What in the hell …

I’ve been reading Badiou lately. I shall soon-ish be formulating more questions on that. For now, more notes on the later Althusser, which is quite resonant with Badiou. I can’t recall the relationship between the two. I seem to remember Badiou being a student of or a younger professor influenced by Althusser. In any case …

The unit, so to speak, that matters for Althusser in ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ is the encounter. He draws upon ancient atomism for an analogy - the clinamen. The clinamen is the swerve that occurs such that atoms falling through space along parallel lines diverge from their trajectories and run into each other. I don’t find the analogy particularly interesting or helpful, but the important bit seems to getting away from a certain type of causal determinism.

“The encounter may not take place or may take place. The meeting can be missed.” (172.) No guarantees, then. The encounter occurs in a void: in politics, a political void, but “this political void is first a philosophical void.” (173.) The void is the space through which the atoms fall. Within the void or in relation to the void one ought to think “not in terms of the Necessity of the accomplished fact, but in terms of the contingency of the fact to be accomplished.” (174.)

Unfortunately, determination pegged to the unforeseeable and uncontrollable occurrence of swerve is itself amenable to a type of determinism. Althusser writes, “the enocunter may not take place, just as it may take place. Nothing determines, no principle of decision determines this alternative in advance; it is of the order of a game of chance.” (174.) The metaphor doesn’t hold, though. If there a determining occurs, then there must be something which determines. There is a risk here of re-importing a thought of being-determined rather than of the determining act. The point about outcomes and encounters not being pre-determined is important, however. I’m not sure one needs the baroque ensemble from the history of philosophy that Althusser assembles to make the point, but it’s a pleasant stylistic choice on his part at a minimum.

This is quite good:

“A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might not have taken place it may no longer take place. (…) In other words, nothing guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability.” (174.)

There’s a resonance between Althusser’s enounter, clinamen, and Badiou’s event. The encounter that lasts seems analogous to the event to which a subject maintains fidelity.

“History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about.”

Althusser terms this “a philosophy of the void,” a void constituted by this philosophy in service of (at the moment of) this philosophy’s self-constitution via “evacuating all philosophical problems (…) in order to set out from nothing, and from the infinitesimal, aleatory variation of nothing constituted by the swerve of the fall.” (174-175.)

The void is “[p]hilosophy’s ‘object’ par excellence“. (175.)

There’s an interesting quote from Macherey, on page 204, note 24, defining the void as “the infinity, that is, indivisibility of extension, which, as such, is irreducible to any physical component of nature whatsoever, so that we must be able to think it in and of itself, independently of the presence of any finite material reality. Whether one calls this infinity full or empty is, after all, merely a question of the name one chooses to give it, and has no bearing on the content of the reasoning that name designates.”

Vittorio Morfino’s “An Althusserian Lexicon” is quite useful, it’s in the Borderlands special issue on Althusser which David edited. It includes the following on the void.

[T]he entire constellation of significations the void assumes through the prism of the authors belonging to what Althusser calls “the underground current” (…) can be reduced to the following four:

1) The void is first of all understood as the negation of every metaphysical principle compelling thought to imagine the thing rather than think what Machiavelli defined as its “effective truth”. This void is not a point of departure but a point of arrival, bound to a specific action: it means that, through knowledge, one makes a void, but a void that is not absolute. This void is the voiding of metaphysics, the metaphysics of knowledge as well as the morals and religion that imprison the real in the snares of an imagination whose function is to mystify this real. It is to make a void that renders visible an existence that is beyond good and evil, a network or weave of relations in which human actions insert themselves according to the logic of an “if…then…”

2) The void is also understood as what allows for an access to this “effective truth” of the thing. This “effective truth” of the thing is not what the thing should be, but the thing thought as having its foundation in an abyss [an Ab-grund]. The void is the radical absence of God and every guarantee that could be introduced to stabilize being: the void opens the way to the effective truth of the thing not a parte post - the constituted existence of the thing - but a parte ante , to the fluctuation or instability of the elements that have given rise to the existence of the thing, an existence that might not have taken place or emerged at all.

3) The void is understood as the possibility of movement, as a favorable conjunction in which there is no impediment opposing action. It is in this void that we find the sole materialist concept of freedom: “the absence of impediments to movement”, according to Hobbes’ definition.

4) Finally, the void as distance, the void as the place where it is possible to draw a line that will allow for the momentary management of a given balance of power: the Machiavellan metaphor of the fox incarnates the possibility of creating an empty distance necessary for the institution of an enduring power.

Morfino also formulates encounter and the relationship between void and encounter as follows.

The concept of the encounter therefore receives a complex articulation within Althusser’s consideration of the authors of aleatory materialism. The following are, I believe, the fundamental points:

1) Encounters can be brief or can last. The lasting encounter is one in which the relations between elements take hold; but the fact that the encounter endures does not guarantee that it will last forever. Every encounter is, in fact, provisional (even the ones that last). And not only that: every encounter is founded literally on an abyss; that is, on the fact that it cannot take place.

2) Every encounter is the result of prior encounters, all of which in their turn might not have taken place: “There are encounters only between series [ séries ] of beings that are the results of several series of causes - at least two, but this two soon proliferates, by virtue of the effect of parallelism or general contagion…” (Althusser 1994a: 580). The reference here is to Cournot’s Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilities, where “chance” is defined as an encounter between two independent causal series.

3) The encounter depends on an affinity between the elements that encounter one another. Even those elements containing nothing of what they will be after the encounter are nevertheless affinissables : “… every encounter is aleatory in its effects, in that nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter, the contours and determinations of the being that will emerge from it. Julius II did not know that he was harbouring his mortal enemy in his Romagnol breast, nor did he know that this mortal would be lying at death’s door and so find himself outside history [hors histoire] at the critical hour of Fortune, only to go off and die in an obscure Spain before the walls of an unknown castle. This means that no determination of the being that issues from the ‘taking-hold’ of the encounter is prefigured, even in outline, in the being of the elements that converge in the encounter. Quite the contrary: no determination of these elements can be assigned except by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction.” ( Althusser 1994a: 566) The elements can, therefore, have affinities, but they do not have them prior to the encounter. They do not have, therefore, a priori affinities of the sort Goethe described; they can, however, develop an affinity in very specific, aleatory conditions (because every element is in its turn the result of an encounter). The elements have affinities, then, but only a posteriori, which means that these affinities can only be discovered retroactively, by looking back over an encounter that has already taken place.

4) Finally, after the encounter takes hold, the structure takes priority over the elements.

According to Althusser, the concepts of the encounter and the void, thought together in their strict interdependence, necessarily lead to a primacy of the nothing over every form and the primacy of aleatory materialism over every formalism - that is, over every type of structuralist combinatory of elements. Every form emerges out of and is founded on a triple abyss. The encounter

1) can not be;

2) can be brief;

3) can no longer be.

Philosophy’s essence is, according to Althusser’s Spinoza, the void. It is nothing other than the recognition and observation of the encounter: “What becomes of philosophy under these circumstances? It is no longer a statement of the Reason and Origin of things, but a theory of their contingency and a recognition of fact, of the fact of contingency, the fact of the subordination of necessity to contingency, and the fact of the forms which ‘gives form’ to the effect of the encounter. It is now no more than observation [constat]: there has been an encounter, and a ‘ crystallization ‘ [prise] of the elements with one another (in the sense in which ice ‘crystallizes’)” (Althusser 1994a: 556).

There’s an ambiguity here, though. How is “the recognition and observation of the encounter” different from the taking of something as - or the positing of - an encounter?

If “no determination (…) can be assigned except by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction,” if “affinities can only be discovered retroactively, by looking back over an encounter that has already taken place” then why retain the encounter at all? Since activity in the second moment, the moment of retroaction, is what defines the first moment as having been the first and a beginning, why not simply foreground the activity that takes place in the second moment as the starting point? I’m fond of Kant’s formulation in the piece on religion within the bounds of reason, that one should act as if everything depends upon one - the ‘as if’ makes no claim for or against that actual dependence of everything on one, being solely a practical maxim. Similarly, why not prescribe a maxim of acting as if there has been an encounter, which brackets out the question of whether or not there has? Part of this bracketing for me is the bracketing out of ontology as unnecessary.

(Note to self re: Badiou and fidelity to the event, can fidelity be individual, private? Or must it be shared, common? Essentially, is fidelity like a language such that one can’t have it privately? Does one need a co-militant in order to check if one has gone off the rails?)