Ontology and Politics – Whitehead, Badiou, Deleuze

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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 State-
apparatus, 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.