Ontology And Politics

Ontology and Politics – Whitehead, Badiou, Deleuze http://www.whiteheadresearch.org/event-and-decision/EandDCallForPapers.pdf Politics through the Abyss Ontology after Whitehead, Badiou, Deleuze Politics, and more generally ontology, are not concepts, but functions which divide. The consistency of a political axiom rests fundamentally on divisive operations. Both ontology and politics are, in effect, the study of the potential varieties of groups, masses, and milieus. More precisely, ontology is the study of plausible inter-relations. Then ‘division’ is the ontological term, because classes have to do, morphologically and genealogically, with inclusion and belonging. It is important practically and politically to distinguish interested from uninterested classes. The necessity for this real distinction is important to bear in mind since, theoretically speaking, all classes are interested (not to mention they are all intrinsically interesting from a psychological and historical point of view.) Let’s agree in general that any kind of mass has interests. Then the question becomes whether and how they are cared for – for example, we can consider that a cursory science merely takes account, but a mature science investigates interconnections. Similarly, enframing the social question as an ontological distinction already begs the question of interconnection: for masses always have interests, even when ignored by those who ‘count.’ Those who escape the territory of the count –‘mutants’ on the edge of the ‘void’ – are those in whom real thinking can occur. For Badiou, justice is purely disinterested, and the question is about the distance from the Stateapparatus, the counting-machine. For Deleuze, the question is about the possibility of a nomadology, or schizoanalysis, of the institutional misdirection of “neutral” desiring-machines. For Whitehead, the question of social change is about evolution and flux. What ties them together is not faith in the future, but a faith in a primordial vision of society which is possible from our modern perspective. We could not have gotten this far without having a past, and while it is important to move beyond the past, history is required for the adaption of social systems towards new potential arrangements. So how are we to judge ontologies, which themselves dictate eschatologies, potential utopias? Any particular ontology already has its

entire future sewn within itself – and even its prehistory. It is on the intuition that prehistories have affects in the present that we can find a golden thread through Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their modern counterparts – Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead – have taken a similar inspiration towards a new kind of ontology. [We are thus given a new kind of master, and a new moral question: ethics is no longer whether or not we desire to be ruled – but rather, whether we desire to dominate. (?)] Now, fidelity of course structures the politics of subjective representation. Topologically, the subject is the origin, the void-point around which the entire symbolic coordination is achieved. What is most interested is the possibility of a counter-coordination, the inauguration of a new kind of public space, which is able to dispense with the hypocritical historical divisions between private ‘self’ and public ‘person.’ This division is the radical core of ontology, its danger and saving power – it is the dream of an ontology. The power of fidelity as a subjective split between within and without is the most powerful of social drives, even intervening in the most mundane of political processes. Whitehead concludes The Adventure of Ideas: “At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace:- That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of this Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.” Suppose the entire question of the political is merely the logic of interest. Then we would only be able to ask the genealogical question: how does the apparent order of political categories arise in the first place? In other words, if disinterestedness remains our criteria for justice, then the logic of politics collapses into a pseudo-logic of public and private spaces. Concretely, political machines introduce a divisional logic of splitting. Theoretically, this would imply that if politics is the logic of interest, then thinking politically is only about fidelity, or loyalty – that is, being able to clearly distinguish inside from outside. Again materially, this amounts to a surgical incision

which is pedagogical, a suffering which functionalizes our body, making of it an object-lesson. A distinction serves a new axis of freedom for it allows access to new spaces of the machine, implies new trajectories of social movement. But insofar as distinction is a compressed sort of division, distinction also wounds us. Ironically, division (almost!) fulfills our desire to be whole. Let’s say that “social transversality” refers to that involution of social desire which transfigures reality by scrambling and reordering all of the infinite segments of experience – maximizing their potential. To speak of the pure transversal is dishonest, because it already speaks-- it is the flowing of speech and even of comprehension itself; for the pure transversal would be the very source of order. But we are poets when we describe it figuratively; after all, the transversal is not a point, but the flowing and endless remapping and self-organizing of singularities. Just as with distinction, the tranvsversal ought to be thought of as more a function than a concept. Transversality is not something you think; it’s something we do! So what underlies all politics questions are the social machines which produce unconscious and even preconscious interests. Our desires, political or otherwise, seem to express themselves as though formed and even enunciated by complex machine of coordinating energy, force and power. 0. Preface a. Process and Event b. Power and Duality i. Mathematics and Poetry ii. Culture and Violence iii. Love and Politics iv. Difference and Repetition 1. Badiou a. 2. Deleuze a. What is Philosophy? i. The event inheres with propositions and things but doesn’t coincide with them, with the actions and passions of bodies b. A Thousand Plateaus i. Indirect discourse (‘the Nietzsche book…’) relates itself to metaphysical knowledge (what does it mean to be a book? How do they function? Even: what does it mean to speak of this book? What are the criteria for evaluation?)

ii. Metaphysics startles our preconceptions. Communication is not possible without being grounded in metaphysical knowledge. Thoughts are only thoughts insofar as they relate to universes of reference (incorporeal universes of value.) But Whitehead probably means these ideas in a more general sense: we can’t state a proposition without it already being linked to a possible. 3. Whitehead a. The Concept of Nature i. There is a difference between entities and events 1. Entities have to do with thought, events with nature 2. If nature has a substance, this substance is events. Whitehead considers the green of a blade of grass, or the blue of the sky, to mean that there are events at work making the sky blue (chemical composition, interrelation,) but the color itself is not an event. 3. We can say that the experience is situated in the event, that experience functions in relation to but in itself is not an event ii. Language – the difference between demonstration (dealing with a ‘this’ or ‘that) and description (dealing with indefinite articles, ‘a’ this or that.) 1. The act of distinction is itself an event (which is a sort of dream-subject) required for communication 2. Description forms a part of the proposition that it helps to express, whereas demonstration never forms a part of the proposition that it still nevertheless it helps to express b. Process and Reality 4.