In the last paragraph of Alex Williams’s Badiou piece, he mixes up (or so it seems to me) an objection to Mark K-Punk’s characterization of the present political conjuncture as “a new year Zero” with an objection to (Badiou’s or, we must suppose, anyone at all’s) systematic philosophy, which supposedly maintains the mirage of “a purified realm, somewhere apart from the rot of the flesh”, a kind of clean room or sterilized environment for the birthing of pristine subjects. Although both of the targets of Alex’s polemic are, in my view, defensible, I don’t especially want to try to defend them together, because I don’t think they particularly belong together; having partly addressed the latter in my previous post, in this post I’ll concentrate largely on the former.

It is a matter of political narrative: how do we tell the story of what is happening to us right now? Control of the story is, as Thatcher learned quite early on and Blair seems to have understood from the beginning, key to the effectiveness of any political programme pursued in the parliamentary-capitalist sphere. A Conservative government under David Cameron will have a particular story to tell about why the various austerity measures it will try to push through are painful but necessary, disciplinary actions undertaken for the sake of the nation’s morals. What they will mean is “painful for you, necessary for us”. The danger we are facing here is that this will turn out to be the “year Zero” of a rebooted neo-liberalism, with privatization (of the post offices, the health service, prisons, roads…) once again touted as the only way to increase the “efficiency” of a public infrastructure we can no longer afford. Labour has already effectively capitulated to this narrative, promising to cushion the blows that must inevitably fall but still insisting, with a truly bizarre dedication to unreality, that the electorate will not forgive them if they fail to uphold the “tough decisions” that will be dictated to them by - in all probability - the IMF. This is not a process that I wish to see pursued “all the way down” - it’s done enough damage already. We need a compelling counter-narrative, one that can uphold the premise that neo-liberalism has failed, is wholly and irreparably discredited, and should be forcibly repudiated.

It isn’t as a systematic philosopher that Badiou turns out to be a useful ally here, but as a trenchant opponent of Sarkozyism whose conjunctural analysis identifies the need to nominate and defend particular “points” against the disorientation of electoral politics and the imposition of managerial necessity. The question of “management” here is not the same as the question of “organization”, and the difference is precisely one of class and class interests. A coinage such as “conspiratorial management”, while attractive on the face of it, blurs this useful distinction to no useful purpose. Public anger can be mobilized around issues where the stakes are clear and the difference between “their” interests and “ours” produces a visible antagonism; the points and prescriptions of Badiou’s political interventions are chosen for their polemical potential, their divisiveness. Quite where anybody gets the notion that this - in certain respects classically “French Maoist” - view of what is to be done is “prissy” I’m not sure. The antagonisms here are not between “cleanliness” and “contagion” but between - to a first approximation - those who are concerned with what they make and do, and those who are concerned with securing the profit their class derives from what (mostly other) people make and do. The “corruption” of the latter is not their motive, to be opposed by a purer motive, but their ontological signature, the subjective form their objective interests call into being and inscribe under the banner of worldly realism. To oppose this “realism” is not to seek a purer realm, but an alternative, painstakingly “worlded”, subjective figure.