Oy... I was just saying "don't tase me, bro!" ;-). Now for some content. This guy Badiou is quite in resonance with my scientism- hating self -- from Number and Numbers:
> What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is
> counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be
> valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross-
> references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting
> patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the
> tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical
> exegesis.
>
> 0.4. Number rules over the quasi-totality of the "human
> sciences" (even if this ciphered alibi can scarcely hide the fact
> when we speak here of "science", what we have is a technical
> assemblage whose pragmatic basis is governmental). It is overrun by
> the statistical data of the entire domain of its disciplines. The
> bureaucratisation of knowledge is firstly an infinite excrescence of
> numbering.
>
> At the beginning of the 20th century, sociology was inaugurated in
> all its
> ambition – audacity, even – in the will to collapse the image of the
> communitarian
> bond into number. It sought to extend to the social body and to
> representation the
> Galilean process of formalisation and mathematisation. But
> ultimately it succumbed
> to an anarchic development of this programme. It is now replete
> with pitiful
> enumerations which serve only to validate the obvious or to
> establish parliamentary
> opportunities.
But it is the Platonic turn that continues to worry me. After much speculation, I have tentatively concluded that there are things about the ancient Greeks that give your average white man with a post- graduate degree a boner. Like Ronald Reagan for the conservatives, these Hellenic superstars seem to exist larger than life, representing all sorts of miraculous and foundational promises and desires. Hence the zero of the "Hindoos" and the Arabs (here I am not quoting Badiou as much as throwing him into a camp, though to quote Badiou: "The modern ruination of the Greek thinking") is a taint on the purity of Hellenic thought. But I digress (for I am once again thinking of Kline, more than my new friend Badiou). It is passages such as the below that are impenetrable to me:
> The second cause is that, if the entire edifice of number is
> supported by the
> being of the One, which is itself beyond being, it is impossible to
> introduce without
> some radical subversion that other principle – that ontological
> stopping-point of
> number – which is zero, or the void. It could be, certainly – and
> neoplatonist
> speculation begins with this assumption – that it is the ineffable
> and architranscendent
> character of the One which is denoted by zero. But then the problem
> comes back to
> numerical one: how to number unity, if the One that supports it is
> void? This problem
> is so complex that we shall see that it is, even today, the key to a
> modern thinking of
> number.
It is strange for me to read Badiou tying up all the rigorous mathematics of Cantor, Peano, Russell, and particulary Frege, with all this talk of Greek One, Being, etc. It may just be me, but the efforts of these mathematicians seemed to me a diametrically opposite programme i.e., start from some minimalistic syntactic notions and attempt to expand on them (I write this despite knowing that Euclid is credited with the axiomatic method). Which reminds me of our earlier discussion about Chomsky. Anyway, I am rambling...
--ravi
-- Anyone who takes an effort to intellectually challenge the status quo and established habits is infinitely more venerable than hacks defending that status quo and established habits, regardless of the truth function of their propositions. -- W.Sokolowski