Welcome back to the XG reading group.
It’s been about a month since our last session, mostly due to my fat January, but we really went the distance in this session.
We read Ray Brassier’s essay “Prometheanism and its Critics”, as found in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. I think we really got round to clarifying a lot of the questions we had initially tiptoed around during our last session, and I hope we’ve got some sort of trajectory now that will carry us forwards through a certain set of readings related to Badiou and accelerationism.
I’ve every excited about where this new series of sessions is headed.
As ever, thank you to Wassim for his amazing Shakespearean pun — beautifully stitching together a load of points of discussion. Below I have included the notes I wrote for this reading. Join us in the #book-planning channel on the Discord for information about what we’ll be reading next.
Until then!
In a forthcoming conversation with Thomas Moynihan for the MIT Press podcast, we ended up discussing a topic that I’d like to refer to as “the ethics of infinity”.
Tom’s book X-Risk makes the case for this magnificently and very early on, when he challenges the “principle of plenitude”. He explores how, for much of human history, we have maintained a view of nature as an inexhaustible resource, from which nothing can ever truly disappear because, in her wisdom, nature is always productive and reproductive. However, against the backdrop of existential risk, we have slowly begun to appreciate the horrifying fact that we have driven many species to extinction, which nature is not going to just vomit forth again in its infinite evolutions. In possession of this knowledge, we must take greater responsibility for our own species and other species also.
But this doesn’t wholly eradicate the concept of infinity as such. Our world might be finite but infinity, as a promiscuous concept, continues to trouble us. In fact, we should probably try and understand infinity in a new way that isn’t tied to some sort of Kantian imperative, allowing us to relinquish all responsibility. After all, to focus too much on finitude is risky business in itself, when we consider that one of capitalism’s central constraints is the imposition of an artificial scarcity.
And perhaps this is part of the play-off here. We can perhaps better understand our ideological understanding of infinity via capitalism, which imposes upon us an artificial scarcity of wealth whilst at the same time constantly talking up the potential infinity of capitalism’s productive capabilities itself. What we end up with, however, is a pretty lacklustre understanding of what infinity actually means for us and how capitalism’s artificial scarcity fundamentally limits those potentials.
I think this is part of the problem that Brassier is approaching in his essay on Prometheanism. What comes after the otherwise (artificial) scarcity of human life? Or the supposedly soon-to-be-eclipsed finitude of human cognition? We can’t just understand these great adventures on the horizons as the sudden proliferation of possibility, avoiding a firmer understanding of what parts of our own existence are within our power to act upon and change. But, against this diverse background, the question that he asks — “What can we make of ourselves?” — suddenly takes on pretty enormous proportions.
I think a good way of thinking about this, with regards to infinity, is probably to consider that basic analogy about monkeys and typewriters. As a way to articulate the generative potential of infinitude, people often point out that an infinite amount of monkeys given an infinite amount of typewriters and an infinite amount of time would eventually produce, word for word, the works of Shakespeare. The point is, perhaps, about probabilities. What is the probability of one monkey with one typewriter typing out those works? The probability, represented as a fraction, would probably be very difficult to calculate and write down. But with infinity, it doesn’t matter. Eventually it would happen.
But this is also a bit of a backwards insult to Shakespeare, isn’t it? If we reframe the analogy, and understand the history of humanity as a proliferating number of very smart monkeys, we sort of loose sight, under infinite, of the specific conditions that gave birth to those works in the first place. Under infinity, Shakespeare is essentially rendered meaningless. They are just a long series of words presented in an arbitrary order that could be repeated. It undermines the specificity and commitment of Shakespeare himself in his proper time and place.
Now, to expect a monkey with a typewriter to account for the Shakespeare’s sociohistorical context, rather than just getting the words in the right order, is probably an “unreasonable” expectation to apply to a thought experiment regarding infinitufe, but that’s where the stakes lie, isn’t it? And isn’t that part of Brassier’s argument here? “Reason is unreasonable” — to fully account for the conditions under which change happens and the new occurs is harder to affirm rather than a probabilistic understanding of the organic emergence of works of culture. But what is the point is aiming for anything less?
Prometheanism, then, is maybe a sort of infinity feedback loop. It is true that “there is not limit to what we can achieve” but we have to commit ourselves to achieving it, and may particular attention to the conditions that make it possible. This is how Brassier reframes that critique laid at Prometheanism’s feet, which is that “the Promethean error is to formulate a rule for what is without rule.” But infinity without rules is meaningless. And when infinity is itself a concept, how can it be without meaning? Infinity is, instead, a concept constrained by a kind of artificial scarcity of reason. And this is how we might better understand Brassier’s sense of a nihilism unbound. How is nihilism the denial of all meaning, when an -ism is, by definition, a kind of distinctive practice. Nihil unbound, then, is nihilism un-ismed — freed from its artificial limitations so that we can finally understand the conditions of its appearing. In this sense, Brassier’s Promethean nihilism is a way of affirming infinity as a truth rather than just a truism.
[What follows are some further notes I wrote down to remind myself of a few talking points but which are a bit more formless and unclear — this is the next stage of understanding on the horizon for me.]
I think this is also connected to our understanding of zero — not “nothing” but rather pure potential. This is why Lacan turns to mathematics, which might further build on our previous session looking at Brassier’s critique of Badiou. In one of his seminars, Lacan argues that “the thing”, or “the real”, can be represented by a vase — a signifying object that holds nothing. But an empty vase is still more a signifier for vases than it is for the emptiness inside it — such is the tyranny of language — so Lacan turns to mathematics and, specifically, Cantor’s notion of an “empty set” in order to discuss the void in a way that is not contaminated by our aesthetic sensibilities and linguistic conceptualisations. In being outside of signifying language and instead in the realm of mathematics, the empty set is a better way of understanding emptiness not as zero (which can be a measure of lack) but rather as a set without elements.
It’s a tricky way of framing things, and my complete lack of mathematical knowledge doesn’t help, but if anyone saw my talk with Isabel Millar at the end of January on Repeater’s YouTube channel, she explained it really well I thought, in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis anyway. [See her response starting from about 1hr in.] She explained why Lacan uses Cantor’s “empty set” as a way to talk about women or femininity or, even more specifically, female sexuality. Under patriarchy, and especially Freudian psychoanalysis, we can see how female sexuality is woefully misunderstood and takes on this kind of empty set-ness — woman has no elements of its own. It is lack. It is, in terms of masculinity, the thing desired, but to understand femininity as having desires of its own is this sort of striking taboo. (It’s worth noting here too, as Isabel did, that these senses of masculine and feminine are not necessarily tied to a gender binary but rather are these signifiers for a sort of broader social relation.) Anyway, Lacan suggests that we can affirm this sense of being an “empty set” because it produces a space of pure potential. And whilst I cannot say that I fully understand Lacan’s reading in this sense, and also haven’t read his twentieth seminar directly, I think it is the sort of argument we can recognise from Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones. Plant’s identification of women with zero is very much in line with Badiou and Lacan, I think. And it is all of this that I see lurking in the background of Brassier’s essay here, which he removes from the highly specific nomenclature of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and Lacanian subjectivity and instead turns into a kind of post-Enlightenment nihilism — what he calls “subjectivism without selfhood” or “autonomy without voluntarism”.
This empty set issue may also be understood via Brassier’s exploration of the distinction between “the human condition” and “human nature” in Heidegger. The former has no fixed essence, and is therefore malleable, whereas human nature is less so because it is understood relative to the behavioral qualities of other species.