Hegel, Mao, Badiou
Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
David Morgan, University of Newcastle
(paper presented at the 2009 Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. 27-29 August 2009.)
There is a copy of this paper, complete with groovy graphics (or so they seemed at 3 a.m) on my poetry blog: www.davidword.com
Abstract:
Badiou’s project in Theory of the Subject can be read as an appraisal of Hegel’s dialectics in the light of Mao’s quite different dialectical approach as laid out in On Practice, On Contradiction and as further developed in the Cultural Revolution. But Badiou makes key changes in Mao’s terminology and uses this new terminology to develop a distinct revision of classical Marxism and a misreading of Mao. In Theory of the Subject, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is treated as essentially passive and structural, and the role of driving force in history is assigned to the proletariat in their confrontation with the bourgeoisie. However, when this confrontation is not understood as grounded in the creativity and initiative unleashed in productive activity, there are two consequences for Badiou’s theory of the subject, consequences that are carried over into his later work in Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds:
a) The subject is located outside the structure of the situation. In Theory of the Subject, this is described as the contradiction between the splace and the outplace.
b) The subject is essentially passive, reacting to oppression and exploitation, rather than driven by its own creative impulses.
Thus Badiou is unable to give an account of structural change that arises out of empirically identifiable internal forces and that places the subject at centre of this process.
Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
In the early pages of Theory of the Subject, Badiou makes a distinction (which he ascribes to Mao’s On Contradiction) between two different types of contradiction that define capitalism: the fundamental contradiction and the principal contradiction. He defines the fundamental contradiction as that between the forces of production and the relations of production. He defines the principal contradiction as that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
| Fundamental contradiction | Principal contradiction |
| FORCES of production | PROLETARIAT |
| vs. | vs. |
| RELATIONS of production | BOURGEOISIE |
But this distinction is not supported by the text. Mao uses these two terms more or less interchangeably, although in different contexts and with different connotations.
Mao uses the term “fundamental contradiction” when discussing the fact that a lengthy process may go through various stages of development. He describes the fundamental contradiction as determining the essence of a process. He refers specifically to the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in this context, as defining the essential contradiction of capitalism.
The fundamental contradiction in the process of development of a thing and the essence of the process determined by this fundamental contradiction will not disappear until the process is completed…For instance, when the capitalism of the era of free competition developed into imperialism, there was no change in the class nature of the two classes in fundamental contradiction, namely, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[1]
Mao uses the term principal contradiction when describing the play of forces in a complex process involving many contradictions. He describes the principal contradiction as that which determines or influences the existence and development of other contradictions. In this context also, he refers specifically to the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction, whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.. For instance, in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. [2]
There are two points at issue here. The first is the relationship between the terms, fundamental and principal contradiction. Mao’s use of the terms is at least a little ambiguous, since he uses them in different contexts with different connotations but referring to the same pair of opposites. Some Maoists have treated the terms as interchangeable. Some have separated them – although not usually in the way Badiou has.[3] However, this first point is purely formal: how to configure the terms in a way that is the most analytically useful.
The second point at issue in Badiou’s distinction is more substantial. In fact, it goes to the heart of Badiou’s approach to the nature of subjectivity and agency. Badiou argues that every dialectical process is made up of two different types of contradiction, the structural and the historic. A structural contradiction expresses an invariant asymmetry. The relationship is fixed. The difference between the opposed terms is one of place, rather than qualitative heterogeneity. A historical contradiction, on the other hand, is dynamic and antagonistic. The asymmetry is reversible.
| Structural Contradiction(forces vs. relations) | Historical Contradiction(proletariat vs. bourgeoisie) |
| weak (difference of place) | strong (qualitative heterogeneity) |
| weak (scission) | strong (struggle) |
| invariant asymmetry | reversible asymetry |
According to Badiou, the contradiction between the social forces of production and the private relations of production is a structural contradiction, whereas the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is an historical contradiction. The proletariat forms a knot that links the two contradictions:
The class plays an active part both in the first definition, where it is the principal productive force, and in the second, where, in the guise of its political unity and under the name thus conquered of the proletariat, it confronts the bourgeoisie.[4]
Thus the working class is split into two. The first is the part that is indexed, that fits into capitalist relations of production. Badiou identifies this with trade unionism and revisionism. The second part is the excess that cannot be defined in terms of the capitalist structure. Badiou identifies this part with mass uprising, with insurrection, with what will become in later books “the event”.
However, Badiou doesn’t examine the relationship between the productive forces and the relations of production beyond labelling the former social and the latter private. In fact, the productive forces tend to drop out of sight entirely, and the relations of production are conflated with three distinct concepts of “the state”: the state as an instrument of class rule, the state as the socio-economic status quo and – later in this book and subsequently in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds – the state as the set of all subsets of a situation. For example, in his table comparing objective and subjective dialectic as expressed by the contradiction proletariat/bourgeoisie, the “relations of exploitation and control of the state” feature prominently. The forces of production play no role at all.[5]
While the productive forces disappear entirely in Badiou’s analysis, the bourgeoisie is both there and not there:
The famous contradiction of bourgeoisie/proletariat is a limited, structural scheme that loses track of the torsion of the Whole … the project of the proletariat, its internal being, is not to contradict the bourgeoisie, or to cut its feet from under it. This project is communism, and nothing else. [6] That is, the abolition of any place in which something like a proletariat can be installed.[7]
So the “real” contradiction turns out to be between the proletariat and the structural relations that it exceeds. This conforms to the formal template that Badiou has already established in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic. Hegel’s thing-in-itself vs. thing-for-others becomes Heidegger’s ontological being vs. ontic being, or as Badiou describes it, “the effect on A of the contradiction between its pure identity and the structured space to which it belongs.”[8] Badiou uses the term “splace” to refer to this structured place and “outplace” to refer to that part of the term that does not conform to the rule of the splace.
According to Badiou, all contradiction takes the form of the splace, which is the structural base, vs. the outplace, which is the motor. In the case of capitalism, the structural contradiction is the base and the proletariat is the motor.[9] The effect of the motor on the base is twofold. On the one hand, it must result in the destruction of the splace. On the other, this destruction must culminate in the formation of a new splace.[10]
The process is essentially Hegel’s negation of the negation. Each new splace generates an outplace that is the motor for destruction of the old order and creation of the new. The motor for change constantly reappears in a new form.
The obvious question is: what drives the motor? The question gives rise to two philosophical problems relating to agency:
- Agency as motor of change
- Agency as free choice
For Hegel, the force that generates each new contradiction and forces its resolution is Reason and its drive towards Totality. Consequently, the motor of change is teleological, and Reason is both the goal and the Absolute Subject.[11]
Badiou, strongly influenced by the Cultural Revolution’s summation of “one divides into two” as the fundamental principle of dialectics,[12] rejects any concept of Totality. But he also rejects the Althusserian concept of “history as a process without a subject”, because it resolves the question of the motor at the expense of agency as free choice.
Badiou’s solution to the problem of agency as free choice is essentially Kantian: freedom as human agency is located in the suspension of causality. In Kant, this suspension occurs in the noumenal world. In Badiou, the suspension takes place in key moments of human history, in times of insurrection or mass uprising.
When the popular insurrection breaks out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has arrived… It is the interruption of an algorithm, and not its execution that has a subjectivizing effect… As for the subjective process, it exists only in the recomposition of consequences in light of the interruption. It is never the pursuit of the algorithm, since the entrance of force onto the stage breaks with the law to which it owes the fact that it exists in its place.[13]
Thus, the development of the forces of production as the driver of social change disappears – and with it, any form of economic determinism. But since the subjective “exists only in the recomposition of consequences” after the fact, the role of consciousness as a cause of change must also disappear. The problem of freedom of choice is resolved at the expense of leaving the problem of agency as motor of change unresolved – or, resolved only in a supernatural manner.
This is the site, I believe, of one of Badiou’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses as a philosopher. Badiou has a clear sense of the often cataclysmic and unpredictable nature of profound change, and his philosophy is an attempt to grapple with this. But I would argue that Badiou steps over a line here – and it is a choice that is adhered to and further developed in Being and Event. An insurrection is an extreme and very clear example of qualitative leap arising out of quantitative change. Dramatic changes in complex situations can, as Lenin said, appear miraculous, that is to say, the complexity can baffle prediction,[14] but this is very different from maintaining a claim of absolute contingency for “the event”. One could say – although I’m sure Badiou would emphatically reject this – that for Badiou “the event” is the unknowable Kantian thing-in-itself.
Badiou’s example of The Oresteia as a prototype of revolutionary change is perhaps more revealing than he intends. Orestes, as the outsider, forces the destruction of the splace. The new order replaces the old. But this is only accomplished through the agency of Athena as a dea ex machina.
However, Badiou argues that his solution is not irrationalist.[15] To explain this, he draws a comparison with the atomic theory of the ancient Greek materialists. If the universe is composed of nothing but atoms and void, what causes the appearance of determinate forms? The Greek answer was that the void caused the atoms to swerve. This initial impulse was called the clinamen. To give the void as the source of movement in the context of Greek atomism is essentially irrationalist, a suspension of the logic of the scission: atoms/nothing. But the irrationalism is negated by the fact that the clinamen appears nowhere.
…It is of the utmost importance that the clinamen in turn be abolished… no particular explanation of any particular thing whatsoever should require the clinamen, even though the existence of a thing in general is unthinkable without it. It means that no atom should ever be mappable as deviant, in any combination of atoms whatsoever, even though the existence of deviation conditions the very existence of a combinatory.
Badiou argues that for Marxists, the masses – in their insurrectionary moments – are the clinamen. The insurrectionary moment founds a new order but disappears in the founding. It is the essential nature of an insurrection that it is a singularity, an interruption of the rules. It is absolutely incompatible with any order, including the new order, even though it creates it.
It is according to the modality of the stable splacement that the masses are history, whereas it is in their appearing-disappearing that they make history… However, this being of history is a result, whose possibility invariably arises from the disappearing fury of the deviating masses, that is to say, the masses who in the unpredictable storm of their confident revolt, stood up against the figure of the State that first served as their founding principle[16]
But this still leaves the motor of history as the essentially irrationalist eruption of disappearing fury, a reaction against oppression and exploitation. Without some positive content, where does the ability to form a new splace and create order out of chaos come from? Badiou understands problem and states it clearly:
Yet the philosophy behind all this comes up short, because it denies at bottom any active autonomy, any real independence, any affirmative political virtuality, to what rises up in the guise of the enraged rebel of good faith… How, in the echo of the great antirepressive vituperation, will I be able to establish my capacity to repress the repression?
However, Badiou’s solution is to describe a process that seems logically necessary, given the nature of the contradiction as he has laid it out, but that is still not rooted in any substantial material base. He proposes a process of purification.
The proletariat, as noted earlier, is a class divided. It appears in the splace as a productive force, but outside the splace as the force that cannot be contained. The proletariat must, through the agency of the party, keep itself “maximally out of place” and destroy in itself “all that is not destruction of the splace: the party is purification.”
But this begs the question that Badiou himself has just raised: purification of what? What force drives the insurrectionary moment?
The classical Marxist position is that the driving force in human history is the application of human intelligence, creativity and social organisation to the problem of survival and reproduction. Human society develops increasingly more productive technology and forms of organisation. This development drives social organisation and culture in general. Science, technology and the arts take on a life of their own and react back on the development of production,[17] but they all have their genesis in this struggle for material survival and the consequent development of the productive forces. When the relations of production become obstacles to the further development of the productive forces, “an era of social revolution begins.”[18]
When Marx wrote about the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it was not about a different contradiction than that between the productive forces and the relations of production. Rather, he was writing about the human agents who act out this contradiction. Steam engines do not take up arms against the court house.[19] Class struggle is not something separate, something over and above the struggle for material survival – it is clearly not just a question of how you dig up the potatoes, but who gets to eat them.
The struggle for better wages, better working conditions, political freedom and social justice all arise out of the same ultimately biological impulses that fuelled the invention of the plough and the exploration of the oceans and continents. This is not to say that there is a straightforward correlation: proletariat = forces of production; bourgeoisie = relations of production. Rather, it is principally these two classes that are drawn into battle in the resolution of the contradiction. The key point is that the contradiction between the forces and relations of production is not structural in the sense of something fixed and repetitive; it is the source of revolutionary change.
But then the question arises: if the productive forces drive forward social development, if the working classes are no more than “agents” of this development, what is the role of the subjective in human history, of freedom and conscious choice? This passage from Capital shows the problem starkly:
We have seen that the capitalist process of production is a historically determined form of the social process of production in general. The latter is as much a production process of material conditions of human life as a process taking place under specific historical and economic production relations, producing and reproducing these production relations themselves, and thereby also the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence and their mutual relations, i.e. their particular socio-economic form.[20]
In other words, the producers are themselves produced. How then can they be free?
Here a distinction has to be made between freedom as “free will” and freedom as “conscious choice”. Free will is essentially a judicial concept, whether the judge is a deity or a magistrate. If there is no break in the chain of causality, there can be no determination of guilt.[21]
But freedom as conscious choice requires causality – not its suspension – because that is what gives agency its power to affect the future. This position was first clearly articulated by Hegel as a critique of the Kant.
Hegel was the first to state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him, freedom is the recognition of necessity. “Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.” Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility which is thus given of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality.[22]
The power and grandeur of subjectivity lies not in the suspension of causality, but in the capacity for conscious choice. Without causality – without some form of determination and consequence – one choice is as good as another, and no choice has any particular value.
The concept of the clinamen that Badiou introduced in Theory of the Subject, combined with set theory – although not as a universal ontological statement, but as a framing device – can provide a useful metaphor to describe this dialectical view of human agency. Within the situation, causality is – or is assumed to be for purposes of scientific investigation – absolute.[23] But it is the nature of consciousness as reflexivity that it stands outside the situation that created it.[24] Any force that acts on a situation from the outside appears as contingent from the inside. But inside and outside are relative terms. Any conscious understanding of a situation that can be applied as an outside force to that situation is itself contained in a larger situation. We can step outside of any particular situation, develop an understanding of its causal interconnections, and use that understanding to manipulate, rather than be manipulated – but we can never step outside of the process. Consciousness is the clinamen, appearing inside the situation only as effect, but operating as cause from a position outside the situation –only to disappear as an effect from inside the larger situation.
The same spatial diagram used earlier [see the graphic version of this paper at www.davidword.com] to illustrate the splace/outplace contradiction works equally well here to describe the contradiction between consciousness as determined by the situation and consciousness as agent for change. But now the driving force is the dialectical relationship between determined material development and reflexivity of the subject.
If there were an absolute limit to this spiral development, it would result in an irresolvable contradiction between absolute determinism and absolute subject. But as Badiou has shown with his use of Russell’s paradox as an ontological proof for the inexistence of God, an absolute limit is inconceivable.
In this paradigm that I’ve outlined, the terms “inside” and “outside” are no less problematic than the terms “causality” and “consciousness”. Badiou’s application of set theory to ontology, is a useful way of conceptualising the fluid and overlapping nature of situations, but it gives no gives no guidelines for determining what should be included or excluded from this or that particular situation. I would argue that this can only be a decision based on concrete investigation of actual phenomena in their contradictory development.
Any decision about the limits of a situation will have profound implications for the attempt to understand and change it. To return to the case of the contradiction, proletariat/bourgeoisie, for example, is the arena France? Paris? The world? There are sound practical arguments for a nativist working class hostility to immigrants, if the arena is closed off at the national level.
It is the international proletariat that Marxism identifies as a revolutionary subject. According to this view, the potential for internationalism is a product of the proletariat’s objective position as the main exploited class in world capitalism and of its central role in the production process. Whether this is still true today – whether it was ever true – is not a question for philosophy or mathematics. It requires a scientific analysis of the social forces and relations in modern capitalism. The phenomena are complex, contradictory and emergent. They are neither unknowable nor absolutely contingent.
The two pillars of the communist enterprise are causality and the decisive role of consciousness. This does not make up a logical contradiction, but a dynamic and productive unity of opposites. Badiou abandons causality at the expense of disempowering the subject.
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[1] Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction, (London: Verso, 2007), p. 81
[2] Mao Tse-Tung, On Contradiction, (London: Verso, 2007), p. 87
[3] The main form this separation has taken is to use the fundamental contradiction to refer to the underlying contradiction that defines a process. For example, capitalism is defined by the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (or between the social productive forces and the private relations of production – more on this later). The principal contradiction in this case would be used to refer to the most intense contradiction, the one that – at a given stage of development – was the most intense and was exercising the strongest influence on the development of the all the other contradictions. The principal and fundamental contradiction could be identical, but not necessarily so. For example, Lin Biao in “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!”, (Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1965) defined the principal contradiction in the world at that time in the following way:
Since World War II, revolutionary storms have been rising in this area, and today they have become the most important force directly pounding U.S. imperialism. The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world.
Following on from this analysis, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union in the United States argued that while the fundamental contradiction in the United States was the class contradiction, the principal contradiction was between the oppressed nationalities and U.S. Imperialism. This contradiction was producing the most intense struggles at the time and was having the biggest influence on the development of the other contradictions. In this view, the principal contradiction was still profoundly linked to the fundamental class contradiction, both because the overwhelming majority of the oppressed nationalities inside the U.S. were proletarian and because the resolution of this contradiction could not be resolved short of proletarian Revolution. (A Selection from the Red Papers, 1-3, Chicago, Revolutionary Union,. 1974)
See also Charles Bettelheim for a similar usage in analyzing contradictions within the U.S.S.R. The Transition to Socialist Economy, trans. by Brian Pearce, The Harvester Press Limited, 1975), p. 146
[4] Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. by Bruno Bosteels, (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 26
[5] Badiou,p. 25
[6] This is, of course, a very clear departure from Marxist theory, where the first step in revolution is precisely the proletariat cutting the feet out from under the bourgeoisie and replacing them as the dominant class in class society. Badiou gives lip service to Mao’s conception of the principal aspect of a contradiction as determining the character of that contradiction, but he fails to apply this to the question of bourgeois dictatorship vs. proletarian dictatorship.
This is related to Badiou’s conflation of” the state” as an instrument of class power with “the state” of the situation, i.e. in this case, the totality of capitalist society. The first step in a revolution, as articulated by Lenin, would be to seize power, smash the old state apparatus and build a new type of proletarian state power that would preside over the abolition of class society – in a process that, according to Mao, could take a very long time indeed for completion. In Marxist theory, the state (as an instrument of class rule) can and must be dismantled immediately, but to dismantle the state (as class society) requires a long period of ideological struggle and social reorganisation. To say that the project of the proletariat is communism and “nothing else” may or may not be correct, but it is an anarchist position, not a Marxist one.
[7] Badiou, p. 7
[8] Badiou, p. 7. In Logic of Worlds, Badiou will return to the distinction between the ontological and the ontic (ontological and onto-logical) and the application of set theory to the former and category algebra to the latter that he first introduces here in Theory of the Subject.
[9] Badiou, p. 26
[10] Badiou, p. 264
[11] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),. p. 50
[12] ‘The Theory of “Combine Two into One” is a Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism’, Three Major Struggles on China’s Philosophical Front (1949-1964), (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973)
[13] Badiou, p. 257
[14] “There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous.” Lenin, “Letters from Afar,” Collected Works, Vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), p. 297 (quoted in Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K. J. A, 1Alain Badiou’s “Politics of Emancipation”: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World’, Demarcations, Issue Number 1, Summer-Fall 2009
[15] Badiou,. p. 60
[16] Badiou, p. 64
[17] Frederick Engels, ‘Engels to J. Bloch in Königsberg, 1890’, Historical Materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin), (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 294
[18] Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977)
[19] At least not outside of Transformers.
[20] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishardt, 1974), p. 818
[21] “The texts say: the subject of law is the general and abstract expression of the human person; they also say: what makes this expression effective is the general capacity of man to be his own master, and therefore to be acquisitive. They say finally: that if this capacity is the mode of being a subject, it is because the subject can be/wants to be/consents to be/is free to be his own master and to be acquisitive. Edelman, Le Droit saisi par la photographie, p. 20, quoted in Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism, (London, Routledge, 1977, p. 76.
[22] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. by Emile Burns, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947), p. 144
[23] The rule of some form causality is a necessary working hypothesis for science. It is not an ontological principle. Science asserts no ontological principals.
[24] It should be said here that reflexivity begins with biology – its extreme form, so far, is consciousness.
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