Ontology = Mathematics??? Badiou’s Militant Ontology and Black Nihilism
06–29–2023Ngozi Harrison
Recently I've been working through the philosophy of Alain Badiou and his central text/magnum opus Being and Event. I've been interested in ontology, the study of being, and the ways we conceptualize being impacts our interactions with technology, culture, etc. This has taken me to the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui, works of Afro-pessimism and Black Nihilism, and more. What I have noticed is that when having conversations about Ontology eventually all roads lead to Heidegger. Martin Heidegger looms very large in philosophy broadly, in the German idealism tradition, and more specifically in the turn to the ontological in the 20th century. So much so that one of the statements that Badiou began his book with is "Heiddegar is the last globally recognizable philosopher" Heidegger was also a Nazi, some I explored in a previous post about the idea of algorithmic racializing logics. In my view, sitting with the truth of Heideggar’s Nazi commitments and collaboration cannot be simply reduced to a simple ad hominem but instead says something about his poetic approach to ontology and philosophy of the ways these ideological commitments pervade the philosophical system we seem to have inherited in so many disciplines (refer to Heidegger in Ruins by Richard Wolin for a more rigorous treatment of these points).
What is technical philosophy against or outside of Heidegger? What is ontology outside of Heidegger's poetic framework? Badiou bases his metaontology on the decision that mathematics, specifically Cantor's set theory provides a basis for a fundamental ontology of the pure multiplicity as the way to understand being. However what I've found out over the course of reading Badiou and people who've written about this work. The famous "mathematics is ontology, the science of being qua being" statement is just where it starts, not the whole point of his project. The being and event series is a radical philosophical system of truth as distinct from knowledge, the situation or world, and the event or a rupture in the situation. The event is that which seems impossible and is the chance of radical change. That's about as much as I've grasped so far but this has been a fascinating way to get into a very different way of conceptualizing metaphysics, theories of the state, and "change" using these terms very loosely since they have far more complicated meanings within Badiou's text. One interesting thing is unlike his contemporary Deleuze or even Heidegger Badiou doesn't have much to say about technology. I think there are some interesting ways to apply some of these concepts alongside the intersections of philosophy and technology to find interesting reconceptualizations and innovative ideas. I am also attracted to Badiou’s system because, to be honest, is such a weird and unique philosophical system.
In addition to looking for ontological schemes contra-Heidegger I also in engaging with the work of Afropessimism encountered the work of Calvin Warren which was another factor in leading me to the work of Badiou. I first found Warren through his fantastic book Ontological Terror. This book seeks to reinvigorate and expand Black nihilism by going past Afro-pessimism to investigate the nothing(ness) that is Blackness. The subjugation of Blackness is necessitated by metaphysics to triumph over nothing and to avoid the problems of being and ontology. This work engages with the work of Heidegger, hortense spillers, fanon, afro pessimism, du Bois, and more to unveil the limits of humanist goals of including the Black into ideas of humanity and Being and the ontological terror caused by nothing to show how Blackness does not have access to being but only existence and is represented as Heidegger available equipment. After reading Ontological Terror and engaging with his radical vision of the relation/antirelation between being and Blackness I was led to a paper called The Catastrophe where Warren more directly engages with the Badiou and math as pure form alongside Katthrine Mckittrick and Denise Ferreira Da Silva. The paper’s ideas can be thought of as confronting the loose syllogism displayed below
Warren seeks to demonstrate a relation between form and mathematics and how this relation engenders antiblack violence ultimately calling for mathematical nihilism which is the unthinking and destruction of form and matter through the catastrophe. The catastrophe bears very obvious connections to Badiou’s conceptualization of the event. I am still working through these ideas and thinking through the implications of the non-ontological nature of Blackness and what that means for Blackness in relation to technology. From a very pragmatic standpoint, ontology is not necessarily just a metaphysical concern but also the tools and framing for machinic representation and design in information systems. The Black Technical Object by Ramon Amaro engages with many of these points. For example, we may be able to think of the lack of legibility of Blackness to machinic perception as evidence of the inability of Blackness to have access to being under ontology and ontologies (in the technical sense of digital ontology as the structured representation of an object in an information system). This is just one way the questions of ontology have implications for information studies that I have been thinking about.
Here are a few questions and provocations putting Black Nihilism, Information/Technology Studies and Badiou’s metaontology in conversation
What is technical philosophy against or outside of Heidegger? What is ontology outside of Heidegger's poetic framework? Badiou bases his metaontology on the decision that mathematics, specifically Cantor's set theory provides a basis for a fundamental ontology of the pure multiplicity as the way to understand being. However what I've found out over the course of reading Badiou and people who've written about this work. The famous "mathematics is ontology, the science of being qua being" statement is just where it starts, not the whole point of his project. The being and event series is a radical philosophical system of truth as distinct from knowledge, the situation or world, and the event or a rupture in the situation. The event is that which seems impossible and is the chance of radical change. That's about as much as I've grasped so far but this has been a fascinating way to get into a very different way of conceptualizing metaphysics, theories of the state, and "change" using these terms very loosely since they have far more complicated meanings within Badiou's text. One interesting thing is unlike his contemporary Deleuze or even Heidegger Badiou doesn't have much to say about technology. I think there are some interesting ways to apply some of these concepts alongside the intersections of philosophy and technology to find interesting reconceptualizations and innovative ideas. I am also attracted to Badiou’s system because, to be honest, is such a weird and unique philosophical system.
In addition to looking for ontological schemes contra-Heidegger I also in engaging with the work of Afropessimism encountered the work of Calvin Warren which was another factor in leading me to the work of Badiou. I first found Warren through his fantastic book Ontological Terror. This book seeks to reinvigorate and expand Black nihilism by going past Afro-pessimism to investigate the nothing(ness) that is Blackness. The subjugation of Blackness is necessitated by metaphysics to triumph over nothing and to avoid the problems of being and ontology. This work engages with the work of Heidegger, hortense spillers, fanon, afro pessimism, du Bois, and more to unveil the limits of humanist goals of including the Black into ideas of humanity and Being and the ontological terror caused by nothing to show how Blackness does not have access to being but only existence and is represented as Heidegger available equipment. After reading Ontological Terror and engaging with his radical vision of the relation/antirelation between being and Blackness I was led to a paper called The Catastrophe where Warren more directly engages with the Badiou and math as pure form alongside Katthrine Mckittrick and Denise Ferreira Da Silva. The paper’s ideas can be thought of as confronting the loose syllogism displayed below
If math is ontology
And the Black is non ontological
Does that mean the Black is anti math
Warren seeks to demonstrate a relation between form and mathematics and how this relation engenders antiblack violence ultimately calling for mathematical nihilism which is the unthinking and destruction of form and matter through the catastrophe. The catastrophe bears very obvious connections to Badiou’s conceptualization of the event. I am still working through these ideas and thinking through the implications of the non-ontological nature of Blackness and what that means for Blackness in relation to technology. From a very pragmatic standpoint, ontology is not necessarily just a metaphysical concern but also the tools and framing for machinic representation and design in information systems. The Black Technical Object by Ramon Amaro engages with many of these points. For example, we may be able to think of the lack of legibility of Blackness to machinic perception as evidence of the inability of Blackness to have access to being under ontology and ontologies (in the technical sense of digital ontology as the structured representation of an object in an information system). This is just one way the questions of ontology have implications for information studies that I have been thinking about.
Here are a few questions and provocations putting Black Nihilism, Information/Technology Studies and Badiou’s metaontology in conversation
- What would it mean to unthink our current metaphysical/ontological framework, if Blacks do not have access to being then can we explore other ways of existence outside of being?
- How do surveillance technologoes maintain the divide between belonging and inclusion in relation to the state?
- What does Badiou’s conception about truth and knowledge have to say about data and its ontological nature?
- Can we evaluate the potentiual of a technological epoch as an event
- Why does badiou not seem to make room for or diminish race, alterity, relation, etc. through his emphasis on the universal and generic?
- Can we displace Heideggarian thought as the foundation for contemporary discussions of Being and Technology?
- The powerset which in Badiou’s system represents the state of the situation, can also be thought of as the discrete topology on a given set. Badiou leverages set throry for his conceptualization of ontology in Being and event and uses category theory in logics of worlds. Is there anything useful in thinking of spatiality when it comes to ontology, the generic, the event, etc?
- What are the connections between the generic and the undercommons? In general how can we think about that which is not legible to the state i.e. Blackness?
- Can we have a non-ontological math?
- What is mathematical nihilism?
- Where does category theory fit in all of this?