dominic said:
I should probably retract this statement . . . . I just read an article on the Internet about Badiou and the Organisation Politique [OP], about which I previously knew nothing -- here's the link to article, "Badiou's Politics: Equality and Justice," by Peter Hallward:
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm
None of which is to say that I endorse Hallward's reading of Badiou, or his attendant criticisms. Simply put, I haven't read enough of Badiou to even say. But I found the article stimulating and helpful.
Hallward treats several issues:
(1) The connection b/w Badiou's egalitarian politics and his ontology:
"It is a rudimentary principle of Badiou’s ontology, that all elements which belong to a situation belong (or are presented in, or exist, or count) in exactly the same way, with exactly the same weight. Politics is the process whereby this simple belonging [to this space here] is actively and effectively abstracted from all differentiating conditions or re-presentations."
(2) Politics as axiomatic prescription rather than reasoned argument (Badiou contra Arendt):
"The status of universal political principles, like all forms of truth, is necessarily axiomatic (or non-definitional) . . . . Justice cannot be defined, it is a pure affirmation without guarantee or proof."
"A generic or axiomatic politics asserts the ‘political capacity of all people’, the principle that ‘everyone can occupy the space of politics, if they decide to do so’"
(3) Badiou's relationship to Rousseau and the "general will":
"There is, strictly speaking, only one political actor, namely the we that comes out or demonstrates in the real of fraternity (i.e. in the element of pure presentation as such). What resists the organised political we is not an alternative political subject so much as the brute inertia of re-presentation, which is nothing other than the inertia of the status quo itself."
"All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal interest . . . .
Other, more narrow principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are merely a matter of ‘syndicalism’ or trade union style negotiation, i.e. negotiation for an improved, more integrated place within the established situation."
(4) The importance of the figure of the worker:
"By ‘workers’ Badiou means something almost as broad as ‘people’, insofar as they cannot be reduced to units of capital. In the subjective absence of the worker, there persists only the values of capital (production, competition, consumption). Clearly, work here includes intellectual as much as physical work. If physical work, above all factory work, nevertheless remains pre-eminent in Badiou’s account, it is because it is obviously the least counted, the most vulnerable to exclusion from the criteria of our prevailing social count. Because the factory (and its analogs) is thus on the edge of the void or in the least protected part of our political-economic situation, so ‘all contemporary politics has the factory as its place.' By not counting its workers, a factory becomes nothing more than a place of industrial production regulated by managerial decisions. By not counting its workers, a country is nothing more than a balance sheet writ large, a set of capital flows and statistics, a purely objectified (i.e. thought-less) realm."
(5) Separating the Political from the Economic and Social (in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Arendt):
Badiou and the OP have long maintained that ‘the only kind of economy is capitalist’, which is to say that ‘there is no socialist economy’ as such. What is known in France as la pensée unique adopts this economy as its sole principle, a principle of apparent ‘necessity’ driven by global competition and European monetary union. The OP seeks to articulate a viable refutation of this ‘politique unique whose present form is the declaration that the economy decides everything.’ True politics can only begin at a distance from the economy, and policies supposedly justified by economic necessity are for the OP simply synonymous with reactionary politics . . . . On the other hand, there can be no political retreat from the challenge posed by an ever more global, ever more triumphant capitalist economy . . . . Progressive politics as Badiou understands it must both operate at a level of universality that can rival that of capital itself and ensure that this rivalry unfold on a plane other than that dominated by capital. ‘I think what is Marxist, and also Leninist, and in any case true, is the idea that any viable campaign against capitalism can only be political. There can be no economical battle against the economy.’ Should politics try to confront capitalism on its own economic terrain, the eventual result will be capitalist every time . . . .
(6) Badiou's Ambivalence toward the State and Liberal Democracy, or the Vis-a-Vis:
"The OP remains suspicious of any political campaign – for instance, electoral contests or petition movements – that operates as a ‘prisoner of the parliamentary space.’ It remains ‘an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.’ However, it is now equally clear that ‘their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought.’ The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical ‘vis-à-vis’ with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses ‘any antagonistic conception of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism.’ There is to no more choice to be made between the state or revolution; the ‘vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the annihilation of one of the two.’"
"The OP [has] recognised that the only contemporary movement of ‘désétatisation’ with any real power [is] the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. ‘We are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The state is what can sometimes take account of people and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not incarnate the general interest’ "
(7) The nature of the OP's political interventions:
"The OP intervenes only on particular questions, raised by specific confrontations or events, always guided by the strict, axiomatic assertion of subjective equality: political equality for everyone living in the national community, residence papers for the sans-papiers, political empowerment of all workers as workers, equal universal access to health and education, and so on."
"The prescriptions of the OP are invariably simple, minimally ‘theoretical’ principles – for example: that every individual counts as one individual, that all students must be treated in the same way, that ‘everyone who is here is from here’, that factories are places of work before they are places of profit, and so on. A political situation exists only under the prescription of such transparent statements whose universality is as clear as it is distinct"
"Badiou insists that these interventions don’t add up to form a general programme or party line. ‘God protect us from "socio-political programmes"! The essence of modern politics is to be non-programmatic. Politics, as we conceive it in the OP, promises nothing. It is both without party and without programme. It is a prescriptive form of thought, discerning possibilities entirely inaccessible to parliamentarism, and one that works entirely independently for their realisation’"
(8) The dependence of these prescriptive interventions on the State:
Hallward poses the question -- "The question is whether the very possibility of such prescription according to the general interest does not itself presuppose that same liberal-parliamentary realm upon whose systematic vilification its own critical distance depends. What kind of state can respond ‘responsibly’ to political prescriptions, if not one closely responsible to electoral pressure?"
Hallward goes further -- "That participation in the state should not replace a prescriptive externality to the state is obvious enough, but the stern either/or so often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique reads today like a displaced trace of the days when the choice of ‘state or revolution’ still figured as a genuine alternative."
(9) Are prescriptions aimed at the State adequate to the challenge posed by global capitalism?
Hallward poses the question -- "In what sense can a politics that defines itself as a prescription upon the state afford to remain indifferent to global economic trends whose direct effect is to undercut and limit the functions of a prescribable state? Can Badiou affirm both the fully ‘random’ distribution of events and the structural regularity of ‘global trends’ – without, at least, relating the one to the other?"
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--- isn't the issue that Badiou doesn't give enough emphasis to the influence of activity upon cognition? i.e. to the simple Marxist thought that breaking out of dominant ideology is only possible in certain conditions?