Graham Harman comes out fighting in response to my earlier piece on Badiou and set-theoretic ontology. Besides refusing to give Badiou the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the enigmatic operator behind “the operation of the count” (Graham insists on seeing the man, or Man, behind the curtain here), his strongest objection it seems to me is that all the examples Badiou gives of events and their consequences are eruptions and upheavals within the purview of the four types of truth procedure: politics, science, art and love. Doesn’t this indicate that such events are ultimately “generated” (this word, at least, I take from Graham’s own mouth) out of the material provided by the world of human affairs?

Let’s introduce a couple of supplementary questions. Firstly, can an event take place somewhere where thinking beings and their concerns are not - on the surface of Jupiter, say? Secondly, can an event take place that is not an event for thought - is the event the correlate of the disturbance in thought that it produces? I’ll come back to both of these in a moment, but let’s look first at Badiou’s philosophical anthropology of truths.

The post-evental chain of nomination, fidelity, step-by-step elaboration of (a finite part of) a truth qua generic set, and “forcing” as the means by which a truth is adduced within a situation, clearly requires a being capable of upholding a thought, of deriving the consequences within thought of the unthinkable. This is where “man”, an animal with intellectual passions (rather than an intellect with animal passions), fits into Badiou’s scheme. Earthworms don’t get a look-in here, and neither do newborn infants or (I strongly suspect) human beings with certain kinds of severe cognitive impairment. (Ask me about that last one again some time). But it’s possible that other configurations of thinking being - Skynet, for example - might also be able to support the elaboration of a truth.

We haven’t quite succeeded in fingering “man” as the central actor in Badiou’s ontology here, but we should be clear that he does indeed have a philosophical anthropology in which “thought” and human beings largely, even if only contingently, coincide. And this does mean that, insofar as “novelty” is only ever possible as the aleatory unfolding of a truth, a universe without thinking beings would be for Badiou a universe without novelty, an essentially static situation. Such major cosmic events as the formation of galaxies, comets smashing into planets, suns going supernova and so on are just the working out of given trajectories, predictable dispositions of “the nothing new”. In the event that the Large Hadron Collider accidentally produced a black hole tenacious enough to swallow up the Earth and everyone in it, this would not count as a “novel” occurrence according to Badiou’s definition.

But “novelty” in this sense is arguably ontic - it refers to the re-elaboration of situations that contain subjects able to restructure them - and we were arguing ontology, so let’s get back to my two supplementary questions. For Badiou, while the militant subject is ontic, just a part of the situation it works through, the basis on which it is constituted is (para-)ontological: the event is not just a surprising configuration of existing beings, but a malfunction in the machinery of presentation itself. Can such a malfunction occur without any “nomination” or subsequent truth procedure (both of which require a thinking being to support them) to testify to its occurrence?

I think the answer to that question is yes, although Badiou seems to be arguing that only “evental nomination” gives the event any chance of effecting real consequences in the world - left to itself, it just evanesces away quietly. So an un-nominated event can “happen”, but only as a sort of “unhappening”, an inconsequential blip. It’s as near to never-having-happened as makes no odds, unless some post-evental subject comes along and bets its life on it. So “events” on the surface of Jupiter are possible but unimportant, inasmuch as there is no-one around for whom they can have any import.

While it is thinkable that an event might occur on the surface of Jupiter (and we can imagine a scientific truth procedure being kicked off by the discovery that such an event had once occurred), the ontology according to which it is thinkable must think it according to its own axioms, as a nomological violation. But the event is not a violation of “the laws of nature”, but of the rules by which ontological thought accomplishes the “presentation of presentation”. Can it therefore be said to have a reality wholly independent of the presentation-of-presentation, since it is characterised entirely through a “matheme” inscribed within that presentation? If there were no ontologists, would there be - even in the most evanescent, inconsequential sense - any events?

I think that for Badiou, being is finally independent of the existence of ontologists: the presentation-of-presentation is a second-order recapitulation of being in the language of ontological thought, and being (qua presentation) must already have “occurred” before the latter can get underway. But the matheme of the event conflates a disruption in the machinery of presentation itself with the violation of the “meta-ontological” norms laid down in the presentation-of-presentation, the norms proper to the mathematical discourse of being, and thereby fixes the event as a correlate of ontological thought.

Is there a way out of this correlationist trap? If Badiou had been prepared to argue that events were spontaneous and independently effective disruptions in being-qua-being, capable of producing real consequences in situations without the intervention of a post-evental subject, then he might plausibly have offered the matheme of the event as the discursive inscription of an extra-discursive anomaly, a truly rogue force at loose in the universe. But because the only characterisation he can give of the event is as the violation of the autonomously self-donated norms of ontological thought, the evental “malfunction of the machinery of presentation” is permanently sutured to the presentation-of-presentation, and has no truly independent reality.

So I’m willing to concede Graham half of his side of the argument: while Badiou’s account of “being” does not seem to me to be inevitably correlationist but capable of supporting an ontology which includes entities inaccessibly distant from the parish bounds of human affairs, his “event” is unavoidably an “event for us”. For Badiou, there are no events that matter anywhere except within the purview of the four types of truth procedure, and no novelty anywhere in the universe except where thinking beings are there to produce it.

There’s still something wrong, to my eyes, about the way Graham characterises the count-as-one - he seems to see it as the enumeration or serialisation of some already-present material, whereas I see it as the prior determination of any materiality whatsoever, which starts with the “counting out” of nothing and elaborates an incredibly rich and various universe of structures from that point - but I think it’s immaterial to the question of whether Badiou is useful for what Graham is trying to do. I might try another post later on, though, about some of the ways in which it actually can matter, in set theory, what kinds of internal structure the members of a set possess (hint: take the union).