Saturday, November 12, 2011

Riot Days, part 2





I return now to the attempted reduction of Badiou's Le Réveil de l’Histoire, tracing the steps he lays out that lead from the historical riot to what is properly political: the emergence of an organization that can preserve the creative force of the riot after the riot as receded, that is, give it a duration, invent a temporality proper to politics. After having differentiated the historical riot from the immediate riot by contrasting the strong localization and qualitative extension of the latter to the weaker variants of the former, Badiou undertakes to formalize these internal logic of the historical riot -- specifically, developing the operations that make it up, contraction, localization and intensification -- while also demonstrating how the figure of political organization addresses the specific task of preserving the creative force of the riot.
 E. The historical riot is first of all characterized, then, by a real change in a determined world. If worlds are, for Badiou, always plural, and if a given world is identified with a particular distribution of quantities of existence to the elements making up that world -- a distribution that is necessarily hierarchical insofar as the distribution it operates orders the beings of a given world into a scale of existences differentiated by their intensity of existence -- then a real change in a given world occurs when what in a given world is assigned a negligible or minimal degree of existence suddenly experiences a leap in intensity, and passes from a minimal to a maximal degree of intensity. In the case of a given political situation, this means that that element of the population which, in the normal state of affairs, is deprived of any capacity for deciding the sense of its world -- which is what the name proletariat has always meant, before its more technical and "objective" determination as he or she who, having no access to the means necessary for reproducing his or her existence, must sell his or her labor-power in exchange for a wage which will then be spent on commodities that will in turn secure his or her reproduction as labor-power -- suddenly assumes an undeniable, and intense, visibility. This visibility is secured, moreover, by the production of the localization that this change requires. Localization produces a very specific type of place: a place, whether plaza, factory, university, or the street, assembled an intense minority that, though only a fragment of the population, stands in for the entire population itself. This is an essential aspect of Badiou's argument. The people assembled in a given square or site are necessarily much smaller, in terms of any objective calculus (the idiom of the representative state and its elections), and yet no one can deny that this minority is not only the people as a whole, compact, contracted into a given fraction, but that this formation has the authority to decide the fate of an entire people, since it bears the truth of this or that people. No one can deny it: it is this moment, when even the media of the oligarchic democracies of the West speak of the "Egyptian people" in referring to the assembly in Tahrir Square, when the general will can be said to emerge and be exercised. The authority conferred on this place and this assembly assumes the form of what Badiou calls a popular dictatorship that has the authority of the general will. This authority cannot be denied by anyone publicly, save at the risk of identifying oneself as a suspect, that is, as an agent of the old order. And this authority, as the authority of a truth or reason itself, is what gives rise to the enthusiasm that courses through these sequences: the same enthusiasm, Badiou asserts, that accompanies a declaration of love or the long-awaited demonstration of a mathematical proof.


F. Given the basic structures or operations of the historical riot or the historical mass movement--
         Contraction: a small minority stands in as the truth of the whole
         Intensification: a fraction of the population with a negligible quantity of existence takes on a maximal charge of existence; enthusiasm
         Localization: the intensification is localized in a place through which the entirety of the situation is refracted and attains a visibility
-- the question is posed as to how these traits can be inscribed in a political process oriented by an Idea. Badiou immediately refers to the figure of the Party here, and identifies contraction with the strict rules of belonging to the Party or not, intensification with the construction of a militant life, and localization and constant attention to the conquering of places, whether they be factories, tower blocks or universities, and so on. Now, what is interesting in this account, and marks the point where Badiou's analysis becomes more programmatic and, seemingly, less attuned to the specificity of the current political conjuncture and its riots, is his affirmation that the Party as an historically determined form or figure of political organization failed to solve a fundamental problem, a problem that was formalized but never quite resolved, even in the most ambitious moments of the cultural revolution: the treatment of contradictions at the heart of the people in a manner not modeled on the Stalinist terror, which confuses the contradictions at the heart of the people with the antagonistic struggle with an enemy.

      


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