Badiou and Computers

“Is Badiou a digital philosopher? I want to say yes, at least to some degree”

“any discussion of whether or not Badiou is a digital philosopher stumbles over an awkward truth. Badiou hardly ever talks about the digital**. Badiou hardly ever ever about computers”

“This philosopher, known the world over for his overweening interest in mathematics and formalization, has only rarely addressed the most important instance of mathematical formalism in the world today, namely digital computation. Why is this?”

“I want to appeal to the particularities of Badiou’s own philosophical position, not just the macro context of where he stands in the field of human knowledge”

“computers lie exclusively on one side of the impasse described by Badiou in Mediation 26-27 of Being & Event”

“This impasse is so important to Being & Event that we might simply give the proper name “being and event” to the impasse itself”

“Badiou’s project requires some ability to straddle the gap between two forms of rationality”

“These two forms of rationality have been described in different ways. Hegelians will talk about bad infinity and good infinity. Cantor had his two sizes of infinity as well, which are analogous. Ancient mathematicians spoke of the arithmetical and the geometric. I tend to favor terms like digital and analog”

“For Badiou it’s normal being (also called natural being) versus the abnormal event subtracted from the state of the situation”

“we’re dealing with two radically different manifolds of existence, and a gap or impasse between the two”

“My claim is that computers only have access to one of the two – the arithmetical manifold – and thus are trapped on one side, with no access to the other side, much less to the gap between them”

“Let’s be stubborn and obvious on this point: computers are state machines. Turing said this many years ago; it’s no less true today. Computers operate exclusively within what Badiou calls “the state of the situation.” They have access to a certain domain, specifically the domain that Badiou has called “bodies and languages.” (We might translate Badiou’s phrase instead as “data and procedures.”)”

“Computers don’t and can’t straddle the impasse of ontology”

“in a very literal sense, computers don’t have access to truth procedures; they can’t be subjects in Badiou’s sense of the term; and thus they don’t have any concourse with truth”

“a podcast listener, Joe McCarney, reminds me of two texts that might undermine the above claims”

“The first is Badiou’s essay “Infinitesimal Subversion” from volume 9 of the journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse”

“The second text recommended by Joe is Badiou’s The Concept of Model, which I’ll admit never really resonated with me, despite having tried to work through that book on two different occasions”