Ghost in the Wire

First, I find it difficult to believe that if ontology in any way equals mathematics that the big secret of the universe is actually ... set theory. And a particular and contested version of set theory at that. I mean seriously, come on. How is it that set theory trumps quantum theory? Why in the world wouldn't complexity theory, with its interest in emergent phenomena, provide a better ontological ground? I do not necessarily find fault with Badiou's discussion of set theory, the empty set, the state of belonging, the importance of presentation rather than the assumption of existence, or so on. These arguments all make sense within the logical, expository framework of set theory. I just cannot, for the life of me, discern a reason why I should begin from that framework. The fact that it provides a coherent explanation that avoids many recognized philosophical problems is not in and of itself a reason to believe it. "Ontology = God" avoids many recognized philosophical problems, too, as does "Ontology = Scientology." Of course, as with set theory, each of these raise other problems and require dismissals of questions that fall outside of the original ontological assumptions necessary to offer any such equivalence (see point #3 below for an example). So what am I missing here?

Second, there is a well known property of language called catachresis, wherein we acknowledge that some words do not have strictly literal renditions (the leg of a chair, for example), that they are, in other words, rhetorical (or in de Man's expression, tropological). This property gives to language a different order of presentation, and leads to one of the problems of set theory, namely that any element within a set can be used as an example for the set, thus positioning the element as something contained within the set and simultaneously elevating the element to a synecdoche for the set in its entirety. In other words, the element belongs to the set, but because it can, through the figure of an example or illustration, stand in as the expository figure of the set as a whole, the element gives the very possibility of its belonging. So the attempt to found presentation (and all that goes with it, from ordering to inclusion and back) in the presentation of the empty set as the "one that is not" presupposes an operation that, tropologically speaking, is. The axiom of the empty set (that there is a set for which there does not exist any set that belongs to it) seems rather obviously untenable to me, as even the abstraction of a "presented term" or set that does not "belong" already belongs a) to a set of tropological operations that overdetermine the exposition of the empty set, and b) provides a content to presentation that contradicts the axiomatic assumption of the original empty set. I am always suspicious that obvious things appear so precisely because something less obvious is being overlooked, but I must be one of those folks who just cannot wrap my head around the glories of set theory, because I have yet to figure out how set theory can supersede the tropological property of language, and as a consequence I cannot see why I should begin with set theory as an expository/ontological frame.

Third, I find it almost unfathomable that Badiou would dismiss utterly the consideration of technology, or more specifically what Heidegger famously called the question concerning technology. Here are Badiou's words:

The question of technology, of modernity, of techne is in my opinion not a very important question... Technology is not a real concept, it's a journalistic debate. It's not a serious question. You have to say, first of all, what is exactly the scientific question in the situation, the question engaged in a technological problem, what is the truth–process in some particular technological question, what is the political framework of the question, because there is no technological problem per se, only techno–political problems. You have to determine the political questions, the scientific questions, and finally which field of truth, and after that sort of investigation you can examine the consequences of technical transformation in our world.

Surely, this must be a joke, yes? I mean even if we suspend any philosophical speculation concerning the constitutive force of technology in any of the discussions in which Badiou is engaged, one must recognize that different technologies produce antecedents to political frameworks, precisely because - and again this seems obvious - politics rarely exhausts the consequences of a given technological advance, nor does it control the means (techne) by which thought occurs regarding its own field. So let's assume there's something not obvious, something hidden here, and suppose that Badiou might respond that all technologies are recuperated or are participants within a political frame or question, and so there can be no question that is strictly technological. This seems reasonable enough, but it is not what he is saying, because Badiou makes very clear the nature of the operation in which technological questions are in fact to be understood as techno-political questions. That operation is a tiered process, beginning with political and scientific questions, progressing to a delineation of truth-processes, and then and only then dealing with the questions of the technological. Now Badiou often cites Heidegger, so we can assume he knows well Heidegger's writings on this issue, and we can likewise assume that one of two things is going on here: either a very bad misreading or a substantive disagreement. Of course, we are charitable people, and Badiou seems a rather intelligent fellow, so we should assume the latter and not the former, and thus we should presume that Badiou really sincerely believes that the process of questioning, of the philosophical determination of truth, is free of the contaminations of technological influences on thought, i.e. from the means of its own operation. In effect, that his episteme transcends its techne. I find this belief to be bizarre, and would love to hear warrants for it. I am certainly open to this being the site of most of my confusion with Badiou, a sort of Platonic resonance that plays poorly against my media-ecology eardrums. But, and here's where another support for the Andy Kaufman style joke enters, Badiou also says this:

Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction already made in the work of Kant, between reason and understanding, and it is as you know a capital distinction for Heidegger, who distinguishes truth as aletheia, and understanding as cognition, science, techne.

Now Badiou, who cites and references Heidegger, who is here explicitly using Heidegger to support his distinction between novelty and repetition as the basis for a distinction between truth and knowledge, and who we collectively agree is a smart fellow, is clearly wrong. Heidegger puts techne on both sides of the ledger, as both a process of poiesis (for the Greeks) and the means of enframing (for modernity). The difference is the historical and metaphysical overdetermination of techne, which hides the term's more original meaning and gives techne to us as something that we believe we master or control, but that actually controls us through this belief (a process called, appropriately enough, subjectification). Heidegger is saying (and he says it repeatedly, in Origin of the Work of Art, Age of the World Picture, the Question Concerning Technology, and so on) that different technological modalities produce different possibilities for techne, and with it different relations to Being. His diatribes against the typewriter in his seminar on Parmenides make this abundantly clear. Surely Badiou knows this. So either his disagreement must be more nuanced than I currently perceive, or this is one of those hints, a wink to his audience, a test to see if we figure out he's having us on, piling up layers of set theory in an authoritative tone, making odd declarations about the future of philosophy and the failures of philosophers, and then laughing as eager grad students trip over themselves writing articles extolling his virtues. Incidentally, if this is a joke, I suspect Zizek is in on it. I would have significantly more respect for him if it turns out he set the whole thing up.

My other disagreements with Badiou are just disagreements (regarding the Good, the subject, the question of bad faith and forcing) and don't really do much for my "it's all a big, very odd joke" hypothesis, so I won't include them here. But for you Badiou fans out there, please, let me know I'm wrong. And why.

Incidentally, I can't be the only one who thinks it's a joke, right? Anyone?