault’s rejection of structuralism and Marxism (Cilliers 1998; Olssen 2008). This has even been extended to the post-poststructuralist ‘new materialisms’. William Connolly (2011; 2013), for instance, does so by speculatively embellishing complexity with an ‘immanentist naturalism’ or ‘philosophy of becoming’. For Connolly, forgoing the will to know, predict and control allows us to experiment with novel activist tactics tapping into the unreasonable becoming flowing through our world. An abandonment of the science of history in favour of the local, the embedded, and the contingent, for Connolly prescribes an ethical

History and Event.indd 170

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  171 sensibility substantively in keeping with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This embraces the liberating potential of contingency and forgoes a role for scientific knowledge of historical processes in orienting political practice. It is important to stress that these political and ethical interpretations of general complexity do not apply to all those falling under its umbrella. Critical realists like David Byrne insist that general complexity can provide the basis for rational, scientific knowledge of historical processes. Byrne has also taken a foremost role in advocating new social scientific methods informed by the general complexity programme. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that these poststructuralist interpretations are not inconsistent with general complexity: they merely take some of the paradigm’s tendencies to an extreme. On a more granular level, one important way in which they do so is by supporting the strong emergence hypothesis, in which events are rendered impervious to scientific explanation. The next section examines the consequences of this move before returning to the ‘restricted’ complexity approach and considering its potential role in integrating necessity with contingency, order with disorder.

Strong and Weak Emergence The concept of emergence goes back further than complexity theory. Nevertheless, despite its independent origin, emergence is widely considered one of complexity theory’s key concepts within the philosophy of science. Contemporary philosophies of emergence attempt to rescue the term from being a mere shorthand for casual indetermination, as was the idea’s fate in the early twentieth century, and use it to bring under analytic scrutiny the causal relations between the layers of a complex system. Emergence is identified with the relations of supervenience governing the borders between different scientific disciplines – physics, chemistry and biology – as well as with the mechanisms involved in how local systems such as a cellular automata emerge from their individual, rule-governed components (Holland 1998). The concept of emergence therefore has to satisfy the seemingly paradoxical criteria of how an emergent property can be both dependent on its base and autonomous from it (indeed, one is tempted to follow critical realists and draw an analogy with the Marxist base-superstructure metaphor). Bedau (2008) identifies three broad approaches: nominal, strong and weak.

History and Event.indd 171

03/08/2015 08:39:21

172  History and Event The nominal interpretation need not concern us here. In assuming that emergent properties can be easily identified, nominal emergence does not provide an explanatory mechanism differentiating the results of simple aggregation from instances of real emergent autonomy at the ‘higher’ level. More significant is the strong emergence paradigm. Strong emergence states that the ‘higher’ levels of a complex system are ontologically irreducible to their ‘lower’-level parts. The emergent properties of a system do not just exceed the aggregated properties of their components; even in principle, the emergent properties cannot be explained by reference to the behaviour of their components. So if, for instance, we consider a tropical rainstorm as having emergent properties as a result of the combination of raindrops, wind pressures, solar rays and so on, then strong emergence states that even a hypothetical Gods’-eye understanding of all the lower levels cannot account for these properties. This has the quite startling consequence that no matter how far our knowledge about the mechanisms governing emergence extends, there will be events and emergent properties which necessarily elude explanation. As Bedau (2008: 159) surmises, from this perspective emergent properties represent ‘primitive or “brute” natural powers that arise inexplicably with the existence of certain macro-level entities’. This commitment can be termed ontological irreductionism. Even if not normally using the term ‘strong emergence’, some poststructuralist political theorists taking inspiration from complexity side implicitly with this interpretation. Although in doing so they are right to emphasise complexity’s avoidance of reductionism, in aligning with strong ontological irreductionism they throw out every last drop of scientific method. For this manner of conceiving the irreducibility of emergence gains no traction on explaining emergent properties for the precise reason that strong emergence proscribes ontologically such explanations. This, for example, is broadly what Connolly means when he employs the neologisms ‘onto-unknowns’ and ‘onto-creativity’ to describe events taking place in periods of extreme disequilibrium in a complex system. ‘The reassuring faith that our inability to predict such an event is merely an epistemic screen shielding us from solid factors in principle reducible to full determination expresses a contestable ontology. It in fact expresses an ontology that needs to be contested’ (Connolly 2013b: 405). The main problem with this advocacy of strong emergence is that it ignores the literature on the alternative ‘weak emergence’ paradigm

History and Event.indd 172

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  173 which seeks to avoid such speculative excesses. As Bedau (2008: 156) persuasively argues, the point of weak emergence is to define a ‘metaphysically acceptable and scientifically useful notion of emergence [which] might involve inventing new concepts that revise our view of the world’. In this sense, weak emergence is a revisionary concept aiming not to produce an a priori metaphysics, but to provide an open analytic which can encompass epistemological developments within scientific practice. It satisfies the key demand placed on the term emergence – thinking the apparent underivability of emergent phenomena as a result of non-linear and context-dependent microlevel interactions – yet does so by still holding out the possibility of scientific explanation. Bedau (2008: 160) writes that ‘weakly emergent macro phenomena are autonomous in the sense that they can be derived only in a certain non-trivial way. In other words, they have explanatory autonomy and irreducibility, due to the complex way in which the iteration and aggregation of context-dependent micro interactions generate the macro phenomena.’ Using the example of three rule-based computer simulations taking place in John Conway’s famous game of life, Bedau (2008: 162) explains what he means by showing that there is no way of knowing in advance of running the simulations which will give rise to genuinely emergent properties. For this reason, Bedau defines weak emergence as being unidentifiable except by simulation: we cannot know, in advance of running a simulation, which underlying causal dynamic will give rise to emergent properties. Manuel De Landa (2012: 6) comes to similar conclusions in identifying emergence with simulation: Since this emergence is reproducible in many computers it can be probed and studied by different scientists as if it were a laboratory phenomenon. In other words, simulations can play the role of laboratory experiments in the study of emergence complementing the role of mathematics in deciphering the structure of possibility spaces. And philosophy can be the mechanism through which these insights can be synthesized into an emergent materialist world view that finally does justice to the creative powers of matter and energy.

In its identification with simulation, weak emergence is therefore more in keeping with the spontaneous philosophy of scientists and the tools employed in real scientific practice. Bedau endorses this pragmatic criterion to support his advocacy for weak emergence against its strong variant. There is ‘no evidence that strong emergence

History and Event.indd 173

03/08/2015 08:39:21

174  History and Event plays any role in contemporary science’, Bedau writes (2008: 159), because strong emergence ‘starts where scientific explanation ends’. Climate modellers, social science researchers, and all those whose vocation it is to create knowledge about the complex systems they study, of necessity have to hold to something like weak emergence. Strong emergence is an interesting thought experiment, but judged on the criteria that philosophy should aim to serve science and respect the autonomy of its practice, it fails the test of usefulness. This leads us to our next point of contention with the drift towards strong emergentism amongst social theorists. Too rare are their attempts to justify their alignment with strong emergence. Some simply dismiss weak emergence without further ado. ‘[W]e are not concerned with this variety of emergence’, write Osberg and Biesta (2007: 34) – and that is that. Needless to say, neither do most of the social theorists aligning with strong emergence tend to pay much attention to distinctions such as diachronic and synchronic emergence, or upwards and downwards causation. In following the paragons of the general complexity genre, poststructuralist readings of complexity exempt themselves from the need to engage such analytic binaries. Cilliers (1998: 22) provides the most straightforward defence of this perspective. He claims that analytic philosophy of science is complicit with the very modernist model of science called into question by complexity. Carving up the scientific domain into logical compartments, he alleges, aims to merely generate an abstract meta-narrative legitimating science.38 Analytic binaries take us away from the complex thought advocated by the likes of Morin, which aims to overcome classical scientific epistemology in its entirety. It is true that all interpretations of complexity, insofar as they comprise a meta-scientific enterprise more than a classically scientific one, will be prejudiced by the notions we take to the science. Yet in the absence of justifications channelled through analytic categories, readers of poststructuralist complexity theory might never know that they are being offered a contestable interpretation of the field. The main consequence is that the predominant reception of complexity by political thought, marked by a plea for humility in the face of unpredictable and scientifically inexplicable events, tells only one side of the story. The other, equally plausible side, informed by an epistemology of weak emergence, is that complexity holds out the promise of an expanded domain of scientific knowledge; that it renders intelligible the non-linear feedback loops and exaggerated

History and Event.indd 174

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  175 effects of structural bifurcations; and that it promises an enriched comprehension of emergent properties and processes as we push back scientifically and creatively against our current epistemological limitations. Where the preference for strong emergence among poststructuralist social theorists encourages them to see events as inexplicable exceptions to historical processes, an epistemology of weak emergence does not foreclose the possibility of making intelligible their relation. Restricted complexity methods closer to weak emergence might then, appropriately retooled, usefully bridge history and event in historical science.

The Politics of Simulation Previously, we remarked on some of the apposite criticisms directed against restricted complexity and its principal methodology: agentbased modelling and simulation. This method’s predilection towards methodologically individualist foundations; its ahistorical and idealist assumptions; its denial of an ontology of social structure; and its normative preference for order over disorder – all these would seem not to augur well for its contribution to a new science of history. When ‘agents’ in these simulations are taken as individuals whose interaction is productive of group norms, this takes us far from a historical science incorporating economic production, class conflict, institutions, social demographics, and the reflexive capacities of conscious social actors. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish between what agent-based modelling and simulation conventionally entails and the theoretical possibilities enabled by these methods. For, seen from a more imaginative perspective, there is nothing intrinsic to the method prescribing the need for individuals to be the sole units of analysis. Classes could be modelled as agents; the emergence of institutions might be derived from different economic configurations; and simulation of group norms could be extended to the reflexive powers for social organisation transforming individuals’ behaviour. Advocates of agent-based modelling are often sceptical about specifying such meso- or macro-level structures and simulating processes of downward causation (Sawyer 2003). But this is only because of their determination to simulate emergence on the basis of methodologically individualist assumptions and because of their belief in the purity of relying on only a minimal number of axioms.

History and Event.indd 175

03/08/2015 08:39:21

176  History and Event Yet as Byrne and Callaghan (2013: Chap. 9) have argued at length, the social ontology we bring to complexity in many respects dictates what we get out of it. If one enters the model with an incredibly restricted number of apodictic laws about human behaviour, one should not be surprised if the resulting simulation applies only to an incredibly idealised domain of human behaviour. Although agentbased modelling’s novelty lies in how it simulates the interactions of heterogeneous agents and adopts an experimental approach to emergence, if overly pared down in its assumptions it can merely reduplicate Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature or Robinson Crusoe’s desert island. If, on the other hand, agents are modelled at multiple levels from individuals to social classes, and meso and macro structures are specified in accordance with the characteristic features of human civilisations, then a richer experimental domain is made available. The balance between simplicity and detail in the model’s structural specification is therefore one of calibration between ahistorical abstraction and historical contextualism. Modulating simulations experimentally between either extreme can serve to disentangle general constraining principles governing human interaction (necessity) from the inflections provided by specific social structures (contingency). Or better, in modelling downward causal processes such simulations may even destabilise assumptions about fundamental human behaviour and point to the historical-structural conditions which shape and change it. The upshot is that agent-based modelling is not tied necessarily to methodological individualism, ahistorical idealism, and a monolithic focus on order. Even granting that the moderated level of abstraction proposed here might not satisfy Byrne and Callaghan’s (2013) preference for highly localised, empirically calibrated simulations, neither do such hypothetically retooled agent-based models seem inconsistent with the critical realist take on complexity. Thom’s bifurcation theory, proposing a structural morphology with different attractors representing an open yet finite number of social possibilities, complements the experimental work of modelling. Simulations can serve not only to disentangle necessity and contingency, preventing us from advocating an excessively utopian politics, but also, calibrated to our specific historical time, allow us to experiment with the political alliances, forms of organisation, and sites of intervention best suited to help bring about lasting change. This is not to say that these simulations will actually predict anything reliably enough to be of

History and Event.indd 176

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  177 immediate use in political practice. But they may be good enough to help get a feel for the general constraining principles we work within and the direction in which history is heading. ‘Men make their own history,’ Marx once declared; but, he added, ‘they do not make it as they please’. In a complex, epistemologically opaque and globalised world, agent-based modelling and simulation may help us know the limits and the potential of political practice. It should be acknowledged that there is a politics of logistical and cognitive limitation which might prevent complexity science from actually serving this function. After all, agent-based modelling and simulation demands a level of expertise that at present it is hard to imagine being brought to bear in the service of a counter-hegemonic project. Who would run such models, and how their insights could be operationalised, is far from clear. Perhaps more problematically, should such tools find employment they would confer a certain authority to those who operate them. In order to avoid processes of reflexivity undermining the model’s predictions, the results of simulation may need to be masked from the individuals and groups being modelled, raising the spectre of social manipulation. Yet one could also ask whether the use of these tools really would be such a profound shift away from current practice. Do not the leaders of even radical left political parties make use of polling data and statistics in order to facilitate their strategic decisions? Does not the environmental movement ultimately defer to the wisdom of expert climate scientists whose models serve to dictate the rhythms and the urgency of activist interventions? There are no easy answers to the questions and I will not squander the limited number of words I have left attempting to provide them. I will, however, conclude by noting the gains made by complexity models over the theoretical lineages looked at in both parts of this book. In terms of the authority they bestow, these models’ openness to empirical verification and the fact that they offer tools which anyone with a computer and a theoretically informed imagination can put to use, takes us a long way from the Platonic heights assumed by Althusserian theory. They bring us back to something closer to the materialism of classical Marxism, but free of its teleology and its problematic relationship with the natural sciences. Equally so, simulations allow us to further Althusser’s project of rationally articulating discontinuous events with historical change, but liberate us from the hermetic rationalist edifices of Althusserian theoreticism.

History and Event.indd 177

03/08/2015 08:39:21

178  History and Event A complexity theory navigating between the general and restricted paradigms, holding to an epistemology of weak emergence, and reorienting agent-based modelling away from methodological individualism thus provides the basis for a science of history circumventing the impasses discerned in both parts of this book. In breaking free of teleology, respecting the autonomy of natural science, and permitting empirical verification of its analysis, this complex science of history might just earn a right to the name materialism. Only time will tell.

The End of the Beginning What I hope to have demonstrated in this book is that neither classical Marxism nor contemporary French theory provides us with satisfactory solutions for thinking scientifically historical change. Complexity is no different. It provides no panacea which will magically resolve all the theoretical problems encountered by these traditions. Complexity may improve decisively upon these theoretical lineages in a number of respects, but it does not obviate the need for theorisation of social structure or historical periodisation, nor of the role of theory in political practice. One might ask, then, whether we even need a science of history grounded in mathematics, epistemology, or complexity science? We have already addressed reasons why postmodern philosophies of the event, surrendering political change to the liberating power of contingent events, are insufficient. A more subtle challenge is posed by the kind of mid-level theorising taking its inspiration from Weber’s ideal types (Portes 2010: Chap. 1). Mid-level theorising, avoiding grand theory while acknowledging the poverty of mere empirical descriptivism, is the signature form of social scientific discourse today. It tailors its theorisations to the specific object in question and acknowledges that no one theory will ever be able to explain everything, and certainly not something as multi-faceted as the movement of history. It is hard to deny the appeal of this argument. And it is worth admitting that in many cases this might be the entirely correct approach to gaining a deeper understanding of social scientific and theoretical problems. Yet there is also a very real danger that giving up on grand theory and its scientific aspirations will limit our ability to imagine how things once were and will be radically different from how they are today. The limited scope of the mid-level position can

History and Event.indd 178

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Afterword  179 elide all too easily into surrendering the Enlightenment conviction that employing knowledge of the mechanisms of historical change is our best bet for realising human emancipation. If nothing else, this book aims to show that there is a certain intricate beauty, theoretical bravado and an enrichment of the imagination that sweeps through the whole enterprise of thinking rationally history and event: from Marxism to contemporary French theory. This project has been at the cutting edge of radical political thought since the early nineteenth century. It has shaped the destiny of political movements and, for better or worse, made the modern world what it is today. We may be increasingly sceptical of grand historical visions. Yet today more than ever we feel powerless to bring the course of events under control and to realise a socially just future. Sciences of history surely still have a role to play.

History and Event.indd 179

03/08/2015 08:39:21

History and Event.indd 180

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Notes

Notes 1. Pierre Macherey’s (2011: 11) search for the ‘conflictual unity’ of commonly counterpoised philosophies serves as a prototype for this book’s approach to genealogy. A close collaborator of Althusser’s in his project of the 1960s, what Macherey attempts to convey with this choice of words is a way to read philosophies through one another without assuming either progressive improvement or the purity of origins. 2. Though one does not have to stretch far to intuit parallels between Hegel and Althusser’s rationalist epistemology, Badiou’s (2010) Idea of communism, and Meillassoux’s (2008) speculative materialism, such parallels should not be expected to grant great insight into these philosophies’ novel contributions (nor do they in the frenetic efforts of Slavoj Žižek (2012) to craft a Badiouian Hegel). 3. An analogy can shed light on the problem. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), the most eventalist paradigm within Anglo-American philosophy of science, also struggled against accusations of authoritarianism (see Fuller 2000). Because Kuhn insisted upon scientific revolutions as an incommensurable break with existing paradigms, delivered by a miraculous flash of insight, he was forced to insist that ‘paradigm shifts’ rest solely on the application of disciplinary force. Ultimately, Kuhn’s refusal of both rationalist and empirical criteria as determining the outcome of a scientific revolution led him to what some see as a theoretical endorsement of mob rule. 4. In Anti-Dühring Engels faults Dühring for failing to go beyond Hegel’s Logic yet employs Hegelian concepts and examples practically to the letter. Chapter X, which Engels reports was written by Marx, deals exclusively with political economy and does not make mention of any of the more speculative themes running through the rest of the book. 5. There are two instances, however, where Marxist thinkers come close. Étienne Balibar touches upon the issue when he insists that ‘the transition from one mode of production to another, e.g., from capitalism

History and Event.indd 181

03/08/2015 08:39:21

182  History and Event to socialism, cannot consist of the transformation of the structure by its functioning itself, i.e. of any transformation of quantity into quality’ (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 307). Badiou (2009a: 4) comes yet closer in Theory of the Subject when he writes that Hegel’s objective ‘is nothing less than to give rise to the dialectic of the One and the many, of the infinite and the finite’, that is, ‘what we orthodox Marxists call quantitative accumulation, which, as everyone knows, is reputed to produce a quantitative leap’. Badiou (2007c: 169) will later criticise Hegel in Being and Event when he derides Hegel’s mathematical infinite as a trick of ‘speculative theatre’. 6. The intermediary form of the 1804–5 Jena Logic shows the importance Hegel attached to Quantity and Measure. In this early text, logic and metaphysics are still maintained as separate regions of being (Hegel 1986; see also Giovanni 2010: xix). Although the first section of the Jena Logic corresponds with the Logic’s Doctrine of Being, absent is the section on Measure where Quantity and Quality are synthesised (Rinaldi 1992: 91). Indeed, in Jena, Hegel repudiates the concept of Measure he will later endorse in the Logic. He writes, ‘The Thing does not disappear in the absolutely small any more than it goes beyond itself in the absolutely large; the disappearance does not become intelligible by increase or decrease because it is of the essence of magnitude that it be not a determinacy of the Thing itself’ (Hegel 1986: 19). The later Nürnberg Logic on the other hand – so-called after the five texts written during Hegel’s time as Rector and Professor in the town’s Gymnasium – marks the end of the distinction between logic and metaphysics. And by Hegel’s last 1810/11 text written in the city, the end of this distinction also coincides with the introduction of the category of Measure. In addition, the most significant revisions to the 1832 edition of the Logic were appendices of extra mathematical reflections. This further indicates the centrality of the transition for Hegel. In the Jena Logic, Harris notes that ‘Hegel needs to resort to a long note (or a series of notes) at this point because in the first place he wants to put his discussion of the “bad” infinite into the context of the “good infinite” (the “absolute essence,” which properly belongs to metaphysics)’ (H. S. Harris explanatory note in Hegel 1986: 14). 7. If Hegel could not show how the mathematical infinite resolves itself into ‘true’ infinity he would lack a logical proof for demonstrating the superiority of infinite speculative reason (Vernunft) compared with the concepts of the finite intellect/understanding (Verstand). Nonetheless, it is worth acknowledging that some scholars contest this interpretation of Hegel’s intentions. The editors of a recent volume on Hegel’s thought consider the view that Hegel privileges Reason a conservative interpretation where Hegel is attributed a liberal-minded

History and Event.indd 182

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Notes  183 bourgeois sensibility ‘grounded in the idealized split between Reason and the external world’ (Žižek et al. 2011: 2). A similar debate has taken place between John Burbidge (1990) and Stephen Houlgate (1990). The former argues that the culmination of Hegel’s Logic in the Absolute does not demean finite understanding but rather establishes it as the most crucial of all speculative moments. Drawing on a wealth of citations which show Hegel taking the opposite view, Houlgate provides a convincing rejoinder to this revisionist view. 8. An intermediary view on the matter is suggested by Kol’man and Yanovskaya (1983) who argue that Hegel exposes deep, underlying issues related to the quantitative finite’s relation to the infinite. Kol’man and Yanovskaya (1983: 237–8) argue, however, that Hegel ‘thinks that such a transition [between elementary and higher mathematics] is only conceivable outside of mathematics in his philosophical system . . . and in doing so replaces the then still unknown real relations with ideal, fantastical relations and thus creates an apparent solution where he should have sharply posed an unsolved problem’. 9. With these epistemological deficits in mind, it is possible to appreciate why despite appearing to stress conceptual movement Hegel’s ontology is essentially static; it rests on a cyclical epistemology where all innovations have to be reinterpreted through the successive historical development of metaphysical categories. As Colletti (1973: 135) rightly concludes, ‘the principle of reason or dialectical contradiction is insufficient not only in scientific knowledge but also in historical knowledge’. 10. In a letter sent on 16 June 1867, Engels (1987: 382) advises Marx to treat the first chapter of Capital ‘in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, with short paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasised by means of a special heading’. Further on in the letter Engels (1987: 382) refers to A. W. Hoffman’s theory of the molecule as a Hegelian ‘nodal point’, which ‘marks a qualitative change’. Marx responds on 22 June by pointing Engels to the end of his third chapter of Capital, where in a footnote Marx represents the transformation of a master of trade into a capitalist as a quantity-quality transformation attesting to the Hegelian law operative in ‘history and natural science alike’ (Marx 1987: 385). Engels was to make this note the centre of his case for the saliency of Hegel’s law for Marxist dialectics in his Anti-Dühring. It is not clear from the letter, however, if Marx added this note on the impulse of Engels’s suggestions. Given their close personal relationship it seems likely that some of Engels’s enthusiasm for Hegel rubbed off on Marx during this time. The fact that this Hegelian ‘law’ was consigned to a footnote by Marx and elevated to a general law of the dialectic by Engels is nonetheless symptomatic of their lasting differences on the subject.

History and Event.indd 183

03/08/2015 08:39:21

184  History and Event 11. Engels’s Anti-Dühring was written against Dühring’s reformism and presents dialectical laws as valid in nature, science, history and political economy. Thus, although Engels does not position explicitly quantity-quality leaps as a model of social revolution, one does not have to stretch too far to make the connection, as did Kautsky (1916) and Plekhanov (1974a; 1969). 12. I concur with Carver (2000: 41) when he argues for an interpretative strategy of ‘minimising Hegel’ in order to move away from the narrative set in place by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach which sees Marx as engaging in a lifelong Oedipal struggle with Hegel. 13. There is no consensus on the definition of real abstraction. SohnRethel, for instance, focuses exclusively on the commodity form. In his words, the ‘view that abstraction was not the exclusive property of the mind, but arises in commodity exchange was first expressed by Marx in the beginning of Capital and earlier in the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, where he speaks of an abstraction other than that of thought’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 19). Colletti (1975a: 39), on the other hand, has made a strong case that Marx adheres to the notion throughout his works. ‘The process is always the same. Whether the argument is with fetishism and alienation, or with Hegel’s mystifying logic, it hinges upon the hypostatizing, the reifying, of abstractions.’ For a good introduction to debates about real abstraction, see the first part of Alberto Toscano’s (2008) article. 14. Carver (2000: 50) writes that Marx ‘might reasonably have considered that even a polished version of his work on the relevant “simple determinations” in the Grundrisse was an unnecessary and possibly confusing step in putting his case to the reader of Capital’. However, it seems more likely that Marx considered these simple determinations as initial interrogations of the subject matter which would have to be substituted with real scientific analysis. 15. For more on temporality in Marx’s mathematical writings, see Carchedi (2008). 16. Marx’s problem is laid out with a simple example: In the function y = ax if you have an increase in the magnitude of y then y1 = ax1 and y1 – y = a(x1 − x). But if you perform the differential operation by making x1 = x (i.e. by reducing the difference to nothing) then the complete equation y1 − y = a(x1 − x) also reduces to nothing: 0 = 0. Escaping this impasse involves determining the ‘moments’ of the transformation. If instead of dy the equation is presented in the foldx lowing form:

y1 − y ∆y = a= x1 − x ∆x

History and Event.indd 184

03/08/2015 08:39:21

Notes  185 Marx argues that the change in x ‘was thus necessarily a finite difference’, hence the possibility to represent it as a change in quantity ∆. For Marx this insight goes towards showing that a presentation of dy dx as an infinitesimal is a chimera. 17. Finelli (2007: 62) writes that ‘for Engels, commodity → value → labour → money → capital is an historical progression which is mirrored in the logical progression, of the same order with which Marx supposedly constructed Capital by employing a simplistically materialist gnoseology, based on the reflection of the real in the logical-mental’. The relationship between Marx’s categories and their historicity continues to perplex. Schmidt (1981: 64) writes that the ‘relationship [in Marx’s mature political economy] between scientific presentation and the real movement’ of history was not settled. 18. On Marx’s theory of money see Foley (1983; 2005). One of the major contemporary debates is whether for Marx money needs to be a commodity, or whether Marx’s analysis is compatible with fiat money (see Williams 2000). 19. Contemporary anthropological research continues to undermine the impression that money occupies an intermediary place in a historical sequence whereby a simple commodity economy gives way to capitalism. As we now know, complex financial instruments and credit go back all the way to the ancient world (see Harris 2006; Graeber 2010). Marx was therefore right to see the commodity form abstraction as the basis of the monetary expression of value even before the valorisation circuit establishes its dominance under capitalism. 20. The so-called ‘transformation problem’ underlines the significance of temporality for Marx’s labour theory of value. Ladislaus Bort­ kiewicz’s neoclassical critique of Marx took a simultaneist approach to valuing input and output prices, resulting in a divergence between aggregate values and prices rendering Marx’s theory logically inconsistent (see Kliman 2007: Chap. 3). In Bortkiewicz’s words (cited in Kliman 2007: 47), he rejected Marx’s economics where factors are ‘regarded as a kind of causal chain, in which each link is determined, in its composition and magnitude, only by preceding links’. 21. This might be considered close to an ‘orthodox’ account of Capital’s structure in the view of the ‘new dialecticians’. Arthur (2004: 18) describes the orthodox account as ‘a sequence of models, that a model of simple commodity production as a one class society allows him to give a complete account of the law of value, and that the subsequent introduction of a model of capitalism as a two class society allows him to demonstrate the origin of surplus-value through the specific inflection capital gives to this law of value; subsequently more complicated models, including landed property and the like,

History and Event.indd 185

03/08/2015 08:39:22

186  History and Event introduce still further distortions of the operation of the law of value’. 22. Marx believed that the expropriation of the means of production would not mean devising an entirely new organisational infrastructure, since the planning going on within large capitalist firms already prefigures the rational planning of the entire economy. Experiences in the Soviet Union, however, suggest that while the socialisation of great swathes of the economy is possible, controlling money, efficiently allocating resources and overcoming value/price imbalances is not as simple as Marx imagined (Gourvitch 1936; Nove 1961; Nakamura 2011). 23. The need for communist theoretical insight is also distinguished from utopian socialism through the temporality of social revolution. Marx (1963: 18) writes that the ‘social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’. Social democracy wishes to transform antagonism into harmony (Marx 1963: 50), whereas the aim of a truly modern revolution is to release the fruits of the ‘most singular contradiction’ (Marx 1963: 22). For Tomba, Marx’s theorisation of revolutionary temporality signals a mediation, or better, interruption, of the gradualism of historical materialism. Marx ‘reasons with a plural semantics of history: he counterpoises a notion of history marked by fractures to the history of the continuum. This contraposition is political: it grows out of the search for a revolution capable of interrupting the continuum’ (Tomba 2012: 54). 24. That said, it is necessary to acknowledge the Renaissance in studies of Althusser’s work over the last decade. Not only are the overlapping concerns with contemporaries like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Deleuze being explored through Althusser’s archives of unpublished material (Montag 2013; Peden 2014), but Althusser’s influence upon the thought of Alain Badiou, considered by many the greatest living French philosopher, has also encouraged a focus on the field of French historical epistemology of the 1960s (Eyers 2013). 25. Like many of his critics I believe that Althusser’s post-’68 revisions introduced little more than a tip of the hat towards class struggle, won at the price of rendering his project inconsistent and ultimately degenerate. At the same time, against the attempt to recuperate Althusser’s legacy by valorising his ‘philosophy of the encounter’ (see Coole and Frost 2010), I defend Althusser’s project of the mid-1960s as the source of his most fecund contributions to contemporary theory. 26. Althusser’s development of his epistemology within the discourse of dialectical materialism has fenced it off from mainstream philosophy of science. Add to this Althusser’s situation within the tradition of French

History and Event.indd 186

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Notes  187 scientific rationalism – circling theoretical loci foreign to a discourse dominated by the names of Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos – and his seemingly traceless contribution to the field is not surprising. Unusual indeed is a book like A. F. Chalmers’s What is This Thing Called Science? (1976) which discusses Althusser’s theories (and even here, Althusser is consigned to the end of the book as just a ‘radical critic’; Chalmers removed his discussion of Althusser from later editions). Lecourt (1975: 9) observes that ‘The New Scientific Mind, Gaston Bachelard’s first great work, was published in 1934, the same year in which Karl Popper’s famous book The Logic of Scientific Discovery appeared in Vienna. During the subsequent thirty years the works of the one and the other have been developed, enriched, corrected and broadcast without it ever being possible to register either the beginnings of a confrontation or a sign of any emulation between them.’ 27. Lecourt (1975: 10–16) argues convincingly that Kuhn considers ‘normal science’ under an idealist notion of normativity stemming entirely from the choices the scientific community chooses to make. Bachelard, by contrast, stresses that the truth of a science is immanent to its practice. 28. Jacques Rancière alleges that Althusserian philosophy was a discourse used to reassert order in the Universities after the 1968 student revolts. Science is accorded assumed neutrality by Althusser only because ‘class struggle is not already there, for example, in the social function of the scientific institution and its concomitant modes of selection . . . in sum, in the double relationship scientific activity entertains with power and with the masses. All of this is replaced by a class struggle conceived through the opposition between a materialist element originating in science and an idealist element intrinsic to it’ (Rancière 2011: 63). Gregory Elliott (1987: 188) also demurs: ‘The imputation of a spontaneous materialism to the proletariat integral to the “representative” function of Marxist philosophy is at best implausible.’ 29. Focusing almost exclusively on Being and Event runs the risk of missing the nuances introduced in the second stage of his mature work, which offers a gradated typology of events (Badiou 2009b: 374). I excuse neglecting these modifications to Badiou’s philosophy on the grounds that Logics of Worlds does not add to the lines drawn in Being and Event between philosophy/truth procedures and ontological/non-ontological situations. If nothing else, the sheer complication of putting both periods of Badiou’s mature philosophy into systematic relation – one not helped by their incomplete connection – militates against the possibility of taking a comprehensive overview of both periods in a single chapter.

History and Event.indd 187

03/08/2015 08:39:22

188  History and Event 30. Badiou’s contribution to Althusser’s ‘Philosophy Course’ lecture series was published as The Concept of Model. In this book, Badiou considers ‘model’ both a descriptive (ideological) notion of scientific activity, and a concept (scientific) in mathematical logic. Badiou (2007b: 12) then argues that the use of mathematical logic can perform the partisan role of recovering science and in so doing make a contribution to class struggle in theory. This entails drawing a line of demarcation between the formal model (progressive) and the vulgar epistemological model (reactionary). In Badiou’s demonstration logical positivism is thereby exposed as illegitimate because it fails to recognise how the formal syntax (drawing on recursive algebra) and the semantic model (based in set theory) adjoin one another in an experimental dialectic. Where Althusser had only invoked science for identifying the science/ideology rupture, Badiou locates within mathematical model theory a site of rupture between logical syntax and semantic models. For more on Badiou’s The Concept of Model see Brassier (2005). 31. In his book Cohen (2008) contrasts forcing with the standard mathematical notion of implication. Whereas implication demands that a statement implies another to be true (e.g., a ⇒ P, or, if a then P), forcing differs in that when constructing a generic set consistent with the model, it is necessary to construct statements (A) which can be decided true or false for this generic set. Because statements about the generic set cannot contradict the semantics of the ‘ground model’, this means that in compiling consistent statements it is possible to create a finite set of such statements (P), what Cohen calls a ‘forcing condition’. Forcing therefore differs from implication because not just any set a satisfying the set of statements P will also satisfy the requirement of P to impute truth or falsity to a statement A about a. Only a generic set a will fulfil this demand. 32. Another motivation for questioning why Badiou makes use of Cohen’s semantic forcing method is provided by the existence of a Boolean model variant utilised by ‘beginner’s guides’ to forcing (Chow 2008). This procedure differs from Cohen’s in that it creates a Boolean algebraic model 𝔹 within the standard model M of set theory, and then uses an ultra-filter mapping to verify or disprove independence results. Despite the fact that the development of syntactic, Boolean approaches contributed to Cohen’s decision in favour of a formalist philosophy of mathematics (Kanamori 2008: 369), Badiou describes pejoratively the Boolean approach as a ‘realist’ interpretation. Nowhere has it been addressed satisfactorily why Badiou chooses to follow Cohen’s semantic forcing technique. Although Jean-Toussaint Desanti (2004: 63) teases the reader with a

History and Event.indd 188

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Notes  189 promise to ask ‘how is it that Badiou seems to have had no option other than to accept completely the “procedure” of forcing, and more specifically, the version of it put forward by Cohen himself?’ he frustratingly neglects to answer his own question. Though Badiou’s reasons remain opaque, my suspicion is that he sticks with Cohen’s original semantic approach because it maintains a clearer sense of internality and externality, and hence something analogically closer to the ontological/non-ontological distinction upheld throughout the rest of Being and Event. 33. In the 1960s and 70s a number of scholars – Emmanuel Terray, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Pierre Philippe Rey – attempted to synthesise the work of Althusser with the insights of Claude Meillassoux’s ethnography. Their work concerned thinking how ‘traditional economies’ are synthesised with the capitalist economy to form a complex articulation of modes of production. The ‘Meillassoux seminar’, as it was known, ran for a decade from 1969 and was known as a lively cross-disciplinary forum for exchanging new ideas. See Saul (2005) and Schlemmer (2005). 34. Toscano (2010: 24) writes that though ‘few philosophical positions are ever readily reducible to the status of symptoms, it would also be naïve to disregard the link between the recent period of capitalist restoration and the emergence of concern with the messianic and the event’. 35. Astute readers will recognise this as the crux of Meillassoux’s entire argument. In an extremely incisive critique Catren takes issue with Meillassoux’s desire to prove that we cannot discover any rational necessity of physical laws, accusing him of fomenting confusion between epistemological criticism and ontological idealism. The result is that far from ‘defending science from the Ptolemaic counterrevolution that Meillassoux describes so admirably, this narcissistic absolutisation of an inexistent limitation bolsters a certain form of contempt for scientific rationality’ (Catren 2012: 466). 36. Edgar Morin (2008: 4, 31) announces the need for a new ‘complex thought’ adamantly opposed to the ‘obtuse doctrines’, ‘narrow-minded scientism’ and ‘arrogance’ of Althusserian Marxism and structuralism. Byrne (1998; Byrne and Callaghan 2013) also takes persistent pot-shots at Althusser by citing Thompson’s (1978) polemic. The rhetorical bluster surrounding Althusser seems to derive from a rather one-sided reading of his theory of ideology and a misunderstanding of his anti-humanism as a form of absolute structural determinism. One also suspects that Althusser serves as a something of a straw man for affirming one’s own conviction in the transformative potential of human agency.

History and Event.indd 189

03/08/2015 08:39:22

190  History and Event 37. A third is Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, but I do not consider this branch of complexity theory in this book. As Castellani and Hafferty (2009) have shown in their network analysis of the sociology and complexity science community, Luhmann’s school of complexity is relatively disconnected from the rest of the field. 38. Cilliers and those of a similar opinion fail to address a crucial advantage to working within the framework of analytic philosophy of science. For even if we acknowledge the artificiality of analytic categories, this does not lessen their ability to help us clarify the reasons we give for adopting certain configurations of the complexity framework. The highly sophisticated discussions of complexity and emergence for thinking social structure, agency and change by critical realists like Tony Lawson (2012) and Dave Elder-Vass (2010) provide a model example of how these categories serve not to stultify discussion but to deepen and advance its exploration. To refuse to engage the categories provided by philosophy of science, those which allow us to clarify and defend our normative commitments, is thus to commit a naturalistic fallacy: it is to elide an assumed epistemic fact into an ethical prescription. It results in a vicious circularity between complexity and poststructuralist philosophy where one is never certain that the science is not being marshalled solely to support philosophically derived convictions. In an innocuous sense, this could mean that complexity ends up serving merely to support a world view derived from poststructuralist philosophy (the philosophical tail wagging the scientific dog). At its worst, it can transform into a self-legitimating ethical prescription: the world is complex, thus, so too should be our politics. Cilliers (1998: 127) is guilty of this when he argues that ‘[l]iberty and justice will not come about through the imposition of universal laws by some form of central control, nor will science flourish if it maintains a closed shop and speaks a private language.’ Such remarks are all the more problematic when one considers his sanitised representation of the economy. Cilliers pictures the economy as a network of investors, borrowers, consumers and traders; class, wage labour and inequality disappear from sight. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the structural level of the economy gives way to a form of methodological individualism. Working through the analytic categories of rigorous philosophy of science would at least have forced Cilliers to justify his choices here.

History and Event.indd 190

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography

Bibliography Althusser, Louis (1976), Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke, London: NLB. Althusser, Louis (1993), The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, eds Oliver Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, trans. Richard Veasy, New York: The New Press. Althusser, Louis (1998), ‘Preface to Pierre Macherey’s Article “Georges Canghuilhem’s Philosophy of Science: Epistemology and History of Science”’, in Warren Montag (ed.), In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey, trans. Ted Stolze, London and New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis (2001), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press. Althusser, Louis (2003), ‘The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research’, in François Matheron (ed.), The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–1967), trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso, pp. 1–18. Althusser, Louis (2005), For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London and New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis (2006a), ‘Marx in His Limits’, in F. Matheron and O. Corpet (eds), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso, pp. 7–162. Althusser, Louis (2006b), The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis (2006c), ‘Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher’, in F. Matheron and O. Corpet (eds), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso, pp. 290–2. Althusser, Louis (2006d), ‘Philosophy and Marxism’, in F. Matheron and O. Corpet (eds), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso, pp. 251–89. Althusser, Louis (2007a), ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’, in Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster, London and New York: Verso, pp. 161–86.

History and Event.indd 191

03/08/2015 08:39:22

192  History and Event Althusser, Louis (2007b), ‘Montesquieu: Politics and History’, in Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster, London and New York: Verso, pp. 13–107. Althusser, Louis (2011), Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso Books. Althusser, Louis (2014), On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, London and New York: Verso. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar (2009), Reading Capital, London and New York: Verso. Anderson, Kevin (1995), Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Aristotle (2001), ‘Categoriae’, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: The Modern Library, pp. 7–39. Arthur, Christopher J. (2004), The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Arthur, Christopher J., and Geert Reuten (1998), ‘Marx’s Capital II, The Circulation of Capital: General Introduction’, in Christopher J. Arthur and Geert Reuten (eds), The Circulation of Capital: Essays on Volume Two of Marx’s Capital, Houndmills: Macmillan Press, pp. 1–16. Aubin, David (2004), ‘Forms of Explanation in the Catastrophe Theory of René Thom: Topology, Morphogenesis, and Structuralism’, in M. N. Wise (ed.), Growing Explanations: Historical Perspective on the Sciences of Complexity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 95–130. Axelrod, Robert (1997), The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton Studies in Complexity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bachelard, Gaston (2002), The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary MacAllester, Manchester: Clinamen Press. Badiou, Alain (1990), Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Badiou, Alain (2001), Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain (2006a), Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain (2006b), Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain (2006c), Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, London and New York: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2006d), Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Trans­ itive Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

History and Event.indd 192

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  193 Badiou, Alain (2007a), ‘Interview with Alain Badiou by Tzuchien Tho’, in Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, Melbourne: Re.press, pp. 79–106. Badiou, Alain (2007b), The Concept of Model, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, Melbourne: Re.press. Badiou, Alain (2007c), Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Badiou, Alain (2008), The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans. David Fernbach, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain (2009a), Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, London and New York: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2009b), Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano, London and New York: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2010), The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran, London and New York: Verso Books. Badiou, Alain (2011a), ‘Can Change Be Thought? An Interview with Alain Badiou Conducted by Bruno Bosteels’, in Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 289–317. Badiou, Alain (2011b), ‘The Democratic Emblem’, in Amy Allen (ed.), Democracy in What State?, New Directions in Critical Theory, trans. William McCuaig, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, pp. 6–15. Badiou, Alain (2011c), Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Badiou, Alain (2012a), The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain (2012b), Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels, London and New York: Verso. Badiou, Alain, Joël Bellassen, and Louis Mossot (2011), The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, trans. Tzuchien Tho, Melbourne: Re.press. Bedau, Mark A. (2008), ‘Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence’, in Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys (eds), Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 155–88. Bernstein, Eduard (1961), Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, trans. Edith C. Harvey, New York: Schocken Books. Bosteels, Bruno (2001), ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: Part I – The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?’, Pli 12: 200–29. Bosteels, Bruno (2011), Badiou and Politics, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Brassier, Ray (2005), ‘Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10 (2): 135–50.

History and Event.indd 193

03/08/2015 08:39:22

194  History and Event Brassier, Ray (2007), Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Nathan (2009), ‘Rationalist Empiricism/Dialectical Materialism: From Althusser to Meillassoux’, presented at Middlesex University’s CRMEP research seminar series. Brown, Nathan (2011), ‘The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux’, in Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman, and Levi Bryant (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, pp. 142–63. Burbidge, John (1990), ‘Where Is the Place of Understanding?’, in George di Giovanni (ed.), Essays on Hegel’s Logic, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 171–82. Burns, Tony, and Ian Fraser (eds) (2000), The Hegel–Marx Connection, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Byrne, David (1998), Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Byrne, David (2005), ‘Complexity, Configurations and Cases’, Theory, Culture & Society 22 (5): 95–111. Byrne, David, and Gillian Callaghan (2013), Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art, London and New York: Routledge. Callinicos, Alex (1996), Althusser’s Marxism, London: Pluto Press. Canguilhem, Georges (1975), ‘Foreword’, in Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB, p. 23. Canguilhem, Georges (1991), The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen, New York: Zone Books. Cantor, Georg (1941), ‘On Infinite, Linear Point-Manifolds’, in Transfinite Numbers: Three Papers on Transfinite Numbers from the Mathematische Annalen, trans. George A. Bingley, pp. 92–150. Cantor, Georg (1952), Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, The Open Court Series of Classics of Science and Philosophy 1, trans. Philip E. B. Jourdain, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Carchedi, Gugliemo (2008), ‘Dialectics and Temporality in Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts’, Science and Society 72 (4): 415–26. Carlson, David Gray (2003), ‘Hegel’s Theory of Measure’, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Working Paper No. 66. Carver, Terrell (1983), Marx & Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Carver, Terrell (2000), ‘Hegel and Marx: Reflections on the Narrative’, in Tony Burns and Ian Fraser (eds), The Hegel–Marx Connection, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, pp. 34–55. Castellani, Brian, and Frederic W. Hafferty (2009), Sociology and

History and Event.indd 194

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  195 Complexity Science: A New Field of Inquiry, Understanding Complex Systems, Berlin: Springer. Catren, Gabriel (2012), ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish the Copernican Revolution’, Collapse V: 455–502. Chalmers, A. F. (1976), What Is This Thing Called Science?, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Chow, Timothy T. (2008), ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing’, http://arxiv. org/pdf/0712.1320v2.pdf (last accessed 6 March 2015). Cilliers, Paul (1998), Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, New York and London: Routledge. Cohen, Paul (2002), ‘The Discovery of Forcing’, Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 32 (4): 1071–100. Cohen, Paul (2008), Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, New York: Dover Publications. Colletti, Lucio (1972), From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White, New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Colletti, Lucio (1973), Marxism and Hegel [Volume II], trans. L. Garner, London and New York: Verso. Colletti, Lucio (1975a), ‘Introduction’, in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Books, pp. 7–56. Colletti, Lucio (1975b), ‘Marxism and the Dialectic’, trans. John Matthews, New Left Review 93: 3–29. Connolly, William (1981), Appearance and Reality in Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, William (2011), A World of Becoming, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William (2013a), The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William E. (2013b), ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 399–412. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost (eds) (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dauben, Joseph Warren (1990), Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Landa, Manuel (2012), Philosophy and Simulation, London and New York: Continuum. Della Volpe, Galvano (1978), Rousseau and Marx, trans. John Fraser, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Della Volpe, Galvano (1980), Logic as a Positive Science, trans. John Rothschild, London: NLB.

History and Event.indd 195

03/08/2015 08:39:22

196  History and Event Depre, Olivier (1998), ‘The Ontological Foundations of Hegel’s Dissertation’, in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 257–82. Derrida, Jacques (2006), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge. Desanti, Jean-Toussaint (2004), ‘Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou’, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 59–66. Dunayevskaya, Raya (1973), Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao, New York: Delacorte Press. Elder-Vass, Dave (2010), The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, Gregory (1987), Althusser: The Detour of Theory, London and New York: Verso. Engels, Friedrich (1936a), Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), ed. C. P. Dutt, trans. Emile Burns, The Marxist-Leninist Library 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, Friedrich (1936b), Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt, The Marxist-Leninist Library 2, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, Friedrich (1941), Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt, The Marxist-Leninist Library 19, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Engels, Friedrich (1981), ‘Preface’, in Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin Books, pp. 91–111. Engels, Friedrich (1987), ‘Engels to Marx in London: Manchester, 16 June 1867’, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 381–3. Epstein, Joshua M. (2007), Generative Social Science: Studies in AgentBased Computational Modeling, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Epstein, Joshua M., and Robert Axtell (1996), Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute. Eyers, Tom (2013), Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Ferrini, Cinzia (1998), ‘Framing Hypotheses: Numbers in Nature and the Logic of Measure in the Development of Hegel’s System’, in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 283–310. Finelli, Roberto (2007), ‘Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s “Capital”’, Historical Materialism 15 (2): 61–74.

History and Event.indd 196

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  197 Foley, Duncan K. (1983), ‘On Marx’s Theory of Money’, Social Concept 1 (1): 5–19. Foley, Duncan (2005), ‘Marx’s Theory of Money in Historical Perspective’, in Fred Moseley (ed.), Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 36–49. Fraser, John (1977), An Introduction to the Thought of Galvano Della Volpe, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Fraser, Zachary Luke (2007), ‘Introduction’, in Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, Melbourne: Re.press, pp. xiii–lxv. Fuller, Steven (2000), Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Giovanni, George di (2010), ‘Introduction’, in G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xi–lxii. Gourvitch, Alexander (1936), ‘The Problem of Prices and Valuation in the Soviet System’, The American Economic Review 26 (1): 267–82. Graeber, David (2010), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville House Publishing. Hallward, Peter (2003), Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hallward, Peter (2011), ‘Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude’, in Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman, and Levi Bryant (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, pp. 130–41. Harman, Graham (2011), Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harris, William V. (2006), ‘A Revisionist View of Roman Money’, Journal of Roman Studies 96: 1–24. Harvey, David (2013), A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume II, London and New York: Verso. Hegel, G. W. F. (1956), The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Dover Publications. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969), The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, New Jersey: Humanities Press International. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1986), The Jena System 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics, eds George di Giovanni and John W. Burbidge, Montreal: McGillQueen’s Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1987), ‘Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets’, trans. P. Alder, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 12 (1): 269–309.

History and Event.indd 197

03/08/2015 08:39:22

198  History and Event Hegel, G. W. F. (1995), Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol. I, trans. E. S. Haldane, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hericlitus (2011), ‘Heraclitus of Ephesus’, in Patricia Curd (ed.), A Pre­ socratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, trans. Patricia Curd and Richard D. McKirahan, 2nd edn, Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 39–54. Holland, John H. (1998), Emergence: From Chaos to Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Houlgate, Stephen (1990), ‘A Reply to John Burbidge’, in George di Giovanni (ed.), Essays on Hegel’s Logic, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 183–90. Jameson, Fredric (2011), Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, London and New York: Verso. Johnston, Adrian (2009), Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj (2011), ‘A Tunisian Renaissance: Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem by Alexander Galloway’, trans. Joshua Jordan, http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1046 (last accessed 6 March 2015). Kanamori, Akihiro (2008), ‘Cohen and Set Theory’, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 14 (5): 351–78. Kant, Immanuel (2007), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt, London: Penguin Books. Kautsky, Karl (1916), The Social Revolution, trans. A. M. and May Wood Simons, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Kautsky, Karl (1918a), Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, trans. John B. Askew, 4th edn, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Kautsky, Karl (1918b), The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J. Stenning, 2nd edn, Manchester: The National Labour Press. Kautsky, Karl (1927), Thomas More and His Utopia: With a Historical Introduction, trans. H. J. Stenning, London: A. & C. Black. Kautsky, Karl (2007), The Road to Power: Political Reflection on Growing into the Revolution, ed. John H. Kautsky, trans. Raymond Meyer, Alameda, CA: Center for Socialist History. Kautsky, Karl (2009a), ‘The Consequences of the Japanese Victory and Social Democracy (July 1905)’, in Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds), Witness to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, trans. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, Historical Materialism Book Series 21, Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 386–408. Kautsky, Karl (2009b), ‘The Slavs and Revolution (1902)’, in Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (eds), Witness to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, trans. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, Historical Materialism Book Series 21, Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 59–65.

History and Event.indd 198

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  199 Kliman, Andrew (2007), Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books. Kojève, Alexandre (1969), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., New York: Basic Books. Kol’man, Ernst, and Sonia Yanovskaya (1983), ‘Hegel and Mathematics’, in Karl Marx, The Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, eds Ernst Kol’man and Sonia Yanovskaya, London: New Park Publications, pp. 235–55. Kouvelakis, Stathis (2007), ‘Lenin as a Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s the Science of Logic’, in Slavoj Žižek, Sebastian Budgen, and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 164–206. Koyré, Alexandre (1957), From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. Kuhn, Thomas (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lacroix, Alain (2000), ‘The Mathematical Infinite in Hegel’, The Philosophical Forum XXXI (3–4): 298–327. Lautman, Albert (2011), Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, trans. Simon Duffy, London and New York: Continuum. Lawson, Tony (2012), ‘Ontology and the Study of Social Reality: Emergence, Organisation, Community, Power, Social Relations, Corporations, Artefacts and Money’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 36 (2): 345–85. Lecourt, Dominique (1975), Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Lenin, V. I. (1960), ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists)’, in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Lenin, V. I. (1961a), ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in Our Party)’, in Clemens Dutt (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 7, trans. Abraham Fineberg and Naomi Jochel, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 201–423. Lenin, V. I. (1961b), ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic’, in Stewart Smith (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 38, Philosophical Notebooks, trans. Clemens Dutt, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 84–238. Lenin, V. I. (1961c), ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Lectures on the History of Philosophy’, in Stewart Smith (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 38, Philosophical Notebooks, trans. Clemens Dutt, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 254–304.

History and Event.indd 199

03/08/2015 08:39:22

200  History and Event Lenin, V. I. (1961d), ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, in Stewart Smith (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 38, Philosophical Notebooks, trans. Clemens Dutt, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 355–64. Lenin, V. I. (1961e), ‘Conspectus of Lasalle’s Book The Philosophy of Hericlitus the Obscure of Ephesus’, in Stewart Smith (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 38, Philosophical Notebooks, trans. Clemens Dutt, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 339–54. Lenin, V. I. (1962), ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, in Clemens Dutt (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 14, trans. Abraham Fineberg, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 13–358. Lenin, V. I. (1964a), ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’, in George Hanna (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 26, trans. Yuri Stobnikov and George Hanna, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Lenin, V. I. (1964b), ‘Karl Marx (A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism)’, in Julius Katzer (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 21, trans. Julius Katzer, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 43–91. Lenin, V. I. (1964c), ‘The Collapse of the Second International’, in Julius Katzer (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works Vol. 21, trans. Julius Katzer, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 205–59. Lenin, V. I. (1964d), ‘Junius Pamphlet’, in George Hanna (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 22, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 305–19. Lenin, V. I. (1964e), ‘Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism’, in George Hanna (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 22, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 195–304. Lenin, V. I. (1965), ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin’, in Yuri Sdobnikov (ed.), V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 32, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 70–107. Lenin, V. I. (1966), ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’, in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 33, trans. David Svirsky and George Hanna, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 227–36. Lenin, V. I. (1987), ‘State and Revolution’, in Henry M. Christman (ed.), Essential Works of Lenin, New York: Dover Books. Lih, Lars T. (2006), Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lih, Lars T. (2010), ‘Supplement: Kautsky, Lenin and the “April Theses”’, Weekly Worker, http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/800/supplementkautsky-lenin-and-the-april-theses/ (last accessed 6 March 2015). Lih, Lars T. (2014), ‘“The New Era of War and Revolution”: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Oubreak of World War I’, in Alexander Anievas (ed.), Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

History and Event.indd 200

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  201 Little, Adrian (2012), ‘Political Action, Error and Failure: The Epistemological Limits of Complexity’, Political Studies 60 (1): 3–19. Lukács, Georg (1971), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lukács, Georg (1975), The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Merlin Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1941), Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl (1951), ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, Volume II, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, Karl (1963), The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York: International Publishers. Marx, Karl (1973), Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl (1975a), ‘Preface (to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Books, pp. 424–8. Marx, Karl (1975b), ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Books, pp. 279–400. Marx, Karl (1975c), ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Books, pp. 57–198. Marx, Karl (1975d), The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty’ by M. Proudhon, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl (1976a), Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, 4th edn, London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl (1976b), ‘Postface to the Second Edition (1873)’, in Capital Volume I, London: Penguin Books, pp. 94–103. Marx, Karl (1983a), ‘On the Concept of the Derived Function’, in Ernst Kol’man and Sonia Yanovskaya (eds), The Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, London: New Park Publications, pp. 3–14. Marx, Karl (1983b), ‘Second Draft’, in Ernst Kol’man and Sonia Yanovskaya (eds), The Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx, London: New Park Publications, pp. 54–64. Marx, Karl (1983c), ‘Drafts of a Reply to Vera Zasulich; The “First” Draft’, in Teodor Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 99–122. Marx, Karl (1987), ‘Marx to Engels in Manchester: London, 22 June 1867’, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 42, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 383–6.

History and Event.indd 201

03/08/2015 08:39:22

202  History and Event Marx, Karl (1996), ‘“Notes” on Adolf Wagner’, in Terrell Carver (ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings, trans. Terrell Carver, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227–57. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels (1998), The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to The Critique of Political Economy, New York: Prometheus Books. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels (2002a), The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels (2002b), ‘Preface to the German Edition of 1872’, in The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin Books. Mayer, Robert (1999), ‘Lenin and the Practice of Dialectical Thinking’, Science & Society 63 (1): 40–62. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008), After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, London and New York: Continuum. Meillassoux, Quentin (2011a), ‘Excerpts from L’inexistence Divine’, trans. Graham Harman, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 175–238. Meillassoux, Quentin (2011b) ‘Interview with Quentin Meillassoux’, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 159–74. Meillassoux, Quentin (2012a), The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de Des, trans. Robin Mackay, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Meillassoux, Quentin (2012b), ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign’ (lecture), trans. Robin Mackay, Berlin: Freie Unversität. Montag, Warren (2005), ‘“Foucault and the Problematic of Origins”: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et Déraison’, Borderlands 2 (2), http://www. borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/montag_foucault.htm (last accessed 9 March 2015). Montag, Warren (2013), Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Morin, Edgar (2006), ‘Restricted Complexity, General Complexity’, trans. Carlos Gershenson, http://cogprints.org/5217/1/morin.pdf (last accessed 9 March 2015). Morin, Edgar (2008), On Complexity, trans. Robin Postel, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Nakamura, Yasushi (2011), ‘Did the Soviet Command Economy Command Money? A Quantitative Analysis’, Europe-Asia Studies 63 (7): 1133–56. Negri, Antonio (2014), Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, trans. Arianna Bove, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.

History and Event.indd 202

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  203 Nove, Alec (1961), The Soviet Economy: An Introduction, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Olssen, Mark (2008), ‘Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming the Problems of Classical Philosophical Analysis’, Educational Philosophy & Theory 40 (1): 96–117. O’Neill, John (1982), For Marx, Against Althusser: And Other Essays, Current Continental Research 201, Washington, DC: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. Osberg, Deborah, and Gert J. J. Biesta (2007), ‘Beyond Presence: Epistemological and Pedagogical Implications of “Strong” Emergence’, Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education 1: 31–51. Paterson, Alan L. T. (2004), ‘Hegel’s Early Geometry’, Hegel Studien 39/40 (May): 61–124. Paul, Ashton, A. J. Bartlett, and Justin Clemens (eds) (2006), The Praxis of Alain Badiou, Melbourne: Re.press. Peden, Knox (2014), Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze, Cultural Memory in the Present, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pinkard, Terry (1981), ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Mathematics’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41 (4): 452–64. Plato (1997a), ‘Sophist’, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, trans. Nicholas P.  White, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 235–93. Plato (1997b), ‘The Republic’, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, trans. G. M. A. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 971–1223. Plekhanov, Georgi (1969), Fundamental Problems of Marxism, New York: International Publishers. Plekhanov, Georgi (1974a), ‘A New Champion of Autocracy, Or, Mr. L. Tikhomirov’s Grief’, in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 363–97. Plekhanov, Georgi (1974b), ‘Once Again Mr. Mikhailovsky, Once More the “Triad”’, in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. I, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 698–704. Plekhanov, Georgi (1976a), ‘Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century’, in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. III, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 534–76. Plekhanov, Georgi (1976b), ‘French Utopian Socialism in the Nineteenth Century’, in Georgi Plekhanov Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. III, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 492–533. Pollock, Ethan (2006), Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Popper, Karl (1966), The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2 Hegel and Marx, 5th edn, London: Routledge.

History and Event.indd 203

03/08/2015 08:39:22

204  History and Event Portes, Alejandro (2010), Economic Sociology: A Systematic Inquiry, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Potter, Michael D. (2004), Set Theory and Its Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prigogine, Ilya (1981), From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. Rancière, Jacques (2011), Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista, London and New York: Continuum. Reed, Joel (2005), ‘Althusser and Hume’, in Stephen H. Daniel (ed.), Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 210–22. Resch, Robert Paul (1992), Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reuten, Geert (1998), ‘The Status of Marx’s Reproduction Schemes: Conventional or Dialectical Logic?’, in Christopher J. Arthur and Geert Reuten (eds), The Circulation of Capital: Essays on Volume Two of Marx’s Capital, Houndmills: Macmillan Press, pp. 187–230. Rinaldi, Giacomo (1992), A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. Rosenthal, Jonathan (1998), The Myth of Dialectics: Reinterpreting the Marx–Hegel Relation, Houndmills: Macmillan Press. Russell, Bertrand (2009), Principles of Mathematics, London: Routledge. Saul, Mahir (2005), ‘Claude Meillassoux (1925–2005)’, American Anthropologist 107 (4): 753–7. Sawyer, R. Keith (2003), ‘Artificial Societies: Multiagent Systems and the Micro-Macro Link in Sociological Theory’, Sociological Methods & Research 31 (3): 325–63. Schelling, Thomas C. (1971), ‘Dynamic Models of Segregation’, Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (2): 143–86. Schlemmer, Bernard (2005), ‘A Tribute to Claude Meillassoux’, Review of African Political Economy 32 (103): 197–201. Schmidt, Alfred (1981), History and Structure: An Essay on HegelianMarxist and Structuralist Theories of History, trans. Jeffrey Herf, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred (1978), Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Spencer, Matt (2013), ‘Doing Science Justice: Speculative Materialism and the Facticity of Research’, Symploke 21 (1): 163–77. Squibb, Stephen (2010), ‘Aleatory Critique: On the Materialist Genre’, in Alexander Galloway, French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures, New York: TPSNY/Erudio Editions, pp. 30–7, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/FTT/French-Theory-Today.pdf (last accessed 9 March 2015).

History and Event.indd 204

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Bibliography  205 Stalin, Joseph (1941), Dialectical and Historical Materialism, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2008), The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, London: Penguin. Thompson, E. P. (1978), The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays, London: Merlin. Tomba, Massimiliano (2012), Marx’s Temporalities, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Toscano, Alberto (2008), ‘The Open Secret of Real Abstraction’, Rethinking Marxism 20 (2): 273–87. Toscano, Alberto (2010), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, London and New York: Verso. Toscano, Alberto (2011), ‘Against Speculation, Or, a Critique of the Critique of Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (After Colletti)’, in Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman, and Levi Bryant (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, pp. 84–91. Tucker, Robert C. (1969), The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Urry, John (2003), Global Complexity, Cambridge: Polity. Watkin, Christopher (2011), Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, Michael (2000), ‘Why Marx Neither Has Nor Needs a Commodity Theory of Money’, Review of Political Economy 12 (4): 435–51. Winfield, Richard Dien (2006), From Concept to Objectivity: Thinking Through Hegel’s Subjective Logic, Aldershot: Ashgate. Zalamea, Fernando (2011), ‘Albert Lautman and the Creative Dialectic of Modern Mathematics’, in Albert Lautman, Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, trans. Simon Duffy, London and New York: Continuum, pp. xxiii–xxxii. Žižek, Slavoj (2012), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London and New York: Verso Books. Žižek, Slavoj, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis (eds) (2011), Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, New York: Columbia University Press.

History and Event.indd 205

03/08/2015 08:39:22

History and Event.indd 206

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Index

Index Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ are notes, and those followed by ‘t’ are tables. ‘absent cause’, 105 absolute contingency, 15, 151 Absolute Idea, 22–4, 79 abstract forms of abstraction, 51 After Finitude, 10, 140–59 agent-based modelling, 165, 168–70, 175–8 aleatory materialism, 110–11, 112, 164 ‘algebra of revolution’, 42 Althusser, Louis, 6, 70, 117–20, 164 affinity and distinction from Hegel, 9–11 as anti-Hegelian theorist, 14 anti-humanist, 95, 97 and Badiou, 114–17, 133, 137–8, 158–9 historicism, 6–8 and Lenin, 69–70 science of history, 9–12, 88, 91–113 Anderson, Kevin, 14, 67–84 Anti-Dühring, 19, 24, 41, 75, 79, 181n, 183n, 184n transformation, 5 utopians, 59

History and Event.indd 207

Arab Spring, 11, 115, 135, 136 Aristotle, 36, 50, 123 ‘arithmetic of development’, 42 Arthur, Christopher J., 185–6n Aufhebung, 38, 48–9 authority of philosophy, 11, 14–15 problem of, 11, 112 Bachelard, Gaston, 7, 95–7, 100–1 Badiou, Alain, 11–12, 14–15, 37, 109, 187n, 188–9n and Althusser’s self-criticism, 158–9 decision to give up leadership, 114–39 derision of Althusser’s Marxism, 114 distinction from Hegel, 10, 182n mathematical infinite, 13, 20 notion of the event, 111 as public intellectual, 15, 134–9 Balibar, Étienne, 101–2, 181–2n Basle Manifesto (1912), 70, 81 Bedau, Mark A., 171, 171–4 Being, 124–7 Being, Event, Intervention, 124–30

03/08/2015 08:39:22

208  History and Event Being and Event, 11–12, 14–15, 37, 115–17, 187n axioms of, 125t categories and mathematical models, 117–39, 158 Being and non-Being, 36–7 Bernstein, Eduard, 42 bifurcation theory, 166, 167, 169, 175, 176 Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus, 185n Bosteels, Bruno, 111, 115 Brassier, Ray, 119–20, 133, 134, 142 Bukharin, Nikolai, 81, 82 Byrne, David, 167–71, 176–7, 189n calculus, 24, 28, 29, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 50, 78 Callaghan, Gillian, 168, 170, 176–7 Callinicos, Alex, 106 Canguilhem, Georges, 92, 95–7 Cantor, Georg continuum hypothesis, 34–7, 130, 131 transfinite, 13, 20, 21, 27–8, 87, 155 Capital, 13, 42–3, 56, 61, 63, 183–5n ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, The’, 5, 57 non-historicist logic of, 46, 51–7 Postface to, 44 capitalist totality, 56–7 Carver, Terrell, 8, 184n Catastrophe theory, 67, 153, 166 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay, 76 Cilliers, Paul, 174, 190n Cohen, Paul, 116, 123, 137, 188–9n

History and Event.indd 208

forcing technique, 124, 129, 131–3, 134 Collapse of the Second International, The, 81–2 Colletti, Lucio, 7–8, 38, 39, 46, 52, 55, 183n, 184n Communist Hypothesis, The, 115 Communist Manifesto, The, 58, 60–1 ‘complex whole’, 53, 56, 92, 102, 105 complexity theory, 15, 164–5, 165–79 Concept of Model, The, 121, 188n ‘conflictual unity’, 3, 8–9, 181n Connolly, William, 170–1, 172 ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic’, 73–4, 77 constructible universes, 124, 129, 130–4 ‘continent of history’, 6, 7, 93, 96, 97, 107 ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, 102–5 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A, 1859 preface to, 4, 5, 9, 42, 52, 57–8 ‘Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard, Un’, 149–51 ‘critical rationalist idealism’, 10, 95 ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, 46–7 ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme, The’, 43, 61 ‘Day after the Revolution, The’, 62 De Landa, Manuel, 173 Della Volpe, Galvano, 7–8, 45–6, 51, 52, 55 ‘democratic materialism’, 115, 135 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 110, 144, 170–1

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Index  209 de-Stalinisation, 91, 93–4 ‘determinate abstraction’, 45 Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 5 dialectical materialism Althusser and, 7, 10, 92, 94, 97, 102, 112, 186–7n Badiou and, 10 Colletti and, 8, 38, 46 definition, 2, 4, 12 della Volpe and, 8 Engels and, 43, 46, 87, 94 Hegelian-Marxists and, 5, 39, 43, 64–5, 92–3 Lenin and, 67–88 Meillassoux and, 10, 146, 159 Plekhanov and, 78, 85 Stalin and, 146 Dialectics of Nature, 37–8, 41, 75 Divine Inexistence, The, 15, 141, 143–5, 148, 152, 156, 157 division of labour, 53–4, 134 Doctrine of Being, 74, 182n Dunayevskaya, Raya, 14, 67–8, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76–80, 83–4 ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, 107–8 empirical verification, 15, 88, 92, 106–7, 138, 151, 159, 177–8 Engels, Friedrich, 75–80 abstractions, 52 Althusser and, 104–5, 110 and classical Marxism, 4 dialectical materialism, 43, 46, 87, 94 and Hegelian mathematics, 24, 28, 40 and Hegelian-Marxism, 8, 13, 74, 88, 183n and Lenin, 70–4, 80, 84 materialist inversion, 45 and quantity-quality leaps, 19, 40, 41

History and Event.indd 209

quantity-quality leaps, 85, 184n revolution as leap, 40, 67, 184n and scientific developments, 37–8, 67 and transformation, 5 and utopian socialists, 59–60 epistemological break Althusser’s theory of, 7, 91–113 Hegel’s denial of, 21, 36–8 Marx’s, 45, 93–7, 97–102 ‘epistemological obstacles’, 93, 95–7 Erfurt Program (1891), 4 esotericism, 142, 148–52 Euclid, 25 Event, 127–8 evolution and revolution, 43, 57–64 evolutionary notion of communist transformation, 52–7, 57–64 facticity, 153–4 ‘fetters hypothesis’, 42, 58 ‘final instance’, 102, 104 Finelli, Roberto, 185n Formation of the Scientific Mind, The, 95–7 Foucault, Michel, 111, 170 Fourth World of Justice, 147–8 French Communist Party (PCF), 11, 93–4, 112 French historical epistemology, 7, 8, 10, 94–7, 101, 111–13, 144, 164 Fundamental Problems of Marxism, 39, 42, 85 ‘general contradiction’, 9, 56, 102–3 Geometrical Studies, 25 German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 4, 42 Giovanni, George di, 23

03/08/2015 08:39:22

210  History and Event Gödel, Kurt, 124–30 constructable universe, 130–1 Gödelian Platonism, 123 Hallward, Peter, 131, 142–3 Hamilton, Iain, 142 Harman, Graham, 142, 158 Harris, Erol, 33, 182n Hegel, G. W. F. Absolute, 22, 23, 79 Althusser’s critique of historicism, 6–10, 93, 97, 99, 101–7 and Cantor, 21, 34–40 denial of epistemological break, 21, 36–8 geometry, 25–6 Lenin and, 66–88 mathematical infinite, 13, 20–40, 64, 182–3n mathematical philosophy, 19–40 Meillassoux and, 141, 144, 157–8 Montesquieu and, 9 Notion, 74 ontology of contradiction, 44–51, 74 and Pythagoreanism, 25–7 quantity-quality leaps, 19–40, 42 revolution and evolution, 42, 57–8 in Switzerland, 69–70 totality, 22, 23–4, 56–7, 101–3 transformation, 5 Hericlitean flux, 23 Hericlitus, 36, 79 Herzen, Alexander, 42 ‘historical dialectics’, 40, 48, 52, 63, 77, 107, 122 ‘historical riots’, 11, 115, 136 ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, The’, 5, 57

History and Event.indd 210

historicist theory of knowledge, 19–40 History of Madness, 1963 Preface to, 111 history of symbolisation, 145–6 Hobbes, Thomas, 145, 147, 176 ‘humanity’, 93–4, 146, 148 Hume, David, 53, 99, 155 Husserlian phenomenology, 10, 95 Idea, 115, 128 ‘Idea of Communism’, 115, 136–7 ‘idealism of the ante-predicative’, 101 Imperialism, 84 infinite, 104, 105, 125t, 128, 131, 149–51 mathematical, 13, 20–40, 64, 87, 128–9, 182–3n Intervention, 128–9 intra-Worldly injustices, 147–51 irrational numbers, 13, 21, 34–41, 87 Jameson, Frederic, 42–3 Jena Logic, 182n Johnston, Adrian, 136–7 ‘Junius Pamphlet’, 82 Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 11, 136 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 53, 72, 152–4, 155 Kautsky, Karl, 4, 5, 13, 59–60 and communist transformation, 62–3 defence of revolutionary imperative, 42 and Lenin, 70 national-chauvinism, 81 quantity-quality leaps, 39 Kol’man, Ernst, 183n Kouvelakis, Stathis, 67 Koyré, Alexandre, 95, 98

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Index  211 Kronecker, Leopold, 36 Kuhn, Thomas, 98–9, 181n, 187n labour-power, 50, 54 Lacroix, Alain, 31, 109 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis, 31–2, 36–7 Lautman, Albert, 37, 121–3 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 20, 27, 73 Lenin, Hegel, and the Path of Western Dialectics, 14 Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, 68 Lenin, V. I. Althusser and, 94, 95, 99, 102–3 and communist transformation, 62–3 dialectical materialism, 67–88 and Engels, 70–4, 80, 84 and Hegel, 66–88 and quantity-quality leaps, 68, 72, 78, 80, 84–7 study of Hegel’s Science and Logic, 66–9 Lenin and Philosophy, 70, 108, 109 letter from Engels to Bloch, 104–5 ‘Letter to Jean Lacroix’, 109 Lih, Lars T., 70–1, 84 Logics of Worlds, 115, 187n Ludwig Feuerbach, 4, 77, 184n Luxemburg, Rosa, 82 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2, 170 Lysenko affair, 88, 94, 102 Macherey, Pierre, 181n Mallarmé, Stéphane, 142, 149–51 Mandel, Ernest, 42 Maoist activism, 114, 117 Marcuse, Herbert, 8, 71 ‘Materialism and EmpirioCriticism’, 10, 73, 99, 140–1

History and Event.indd 211

‘materialist rationalist empiricism’, 10, 95, 141 mathematical infinite, 13, 20–40, 64, 87, 128–9, 182–3n mathematical Platonism, 122–3 mathematics, 27–34, 120–4 Mayer, Robert, 70–1 Measure, 27, 33–4, 182n Meillassoux, Claude, 143–4 Meillassoux, Quentin, 15, 138–9, 189n distinction from Hegel, 10 Marxism background, 143–4 speculative justice, 140–59 speculative materialism, 12 messianic roots, 142–8 meta-ontology, 118, 119–39, 140 Metapolitics, 114–15 Montag, Warren, 111 Montesquieu, 9, 92 Morin, Edgar, 168, 189n national-chauvinism, 81 Navarro, Fernanda, 110 Negri, Antonio, 67 new dialecticians, 52, 55, 185n new dialectics of revolution, 44, 66–88 ‘Notes’ on Adolf Wagner, 61–2 Notion, 22–3, 32, 74 Number and the Siren, The, 15, 141, 149–51 Nürnberg Logic, 24, 182n ‘Objective Logic’, 22, 36–7 ‘On Infinite, Linear PointManifolds’, 35–6 ‘On the Differential’, 55 ‘On the Question of Dialectics’, 73–4, 79 On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 6

10/08/2015 12:04:23

212  History and Event ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’, 83 ‘Once Again on the Trade Unions’, 82 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 70, 76–7, 81–2 O’Neill, John, 6 Organisation Politique, L’, 117 Osberg, Deborah, 174 ‘overdetermination’, 102–4 Owen, Robert, 59–60 Parsons, Talcott, 165–6 Paterson, Alan, 25 Peden, Knox, 94 Phenomenology of Spirit, 21–2, 51, 52 ‘Philosophical Conjecture and Marxist Theoretical Research, The’, 106 Philosophical Notebooks, 14, 44, 65, 68, 69–71, 78, 84–92 Philosophy and Revolution, 14, 67–8 ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, 117, 188n Philosophy of Hericlitus, 79 Philosophy of History, The, 22, 79 Philosophy of Right, 47–8 Plato, 79–80 Parmenides, 37 Republic, 145 Sophist, 36 Timaeus, 26 Platonism, mathematical, 122–3 Plekhanov, Georgi Lenin’s break from, 70–1, 72–5, 78–80, 82–5 national-chauvinism, 81 quantity-quality leaps, 5, 13, 39 revolutionary event, 5, 42, 77 unity of opposites, 76 utopian socialism, 59–60

History and Event.indd 212

political economists, 47–9, 51, 64 politics of simulation, 175–8 Poverty of Philosophy, The, 48, 55 Prigogine, Ilya, 166–7, 168 private property, abolition of, 60–1, 62 ‘productive consumption’, 49 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 48–9, 51, 55, 64 Prussian state, 46–8 Pythagoreanism, limits of, 25–7, 121 quality as being, 29–30 Quantity, 30–3 quantity-quality leaps, 5–6, 8 Engels and, 19, 40, 41, 85, 184n Hegel, 19–40, 42 Lenin and, 68, 72, 78, 80, 84–7 and Marx, 41, 43–5, 57–9, 63–5, 183n quotes, famous, 72–5 ‘radical democracy’, 115 Rancière, Jacques, 114, 187n ratio of powers, 32 rationalist as radical public intellectual, 134–9 Reading Capital, 98–9, 100 ‘real abstraction’, 8, 46–56, 64, 86–7, 99, 184n Rebirth of History, The, 136 ‘regulative law of nature’, 53–4 religion, 143, 146–7, 156 Representing Capital, 43 Resch, Robert Paul, 101, 105, 108 Reuten, Geert, 56 Rinaldi, Giacomo, 28 Road to Power, The, 70 Rosenthal, Jonathan, 53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 145 Russian Revolution, 61, 66, 83

03/08/2015 08:39:22

Index  213 Science of Logic, 13, 20–5, 36, 40, 52, 66, 69, 77 scientific socialism, 59 Second International (1889–1916), 4, 8, 40, 66, 69–72, 73, 88 Second Manifesto for Philosophy, 118 ‘self-movement’, 66, 68, 71–2, 75–80 separation, 30, 46–9, 51–7, 63, 124–5 social abstraction, 47, 50 social change, 165–79 Social Democrats, 4–5, 42, 43, 62, 64, 67, 88 Social Revolution, The, 42, 85 Specters of Marx, 1, 144, 171 Stalinism, 5–7, 39, 91–4, 102, 146 State and Revolution, The, 66, 67, 84–5 structural causality, 102–5, 111 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The, 98–9, 181n ‘subjective empiricism’, 99–102 subjective idealism, 154 ‘Subjective Logic’, 22–3 superposition technique, 25–6

Theory of the Subject, 182n theory of the subject, 124, 126, 128, 137, 140 Thom, René, 166–7, 169, 176–7 Tomba, Massimiliano, 186n Toscano, Alberto, 143, 189n totality Althusser, 101–3 Cantor, 130, 155 Hegel, 22, 23–4, 56–7, 101–3 Meillassoux, 155 Montesquieu, 9 Tunisia, 11, 136

Taylorist production processes, 63, 65, 68, 85, 88 theoretical void, 104, 109–14 theory of the event, 14–15, 127

Zalamea, Fernando, 121 Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) theory, 124–30, 155 Žižek, Slavoj, 136

History and Event.indd 213

‘unity of opposites’, 66, 68, 69, 71–2, 75–80 utopian socialists, 43, 58–60, 62, 176–7, 186n value abstraction, 52–7 Watkin, Christopher, 143 Weiner, Norbert, 165–6 What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are, 14, 63, 70 Yanovskaya, Sonia, 183n

03/08/2015 08:39:22

History and Event.indd 214

03/08/2015 08:39:22