NOTES FROM
Badiou, A.(2012) Introduction to the philosophical
concept of change.
EGS video
There seem
to be three basic questions:
(A) what
is change?There are different forms of change, for
example change within the laws and change
outside of the laws.Is
repetition the same as change?
(B) how is
change oriented—is it global?How do
we think of change, real change?Some
traditional philosophers, such as Plato, argue
that real change as such is impossible.What
part of the totality remains after change?Our
intuition is not very helpful here, because
change just seems natural to us, one of the
reasons that traditional philosophers like Plato
are now seen as the enemy of modern philosophy.Change
implies more than a substitution but the change
of some thing—but what exactly, and, if it
changes, is it the same thing?If
not, we’re talking about succession.At the
bottom, the issue is one of identity and
difference, the issue that lies at the bottom of
all problems, both political and philosophical.If
change is pure difference, then difference does
not change—in what sense am I the same as you,
allowing for all sorts of problems of genetic
combinations and the effects of social
structures and so on.
(C) is there
any principle to evaluate or judge change, to
distinguish, for example positive and negative
forms of change?The traditional philosophical positions
says that change is bad, and this is reversed in
the revolutionary tradition with the absence of
change means death.It is
possible that some change might be good and some
bad, depending on the context or orientation.
We can
unify these questions by pursuing a particular
approach.Let’s
begin by asking why are we [the audience for the
lecture] here?The audience is not the usual university
class, but is very diverse.It
could be seen as a generic set, where the
elements are not defined by a precise property.Audience
members are not identical they may have no
common nationality, generation or sex, and
possess many different motivations.If
they are a generic set, how can change be the
same for all the members?Change
is always relative to a world, and abstract
concepts are always transmitted to the generic
audience [seem to be important issues for
distance education here—embrace the generic
nature of the audience!]
For
traditional philosophy the notion of a generic
set is impossible, and groups always are
constituted inside the tradition: the tradition
determines the collectivity and its common
properties.Traditions are national, rational, or for
a particular group.Identity
is therefore always involved as well.For
traditional philosophy, the generic set is not a
suitable audience and is always a problem.
St Paul
was one of the first to say that he was
interested in a new religion, still not very
codified as Christianity, for a generic
audience—not Romans or Jews or women, slaves or
masters, but for an undefined ‘everybody’.This
is the radical newness of St. Paul, and the
concept was much refused and denied.People
had not yet grasped the concept of a generic set
with no name.Paul was suggesting that change was
difficult and must be universal, and this was
the subject of an intellectual war over
contrasting national or cultural visions.
Marx is
the other example, offering a universal
international politics.He
even uses the word ‘generic class’ for the
proletariat, and the issue was the relationship
between this class, change and the world.Political
change is normally seen as a change of a precise
definable world, as in a national revolution, or
the coming to power of a specific group.Marx’s
conception of universal revolution is
exceptional, and there may be only three or four
advocates of generic change altogether.Searching
for a complete political rupture of the modern
world must be universal.
Truth is
connected to the notion of a generic set.It is
a universal not a partial quality.Of
course it is possible to say there is no truth
as in relativism, and this is actually dominant
today.This
is because capitalism does not need truth, there
is no profit in, or price to attach to, it.Capitalism
must assume no generic set.So
arguing for one is an important issue for both
philosophy and political and social change.Truth
does not change it is not radically historical
[so ‘everybody’ means everybody in the future as
well?]. The concept of truth is therefore rather
paradoxical in a changing world dominated by the
market.
The
concept of the generic set is an important
question, especially if we think of it as not
containing uniform elements, but, on the
contrary, containing all the differences.The
concept of truth similarly does not assume
uniformity but its opposite.In
this sense, the truth 'emancipates' differences.St.
Paul says his truth is not for Romans or slaves
but for everybody, across all the differences,
and must be accepted by very different human
beings.Without
such a universal truth, differences are
contained, but with one there is a notion of a
freedom beyond differences.
So the
generic set is at the heart of universal change
in politics, and in artistic creativity.The
most important desire of human beings is for the
truth, something exceptional.We see
this when people talk about love as exceptional,
not at all normal or routine, not reducible to definite
properties.We see this in classic stories of the
conflict between young lovers and their
traditions, how they are driven by some
exceptional love, chance encounters, and how
this leads to rebellion against tradition, such
as the traditional family structures.So
this sort of love is also generic, a pure
encounter with a generic somebody.The
same can be said of art and the desire for
creating something exceptional.Desire
is exceptional, never law governed or
traditional.It follows that desire is for a change
outside the laws or traditions.Desire
also reflects something unchanging, not
understood by the normal laws of [mundane]
change.What
we desire is therefore a social monster.The
important things in life are never anything
normal, they’re always exceptional, and often
tragic, as in wars.War is
also generic, the same for all soldiers.We can
also see why some people refuse such desires as
too terrible, a matter of fear and anxiety.It’s
easy to see why the traditional views see desire
as bad, outside the law, never normal.
So there
are contradictory tensions of desire and the
law, break and repetition, desire and universal
change.We
need to turn to set theory again.If we
suppose a set of any kind, it’s possible to
conceive of a subset which is completely defined
by a property.This would be a nice formal complete
definition.We say that the subset is constructible.The
question is, are all sets constructible like
this?Axioms
of set theory affirm this: the whole universe is
constructible.The mathematician Godel argued that there
is no way to refute this idea—everything is
definable by clear properties, or to put it
another way, sets conform to their direct
referents in language.It’s
possible to see that all sorts of problems for
action and choice can now be explained in terms
of this tight relation of language to ontology
[in a pretty limited way, as choices between
fixed alternatives etc?].
However,
no mathematician wanted to accept this!The
desire of mathematicians cannot accept this
tight law, and they all want to go beyond, to
search for a monstrous
inconstructible set.This
is a complex desire, and an irrational one,
since the non constructible set can never be
properly defined.There is a search for something
inconstructible in order to find some exceptions
to what existed in the world.This
is the artistic desire to create new forms, to
let them emerge.We find it in science as well.In set
theory, the problem becomes one of constructing
the non constructible.The
mathematician Cohen solved it in the 1960s with
the notion of the generic set.This
can not be constructed in the usual way.It is
like Marx’s universal class, and this can
be seen as a generalization away from Marx’s
specific political point.Neither
are reducible to law or language, and both
represent real creation.The
exercise represented the victory of desire over
law!
The
generic set is a monster.It can
never be specified, because to do so would mean
adding a property.We can only prove it must exist.All
differences are contained in it.It is
a multiplicity of differences rather than a
collection of sameness as in the constructible
set.There
are clearly political implications.Revolutionaries
aim to rupture the world as a desire for
something generic, something not reducible to
existing properties, something that goes across
differences.Differences are to be emancipated,
accepted inside a generic set with no common
property, and with a recognition of the truth of
the generic set and of difference.We can
conceive of a common world where differences are
acknowledged as the truth, exceptions are
accepted.It’s
not just mathematicians who want this, and its
not just an abstract issue.
Is worth
noting that Godel went mad and saw himself as
living in a terrible world where everything was
fixed in its place.There
was no freedom, no possibility of going to other
places.He
could not accept his own argument for a
constructible universe, and was pleased with
Cohen’s argument.
The
generic set permits change, it helps us cross
differences [I think the argument is that this
would not involve chaos, but whether he meant
the concept of chaos as in Deleuze, or just a
general sense of disruption is unclear].It
opens us to change without dissolving all
differences.We must preserve the notion of truth to
recognize differences, however, rather than
operating with indifference: differences have to
be recognized not closed off.The
possibility of changing places becomes part of a
common truth, implying the right to be different
and the right to change differences on the basis
of a common truth [reminds me of Rawlsian
experiments with social justice].Notions
of tradition, change, history and nature must be
on the basis of this truth, the truth of St.
Paul and Marx.We need to think differences and changes
of difference.We need to accept differences and the
‘game of differences’.