Badiou, Freire, and the Pedagogy of Concentration

Michael Christopher Primrose

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters in Curriculum and Pedagogy Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Michael Christopher Primrose

Masters of Curriculum and Pedagogy

Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

The renowned pedagogical theorist Paulo Freire made political subjectivity one of his core concerns, and he opposed approaches to subjectivity which considered the latter in terms of classical transparency and approaches which understand subjectivity in a deterministic fashion. I argue that Freire’s approach is an example of “concentration”, a concept I borrow from Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject. I use Badiou’s dialectical concepts in order to argue that Freire’s famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a Marxist text, but one that engages in constructing an anti-deterministic approach to subjectivity.

I make this argument via a consideration of the problems of subjectivity and objectivity in the classical Marxist canon in order to show how Freire and Badiou depart from this canon while building upon it. This analysis is intended to pose in new terms the relationship between Freire and Marxism, and between Badiou and education.

!ii Acknowledgments

First I would like to thank Peter Trifonas. I came to him with a strange proposal and he took a risk by giving me the independence to grow into my ideas. I will always cherish his belief in me, and his support.

Next I must acknowledge Lauren Bialystok. It quickly became clear — just after or even during my first day in her philosophy of education course — that I would accrue tremendous benefit if she were to be one of my supervisors. I am honoured that she accepted my request to fill this role, and I am pleased to say that my expectations for the support she would provide were met and exceeded.

I must also thank Abigail Bakan, who was so quick to step in to ﬁll a supervisory role without knowing much about me. It is to her immense credit (and to my immense beneﬁt) that she is so quick to lend a helping hand, and to do this so thoughtfully

Without my friend Nadine Violette this thesis would be a poor simulacra of what it has turned out to be. I could not count the number of times that she has been there to support me in times of crisis, both minor and major. Her curiosity and commitment have been a continuous source of inspiration, both with regard to my work and to my life in general. To say that my time at OISE would have been impoverished if we had not met would be to say the most obvious thing.

Next I must thank my friend Eryn Charlton. Our semi-regular chats about the world have helped me through this strange year. When these chats have touched upon politics or upon my thesis I have often been struck by her astuteness, and how quick she is to grasp the ideas with which I have struggled.

!iii Finally, I must thank the Boys — Trevor, Cam, Duncan, and Jacob — with whom I play video games on a regular basis. Creating a thesis can put you in a bad mood sometimes, and this past year has produced many other sources of such moods. Their friendship and our messing around online has shaken me out of so many of them. Without their inﬂuence this thesis would be signiﬁcantly worse off, and so would I.

!iv Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Table of Contents ...... v

List of Figures ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

On Education and Philosophy ...... 1

Freire's Radicalism ...... 6

Badiou and Theory of the Subject ...... 13

Why Badiou and Freire Together? ...... 17

Outline Of This Work ...... 24

Chapter 1: The Theory of the Subject ...... 29

Introduction ...... 29

Marx, Objectivity, and Subjectivity ...... 30

The Axioms of Practice and Partisanship ...... 35

Dialectics, Idealism, and Objective Subjectivity ...... 40

Quantity/Quality Reconsidered ...... 48

Lacan, Materialism, and the Real ...... 53

Outplace, Force, Concentration ...... 57

The Algorithm ...... 66

The Problem of Circularity and the Primacy of Practice ...... 76

Pedagogy Against Stalinism ...... 83

Conclusion: What Kind of Subject? ...... 89

Chapter 2: Spiralling Education ...... 94

!v Introduction ...... 94

Badiou's Pedagogy and The Mass Line ...... 95

Circles, Lines, and Spirals ...... 103

The Mass Line and Problematizing Demands ...... 110

In What Sense Are The Ideas Right? ...... 115

A Sketch of the Process ...... 125

The Problem of Circular Education ...... 136

Conclusion ...... 141

Chapter 3: Problems of Spiralling Education ...... 143

Introduction ...... 143

Deviations, Enemies, and the "Compact Group" ...... 144

Banking and Spontaneity ...... 150

Example: Lenin and What is to be Done? ...... 158

Of What Does Concentration Consist? ...... 166

Hope as The Problem Of The "Compact Group" ...... 174

Conclusion ...... 187

Conclusion ...... 189

References ...... 197

!vi List of Figures

Problem-Posing Model of Education ...... 134

Banking Model of Education ...... 152

Spontaneous Model of Education ...... 153

!vii Introduction

On Education and Philosophy

Philosophers have long identiﬁed the possibility of social change with education. A famous example of this is the “noble lie” of Plato’s Republic, the tale of the “metals” by which the perfect city’s order would be justiﬁed (414d-415a). In The Crisis in Education

Hannah Arendt suggests that “[t]he role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onwards shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new” (173). Of course in the Republic Socrates suggests that “[a]ll those in the city who happen to be older than ten they [the “true philosophers”] will send out to the countryside; and taking over their children, they will rear them— far away from those dispositions they now have from their parents…” (541a). The idea of keeping children away from older “dispositions” is present also in Rousseau’s Emile and he suggests that “[e]verything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things [God]; everything degenerates in the hands of man1” (37). Emile is therefore raised apart from the world for a very long time in order for his natural capacities to develop (38). In John Milton’s brief 1644 work Of Education there is a similar theme of reverence for the divine:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our ﬁrst parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection (227).

1 One might also look to the following from The Social Contract: “Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth; with age they become incorrigible. Once customs are established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise; a people cannot bear to see its evils touched…” (49).

!1 Despite the extreme piety of this passage, education has a signiﬁcant role to play in the maintenance of the state; Milton claims that “the reforming of education” is “one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for the want whereof this nation perishes” (226). If the “end” of education is to correct the wrongs induced by the Fall, this in in any case also serves the cause of sustaining the nation.

Arendt takes the philosophical tradition’s focus on children to be very suspicious:

“So far as politics is concerned, [the focus on children] involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one’s equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed” (Arendt 173).

And her concerns about education and politics are not limited to the education of children:

Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity (Arendt 173).

A political tradition which does not rely upon youth for its explanation of the origin of the new is Marxism, and indeed Marx criticized this view in the third of his famous 1845 Theses on Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (Concerning Feuerbach 422).

The French Marxist Henri Lefebvre suggests that Ludwig Feuerbach — one of Marx’s major inspirations as well as the subject of much of his criticism — maintains “a materialism, inspired by that of the eighteenth century, [in which] the thought, needs and ideas of individuals are explained by education, but this explains nothing, because

!2 the educators themselves need to have been educated” (68). This helps to explain the reason for the displacement of the issue that we see in other formulations (whether idealist or materialist): with Plato the education is put together by the philosopher-king (473d); with Milton the ideal of education is to be like God (227); with Rousseau the social contract requires a “lawgiver” who possesses “a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them” (The Social Contract 44). Despite the diversity of these conceptions there remains that division of which Marx wrote in his Theses which requires the existence of some principle or ﬁgure which is

“superior to society”, which authorizes the correct, just, good (etc.) education and hence the better society.

If in Marxism the new/change does not come from the youth as in so many other systems, where does it come from? One could cite different passages to make this point, but consider the following from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, where he comments on socialists and communists as “the theoreticians of the proletarian class”:

…in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society (117).

Here the question of education is turned around: the point is not that those who are concerned about poverty and oppression should devise some system which they imagine will correct it (“seek science in their minds”), but they should learn to see that the existing system creates both poverty and subversion, and therefore carries within it a tendency for self-abolition (I will return to this classic dialectical theme in Chapter One). Newness is therefore inside the system already and not “above it”, and so those who seek to change things should educate themselves ﬁrst and foremost as to these existing

!3 tendencies.

But when Marx says “they have only to take note of what is happening”, what is happening? What are the causes of the changes taking place at the time of his writing? The decades preceding 1847 bore witness to both an explosion in industrial activity in many parts of Europe and an explosion in worker militancy, culminating in the ﬁery but short-lived revolutions of 18482. Is the important thing the militancy? Or is it the economic changes? Is the militancy an expression of the economic changes? Or are the workers ﬁghting to seize upon conditions which hint that their existence could improve?

These sorts of questions will be familiar to anyone who has considered whether Marxism is a deterministic theory. It is not enough to suggest that the oppressed labourers are working against the structure in spite of its objective and independent tendency to change, because one can always suggest that their courses of action are decided upon spontaneously due to their place within the structure. In this case they would not be acting “independently”, but would be “acting out” the tendencies offered up by the structure itself, only vessels for actions and thoughts which are implied by objective changes bigger than they can understand. I will have much more to say about this throughout what follows.

This issue has signiﬁcant implications for any Marxist discussion of education. If Marxism is deterministic, then one would be justiﬁed in spending time discovering the objective tendencies which are pushing it towards its end and then conceiving of an educational process which is engaged only in communicating these tendencies. Because the world is moving in a certain direction, the only thing to do is to recognize its motion and move with it. This approach would certainly deserve Arendt’s charge about political education as “dictatorial intervention”, although it would not be the “absolute superiority of the adult” but the absolute superiority of the forward march of society

2 For a classic Marxist discussion of this period, see Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution.

!4 that would authorize “the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli” (Arendt 173). One would only be a “mouthpiece” (as Marx says) for changes that were taking place regardless of anyone’s will (Poverty 117).

But there is another hypothesis here. Marx is trying to humble socialist theorists by his suggestion that they be “mouthpieces”, but whether they are meant to be humbled by the relentless advance of industry or by the furor of worker uprising is not so clear (at least in this passage). I will advance that the answer is both, and I do not think that this is very controversial. Consider another of his Theses on Feuerbach where he suggests that

“[t]he chief defect of all hitherto existing materialisms” is that reality “is conceived only in the form of the object… but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively” (Concering Feuerbach 421) [emphasis in original]. We are then faced with the difﬁcult problem of understanding these two senses of “material” (subjective and objective) together. Here the principal source of “practice” is the workers in whom we might otherwise only see deprivation, and the condition of deprivation is the objective (material) situation which can be changed. We can then imagine a dual sense of “education” which involves both “educating the educator” as to the practices which exist already amongst those who are deprived3 and educating those who are deprived in how to better carry out their practices. It is easy to see that this process involves an articulation of subjective and objective and of teacher and learner which is not straightforward. A short (and somewhat mysterious) summary of my proposed solution

3 Marx’s point that “it is essential to educate the educator himself” is sometimes taken only to mean in this other sense, that the one who calls themselves “educator” must learn from those who they would seek to educate. See for instance the following from Peter Mayo: “The [learners] have the potential, as a result of their own studies, preparation and different social locations (these can result in different perspectives on the matter at issue) to re-educate the educator, in the sense employed by Marx in the ‘Third Thesis on Feuerbach’” (91). To say that this is the sense is misleading, because it misses out on the opposition to the view of social change which privileges education (as described by Lefebvre). I think that it is necessary to maintain both senses of “it is essential to educate the educator himself”.

!5 is given by the famous Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire:

It is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this tradition of struggle, of resistance, and ‘work it’. It is a task that, to be sure, is a perverted one from the purely idealist outlook, as well as from the mechanistic, dogmatic, authoritarian viewpoint that converts education into pure “communication,” the sheer transmission of neutral content (Hope 99).

Almost all of what follows in this thesis is engaged in an explanation of what this means, why it is necessary, and how it can be (theoretically) approached. In the next section I begin this explanation by discussing Freire himself.

Freire's Radicalism

When it comes to radical education Paulo Freire is sure to be mentioned before Marx. The ideas of the Brazilian pedagogue have been taken up around the world in an enormous variety of contexts. The broad reception of these ideas has led to disparate interpretations; see the following from the esteemed critical pedagogue Peter McLaren, who (amongst other things) laments the blunting of Freire’s radicalism:

“Has Freire’s name become a floating signifier to be attached adventitiously to any chosen referent within the multi stranded terrain of progressive education? To a certain extent this has already happened. Liberal progressives are drawn to Freire’s humanism; Marxist and Neo-Marxists, to his revolutionary praxis and his history of working with revolutionary political regimes; left liberals, to his critical utopianism; and even conservatives begrudgingly respect his stress on ethics. No doubt his work will be domesticated by his followers in order to make a more comfortable fit with various conflicting political agendas. Indeed, selected aspects of his corpus are appropriated uncritically and decontextualized from his larger political project of struggling for the realization of a truly socialist democracy” (“Paulo Freire’s Legacy” 151).

In his preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed —Freire’s most widely-read and inﬂuential work — Donaldo Macedo makes a similar point by accusing some of those who have taken up Freire’s work of “mechanizing” and “depoliticizing” it, and of ignoring both

!6 Freire’s “revolutionary aim” and his “enormous debt to a philosophical tradition that included Marx, Gramsci, Hegel, and Sartre4 among others” (Oppressed 24-25). McLaren has a similar list, which includes Erich Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Manheim, Che Guevara, Albert Memmi, Lev Vygotsky, Amilcar Cabral, Hegel, and Marx himself (“Paulo Freire’s Legacy” 149-150). I will return shortly to the conspicuous absence of Lenin and Mao from both of their lists.

These lists of references imply that a thinker’s radicalism can be established on the basis of their influences. There is probably some truth in this, but it can only get one so far. In my view this applies particularly to Freire, whose syncretism (especially in Pedagogy of the Oppressed) is obvious and at times overwhelming. Pedagogy of the Oppressed includes references to thinkers who are clearly not very compatible: the occasional references to the staunch anti-humanist and anti-Hegel Louis Althusser grate against the references to (the humanist) Erich Fromm and Hegel himself; Karl Jasper the liberal rests uneasily beside Lenin the communist; the Marx who wrote that religion is “the opium of the people” sits near to citations of clergyman (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy 244); indeed in the preface Freire suggests that it is precisely Christians and Marxists who are most likely to read his work to the end (Oppressed 37). If Freire’s influences were limited to a single tradition or if their traditions were at least close to one another then perhaps listing these influences would be convincing. Given that I share with McLaren and Macedo a broad interest in asserting Freire’s radicalism, and given the inadequacy of

4 Jean-Paul Sartre was not only an influential thinker for Freire but also for Alain Badiou, who I introduce in the next section. Readers familiar with Sartre’s (Marxist) existentialism will see many familiar ideas in what follows in this thesis. However I do not explore the Sartrean connection, and rely on another of Badiou’s major influences (Jacques Lacan) to introduce many of Badiou’s arguments. I set Sartre aside not because he is unimportant, but because I wish to keep focused on Freire and Badiou as much as possible. A longer work would benefit from a sustained engagement with Sartre, particularly the latter’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. For a succinct description of the differences between Sartre’s approach in the Critique and that of Alain Badiou, see the latter’s eulogistic essay on Sartre in the collection Pocket Pantheon (14-35).

!7 the lists in proving this assertion, I think it best to take another path. One way to do this, I think, is to try to identify the logical sinews which bind together Freire’s syncretism. In doing this I will focus almost entirely on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and therefore explicitly leave a broader investigation to another time and/or other people

Educational theorist Stanley Aronowitz takes something of a different route in an essay on Freire’s “radical democratic humanism”. In this piece Aronowitz takes aim at a tendency to interpret Freire’s use of “pedagogy” as a strict synonym for “teaching” as opposed to “a philosophy or a social theory” (162). Among other things this confusion leads to the aforementioned blunting of Freire’s political objectives. Contrary to this Aronowitz insists that ”[i]t is to the liberation of the oppressed as historical subjects within the framework of revolutionary objectives that Freire’s pedagogy is directed” (165). I cannot quarrel with the straightforwardness of his defence of the revolutionary character of Freire’s thought. But later in the piece he makes the strange comment that ”despite occasional and approving references to Lenin” Freire argues against “vanguardism” (170), and indeed his criticism places him in the “libertarian… tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and the anarchists” (170). No serious Marxist can doubt Luxemburg’s commitment to asserting the importance of the spontaneous action of the workers (ie. their action independent of direction from any formal organization). But it will become incredibly clear throughout this text that Freire was strongly opposed to an understanding of politics which deduces political subjectivity completely from objective conditions, and this makes Aronowitz’s reference to Luxemburg somewhat strange: she

!8 was criticized by some contemporaries for precisely this sort of “objectivism5”. It is even stranger to see Aronowitz note the inﬂuence of Mao on Freire given the latter’s lifelong insistence that he was a Marxist-Leninist (even if he developed Lenin’s thinking in many ways) (170). Finally, Aronowitz mentions Freire’s answer to the ”two erroneous alternatives” of ”populism and vanguardism” which ”have plagued the Left since the founding of the modern socialist movements” (170), an answer which relies on the notion of “cultural synthesis” presented via the example of trade-unionist demands for higher wages (I discuss this example in chapter two). The reader may be surprised to

ﬁnd out that Freire’s reference on this point is to Lenin’s famous text What is to be Done? (to which I turn in chapter three) (Oppressed 182), although Aronowitz does not mention this and instead ﬁnishes his paragraph on “cultural synthesis” with a reference to one of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach which I discussed in the previous section6. Aronowitz apparently also has need for the “occasional and approving reference” to Lenin, even if it is only implicitly and only when Freire’s argument itself requires such a reference.

I of course do not intend to reproach Aronowitz for his desire to place Freire within a Marxist context. If it is not clear already that I share this desire then it will become so

5 For instance in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks he refers to Luxemburg’s theory that economic crises both “organize” the workers and “bring about the necessary ideological concentration” in these workers “in a ﬂash”, and he calls this “a form of iron economic determinism” (Gramsci 233). Aronowitz (following Freire) cites Lukacs’ text on Lenin, and in this text Lukacs says that Luxemburg’s view of the revolutionary organisation as “the product of the revolutionary mass movement” is “one-sided and undialectical” (Lenin 32). In his famous History and Class Consciousness devotes an entire chapter to a criticism of Luxemburg which (among other things) asserts that the “decisive point” of her theoretical errors is “the underplaying of the role of the party in the revolution and of its conscious political action, as opposed to the necessity of being driven along by the elemental forces of economic development” (275).

6 Aronowitz’s reference is to the following: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialisms” is that reality “is conceived only in the form of the object… but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively” (Concerning Feuerbach 421) [emphasis in original].

!9 very soon. I do take issue with what I believe to be a desire to avoid the real problems of the Marxist tradition by either 1) choosing a purportedly “good” Marxist (ie. not “authoritarian” and without the burden of having led a successful revolution, with all the historical “messiness” that accompanies such a success) to be Freire’s “real” theoretical companion or 2) papering over Freire’s reference to Lenin with a reference to Marx, where the latter is implied to be a more “authentic” advocate of emancipation in contrast with Lenin the cynical manipulator. In my opinion both of these moves are different manifestations of an urge to retain a “pure” Marxism which can point to its denunciations of authoritarianism as proof of its emancipatory credentials. But even though “authoritarianism” is a word that pillories a certain attitude towards the relationship between workers and leaders (or students and teachers), I view it to be more of an abdication of the duty to advance our understanding of this relationship rather than an attempt to act in accordance with such a duty.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire does not perform any such abdication. On the contrary he confronts head on the problems of political subjectivity and of the relationship between leaders and masses (and of the imbrication of these problems). As I suggested above, my wager is that it is possible to identify a logic which makes both his syncretism and his (sometimes critical) references to Marxists easier to understand. While I will argue that this is a Marxist logic — ie. a dialectical materialist logic— it is necessary to stress that this is a and not the Marxist logic. Without this clariﬁcation I fear that the reader may believe that I am appealing to a dogma in order to disqualify opposing views. On the contrary, I will be criticizing this dogma (both implicitly and explicitly) throughout what follows. I will also not be attempting to argue that Freire’s thought is actually totally coherent beneath his many contradictory inﬂuences; in his The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci Perry Anderson warned of this “assumption… that the thought of a great mind must be as coherent as it is august, and that the highest task of commentary… is to demonstrate its fundamental underlying unity” (Anderson 13). On

!10 the contrary “[t]he reality is just the opposite: the thought of a genuinely original mind will typically exhibit — not randomly but intelligibly— significant structural contradictions , inseparable from its creativity, on which attempts to impose or extract an artificial homogeneity can only end in simplification and distortion” (Anderson 13-14). While trying to suggest that Freire is utilizing a “Marxist” logic which I call “radical” I mean only to suggest that he is struggling with the contradictions bequeathed to us by Marxism’s legacy. To be “radical” in my view is to not to gesture at one’s forebears but to strive with determination and seriousness to go beyond them, never shrinking from the (usually daunting) difficulties that such a striving presents. It will become clear that many of my arguments rely on subtle readings of some of Freire’s formulations, and I think that the necessity of such a subtle treatment testifies to the symptomatic ambiguities which result from the type of creative intervention that Anderson describes.

More speciﬁcally it is not just any Marxist logic, but a post-Leninist or Maoist logic7; that is, it is one which was formed in the wake of Marxism’s ascent to the global political stage, and equally in the wake of the broad degeneration of these victories into bureaucratic and hyper-centralized states which seemed to have gone astray from the earlier hopes for the achievement of human emancipation by the actions of those who are most oppressed8. I will have more to say about Lenin and Mao below, but for now I will simply say that both of those men were very engaged in the questions that I raised in the previous section: the relations between subjectivity and objectivity and educator

7 Longstanding debates exist around the relationship between “Leninism” and “Maoism”, and I do not explore these debates in this text. The interested reader would proﬁt from turning to Continuity and Rupture by J. Moufawad-Paul.

8 This is another reason why Aronowitz’s presentation is not so helpful. By pointing backwards to Rosa Luxemburg and to Marx himself he makes it difﬁcult to think the changes that the experience of revolutionary politics impressed upon Marxist theory. Similarly by gesturing to Mao while repudiating Lenin he makes it difﬁcult to see how Mao is both a follower of Lenin and an innovator in his own right.

!11 and educated (or political party and masses). Perhaps Lenin’s chief contribution to Marxism was his insistence on the need for a militant vanguard party which could be the “tip of the spear” for the proletarian movement. In philosophical terms this amounts to re-asserting the importance of subjectivity in politics against “evolutionist” arguments . One of Mao’s main contributions was a similar assertion: the concept of the “mass line” (more in Chapter Two) is a theoretical afﬁrmation of the subjective independence and primacy of the practice of the masses over the party upon which Lenin insisted without at the same time annulling the importance of this party.

Articulating the relationship between masses and leaders is central to both innovations, and this centrality is a large part of why I ﬁnd it so strange that McLaren and Macedo do not cite their names. They are Marxism’s biggest innovators when it comes to questions of leadership and subjectivity (whatever you think of their innovations) and Freire cites them both approvingly. If one is committed to human emancipation then it is necessary to pass through these thinkers in order to learn from the many successes and failures of the movements which they both led and inspired.

In a collection of posthumously-released writings called Daring To Dream Freire suggests the following, which poses anew the question of subjectivity which I have hinted at already:

This end of the century brings back the importance of the role of subjectivity as a philosophical, historical, epistemological, political, pedagogical problem, which has as much to do with modern physics as with educational practice, with knowledge theory as with democracy. After all, the topic of subjectivity was always present in human concerns and is now revived, overcoming a certain mechanicism of Marxist origin —but not solely of Marx’s responsibility — which reduced subjectivity to a mere reﬂex of objectivity, preventing, in the same way, the repetition of naiveties that made that importance absolute and that resulted in lending to subjectivity or to consciousness the role of maker of the world. One of the ghastly consequences of that mechanistic understanding of subjectivity was an equally mechanistic intelligence of history, one deterministic in nature, where the future was viewed as inexorable, virgin, therefore, stripped of any

!12 problematics. It is in history as possibility that subjectivity, in a dialectic- contradictory relationship with objectivity, takes on the role of subject rather than simply object of world transformations (23).

We can see that Freire is raising similar issues as I raised above. A more substantial analysis follows in Chapter One, and for now I will simply highlight the fact that Freire is advocating for an approach which allows for “subjectivity… [to take] on the role of subject rather than simply object” (Daring 23). What this suggests is that the concepts of “subject” and “object” will not do, because it is possible for subjectivity to be a “mere reﬂex of objectivity” and an “object of world transformations”. On this basis I will suggest that we will need to distinguish objective subjectivity from subjective subjectivity, with a preference (following Freire) for the latter9. This subjective subjectivity must not consist in a departure from an objective basis — this would be ”lending to subjectivity…the role of maker of the work” (Dream 23) — but it must not also reduce itself to its objective basis. It must have the strange property of being both part of society and in excess over it. Much of the ﬁrst chapter of this work involves clarifying this problem and presenting Badiou’s solution for it.

Badiou and Theory of the Subject

With this we ﬁnd ourselves in the proximity of a group of young French thinkers in the 1960s who published work on a host of complicated issues such as structuralism, causality, science, truth, ideology, and subjectivity in the pages of a journal called Cahiers pour l’Analyse. These particular thinkers were trying to articulate a unity between the anti-humanist Marxism of Louis Althusser and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, a merger of two giants of 1960s French “structuralism”. In an introduction to a recent collection of some of these works Peter Hallward suggests that

9 Of course this implies that one should also distinguish between subjective objectivity and objective objectivity. It seems to me that a consideration of these two concepts would have to base itself upon another text because of the extent to which Freire is focused on consciousness and subjectivity in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

!13 “[a]lthough the label remains notoriously vague and contested, the Cahiers’ project can be called ‘structuralist’ in the familiar sense of the term insofar as it attributes unilateral causal power to the relations that structure conﬁgurations of elements in whatever domain … rather than accord primacy to the presumed nature or essence of these elements themselves, which are ‘given’ instead as effects of the structure” (Hallward 2).

Hallward explains that this structuralism (and French structuralism as a whole) came in the wake of several decades where French philosophy “was dominated by various combinations of phenomenology and existentialism, and thus by a broadly shared appreciation for the ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ dimensions of experience” (Hallward 4). The conﬂict between these is obvious: the older generation may have seen “lived experience” as foundational, but for these structuralists this experience is an effect which is only mistakenly understood to be a cause. As Jacques-Alain Miller (one the contributors to the Cahiers) puts it in his Action of the Structure:

It is by starting from structure that we must enter in to the theory of the subject, which takes its insertion for granted. It is essential to preserve the order here, which goes from structure to subject. This is enough to ruin the possibility of any discourse that seeks its foundation in the sphere of the immediately given… (Miller 74).

This is not the place for a fuller discussion of this speciﬁc trend in French philosophy which is quite outside the scope of this work10. As Hallward notes, a political consequence of the Althusserian inﬂuence is “a radicalization of Lenin’s assumption that, prior to its illumination by Marxist science, working class experience can only generate the sorts of ‘utopian or reformist’ consciousness that reinforce rather than overthrow the structures of oppression in which they are forced to live” (Hallward 16-17). But this position was actually inverted during the run-up to May 1968 when some of Althusser’s students broke away from the (orthodox Marxist-Leninist) French

10 The interested reader should read Peter Hallward’s introduction to this collection of essays from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, entitled Theoretical Training.

!14 Communist Party in order to form Maoist organizations (Hallward 50-51). Hallward says that

[t]he sense of shared revolutionary purpose that had crystallized around theoretical training in 1963-1966 thus returned temporarily after 1968 in the form of a political practice that now staked everything on the untrained reﬂexes of the masses…Where before it was theory that guided the party which in turn guided the people, now it is the people who know best and who dispense with any need for theory (53).

It is easy to see that this is merely a strict inversion of the previous position. In the ﬁrst place these thinkers maintained a strong suspicion of the existing ideas of the people and thought that it was their duty to clarify things with a Marxist science, and in the second place they are merely following the inherently correct ideas of the people. I return to these two poles a number of times throughout what follows.

In the years that followed many of these thinkers (those who wrote in the Cahiers, and also many French radicals in general) retreated from their militancy in different ways (Hallward 54-55). Hallward suggests that only one of these thinkers “has remained faithful to the original Althusserian-Lacanian project, precisely by embracing the logic of interruption which ended it” (Hallward 55); namely the tumult of May ’68 in France. This holdout is Alain Badiou. Badiou is better known today for the elaboration of a philosophy based upon set theory than for the texts which came came out of the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter three of his four so-called ‘big books’ — Being and Event, Logics of Worlds and Immanence of Truths— are engaged in the elaboration of this novel philosophy. The ﬁrst of these ‘big books’ is Theory of the Subject, a much more militant book than those to follow whose focus is unabashedly Marxist, or Maoist. To persist with one’s Marxist (and particularly Maoist) convictions during the early 1980s was not easy; Badiou explained in an interview with his frequent translator Bruno Brosteels that the early 1980s “was the period of maximum isolation” and that Theory of the Subject “went completely against the grain and was worked out in absolute

!15 isolation” (Badiou and Politics 291). Here “the grain” was a wide-ranging rejection of the radicalism which had shaken France in recent years; leftists either rallied behind the reformist socialist Francois Mitterand or abnegated completely by undertaking a vicious campaign of denunciation of their previous convictions (Badiou and Politics 291).

It would be wrong to assume that Badiou’s persistence was grounded in a dogmatic defense of any orthodox Marxism. In Theory of the Subject he insists that

Yes, let us admit it without detours: Marxism is in crisis; Marxism is atomized… what we inherit …is a narrow and fragmentary assemblage of thought and action, caught in a labyrinth of ruins and survivals. That which we name ‘Maoism’ is less a ﬁnal result than a task, a historical guideline… To defend Marxism today means to defend a weakness. We must practise Marxism (182) [emphasis in original]

Against other trends, Badiou says that “[w]e demand of materialism that it include what we need and which Marxism, even without knowing it, has always made into is guiding thread: a theory of the subject” (Theory 182). I attempted to suggest the existence of this “guiding thread” in the ﬁrst section of this introduction. The theory of the subject that Badiou presents in this text is very complex and draws from a wide range of sources, especially but not exclusively: the aforementioned French inﬂuences of Lacan and Althusser but also (and contradictorily) Sartre; the ornate symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé; the classic texts of Marxism by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao; Greek Atomism and tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus; Hegel’s foundational dialectical elaborations, principally in The Science of Logic. There are also the rudiments of what would become the set-theoretical approach systematized beginning with Being and Event, with references to the innovations of Paul Cohen. In addition to his decades of creative and cutting-edge philosophical work, Badiou has always been involved in political movements, particularly those around the situation of undocumented migrant workers in France (Nail 109). The importance of this focus on undocumented people will become clearer in Chapter Three.

!16 Why Badiou and Freire Together?

The simplest answer for “why Freire and Badiou together?” is just to say that it has not been done, to my knowledge. Another reason is that the academic reception of Badiou has in general tended to focus less on Theory of the Subject and so there is value in paying it some more attention (Theory ix). This tendency extends into educational research as well; the only edited collection centred on Alain Badiou and education — Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou — contains no references to Theory of the Subject. Excellent treatments of Badiou’s relevance for education do exist, however, and A.J.

Bartlett’s Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths is an outstanding example, but again it focuses mostly on Badiou’s more mature set-theoretical philosophy as established ﬁrst in Being and Event. My focus on Theory of the Subject (and other texts from that same period) allow me to better compare like with like when discussing Freire and Badiou. Although Bruno Bosteels has convincingly argued that the political (particularly Maoist) orientation of Badiou’s work persists long after the latter’s focus shifts more towards mathematics (Badiou and Politics 4-17), Theory of the Subject is the text in which Badiou’s terms and references are most consistently Marxist and in this way the comparison with Freire can be made much more directly. In this sense I hope that future scholarship which would link Freire to Badiou’s later writings will ﬁnd this work to be useful as a way to “bridge the gap”, so to speak.

Another reason to think them together is that Badiou can help to push forward the debate within critical pedagogy between Marxists and various “post-” theorists. To get a sense of how, we can consider a 1998 issue of Educational Theory which presented two entries into this debate. On one side of the problem was the aforementioned Peter McLaren, who issued a full-throated call for left wing educational theorists to refocus their attention upon class struggle and Marxism (“Revolutionary Pedagogy”). The moral force of his call was accompanied by a ﬁrm awareness of the changing nature of global capitalism. His principal adversaries were the various postmodern currents

!17 which had risen to prominence within the academy, a collection of thinkers “[a]fﬂicted by a despair brought about by a Nietzschean perspectivism” and bearing the “political paralysis and semiotic inertia of a cultural politics divorced from a sustained critique of capitalist social relations” (“Revolutionary Pedagogy” 444). Against this he says

In the ﬁnal analysis, educators need to renew their commitment to the oppressed - not in historical-teleological terms, most certainly, but in ethicopolitical terms that can guide political action and create the conditions for dreams to take root and liberatory praxis to be carried forward by an undaunted faith in the oppressed” (“Revolutionary Pedagogy” 462).

I share McLaren’s wariness of so-called “postmodernism” and the frequency with which it produces quietist politics, and I appreciate the vigour with which he insists upon a return to Marx. But I share some of the reservations raised in the other entry into this debate by Patti Lather, who arguably represents exactly the kind of “postmodernist” which had drawn McLaren’s ire. She focuses part of her essay on a critique of McLaren’s position, questioning McLaren’s “desire for reassuring sureties” (489), and contrasting McLaren’s call for a return to Marx with that of Jacques Derrida, whose Spectres of Marx, she says, “is about learning to do without surety of knowing” (491). She also includes a quote from Michel Foucault, who once said that “it is clear, even if one admits that Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day” (491), and then says that she expected this reappearance to be quite different from “McLaren’s discourse of mastery/transparency/rationalism” (491). Despite my above- mentioned suspicions towards “postmodernism”, Lather’s concerns ring true. It strikes me as completely wrong to try to assert the need to return to Marx without trying to speak to Marxism’s problems, whether these are posed by “postmodernists” or Marxism’s own history. Indeed I think that engaging in a process of critique is arguably the most Marxist thing that one can do. Consider the following from Marx’s 18th Brumaire:

!18 Proletarian revolutions… constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their ﬁrst attempts… (180)

I agree with Lather that McLaren’s “search for a ‘new’ revolutionary agent looks suspiciously like the old one” (490). But I do not think that one needs to abandon Marxism in search of this “new” agent. In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx notes that existing materialisms had developed the objective side of materiality but had not conceived of it as “sensuous human activity” and so “in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism” (Concerning Feuerbach 421). I see no reason to avoid applying this same logic today by developing a materialist “active side” which various 20th century theories have developed idealistically. This is impossible, however, if one agrees with this statement from Lather which she puts forward in response to McLaren’s emphasis on political economy: “It is not that I am uninterested in the question of materialism, which is, at base, the question of the object, the referent” (489). Put this way one gets the impression that it is only idealism which can develop the subjective side, but there is no reason to limit materialism to a theory of the “object” or “the referent”.

Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is engaged in exactly the task of articulating a materialist theory of the subject. Like McLaren, Badiou is also against “postmodernism” or what he calls “idealinguistery” (Theory 188). But unlike McLaren or Lather he says Marxism must answer “idealinguistery” via “a Copernican inversion” wherein “active materialism” “demands the position of a theory of the subject, which previously it had the function of foreclosing” (Theory 188). And again: “We demand of materialism that it include what we need and which Marxism, even without knowing it, has always made into its guiding thread: a theory of the subject” (Theory 182). Although I could not explore even a substantial portion of Badiou’s attempt to craft such a theory in this

!19 thesis — its complexity, novelty, and eccentricity are all daunting — I hope that what I do discuss would convince both McLaren and Lather that a “return to Marx” should be be done Marx’s own terms: by harsh self-criticism, by deepening our appreciation of dialectics, and by ﬁrming up our materialism. That Badiou’s presentation so often harmonizes with that of Freire is proof that the debate in Educational Theory was worthwhile, because it provides proof for their shared belief that whatever is to be done with Marxism, this doing must at least in part pass through the difﬁcult questions of pedagogy. Before moving on it is worth noting that McLaren and Lather are arguably both performing a “dodge”, although of a different kind to that of Aronowitz that I described in the previous section. McLaren’s “dodge” is based on not “working through” the critiques of Marxism levelled by various other theorists. Lather’s “dodge” is based on not insisting that these critiques produce a renewed materialism capable of spearheading contemporary political action. Alongside the earlier points about Aronowitz I take all of this “dodging” to be symptomatic of an unwillingness to engage with the problems of Marxism head-on and in a Marxist way.

There are a few other less speciﬁcally academic (but still theoretical) reasons to bring these two thinkers together. The ﬁrst of these is that Badiou gives us a way to approach Freire’s syncretism; as I suggested in the previous section Badiou is a conscious heir to both Althusser and Sartre, who were philosophical enemies. Badiou’s orientation to this contradiction eventually involved “drawing a diagonal across the debate” centred on a rereading of Hegel’s Science of Logic against the tendency in France to direct either praise or venom in the direction of his Phenomenology of Spirit (Bosteels, Badiou and Politics 143). I will make use of this Hegel-dependent portion of Badiou’s work in order to structure much of my own work. This does not mean, however, that I will be engaging in a refutation of Freire’s humanism in this thesis. Refutations of humanism abound, and I do not see the need to add to the pile. My dependence upon Badiou implies a distaste

!20 for humanism and in any case anti-humanism is not a speciﬁcally Marxist project11 and so undertaking such a refutation would be something of a diversion. The only direct engagement with humanism comes in the conclusion to Chapter 1. I hope that the reader takes the paucity of references to humanism as a sign that it is not essential to his thought, or at least that one can maintain a ﬁdelity to Freire while abandoning his humanism.

A third reason to bring them together is due more to history than shared philosophical heritage: both men were strongly inﬂuenced by the radicalism of the 1960s. Even more so, just as Badiou and his comrades found adversaries in the French Communist Party during May 1968 when it turned its nose up at the student revolts, Freire encountered orthodox Marxist-Leninists during his 1965 visit to Chile who viewed the “euphoria” following the election of the reformist Christian Democratic Party to be “naive” (Hope 27). He also notes that around this time a group of revolutionary youth formed a group called Movimiento Independente Revolucionário which broke away from the traditional Communist Party and that this group ”always manifested a sympathy for popular education, something the parties of the traditional left generally lacked” (Hope 29). If we add both the tragic collapse of the May 1968 movements (and the electoral gains of De Gaulle) and the coup in Brazil which lead to Freire’s exile then there is also the common experience of wholesale defeat which would inevitably inﬂuence both of their ways of thinking. One could therefore say that these similar experiences and shared interest in the political and philosophical problem of subjectivity justify bringing them together. Indeed it makes sense that if there are many alignments in their respective approaches (and I will argue that this is the case) then it is precisely because they share similar political experiences.

11 Badiou makes this point in Theory of the Subject: “Yet, today, I do not see how ‘anti-humanism’ could be the particular mark of Marxism. From the 1960s onward, it was universally held that we had to be done with Man, and such was the task for Foucault and Lacan as well as for Althusser” (Theory 187).

!21 These are all interesting and important motivations, as well as active in different ways in what follows. The primary is that — regardless of academic, philosophical, or historical reasons — their investigations into political subjectivity have (to quote from Freire) “[taken] on the character of an inescapable concern” (Oppressed 43). The first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed cites “[t]he current movements of rebellion” which “manifest in their essence this preoccupation with people as beings in the world and with the world” (43), and today we can clearly identify with the urgency of this declaration. The protests, rebellions, and strikes which have taken place in the recent past appear to be striking a death blow to the inertia which for decades has dogged politics in many developed capitalist countries. That this happens in the wake of a string of defeats of more reformist approaches — Bernie Sanders’ left-inflected social democracy , Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist Labourism, Spain’s left-populist Podemos, Greece’s once-defiant Syriza — implies that the radical left must undertake a reevaluation of itself and of its approaches. I hope that this thesis can be a part of this process of reevaluation.

In my view there is no way to do this which does not involve a broad and deep consideration of the legacy of Marxism, including its Stalinist deformations. To take this problem “extremely seriously” as a materialist is to understand that whatever bureaucratic tendencies, authoritarian abuses, and dictatorial crimes of 20th century Marxists be understood not (only) as the consequences of bureaucratic, authoritarian, and dictatorial personalities. A materialist understands that these all lie in wait for anyone who wishes to change the world. There is no sense, then, in avoiding the ideas of these revolutionaries in hopes of protecting the purity of our intentions; indeed the best (I think the only) option is to confront these ideas and work with them, and to try to understand where and when they went wrong so that we do not repeat their mistakes. The “we” here is of course “we Marxists”. Badiou has clariﬁed the task:

We must look the Soviet terror in the face; it is impossible to say even as little as

!22 ‘This does not concern us’, while covering our face. Because this is, in its own way, our history, insofar as it is a matter of thinking and practicing a break with all this… We, more than anyone, are yoked to the task of avoiding the reproduction of the horror… so that it may be rooted from the ground up (Can Politics Be Thought? 53).

And so it is important to study Lenin and Mao for their failures as much as their successes, and so it is important to study Stalin also. And this is a speciﬁc duty:

The denunciation of the repressive and bloody character of a mode of politics does not amount to the real criticism of its politics, nor does it ever enable one to be done with it. We Marxists are the only consistent and effective anti-Stalinists, because we are the only ones who fully grasp — in order to recast — Stalin’s politics (Badiou, Theory 294).

Alain Badiou ends the preface to Theory of the Subject by citing and then commenting upon a passage from the French writer and one-time Communist Julien Gracq, who had written a portrait of a French intellectual wandering the streets during the ﬁnal days and hours of the ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871. Gracq’s portrayal is unsparing: his intellectual meanders and hides, asking for time to “think alone” and handing out vouchers for herring as the city streets are shelled by the advancing army (qtd. in Theory xlii).The following passage comes from the end of Badiou’s citation of Gracq:

In his exile as a courageous incompetent, he must have awoken sometimes at night, still hearing the — after all quite serious — voices of all those people who were to be massacred a few minutes later, and who cried so furiously at him from the barricade: ‘Where are the orders? What is the plan?’ (qtd. in Theory xlii).

In comment upon this (and by way of ending his Preface) Badiou says that

[o]f all possible nightmares, that of being exposed one day to such a ﬁgure is for me the most unbearable. It is clear to me that to ward off this risk supposes a thorough reshufﬂing that certainly touches upon the intellectuals but also upon the workers, for what is at stake is the advent between them of an unheard of type of vicinity, of a previously unthinkable political topology. I write here so that neither I nor my interlocutors —intellectuals or not — ever become the one

!23 who, all told, can only meet the greater dates of history by distributing herring vouchers (Theory xlii).

I believe — and it is only (‘only’) a belief — that Freire would have agreed with this, not least because left-wing movements in both Chile and his native Brazil had their attempts at change crushed by coups and waves of repressive violence reminiscent of the Bloody Week which extinguished the Paris Commune’s experiments in emancipation. I confess that I also fear this nightmare, and it stalks the joy I feel towards the many protests and uprisings which have taken place around the world in recent weeks and months. The necessity of “warding off this risk” is at bottom which has motivated my undertaking, and the choice to focus on Badiou and Freire comes more from being convinced of their political usefulness than any other consideration. The thought of “an unheard type of vicinity, of a previously unthinkably political topology” is what sustains my optimism, which I am not ashamed to admit is more of the heart than of the head.

Outline Of This Work

The first chapter begins by exploring some of the ambiguities of Marx’s formulation of the relationship between objective and subjective class status in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. After doing so, I take a step back and discuss basic Marxist concepts like “idealism”, “quantity”, and “quality” in order to specify exactly where Badiou’s ideas depart from those of other Marxists. The principal difference concerns the link between the development of objective tendencies and subjective action, and of the nature of the intervention one must make in order to pass from that objective development to enact qualitative change. Badiou’s argument is that subjective action cannot be “deduced” from objective conditions, if “deduced” implies that one can provide an absolute justification for a course of action based on objective analysis. In order to clarify this argument I explore some of the ideas of Hegel the influential German dialectician, as well as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This will lead to Badiou’s renewed

!24 deﬁnition of materialism which is based on subjectivity, and which builds upon Lacan’s own theory of the subject. A crucial part of Lacan’s theory is that any part of a structure exists via a relationship of inclusion/exclusion, and I connect this to Freire’s idea that the oppressed experience an internal division as part of their existence within a structure of oppression. This internal division is the basis of “concentration”, which is what Badiou calls the process whereby the oppressed “expel” the inﬂuence of the oppressive structure. I identify this process of concentration with Freire’s goals for the education process.

Afterwards I turn to Badiou’s description of the “dialectical algorithms” which sketch the process of change, and suggest a speciﬁc place for Freire’s method within this algorithm. Practical change requires practical action, and I follow both Badiou and Freire by suggesting that one cannot have a subject without engaging in real struggle. In accordance with this, I argue that the process of education/concentration is a necessary part of the subjective process for how helps the oppressed to “separate” themselves from the oppressive structure, but that it is not able to complete this process. To elaborate upon this point I explore the metaphor of “circularity” which both Freire and Badiou adopt, and to introduce Badiou’s preferred geometrical metaphor: that of the spiral. Next I take a detour to discuss the problem of Stalinism, and suggest some ways in which my approach can help to guard against it. I then conclude the chapter with some reﬂections on what is meant by “subject” in this work, and then discuss some points of divergence between Badiou and Freire where I focus especially on the problem of “humanism”.

In the second chapter I discuss Badiou’s references to pedagogy in Theory of the Subject, and suggest that these refer to what Lacan calls “the discourse of the university”, ie. a bureaucratic form of social organization which prioritizes the passing-down of knowledge without the opportunity to disrupt this knowledge. I connect the university discourse to Freire’s famous concept of “banking education”, and suggest that Badiou’s

!25 preference for the Maoist concept of the “mass line” aligns with Freire’s own approval towards that concept. I introduce the mass line, and use a comment from Freire on the Marxist theoretician Lukács in order to distinguish this Maoist concept from a more “Leninist” perspective.

Having introduced the metaphors of “circularity” and “spirality” in chapter one, I consider the idea that a spiral can be thought of as a “combination” of circle and line. This would imply that one can go astray in a “linear” as well as a “circular” direction, and I explore this idea using some of Badiou’s polemical writings against the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Afterwards I provide a simpler and more practical demonstration of these “circular” and “linear” errors by expanding upon Freire’s discussion of “wage demands” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

An important part of the Maoist concept of the “mass line” is that one must “concentrate” the “right ideas” of the masses, but understanding what “right” means is not so simple. I explore this problem of “rightness” by following Badiou’s assertion that it refers to both scientific/observational correctness (as referring to objective circumstances) as well as political rightness (referring to subjective aims). I then apply this analysis to some difficult passages from Freire which are obscure without this analysis. After discussing “rightness” I turn to Freire’s description of the investigative process wherein one discovers these “right ideas”, and attempt to show that it can be understood in terms of the dialectical logic that I introduced in the first chapter. I schematize Freire’s “problem-posing method” using a simple diagram. I then return to the problem of “circularity”, paying particular attention to how this problem can arise “organically” out of Freire’s investigation/education process itself if this process is taken to be a substitute for rather than a precursor to action.

In the third chapter I begin by introducing the dialectical concept of “deviation”, which allows me to present a diagnosis of pedagogical errors which explains that these errors

!26 result from partial (“one-sided”) views of the dialectical relationships discussed in the previous chapters. I both explain Freire’s concept of the “banking model” in these terms, and suggest the concept of the “spontaneous model” as an error in the opposite direction. I apply this schema to the famous examples of “Economism” and “terrorism” from Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? in order to demonstrate the schema’s utility, and to further elaborate upon it. The main result of this elaboration is that the errors are “symmetrical”, in that they rely on an undialectical “privileging” of either teacher or learner in the education process. Next I turn to a discussion of “concentration”, a concept which I invoke throughout the thesis but which I only deﬁne in an abstract way. I suggest that this limited and abstract treatment is necessary given the many forms in which oppression can manifest, but claim that the speciﬁc role of intellectuals in the process of concentration is universalization: showing that experiences, knowledges, and practices which appear to be merely local are actually connected with every other local experience, knowledge, and practice, because the structure of oppression which affects each affects all, in spite of local variations.

I conclude the third chapter with a discussion of the concept of “faith”, which appears (under different names) in both Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Theory of the Subject. I follow Badiou in arguing that a non-deterministic Marxism requires a sort of “faith” in order to make the leap between objective conditions and subjective practice that I discuss in chapter one during the section on quantity and quality. As soon as we deny that the structure can provide guarantees for our actions, then we require an extra- structural basis upon which to act. This is the role of faith. But I follow both Badiou and Freire in qualifying this faith, and distinguish it from any kind of “naive” religious belief which would lead one to rely on some exterior force to provide change.

In the thesis’ conclusion I provide some commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic and the uprisings that have occurred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and suggest that the logics developed in this thesis can provide some insight on how we

!27 should approach these uprisings (and their co-optation and dispersal). I caution against allowing this insight to trick us into thinking we have all the answers, and ﬁnish the thesis with some passages from Marx which suggest that our initial attitude towards spontaneous rebellion should be one of curiosity and humility.

!28 Chapter 1: The Theory of the Subject

Introduction

In this chapter I begin with a quote from Freire on the importance of subjectivity and show that it bears a resemblance to some reflections from Marx’s 18th Brumaire on how one should not perform historical analysis. I then explore a famous passage from the 18th Brumaire which reflects on the problem of subjectivity, and suggest that its ambiguities have long been a source of trouble for Marxism. To explore this further I establish some basic presuppositions of Marxist thought, and then take a step back to reflect on Hegel in order to establish a specific point of difference between his thought and what I am trying to accomplish. I then extend the critique of Hegel to include Stalin as well, with the principal charge being that both men approach subjectivity as something which is only derived from the development of objective processes.

After doing this I show how Badiou thinks that we should depart from these mechanical (objectivist, deterministic) conceptions by reflecting on his work on the passage from quantitative to qualitative change. This discussion leads us into a Badiouian redefinition of the concept of “materialism” which is based upon the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Badiou builds upon Lacan in order to suggest that all structures (linguistic, societal, or otherwise) are both incomplete and can be ruptured and reorganized. For Badiou, this process of rupture and reorganization is carried about by the subject, and anything which is not engaged in this process cannot be called “subject”. Badiou redefines “materialism” and “idealism” by asserting that modern materialism requires that one accept the possibility that a subject can produced and can

!29 effect such a rupture, and modern idealism requires that one deny this possibility.

I then introduce the Badiouian terms “outplace”, “force”, and “concentration”, which will give a sense of the logic of change which Badiou has developed. I will eventually identify “concentration” with the (Freirean) education process itself. On the basis of these concepts I present Badiou’s description of the logic of dialectical change, and suggest where we can ﬁt education into this process. I then discuss the conceptual problem of “circularity”, the treatment of which has important consequences for escaping deterministic logics of change, and then discuss the problem of Stalinism and suggest some ways in which my approach can ward off the risk of its re-emergence. I conclude with a summary of the important concepts, and a brief discussion of some differences between Badiou and Freire on the problem of subjectivity.

Marx, Objectivity, and Subjectivity

I have already included this passage from Freire’s posthumously-released collection of writings called Daring to Dream, but I include it here in full once again, this time with italics in order to emphasize important points:

!30 First I must note and then set aside Freire’s insistence on the multi-dimensionality of the problem of subjectivity. In what follows the problem is simplified: I discuss only the political aspect of subjectivity. But even this simplification leaves us with much to do, and most of this chapter is engaged with trying to clarify the stakes of only this political aspect. Freire refers to what occupies much of this chapter (and my text as a whole) when he refers to that “mechanicism of Marxist origin… which reduced subjectivity to a mere reflex of objectivity”. That this “mechanicism” (the meaning of this term will become clear) has its origin within the Marxist tradition means that a Marxist response to Freire’s challenge should at least partially take the form of an auto-critique, and this is yet another reason (adding on to those discussed in the introduction) to stick close to this tradition during my analysis. I take the idea of “[reducing] subjectivity to a mere reflex of objectivity” as referring to an approach which sees human actions as merely the “expression” in some sense of objective conditions which are distinct (which does not mean “independent”) from the actors. The term that I will use for this throughout this text is “objective subjectivity”. This formulation implies “subjective subjectivity” as a counterpart, and I will come to this shortly12.

The next few sentences on the “naive” view which makes subjectivity “absolute” and the “mechanistic intelligence of history” echo Karl Marx’s preface to the second edition of his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this preface he comments on two other histories of Louis Bonaparte’s ascent: Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit and Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon’s Coup d’etat (18th Brumaire 143). Marx says that Hugo’s criticisms of Louis Napoleon present the coup as “a single individual’s act of violence” and “[ascribes] to him a personal power of initiative which would be without precedent in world history” (18th Brumaire 144). On the other hand Proudhon “seeks to portray the coup as the result of the preceding historical development” but “his historical

12 Of course it also implies “objective objectivity” and “subjective objectivity”. An exploration of these is somewhat outside the bounds of this text.

!31 construction of the coup imperceptibly turns into a historical apology for its hero” and

“[t]hus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians” (18th Brumaire 144) [emphasis in original]. I hope that it is clear that Hugo has made that error which ”resulted in lending to subjectivity or to consciousness the role of maker of the world” while Proudhon has made the error of a “mechanistic intelligence of history” (Freire, Daring 23). Of course Marx himself opposes to these two errors his own position: “how, on the contrary, the class struggle in France created circumstances and conditions which allowed a mediocre and grotesque individual to play the hero’s role” (18th Brumaire 144).

This is signiﬁcant because Marx -- like Freire -- deﬁnes himself against two incorrect approaches while not saying too much (in this passage) about what “the class struggle” actually is.

I cite these passages from the 18th Brumaire for several reasons:

1) To give some evidence for Freire’s own assertion that the mechanistic Marxism that he opposes is “not solely of Marx’s responsibility”; a similar question about the relation of subjectivity and objectivity is operative in Marx’s own writings.

2) To gesture at the idea (which must be proven, to the extent that this is possible) that the articulation of subjectivity and objectivity that Freire calls for is a question of class struggle, at least insofar as we consider subjectivity as it relates to politics. This “insofar as” is important because Alain Badiou’s later works explore subjectivity more generally, adding “artistic”, “amorous”, and “scientiﬁc” subjectivity to the political subjectivity explored in Theory of the Subject (Ethics 45).

3) That the “class struggle” is deﬁned against two incorrect approaches to the question, which each “go too far” in either the direction of subjectivity or objectivity. Whatever the class struggle is, it is not a total departure from objective conditions nor a submission to them. In other words it is (at least in part) a question of how “subjectivity… takes on the role of subject” (Daring 23). This is the aforementioned “subjective subjectivity”. One

!32 can see many examples of this “neither this nor that” form of argument in Freire as well: (activism/verbalism, nihlism/fatalism...). Many of my arguments depend upon this sort of approach, where the main task is to clarify how one is trying to avoid succumbing to either of these errors. I think that all of this can be covered under Badiou’s point in the preface to Theory of the Subject that “[i]t is no doubt more instructive to write with respect to what one does not want to be at any price than under the suspicious image of what one wishes to become” (xl).

“Subjective subjectivity” and “objective subjectivity” are strange terms and I will spend much of the text clarifying them (both explicitly and implicitly). Here I will cite a famous passage from the 18th Brumaire which I believe works as an introduction to the problem:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conﬂict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as [they] are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization, they do not form a class (18th Brumaire 239).

Here there are two sense of “class” at work. One is based upon “economic conditions of existence”, and the other upon “a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization”. That it is possible to be the former kind of class without being the latter justiﬁes Marx’s statement (on this same page) that “the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (18th Brumaire 239). The metaphor of “sack of potatoes” is apt: the “potatoes” — the peasants of mid-19th century France— only enter into a sort of indifferent and exterior unity with one another. A sack of potatoes is formed by the sack, just as the “great mass of the French nation” was formed by the titular Bonaparte. This is opposed to that second sense of “class” which depends upon conscious links between people, such as a political organization or “feeling of community”. It is easy to see that

!33 the ﬁrst sense of “class” is objective in that it refers to “economic conditions of existence”, whereas the second is subjective in that involves organization and/or other conscious links.

But the nature of the relationship between them is ambiguous, and this passage’s capacity to fail is explained by a failure of “their identity of interests” to produce a political organization (etc). The ambiguity here — and perhaps it is not even that ambiguous — is about the source of the subjective class-identity. In the above-quoted passage the “interests” are clearly objective interests, and Marx’s expectation seems to be that these could produce that second sense of class. Is this an example of what Freire opposes, a “[reduction of] subjectivity to a mere reﬂex of objectivity” (Daring 23)? The answer is not clear. While commenting on Marx’s The Civil War in France, Badiou notes that Marx’s analysis remains “within the undivided unity of the objective and the subjective” (Theory 45). I believe that this comment applies to the above-quoted passage from the 18th Brumaire insofar as we understand the need for a divided unity of the objective and subjective, where we understand both subjectivity and objectivity as having not an external but an internal relation. Not two terms but four: both subjectivity and objectivity should be understood as having both subjectivity and objectivity within them. This is simply repeating Freire’s distinction between “subject as mere reﬂex of objectivity” and “subjectivity which takes on the role of subject”, and with it we can say that the ambiguity in Marx’s passage lies in the fact that it does not clearly make this distinction.

It is an understatement to say that this ambiguity has caused problems within the Marxist tradition, but I think one can ﬁnd at least an implicit awareness of it with Marx himself. Consider the following passage from the 18th Brumaire, which I only quoted in part in the introduction:

!34 Proletarian revolutions...constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their ﬁrst attempts; they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever, they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here! (18th Brumaire 150).

The fear in this passage is obvious, as well as the determination to confront it. The process of change appears more like facing off with a chthonic demon than a valiant march of progress. And I think that the passage has a certain anxious haste; by the end it seems as though we are teetering on a cliff’s edge. And this is no big surprise, because “hic Rhodus, hic salta” famously refers to both dancing and roses as Marx suggests, and also refers to a fabled leap on the island of Rhodes13, and can be translated as: “Here is the Rhodes, now jump!” The point is that the “conditions” only “cry out” that one must “dance” or “jump”, but do not themselves produce either of these. In this we can detect a certain disconnect between conditions and action which I will explore later in this chapter, principally in the section on quantity and quality. Understanding this section will require a detour through some prerequisite concepts from the basics of Marxism, and I turn to these now.

The Axioms of Practice and Partisanship

Much of this chapter deals with laying groundwork on basic Marxist concepts like “idealism”, “materialism”, and “dialectics. This has value in itself for how it allows for a contrast between more standard understandings of these concepts and those of Alain

13 In a note to this passage in the 18th Brumaire Ben Fowkes explains that the Latin phrase comes from one of Aesop’s fables, and was a reply to “a boaster who claimed he had once made an immense leap in Rhodes” (18th Brumaire 150).

!35 Badiou, but there is also a value in treating these basics because they are sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented by scholars when treating Freire’s work. Before continuing I will explore two short examples of this phenomenon.

The ﬁrst example comes from Teaching for Freedom and Transformation by John Dale and Emery J. Hyslop-Margison where they say that “[t]he danger in a dialectical approach, then, is its simple bifurcation of problems and the sharp categorization of supposedly distinct groups” (116), and then that

the adoption by Freire of the oppressed and the oppressor bifurcation far too neatly categorizes and differentiates a vast array of human actions, emotions, and motives. Such a view may in itself engender certain ideological and moral divisions that Freire actually was trying to resolve. In some sense, labeling the world through differences propagates those differences and sets up barriers between different people. Hence, the dialectical portion of Freire’s overall theory, and the misunderstanding it generates, may be the weakest link in his otherwise insightful and important contributions to critical pedagogy (118).

From the outset it must be stressed that Marxism is a materialist theory, and so the accusation that it “may in itself engender certain… divisions” comes up short because it mistakes the observation of such divisions for their creation, or in any case assumes that one can do away with these divisions without bringing attention to them. More troubling however is the assertion that dialectics consists of “simple bifurcation” and “sharp categorization”. Consider the following from Hegel’s Science of Logic from the section on “determinate being”: “…something through its own nature relates itself to the other, because otherness is posited in it as its own moment; its being-within-itself includes the negation within it, by means of which alone it now has its afﬁrmative determinate being” (Science of Logic 125). This is a basic principle of dialectics, and it makes clear that dialectical thought requires that we understand things (whatever they may be) as containing otherness. We are not dealing with “simple bifurcation” or “sharp categorization”, insofar as these refer to strict and binary distinctions, but instead

!36 precisely a theory of the interrelatedness of things via inner connection. It is however perfectly legitimate to say that Marxists have not always held to this and have at times asserted the existence of (say) a proletarian identity which exists in pure opposition to the bourgeoise, but Freire himself (as we shall repeatedly see) consistently opposes this kind of crude and external opposition, and (I wager) he does so precisely by maintaining a dialectical view. Dialectics is not an incidental “portion” of Freire’s thought which can be stripped away. It is essential to it, and it will become clear throughout what follows that I believe the best way to answer the charges levelled by these authors is by taking dialectics more seriously, and not by abandoning it.

The second example that I want to approach comes from Jones Irwin’s Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education. In this text Irwin discusses the role of “idealism” and “materialism” in the work of Marx and Freire (37), and suggests that “Freire’s afﬁrmation of materialism is not exclusive of a certain idealism”, and that “materialism and idealism are co-dependent”, and that therefore “Freire’s perspective [is] less contradictory and more compatible with a both/and perspective rather than an either/or viewpoint” (37) [emphasis in original]. No one can deny that the relationship between ideas and objective existence is signiﬁcant for educational thought, but Irwin enters into a discussion of this problem via a confusion by assuming that “materialism” and “idealism” typically refer to doctrines which maintain an exclusive focus upon that from which they take their names. To see why this is wrong, consider Engel’s classic statement on these “two great camps” of philosophy in his Ludwig Feuerbach, where idealism consists in asserting the primacy of “spirit” over “nature” whereas materialism consists of asserting the primacy of “nature” over “spirit” (21). The question is of the priority given to one over the other and of the relationship between them, which is of course a dialectical (ie. contradictory) relationship. Irwin’s assertion that Freire’s thought need not be considered “contradictory” because it focuses on both matter and ideas reveals a lack of understanding of the fact the relationship between these is not

!37 only one of “co-dependence” but precisely of contradiction. To replace the latter with “co-dependence” is to rephrase the basics in weaker terms which leave one unable to address the question of primacy which Engels took to be central.

I raise these two examples only to suggest that there is some beneﬁt to be gained from dwelling on these basic questions, even if I only do so with the goal of moving on to other topics. At no point in what follows do I attempt to engage more substantively with the arguments of these authors, although much of this thesis could be taken as an implicit response. This is especially true with respect to the ﬁrst example’s dismissal of the importance of dialectics.

To begin my treatment of dialectical materialism I turn to Mao’s On Practice, where he describes dialectical materialism’s two chief characteristics. These are essentially axioms. The first of these is “…[Marxist philosophy] openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat” (67). It is not a universal perspective. Indeed it is not only not universal, but is an explicitly partisan perspective: “proletariat” designates a class which is conflict with another class. To serve it is therefore to engage in this conflict. This means that dialectical materialism is not a universal point of view, even if the ambition of Marxism is the abolition of classes (and therefore the achievement of a kind of universality). The second axiom of dialectical materialism that Mao asserts is its “practicality”: “it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice” (67). I will usually refer to this as the “primacy of practice”, and I will return to this for guidance on a few different occasions. I will modify my explanation of it later in the chapter, but for now I will simply note that Mao is saying that a major feature of dialectical materialism is its insistence on the fact that thinking has an “outside” to which thinking is secondary, and will not be too specific about the character of this “outside”. Until later in the chapter we will take it to be a simple statement of the materialism/idealism divide of which Engels wrote in his Ludwig Feuerbach:

!38 Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other … comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism (21).

These two axioms are not indifferent to one another, and their relationship is illustrated with urgency by Lenin in a letter to Russian author Maxim Gorky. In this letter Lenin described idealism as ”the complex of ideas generated by the brutish subjection of man both by external nature and by the class yoke—ideas which consolidate that subjection, lull to sleep the class struggle” (Letter to Gorky) [emphasis in original]. So the partisanship of dialectical materialism is closely tied to its afﬁrmation of the primacy of matter over ideas (or the Idea). How can we understand this? And conversely, what is it about “materialism” that allows it to work against this “consolidation” of subjection and in favour of class struggle?

One answer would be to shift emphasis by immediately insisting that Marxism is not a materialist but a dialectical materialist manner of thinking. In Ludwig Feuerbach Engels presents the fundamentals of the dialectical view when he says that “the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things… go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidents and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end…” (44). One can easily see how this view lends itself to the cause of the oppressed: it denies that their subjection has come about by nature, and suggests that this subjection is certain to end. In this respect it it satisﬁes the ﬁrst axiom we got from Mao on the need for it to be “in service of the proletariat”. But it is not obvious how Engels’ formulation works to oppose any “[lulling] to sleep [of] the class struggle” (Lenin, Letter to Gorky); indeed the phrase “…a progressive development asserts itself in the end…” could easily be taken to be mean that struggle is unnecessary because “development” will “assert itself”. In this respect it is at least ambiguous in its relationship to our second thesis about the

!39 primacy of practice. In order to clarify the importance of my axioms I will begin my fuller discussion of the history of dialectical materialism by taking a step back from Marx and Engels to consider Hegel’s dialectical idealism.

Dialectics, Idealism, and Objective Subjectivity

In Theory of the Subject Badiou says that “[a] dialectician is someone who turns contradiction into the law of being; a metaphysician, whoever does the same with the principle of identity” (117). What does it mean to “turn contradiction into the law of being”? It will be easier if we ﬁrst look at the non-dialectical view. According to the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, “empirical – non-dialectical [metaphysical]– cognition gives us, as its ﬁnal conclusion, two ‘descriptions’ that are, in relation to one another, ‘non-contradictory’ – the state of the thing in the beginning and the state of the thing in the end, the state of one and the same ‘thing’” [emphasis in original] (31). “Day” has certain characteristics and so does “night”; “water” has certain characteristics and so does “steam”; “life” has certain characteristics and so does “death”. However there is a problem at the boundary between them; as Ilyenkov puts it: “in the act of transition (and in its ‘description’) these two otherwise ‘non-contradictory descriptions’ necessarily encounter one another and each one is as ‘correct’ as its opposite. Evening is as much a ‘day’ as it is a ‘night’” (31). The initially unambiguous terms “day” and “night” fail to capture the movement between the two states.

According to Ilyenkov, Hegel’s response to this problem was to afﬁrm that “we can correctly understand and ‘describe’ a thing only when we determine, in this very thing

!40 (and its verbal determinations14) not only its ‘determinate being’, but also those characteristics of the thing due to which it will sooner or later ‘perish’, that is, be transformed into ‘another’ thing, into ‘its own other’, into its own opposite (as living turns into dead and dead – into living)” (32) [emphasis in original]. But as soon as we say that a thing has characteristics which point towards its transformation into its other, then we are saying that it contains this other, if only in germinal form. It is both itself and its other, and in this sense it is contradictory, and this contradiction strongly inﬂuences its development. While Ilyenkov points to this in the above-quoted text, I

14 A word on the concept of “determination”, which is used here in its dialectical (or at least philosophical) sense and not its everyday sense. Here “determination” means something like “specification”, but this specification should not be taken to be exhaustive. For instance in everyday parlance we might say (albeit clumsily) that we must “determine where we are going out for dinner”. This is exhaustive, because once we choose one place we have excluded all the other places. But if we are in a city we may have many options and so there is a need to narrow our choices; if I suggest “sushi” and you suggest “Italian” then we have specified the choice somewhat. If we then agree on “Italian” I may suggest further that we seek out a restaurant which has a patio or a live jazz band. If we find a perfect match (Italian restaurant with a live jazz band on the patio) then we may be satisfied, but it cannot therefore be said that we have attended to all of the restaurant’s determinations; it could also be on a waterfront, it may have old fixtures but recently-updated restrooms, or any other number of things about it which were not relevant for our problem of finding a place to eat dinner. This is a basic principle: a thing can have an enormous number of determinations, and how many we need to focus upon depends on what we are trying to do. Whether the thing is “specified” is a relative notion. Another basic principle is that there are positive and negative determinations. “Italian” and “not Chinese” both provide information but in different ways (by affirmation and by negation). Finally (and I will need to abandon the restaurant example) a thing’s determinations can be bound up with its relationships to other things. For instance we know that water has a host of its own properties (obvious examples being its boiling and freezing points). When sugar is placed in water the former can dissolve (up to a point), and so we can say that this dissolution is a property of their interaction. But then we also begin to consider water as having the property that things dissolve in it: it is a solvent. Similarly, we come to understand that sugar can dissolve under certain conditions: it is a solute. It is important to stress that just because a thing has certain determinations this does not mean that these will never change or that they have unlimited applicability. For instance the degree of solubility (how much of something can be dissolved into a solvent) is influenced by other factors (for instance the temperature of the mixture). With this digression it is clear that “determination” is a flexible concept which is not totalizing or absolute in the way that its everyday usage might imply.

!41 want to stress that “contradiction” does not refer only to contradictions between the concepts in use to describe something; it refers to this lack of “self-identity”, where a thing is both itself and something else (something other). This why Ilyenkov mentions both “this very thing” and its “verbal determinations”. And it is also what Badiou means by “turning contradiction into the law of being” (Theory 117); these contradictions are really internal to the objects being considered (and all objects, and all processes).

It is important to stress that this presentation is still quite within the bounds of

Hegelianism, and it was this understanding of making a dialectical method out of the understanding of contradiction that was so important for Marx and Engels. According to the latter, “[t]he great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which…. the concepts go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away” was “the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy” (Ludwig Feuerbach 44). But Engels also says that in Hegel’s work “the revolutionary side becomes smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side” (Ludwig Feuerbach 13). The issue, says Engels, is that Hegel insists on giving his system an end which is the return of the absolute spirit to itself; ie. an end which is also a return to the beginning (Ludwig Feuerbach 13). And this “return to the beginning is possible only in one way, namely, by putting as the end of all history the arrival of mankind at the cognition of the absolute idea… [i]n this way, however, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism” (Ludwig Feuerbach 13). So giving the system priority over the dialectic was the issue with Hegel, according to Engels.

Evald Ilyenkov gives us another way to consider Hegel, this time through the lens of the latter’s treatment of the issue of practice (the primacy of which with respect to theory was one of our axioms, you will recall). The problem arises due to the role that

!42 Hegel gives to the external world. Ilyenkov points out that one of Hegel’s major advances lies in his extending the ﬁeld of logic beyond the comparison and manipulation of logical statements by focusing on the fact that thought is not limited to statements in the brain but exists in people’s actions as well, and in the things that they make. For instance: while cooking dinner I can follow a recipe, and the process of cooking and the meal itself both in a sense contain the recipe as well as my own cooking abilities. Understood in this way “logic” is not only a system for providing formal proofs, but actually describes the whole of human society and history (qua human creation). Nothing about the presentation so far is idealist, as Ilyenkov points out (14). The real issue comes from the role that Hegel gives to human action (and the broader world more generally). When someone thinks with their actions (as when I cook dinner), the action is (for Hegel) nothing more than an exteriorization of thought, destined to be folded back into thought, all as part of the process of development of the Spirit, and those material exteriorizations are interesting only insofar as they push the development of a concept. This is a reversal of Mao’s axiom: rather than theory serving practice, practice is serving theory.

An example will be helpful: I mentioned water and steam earlier on the question of contradiction, and they are often used to illustrate the dialectical concept of the passage of quantity into quality. As you heat water, it accumulates joules of energy inside of it and its temperature rises (increase in quantity), until a point where this accumulation causes a phase transition (change in quality): the water turns into steam. Concepts like “temperature”, “joule”, “energy”, and “phase transition” were developed scientifically long after water boiled for the first time. But for the idealist dialectician these concepts are merely the returning-to-thought of the general law of which the material boiling of water was only an exteriorization. The passage from quantity to quality exists before boiling water as a general dialectical concept, boiling water is a material actualization of this general law, and the scientific concepts are examples of the way in which the Spirit

!43 develops itself; “temperature”, “joule”, “energy”, and “phase transition” are all now new determinations by which the law of the passage from quantity to quality is made more concrete as part of the ascent of Spirit.

The problem with this, says Ilyenkov, is that “[b]oth a boiling teapot and the French Revolution are transformed in such an approach into simple ‘examples’ that illustrate the relationship between the categories of quality and quantity” (2). The famous revolutionary Robespierre himself is nothing but a “practical Rousseau”, and he fails to the extent that his actions remain an insufﬁciently developed materialization of the

Absolute Spirit (15). Of course failure is then entirely justiﬁed and explained, just as is every action: Robespierre’s guillotine is “an instrument of realisation of the idea of ‘absolute equality’ (since all the distinctions between persons, according to Hegel, are found in their ‘heads’)” (Ilyenkov 15). Because everything that happens — “no matter how bad and accidental it is” (2) — is turned into a necessary moment of the unfolding of Spirit, “dialectics is easily transformed into a method of subtle and logically sophisticated apologetics of everything existing15” (Ilyenkov 2). Ilyenkov’s solution requires a turn towards materialism; “[a]ny other approach condemns even dialectically literate thinking to the fruitless spinning around in the enchanted circle of canonical categories” (3).

“Fruitless spinning” is clearly not useful for us, interested as we are in practice. In anticipation of Badiou we will ask: what kind of materialism? And more speciﬁcally: what kind of materialism takes the practice of the masses to be central? Ilyenkov’s critique shows that it is possible for a dialectician to deemphasize the role of the masses in favour of

15 Ilyenkov is very likely invoking a famous phrase from Marx, who in an 1843 letter insisted that it was necessary to perform a “ruthless criticism of all that exists”, a criticism which is ”ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conﬂict with the powers that be” (Marx to Ruge). His allusion is clearly meant to indicate the approach to dialectics that he is criticizing is precisely not in the spirit of Marx’s letter.

!44 proper names, and then to explain the actions of even these famous figures by the ideas of the era which have come to occupy their minds. This is clearly the kind of thinking which “[reduces] subjectivity to a mere reflex of objectivity” (Freire, Daring 23); where “objectivity” here refers to the ascending development of Spirit. But Ilyenkov’s demand for “materialism” does not satisfy us in itself, and this is why it necessary to ask “what kind of materialism?” To see why we can turn to Stalin’s section on dialectical and historical materialism in History of the Communist Party Soviet Union, a canonical and extremely influential text on Marxist theory, which the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre called “the notorious theoretical chapter” (14).

Before doing so I want to provide a disclaimer. In my view a proper dialectical and materialist approach is not about selecting “good” or “bad” texts to follow, but of trying to understand why a text succeeds or fails to grasp the real contradictory processes with which the author was confronted. I am therefore wary of the reader taking my criticisms of Stalin below (and Hegel above) as an attempt to create a list of approved thinkers — Marx, Engels, Freire, Lenin, Mao, Badiou — and a list of disapproved thinkers — Stalin, Hegel. This is not at all the point. The point is to suggest that if these (“disapproved”) thinkers say something which I argue is wrong, then this is because the things about which they are thinking are contradictory and confusing and are therefore liable to produce errors. And in any case a materialist understands that the world is going to exceed our ability to represent it in thought, and so our ideas will always be partial and inexact. If the errors result from the way things are (and not from individual error), then we beneﬁt from studying the character of the errors so that we can guard against them ourselves.

In the case of Stalin’s section on dialectical and historical materialism, I believe the error at work is a preference for objective subjectivity, or an ignorance of the difference between objective and subjective subjectivity. For instance, he says that

!45 Arising out of the new tasks set by the development of the material life of society, the new social ideas and theories force their way through, become the possession of the masses, mobilize and organize them against the moribund forces of society… (117).

There are three important things to note here:

The ﬁrst is that the ideas “force their way through”, presumably via their being those ideas which arise by “the development of the material life of society”; ie. because this “material life” is developing, the ideas have some “force” of their own. The second point is that these ideas “become the possession of the masses”. Note the passive voice: the masses do not “take possession of” these ideas”. Instead by some process these ideas “become their possession”. While this clearly refers to some sort of learning process, it is a process in which these masses do not have an active role (or at least this active role is not emphasized). The third point is that these ideas “mobilize and organize [the masses] against the moribund forces of society”; even when these ideas “become the possession of the masses” these masses are not then organizing themselves on the basis of these ideas, but are “mobilized and organized” by these ideas, which are themselves generated by the material conditions (“the development of the material life of society”). The activity of the masses is therefore the activity of the objective conditions via these ideas, and the masses themselves are passive even in their activity.

We can ﬁnd more evidence for our suspicion in the following passage from further down the same page:

...the party of the proletariat must rely upon such a social theory, such a social idea as correctly reﬂects the needs of development of the material life of society, and which is therefore capable of setting into motion broad masses of the people and of mobilizing them and organizing them into a great army of the proletarian party… (117).

The ideas “[set] into motion broad masses”; the latter appear here principally as objects.

!46 Their actions seem to be the putting-into-practice of those ideas generated by the laws of historical development. Stalin is not as far from Hegel as he might have thought, and clearly this again is “[reducing] subjectivity to a mere reﬂex of objectivity” (Freire, Daring 23).

But one should not be misled into seeing this as just a Stalinist deformation of the authentic Marxist perspective. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Marx famously wrote that “theory… becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses” (251). Here again the people are “gripped”, rather than “gripping”. A significant contribution of Mao was to re-emphasize the importance of subjectivity in politics, and this is visible immediately the way that in his Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? he reworks this famous quote from Marx: “Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world” (502) [emphasis added]. Mao’s insistence on the importance of subjectivity also led to him taking specific aim at Stalin: in his Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR Mao says that this text (Economic Problems) “is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people”, and that the Soviets “believe that technology decides everything, that cadres decide everything, speaking only of ‘expert’, never of ‘Red’, only of the cadres, never of the masses” (117), and slightly later: “the conscious activity of the Party and the masses is not sufficiently brought out” (118), and all of this “is walking on one leg” (117), ie., seeing only the objective side of things and not the subjective side of things. Mao therefore has a clear interest in prioritizing “conscious activity” — practice and subjectivity — against Stalin’s tendency to depend upon “objective laws”. Mao disagrees with Stalin over the role of subjective action, and it is useful to see that Badiou believes that for Mao distinguishing himself from Stalin on this point “was a conscious effort” and that

Mao thought of himself as attempting or proposing an alternative to the path in the construction of socialism on which Stalin had taken Leninism…in Maoism, a

!47 very special place seemed to have been reserved for the question of subjectivity in politics — for a properly political subjectivity. In other words, there is the novelty of the break with the theory according to which consciousness is never anything more than consciousness of the objective conditions (Badiou and Politics 296).

This is the sense in which I believe that we are authorized in speaking of Freire as a sort of “Maoist” or at least working with the problematic of post-Leninism. When Badiou talks about “the novelty of the break”, it is clear that this is a reference to an approach which focuses upon “subjectivity …[taking] on the role of subject rather than simply object of world transformations” (Freire, Daring 23).

Quantity/Quality Reconsidered

Before turning properly to Badiou’s dense presentation of dialectics in Theory of the Subject, I want to ask again: what is the difference between a boiling teapot and the French Revolution? Though the question appears to be silly, it is crucial for distinguishing Badiou’s position from that of Hegel (and Stalin). It appears to be a silly question because the answer appears obvious: they are simply different processes. Engels deals with a similar issue in his Anti-Dühring while considering another dialectical law. In this text he answers critics who suggest that dialectical criticism effaces the distinction between clearly different processes via the application of its general laws; the example here is the law of “the negation of the negation”:

It is obvious that I do not say anything concerning the particular process of development of, for example, a grain of barley from germination to the death of the fruit-bearing plant, if I say it is a negation of the negation. For, as the integral calculus is also a negation of the negation, if I said anything of the sort I should only be making the nonsensical statement that the life-process of a barley plant was integral calculus or for that matter that it was socialism… When I say that all these processes are a negation of the negation, I bring them all under this one law of motion, and for this very reason I leave out of account the speciﬁc particularities of each individual process (168) [emphasis in original].

!48 And so while it could be true that the quantity/quality law applies to both the French Revolution and the boiling teapot, the particularities of these processes of development can easily serve to differentiate them. A materialist retort to Hegel would then reject the approach which emphasizes both of these processes being mere examples of the quantity/quality law. The point of the materialist analysis is not only to establish that a process is governed by this law at an abstract level, but to wed this knowledge of the abstract law to an understanding of all of the more speciﬁc and minute processes which, when taken together, produce the abstract passage from quantity to quality16.

But this leaves us in the company of Stalin, or at least not unambiguously away from him. If both the French Revolution and the boiling teapot —despite their particular differences — are ultimately understandable via that law whereby (as Marx puts it in Capital) “at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions” (423), then we are not therefore free of the problem whereby dialectics becomes “a method of subtle and logically sophisticated apologetics”, this time based upon the nascent capital accumulation of the French petty bourgeoisie rather than upon the self-development of the Idea. We can imagine Stalin describing the Terror as the (mere) implementation of that idea of formal equality which is produced by the need for a juridical system which formalizes an embryonic capitalism’s need for a formal equality between wage labourers. It is a partial advance on Hegel (for whom “absolute equality” is an idea which precedes its material actualization) insofar as the reference point for objectivity is economic development and not Spirit, but we are still within the realm of objective development which merely ﬁnds

16 Engels treats an example of this distinction in Anti-Dühring. The titular Dühring accuses Marx of saying that a sum of values must turn into capital (must pass from quantity to quality) at a certain point because the Hegelian law of the passage from quantity to quality says that this must happen (150). Engels argues that Marx’s approach is “the very opposite” of this, and rather consists of ﬁrst establishing the process whereby a sum of values is transformed into capital, and only then suggesting that this transformation proves the correctness of the Hegelian law (149-151).

!49 particular expression in human activity — objective subjectivity and not subjective subjectivity. We have mostly exchanged “the material life of society” for Absolute Spirit (Stalin 117).

This problem of quantity/quality is of fundamental importance to Badiou’s work around the time of Theory of the Subject. In his Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic he says:

It is not quite exact to say that the quantitative summation produces the qualitative jump along a linear causality. In truth, the differential gap, at a certain stage of quantitative variation, no longer has the place for being out of place. As such, a Maoist party that is quantitatively very powerful can no longer remain in simple excess with respect to the place ceded by the bourgeoisie to the revolutionary politics of the people. It is then necessary either to take power, or be brutally reduced. The second hypothesis is always present, and this is why there will never be a mechanical victory. This is precisely because the quantity/ quality dialectic exists at every stage of the development of phenomenon and does not arise through accumulation (67).

We will formalize the technical terms (‘place’, ‘out of place’, ‘excess’) below; for the moment it is crucial only to see that Badiou’s formulation makes room for subjectivity: “It is then necessary to take power, or be brutally reduced”. Transformation is not, then, only about the working out of objective laws: “…there will never be a mechanical victory”. It is necessary to take action, and this is the pertinent difference between the boiling teapot and the French Revolution. The water in a teapot will boil if exposed to sufficient heat, and this might happen because a person places it on a stove or because an asteroid has hit the Earth and raised the temperature of the atmosphere so much that all water boils away. The only necessary thing is heat, and whether this heat is produced by human action is not relevant to the process whereby liquid water becomes steam. According to Badiou this does not apply to political processes (like the French Revolution); one’s influence can expand and expand, but if one does not “take the plunge” then this accumulated influence will be dispersed (“be brutally reduced”). This

!50 is of course where risk enters the picture. One need not worry that an antagonistic force will pose a threat to one’s boiling teapot, but in the case of a political movement such an antagonistic force is an ever-present danger. This distinction is crucial to the whole project of Theory of the Subject; as Badiou puts it towards the beginning of that text: “… one of the objectives of what we are saying her is to establish that the famous ‘leap’ from the quantitative to the qualitative, far from being the measure that makes all the thermometers explode, includes the effect of a subject” (4).

This quantity/quality principle fact is expressed dramatically in Lenin’s famous 1917 article The Crisis Has Matured (a favourite of Badiou’s) , in which he excoriates some other senior Bolsheviks for their hesitation on the question of seizing power, a hesitation which led him to threaten them with his resignation from the party’s Central Committee:

What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, "state the facts", admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee and among the leaders of our Party which favours waiting for the Congress of Soviets, and is opposed to taking power immediately, is opposed to an immediate insurrection. That tendency, or opinion, must be overcome. Otherwise, the Bolsheviks will cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a party. For to miss such a moment and to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery… To refrain from taking power now, to "wait”… is to doom the revolution to failure… it is my profound conviction that if we "wait" for the Congress of Soviets and let the present moment pass, we shall ruin the revolution (Lenin, The Crisis Has Matured) [emphasis in original]

The title of Lenin’s article names the quantitative situation: the crisis has matured! What is needed now is — to use Badiou’s phrasing — “to take power” at or risk “being brutally reduced”: “to ‘wait’ is to doom the revolution to failure”. In Theory of the Subject Badiou cites this text as a crucial example of Marxist politics (170-171). The point is that Lenin recognized that transformation is not only due to some quantitative accumulation which passes into quality, as with boiling water. Moreover, the decision to act can

!51 actually appear to undermine the process of quantitative accumulation by shifting away from the course of action which has led to quantitative accumulation to this point (and so one can see where his fellow leaders were coming from). The severity of Lenin’s tone has theoretical import: if the development of the objective conditions only push you to the brink of a decision but do not actually make the decision for you (as I have suggested, following Badiou), then one must assemble the will necessary to make this decision without any objective assurances. His critique of the cowardice of other Central Committee members is clearly intended to conjure this necessary will. On this point one should recall my brief discussion of the phrase “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” from earlier in the chapter. However much “the conditions themselves cry out” that one should dance or jump (18th Brumaire 150), it is ultimately up to you to do so. I return to this problem at the end of the third chapter, where I discuss the theoretical importance of “faith” or “hope”.

For Badiou the necessity of “taking the plunge” in this way has a general theoretical importance, and this necessity is entirely bound up with his materialist theory of the subject. As he puts it in a critical review of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

True class revolt, in essence, surprises… How could the established rule of the old (including the revolutionary old) put up with a deduction of what tends to break it asunder?… It has been a while now since Marxist-Leninists ceased to identify the rational with the analytically predictable. The dialectic, the primacy of practice, means ﬁrst and foremost afﬁrming the historical objectivity of ruptures. Masses, not concepts, make history (Flux and the Party 173).

So the laws of described by Marxist political economy which predict that crises will occur do not at all express the process whereby one takes advantage of the crisis, they do not explain where the decisive break will occur: “No one can ever really know precisely how, and in which workshop, a revolutionary strike began” (Flux and the Party 173). And to deny this is to (consciously or otherwise) attempt to project the order of the structure which exists onto the disorder which is the latter’s destruction. It is a perspective

!52 which imposes a constraint on transformation, viewing it as the “working out” of objective tendencies rather than as a break with what exists. When Badiou identifies “the dialectic” with “the primacy of practice” (Flux and the Party 173), he is affirming this exact point. This is a characterization of dialectical materialism which brings into relief the specificity of Mao’s formulation which I quoted above: “[dialectical materialism] emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice” (On Practice 67). To insist on the applicability of the objective laws of development would mean putting the theory above the practice, and would be a movement into idealism. We can now see that Mao’s formulation is actually not (as we provisionally supposed) a simple statement on the classic materialism/ idealism divide, but is really a more sophisticated statement of the dependence of materialism upon subjectivity, upon the intentional actions of real people (which are necessarily performed upon an objective, material reality).

Lacan, Materialism, and the Real

After having treated the problem of the passage from quantity to quality we are now in a position to discuss Badiou’s use of “materialism” and “idealism” in Theory of the Subject. As Bruno Bosteels puts it in his Badiou and Politics: “…this is not the usual objection against the idealism of the signiﬁer or of discourse in the name of some hard referent or concrete human practice. Badiou’s argument is rather that idealism consists in denying the divisibility of the existing law of things, regardless of whether these things are ideal or material” (85). Bosteels then cites the following from Theory of the Subject:

!53 The conservative posture requires that the law be named as indivisible: it can only be un-established, but never divided17…The indivisibility of the law … excepts it from the real. To link up this exception in the domain of theory amounts to stipulating the anteriority of the rule [of the law, of the structure]… The position of this antecedence is elaborated in philosophy as idealism (184).

This means that the full expression a materialist viewpoint can only appear in those moments where the laws which govern the normal order of things break down and one is forced to act (here we are merely repeating our commentary on Lenin’s The Crisis Has Matured).

Badiou’s reference to “the real” reveals his signiﬁcant dependence upon the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It crucial that we do not understand this dependence as the result of an attempt to “complete” Marxism (qua theory of the state and of economic processes) by appending to it a theory of the subject derived from another doctrine: “[i]t has never led to anything, nor will it ever lead to anything, to imagine that there is some lack to ﬁll in Marxism, some regional discipline to which its powers ought to be extended” (Badiou, Theory 179). Neither is it the case that Lacan is “an involuntary theoretician of the political party” nor that Marxists are “unenlightened practitioners of desire” (Badiou, Theory 115). Badiou is insistent that “[t]he truth is that there is only one theory of the subject”, and that “Lacan is ahead of the current state of Marxism and we must take advantage of this advance so as to improve our Marxist affairs” (Theory 115). Frequent Lacan translator and commentator Bruce Fink explains how we can understand this “ahead” when he says that ”Lacan, while dubbed a ‘structuralist’ by

17 Badiou’s point about this “conservative posture” should be compared with Freire’s description of a time when a “group was debating whether the conscientiziçāo of men and women to a speciﬁc situation of injustice might not lead them to ‘destructive fanaticism’ or to a ‘sensation of total collapse of their world’” (Oppressed 35). In Badiou’s terms this would mean that conscientiziçāo is feared to lead either to total submission to the structural laws or to an excessive (‘fanatical’) desire for the un- establishment. Freire says “by making it possible for people to enter the historical process as responsible Subjects, conscientiziçāo enrolls them in the search for self- afﬁrmation and thus avoids fanaticism” (Oppressed 36).

!54 certain people and a ‘poststructuralist’ by others, maintains and defends both concepts — structure and subject— in a rigorous theoretical framework” (35). Badiou’s uptake of Lacanian theory does not involve psychoanalyzing anyone, but of adapting (and expanding upon) a number of its key concepts: “structure”, “the Real”, ”symptoms”, “anxiety”, and “superego”, among others. It is not surprise that Badiou took this framework so seriously given that he is a disciple of both Sartre and Althusser, of Marxists whose work focused principally upon subject and structure respectively18.

The concept of “the real” is of particular importance, because of how it allows Badiou to consider the capacity to exceed the law of things, ie. the existing structure. Consider the following from Lacan’s The Sinthome: “I speak of the real as impossible to the extent that I believe, that the real…the real is lawless. The true real implies the absence of any law. The real has no order” (118). And then Badiou, from Theory of the Subject: “Do we then adopt, such as it is, Lacan’s maxim that the real is what is impossible? Yes, without any quibble. The real of Marxism is the revolution” (128). Of course this designation of impossibility refers to the impossibility from the perspective of the law. As Badiou puts it: “Does this mean that revolutions do not exist? Quite the contrary!” (Theory 128). The point is that the concept of the real allows for an understanding of “structure” which implies that the latter is 1) unable to completely “capture” everything (more on this in the next section) and 2) can be disrupted in the “revolutionary” sense suggested above.

The real has another important utility for us, which is that it has a role in structuring the social order. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan says that the real presents itself in the form of the trauma, and says :“Is it not remarkable that… the real

18 Bosteels has suggested that we not take this identification of Sartre with “subject” and Althusser with “structure” too far. Althusser’s theory of overdetermination “reveals the excess of the structure over its immanent resources and how this excess already presupposes the inscription of a subject-effect that is not merely ideological” (Badiou and Poltics 143), and “we can also always expect to find remnants of the opacity and counter finality of the structure” in Sartre’s notion of the “practico-inert” (Badiou and Politics 143).

!55 should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it —in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing upon it an apparently accidental origin?” (55) [emphasis in original]. This point does not only apply to psychoanalysis; as Bruno Bosteels puts it in his Badiou and Politics: “…just as the symbolic order is structured around the traumatic kernel of the real, a social ﬁeld is articulated around the real of antagonism that absolutely resists symbolization” (69). This “antagonism” is the conﬂict that consistently arises in society, the “subversive side” that accompanies the “poverty” in the formulation from Marx’s The Poverty of

Philosophy that I cited in the introduction (117). Here we should recall the formulation from The Communist Manifesto which says that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (473). Reading this statement with Lacan in mind, we can see that class struggle is the “trauma” which “determines all that follows”, and the Manifesto’s claim is a rejection of the notion that history is “accidental”. Lacan continues by saying that “…we see preserved the insistence of the trauma in making us aware of its existence. The trauma reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled” (Four Fundamental Concepts 55). So the class struggle-as-trauma is not only constitutive of the social order (as its traumatic origin), but it “bubbles up” repeatedly as effect of the structure itself.

As an aside, we can use Badiou’s point about the “conservative posture” which believes in the “indivisibility of the law” to reinterpret an above-quoted passage from Lenin on how idealism is ”the complex of ideas generated by the brutish subjection of man both by external nature and by the class yoke—ideas which consolidate that subjection, lull to sleep the class struggle” (Letter to Gorky). If one believes that the law is “indivisible”, then one believes that everything that happens is a result of this law and so anything new which appears is really an understandable result of what came before. Viewed in this new light, the whole quantity/quality discussion is about articulating an idealism/ materialism divide. Everyone accepts that water boils in accordance with laws and the

!56 quantity/quality passage is entirely contained within/explained by these laws. To be an idealist (in this new sense deployed by Badiou) is to extend this understanding of “mechanical” physical laws into society and to imagine that (say) the French Revolution is a “boiling over” in a not-quite-so-metaphorical sense: both are the expression of objective laws. The materialist posture in this instance consists in saying that the law which governs the quantitative accumulation does not cover the passage to quality; one must act in a way that the structure (the Law, the symbolic order) does not “cover”. In this sense, both Hegel and Stalin are idealists. Understanding how to avoid this idealism will require a deeper investigation of Lacan, and I turn to this in the next section.

Outplace, Force, Concentration

In the previous section I introduced the importance of Lacan for Badiou, and suggested (among other things) that the former’s notion of the Real was important for understanding how the social order is structured. The following passage from Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject provides more insight into this while also suggesting the relationship between this structuring (here tied to “primal repression”) and the psychoanalytic process:

Primal repression is, in a sense, the roll of the dice at the beginning of one's universe that creates a split and sets the structure in motion. An individual has to come to grips with that random toss-that particular conﬁguration of his or her parents' desire- and somehow become its subject. "Wo Es war, soll lch werden." I must come to be where foreign forces-the Other as language and the Other as desire- once dominated. I must subjectify that otherness (68).

!57 The meaning of “dice roll” should be understood alongside the notion of class struggle qua trauma of the social order that I put forward in the previous section. Insofar as class struggle is an interruption of society’s normal process of functioning, it is “a-legal”; interruptions of this kind do not “follow” from the logic of (say) capitalist accumulation (within which workers exist only as those who can perform productive labour). Typically a person embedded within capitalist society will not be aware of the struggles which founded this society, but their position nevertheless owes its foundation to these struggles19. This means that (unbeknownst to them) they are in a sense the effect of forces beyond their understanding. The Lacanian analogy is with the Ego (ie. the conscious self-image), which despite appearing to be the subject in classical terms (the seat of decision and of thought), actually “arises as a crystallization or sedimentation of ideal images, tantamount to a fixed, reified object with which a child learns to identify” (36). Furthermore “the ego is by its very nature a distortion, an error, a repository of misunderstanding” (Fink 37), and so it is not to be trusted. If we return to the analogy with capitalist society this implies that someone’s spontaneous self- understanding is immediately suspect, because it is actually imposed from outside (in spite of any sense of self-mastery). Obviously this calls into question any approach to politics which engages in wholesale affirmation of “lived experience”, although the

19 A classic example is that of “so-called primitive accumulation”, which is “a-legal” in the sense that it is a kind of accumulation process which does not follow the logic of capitalist accumulation that it founds. Towards the end of Capital Marx contrasts the ideological myth of capitalism’s origins — that it depends on the industry and frugality of forward-thinking elites — with the reality of these origins: “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” (Marx, Capital 874). In For They Know Not What They Do Slavoj Žižek connects this founding violence and the ideological “forgetting” of it via the myth to the psychoanalytic theory of trauma, primal repression, and fantasy (209- 214). This example is also instructive for how it emphasizes the point that the “class struggle” is not something fought only by the oppressed class; indeed it is typically the oppressor class which engages in this struggle with the most seriousness and effectiveness.

!58 latter (as will become clear) is necessary as a starting point20. Finally, the sense in which one can “subjectify” the otherness will require some elaboration, and I turn to this now.

In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan says that “…this real brings with it the subject, almost by force” (54). Badiou is clearly referencing this quote when we says in Theory of the Subject that “[w]e need a theory of the pass of the real, in the breach opened up by formalization. Here, the real is not only what can be lacking from its place, but what passes through by force” [emphasis in original] (23). So we should not only conceive as of the real as that which resists placement within the structure

(“lacking from its place”), but as that which “forces” its way through this hole, and that this “forcing” has strong connections to the problem of subjectivity. To use Badiou’s terminology: what is called the “splace” (space of placement, ie. structure) also has an exterior where there are elements which are not placed, but are “out of place” and therefore occupy the “outplace”. The “theory of the pass of the real” would then not consist only in the occupation of this place which is out-of-place, but in some sort of movement “through” the impasse. Badiou is therefore suggesting a process which is somewhat different and which in a sense goes “beyond” Fink’s call to “come to be where foreign forces… once dominated” (68). This is an important distinction, because without it you do posit a structural inside and an a-structural outside, but this relationship ends up producing too-ﬁrm a unity between these: “…based on the simple inspection of the splace and of what it keeps out of itself (out of place) you posit the

20 I will return to this theme many times throughout this thesis, but the core of the argument can be seen in the distinction that Louis Althusser makes in the following passage from his Lenin and Philosophy on Lenin’s critique of “spontaneism”: “… Lenin is famous for his critique of ‘spontaneism’, which, it should be noted, is not directed against the spontaneity, resourcefulness, inventiveness and genius of the masses of the people but against a political ideology which, screened by an exaltation of the spontaneity of the masses, exploits it in order to divert it into an incorrect politics” (Lenin and Philosophy 190). The problem is not with the spontaneous actions of the masses or with their lived experiences, but with a certain (wholly afﬁrmative) political attitude towards these actions and/or experiences.

!59 unity of the process as exclusion. There is this, of which that is not“ (Badiou, Theory 29).

In this case the inside/outside relationship is effectively re-absorbed into the inside, because all that one is saying is that the structure requires precisely this kind of exclusion in order for its interior to function. As Badiou puts it: “This is exactly like saying that the unity of the contradiction bourgeoisie/proletariat poses no problem, since it is the historical being of… bourgeois society, which is in fact governed by this contradiction. As outplace, the proletariat comes to be of a piece with the place” (Theory 29-30). Freire engages with this difﬁcult question of inside/outside in the following passage:

The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside"—inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves" (Oppressed 74).

One can easily note a resonance with the Lacanian discussion of symptoms: the oppressed are a “pathology”, and (contrary to common wisdom) this status is due not to individual defect but the constitution of society. Even if they appear “outside”, in fact they are “inside”. Their exclusion is totally a part of the structure’s functioning. He even takes that further step by saying that the structure’s incompleteness does not imply a need to complete it by ﬁlling in its holes (by “integration), but rather a need to transform it. On this point it useful to consider Freire’s call for the oppressed to “change their weakness into a transforming force”(Oppressed 145), which resembles Badiou’s own use of “force” (even if we should avoid being too taken by their mutual use of the word “force”). A more rigorous connection can be drawn if we specify how the passage

!60 from weakness to force should be understood. Noting the importance of “symptoms” and “pathology” for this argument, we can follow Badiou in saying that what “from any other point of view except Marxism reads as a symptom of incurable illness” is “a symptom of health” (Theory 130). What is called “weakness” — the inability to fully assimilate into the structure — is precisely the “breach” in formalization through which “force” (and the subject) can pass. The passage from “weakness” to “transforming force” does not mean that weakness is exchanged for strength, but that weakness is itself taken for an embryonic strength; I believe that this is how we should understand

Freire’s statement that “[i]t is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this tradition of struggle, of resistance, and ‘work it’“ (Hope 99). Transforming the structure means in part that the metrics themselves (for “weakness” and other things) are changed.

But this is not the whole story, because the oppressed are not simply “out.” Badiou is insistent here: “[s]cission is that by which the term [for us, the oppressed] is included in the place as out-of-place” (Theory 15). The fact that the oppressed are “out-of-place” does not mean that they are completely “out”, but rather that the only possible form of inclusion is an incomplete one which runs up against this splitting. This is another lesson taken from Lacan, who insists that the structure’s automatic functioning (“repetition”) is bound up with the real and the split it introduces: “…it is necessary to ground this repetition first of all in the very split that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter. This split … enables us to apprehend the real, in its dialectical effects, as originally unwelcome” (Four Fundamental Concepts 69). This is Lacan’s version of the point from Fink with which I began this section. To return to the class-struggle-as- trauma example: this “originally unwelcome” struggle both founds the structure and sunders it, where “sunder” is taken to mean both that the structure is itself fissured and each of its elements is fissured (more on this in the next section).

!61 Of course the problem of splitting is crucial for Freire as well; consider the following: “The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being… They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized”. (Oppressed 48). Here Freire is making the crucial point that the oppressed do not exist in (only) an external antagonism with their oppressors. The difference here is that while in our discussion to this point the splitting has been presented as a barrier to inclusion in the structure, Freire presents it as a barrier to the latter’s transformation. The dividedness of the oppressed is “the tragic dilemma… which their education must take into account” (Oppressed 48). The truth is that it is both. It is a completely classically-Marxist statement to say that the working class is both the group which will end capitalism and the group which is responsible — by the production of surplus value — for its ever-quickening expansion21. The working class’ existence is split between these two functions which are in contradiction with one another. This is what Badiou means when he talks about scission being the only way that the outplace is included in the splace. The sense of “working class” which refers to it as the principal productive actor in society makes clear that exclusion is actually not necessarily problematic from a structural perspective, because the structure expands and perpetuates itself via this exclusion. This is an example of the more general point that out-of-placeness is not immediately radical, and we can better see why the oppressed must “change their weakness into a transforming force” (Oppressed 145), because even though this “weakness” — this out-of-placeness — is the basis for transformation, it must be “honed” in some sense. This “honing” (I will soon replace this word with one

21 That this statement is classical does not mean that it is always understood. In Theory of the Subject Badiou refers to the economic contradiction between workers and capitalists (where the former produce surplus value which the latter appropriate) the “class contradiction”, and he calls the antagonistic contradiction between workers and capitalists which aims at the destruction of capitalist society the “class struggle”. He then clariﬁes that “[t]o confuse the class contradiction with the class struggle… is the philosophical tendency of economism, of workerism, of somniferous Marxism for the lecture hall” (Theory 24). I return to the concept of “economism” in Chapter Three.

!62 of Badiou’s) refers to a process whereby one distinguishes between the kind of exclusion which is useful for the structure, and that which is destructive to it.

Here it is important to ask why Freire might have emphasized the need to “change their weakness into a transforming force” (Oppressed 145) [emphasis added]; the implication is that there are forces which are not transformational. The following is an example of this:

This is why I have stressed that the passage from “weakness” to “transforming force” involves a redefinition of the metric by which one measures “strength”. Without this redefinition there can be a tendency to replicate its existing form, ie., an oppressive form. This redefinition does not really come after the transformation but is part of the latter; here we can finally turn to one of Badiou’s descriptions of the (obscure but necessary and foundational) concept of “force”:

Force is nothing but that which, by concentrating in itself, out-of-place, a term that was assigned to repetition, jams up the mechanism of repetition and thus triggers the possibility for the destruction of its law. There where the old coherence prescribed a mere sliding displacement, an interruption arises through a puriﬁcation that exceeds the place. This is the history of force (Theory 142).

So the “term which was assigned to repetition” (the oppressed) must go through some process of “concentration” which is a kind of “puriﬁcation”, and this process leads to an “interruption”. “Concentration” is the concept which will designate what I have recently called “honing”, ie. that process which distinguishes within the immediate and/or spontaneous practices of rebellion in order to ﬁnd those which are most “out-of- place”, and then “concentrate” these developing and deepening this out-of-placeness.

!63 Based on the above we can translate “transformational force” into Badiou’s terms, “subjective force” and “objective force”:

A defintion: we will call subjective those process relative to the qualitative concentration of force…Correlatively we will call ‘objective’ the process whereby force is placed and is thus impure. Inasmuch as it concentrates and purifies itself qua affirmative scission, every force is therefore a subjective force, and inasmuch as it is assigned to its place, structured, placed, it is an objective force. More exactly, we will say: the being of force is to divide itself according to the objective and the subjective (Theory 41) [emphasis in original].

With this passage we return to the language of subjective/objective with which we started. But here “subjective” refers speciﬁcally to the process of “concentration”, a process which occurs on the basis of the objective and which exceeds the latter, but without thereby freeing itself from it and becoming completely pure. “Objective force” is akin to what I have described as a “bubbling up”; it describes the spontaneous tendencies towards disorder and rebellion which despite being obstacles to the system’s functioning are nevertheless part of this latter. Incidentally, we can reevaluate a quote from Stalin with this new terminology. Reconsider this passage:

Arising out of the new tasks set by the development of the material life of society, the new social ideas and theories force their way through, become the possession of the masses, mobilize and organize them against the moribund forces of society… (Dialectical and Historical Materialism 117).

We can see that what Stalin is really doing is describing only objective force while leaving out the subjective side. If things “force their way through”, this is a product of the system’s own development, and not principally because there were people there to apply a “transforming force” (subjective force) which could effect the change.

It is worth being very explicit about how Badiou’s approach, despite building upon Lacan, is nevertheless ultimately quite removed from him. The process of concentration and change that I have sketched in this section is not merely the psychoanalytic logic

!64 projected onto politics, and this because “[t]he truth is that the psychoanalytic cure has no real aim other than that of the readjustment of the subject to its own repetition” (Badiou, Theory 142). The process whereby someone “come[s] to be where foreign forces — the Other as language and the Other as desire — once dominated” is ultimately about making existence more bearable (Fink 68). Badiou’s political equivalent to the psychoanalytic process is the politics of trade unionism22 (Theory 141), which is engaged principally in an adjustment of the terms under which oppression takes place in order to make the latter more tolerable, and not the abolition of oppression. Badiou contrasts this with political re-education, which “seeks to provoke… [a] radical toppling of one’s subjective position, that is, the interruption of the repetitions induced by the subject’s previous (class) position” (Theory 142-143). And further: the “ambition” of the “process of revolutionarization” is to “make a symptom out of the old totality, and a total truth out of the symptom — out of the crisis” (Theory 144). Of course that the “old totality” remains as a symptom means that one is not yet done with it, and this is what Freire is referring to when he talks about the “spectres” and ”mythical remnants of the old society [which] survive in the new” and “which by hindering the ediﬁcation of a new society have always constituted a serious problem for every revolution” (Oppressed 159). One can never really relax one’s vigilance.

Finally, and by way of returning to the comments from Freire with which I began this chapter, we can see that this concept of “subjective force” does not “[reduce] subjectivity to a mere reﬂex of objectivity” (this is “objective force”) and equally does not avoid this reduction by making subjectivity independent of objectivity and thereby “lending to subjectivity… the role of maker of the world” (Freire, Daring 23). With the reﬂections in this section we can begin to see that for Badiou “subject” refers to that which in some

22 Badiou’s admonishment of “trade unionism” should not be taken as a condemnation of unions themselves, but of a kind of politics which is centred on wielding unions for ultimately-conciliatory ends. This form of politics is ultimately about the reshufﬂing of places within the structure, and not about disrupting it.

!65 sense bases itself in the structure while exceeding it, and then which by some process “works on” the structure to change it. In the next section I begin to use Badiou’s formalisms to recast what I have laid out in this section, and begin to discuss what it means to “work on” the structure.

The Algorithm

The very ﬁrst move in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is to suggest that Hegel’s dialectic is split, and therefore contains “two processes, two concepts of movement, and not just one proper view of becoming” (3). Quoting directly from the text, these are:

a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term of alienation; the idea of a simple term which unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept.

b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, and whose theme is that there is no unity that is not split. There is nothing the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the ﬁnal and inaugural. Not even ‘integral communism’ as the return, after the exteriorization into the State, to the concept of which ‘primitive communism’ would be the simple immediacy (4).

Here Badiou is intervening on the question of what he calls “the old fool’s bridge of the relation Marx/Hegel” (Theory 53). Intervening into the debate begun by Althusser in his Contradiction and Overdetermination on “turning Hegel the right side up” and “the rational kernel and idealist shell” (Althusser, For Marx), Badiou says “[i]t is worthless merely to oppose an (acceptable) dialectical kernel to an (abominable) idealistic shell” (Theory 3). Rather “[i]t is the dialectic itself that must be divided, according to the edge of its dialecticity, into its structural side and its historical side: logic of places and logic of forces” (Theory 53). In order to articulate this “logic of places and logic of forces” (on which we will have much to say below) Badiou turns to the beginning of Hegel’s

!66 Science of Logic, and in so doing he answers his own23 call uttered The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic24: “ [i]t remains necessary to render speech to a gagged Hegel, to an essential Hegel, one on whom Lenin feverishly annotated, one from whom Marx had drawn the intelligence of the Capital: the Hegel of the Logic” (15). The question of the “logic of forces” is obscure, and I deal with it at different points throughout this thesis (whenever I insist on the need for practice, on the need to avoid circularity, and so on). The “logic of places” and the structural side of the dialectic is somewhat easier to explain, and I turn to this now.

Badiou’s explanation of the “structural dialectic” is intended to replace “idealist dialectic” (Theory 53), and it is not at all equal to “structuralism”. Indeed he says that one of the structural dialectic’s main features is “the primacy of process over equilibrium” (Theory 54), and this clearly makes it not structuralist despite being structural. Despite the fact that he names Lacan and Hegel in his discussion of the structural dialectic it is not correct to say that their thought operates only with this dialectic’s logic. The point is that the dialectic as a whole is split into the above- mentioned “sides” (structural and historical) and these two men have a tendency to “make the structural aspect of the dialectic prevail over its historical aspect” and then

23 It is not correct to say that The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is Badiou’s text. First of all, it is a composite text which includes writing from the Chinese philosopher Zhang Shiying on Hegel’s philosophy, in a section called “The Rational Kernel of Hegel’s Philosophy”. The other part of the text is a commentary on Zhang Shiying’s writing produced by Alain Badiou alongside Jöel Bellassen and Louis Mossot.

24 This comes from a section in Rational Kernel called “Hegel in France” wherein Badiou points out that Hegel’s reception among French philosophers has centred on the Phenomenology of Spirit; either via the enthusiastic adoption of Jean-Paul Sartre and Alexandre Kojeve, or via the wholesale rejection by Louis Althusser. Bruno Bosteels has suggested that says that the point is to “trace a diagonal across the Sartre/Althusser debate” (Badiou and Politics 143), and for Badiou (and his fellow Maoists) this will involve proving “that Marx is neither the same [the “Sartre side”] nor the other [the “Althusser” side] of Hegel. Marx is the divider [diviseur] of Hegel” (Rational Kernel 15). In differentiating between the two concepts of movement in Hegel Badiou is therefore trying to follow through on this division.

!67 “within this very same primacy of the structural foundation, to make the theory of the splace…predominate over the emergence of the outplace” (Theory 54); see the discussion of the distinction between the psychoanalytic cure and the process of re- education/revolutionarization discussed in the previous section.

Badiou devotes an entire section of Theory of the Subject to the structural dialectic and I will only treat it here via his simplest example: that of Greek atomism and the clinamen. The classic problem here is about how one can produce a universe (ie. a combinatory Whole regulated by laws which govern the way things move and combine) out of the absolute difference between atoms and the void. By themselves these two cannot produce any sort of combination or motion (Theory 56). It also does not work to suggest that the void itself engenders motion in the atoms, because this principle would clearly engender the same motion in all atoms which would 1) prohibit any of them ever coming into contact and 2) be indistinguishable from non-motion. There is then a need for a single atom to “deviate” from its inertia in order to disturb the inertia more generally, and this is called the “clinamen” (Theory 57). This one atom moves in a totally inexplicable (unregulated, unﬁgurable, a-legal) way and thereby founds the laws of motion and combination by which all subsequent motion will come to be explained; in this way the clinamen is “out of place” (Theory 58-59). But as soon as this clinamen deviates and founds all of the laws of motion and combination it is no longer possible to tell which atom was deviant (Theory 70). Insofar as each atom comes to be able to link with every other, they all bear the mark of deviation: “Each atom must be regarded as being, on the one hand, itself… and on the other, its capacity to link itself onto the others… that is, its internal marking by the vanishing of the clinamen” (Theory 70). This “capacity to link itself onto the others” is clearly the aspect of the atom which allows it to be ﬁgured into the structure. In this way a founding a-legality comes to mark every element in the structure by inducing an internal split in all of them. This is a recapitulation of what I took from Bruce Fink on the Lacanian notion of “primal

!68 repression” as the “roll of the dice at the beginning of one’s universe that creates a split and sets the structure in motion” (68).

In order to make a similar point through Hegel Badiou takes his initial statements on Being and Nothing from The Science of Logic25 as his starting point, saying that Hegel “does not posit the ‘something’ all on its own, but the difference between something and something other” which “is what repeats the something in the position of itself as other… as the same thing posited twice” (Theory 5). He is referring to Hegel’s (strange) assertion that because one must begin with Being absent all determination, there is nothing that one can say about Being at the beginning. It is therefore Nothing, because one cannot say the ways in which it is different from Nothing, because one cannot say anything about it (it is without determination). And Nothing is also without determination and is therefore indistinguishable from being (Science of Logic 82-83). It is in this sense that Badiou says that Hegel does not “posit the ‘something’ all on its own” (Theory 5), but rather the same thing twice. The difference between them consists of “the statement of the difference, by the literal placement” (Theory 6), and therefore the distinction requires a space of placement against which the distinction can be registered. On this basis one can then speak of any thing “A” in terms of its “pure being” —simply A — or its “placed being” Ap, and because both coexist, any thing that one encounters is split between these two aspects of its being: A= (AAp). Badiou calls this a “constitutive scission” (Theory 6), and it is easy to see the parallel between this and the splitting of the atoms induced by the clinamen. Badiou says that they are really the same thing “reconstructed from a different angle” (Theory 70).

One should imagine the “p” in “Ap” as containing another subscript (p1,p2, p3…) which would point to its particular place in the structure. Of course “place” does not refer only to physical place (although this can be part of it), but to any sense in which

25 Although his reading goes against Hegel, who performs “all sorts of contortions” in order to conceal the importance of this constitutive scission (Badiou, Theory 5).

!69 one could refer to “placement” within a structure: in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, or any other form of specification which is relevant. The fact that this formalism does not depend upon the choice of a specific value of p is important because (among other reasons) it allows us to interpret Freire’s use of “the” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One should not interpret this as suggesting that it is possible to determine “oppressed” in some universal way, or that it is possible to devise some “pedagogy” suited to the task of correcting this universal sort of dejection. If we understand the oppressed in terms of A=(AAp ), then we see that Freire’s use of “the” refers to the status of being placed within an oppressive structure, and not to any particular statement about the nature of this placement (ie. nothing about the specific form of oppression, just the fact of it26).

Starting from A=(AAp) Badiou elaborates some “dialectical algorithms” which sketch (his understanding of) the process of change. The first step beyond A=(AAp ) is to ask what gives A=(AAp ) any specificity, what “gives it the singularity of its existence” (Theory 8). Badiou says that is cannot be done by the generic term A and so it must be done by Ap, “A according to the effect of the whole into which it is inscribed” (Theory 8). In the nomenclature established to this point we have Ap(AAp ) “as the first notation of the determination of the scission, the first algorithm of the unity of opposites” (Theory 9). Badiou clarifies this by reference to French politics, beginning with this general statement: ”the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of its specific bourgeois inversion” (Theory

26 The above-quoted passage from Engels on the law of the negation of the negation is relevant here (Anti-Dühring 168). The fact that different processes can fall under the same general law does not mean that an investigation of these processes is unnecessary. Indeed, the fact that Freire simply says “oppression” has signiﬁcant practical value, because it requires that one exit the study of “pure” theory and conduct concrete investigations into the actually-existing conditions of oppression in a particular place. In the next chapter I discuss his recommendations about how to perform such an investigation.

!70 9). The contemporary “speciﬁc bourgeois inversion” was “modern revisionism27”; i.e., “everything that organizes the rallying of the working class to imperialist society” (Theory 9). Here I should quickly note that this is roughly equivalent to that problem whereby the ideal of the oppressed “is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors” (Oppressed 45).

What gives the proletariat its own positive existence “is its internal purification from modern revisionism” (Theory 9). This also means, however, that is possible that the proletariat will not engage in this “internal purification”, and will instead find a sort of unity between itself and the bourgeoisie. But if this purification does occur, then Badiou says that the progress gained is “dialectical determination in the strong sense”; the algorithm Ap(AAp) leads to Ap (A). It distinguishes itself not by the external opposition of bourgeoisie/proletariat, but by the recognition of those aspects of itself which are repetitions of the society it is attempting to confront. In doing this “the proletariat unmasks the part of itself that is engaged in revisionism, and posits it as an integral part of the external antagonistic term” (Theory 9). This is the other part of the determination — Ap(Ap ) — which just leads back to P itself, the structure. Badiou says

27 The term “revisionism” has a long and complicated history and a detailed explanation is outside the scope of this work. In place of this explanation, consider the following quotes from Lenin’s 1908 pamphlet Marxism and Revisionism where Lenin discusses “the struggle of a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism itself” (Marxism and Revisionism 111). He says that this revisionism “did really try to revise the foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class struggle” (115). And furthermore: “To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the day and to the chopping and changing of petty politics, to forget the primary interests of the proletariat and the basic features of the whole capitalist system, of all capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for the real or assumed advantages of the moment—such is the policy of revisionism. And it patently follows from the very nature of this policy that it may assume an infinite variety of forms, and that every more or less ‘new’ question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though it change the basic line of development only to an insignificant degree and only for the briefest period, will always inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another” (116-117). That revisionism can take “an infinite variety of forms” (etc) is evidence for Badiou’s turning it into a more general principle.

!71 that Hegel calls these “relapses” (Theory 10). Incidentally we can note at this point that there is a political tendency which can arise from these relapses. This is a sort of “structuralist” tendency which sees only the relapses and therefore imagines that the oppressed are equal to their place in the structure: A=Ap. I will return to this on a number of occasions in what follows.

The previous paragraph’s description of “internal puriﬁcation” is essentially a description of “concentration”, and we should note that Freire presents a similar picture in a passage from the beginning of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

…almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub- oppressors’. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation in which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of ‘adhesion’ to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot ‘consider’ him sufﬁciently clearly to objectivize him —to discover him ‘outside’ themselves. This does not mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression (45).

Recognizing that one is externally oppressed (“downtrodden”) is not enough. The crucial step is to recognize the internal adversary. Without this there is the possibility that the oppressed will not recognize this adversary as an adversary, but will merely adopt the oppressor’s methods because they do not see any other way. The internal adversary must be unmasked, to use Badiou’s term (Theory 9). Finally, Freire says that the oppressed must “discover [the oppressor] ‘outside’ themselves” and “objectivize him”; this internal oppressor must understood to be not of the oppressed but of the oppressive society. “Objectivize” refers to the process whereby the oppressed understand that a part of them which seems subjective (their thoughts) is really objective, in that it comes

!72 from outside. The oppressed must “posit [that part of itself which tends towards ‘sub- oppression’] as an integral part of the external antagonistic term” (Theory 9). We can also note that for both Badiou and Freire this moment of “externalization” (puriﬁcation, concentration) is towards the beginning of the process.

Badiou does not stop with the recognition of this internal antagonism. Instead he asserts that it is possible that “the proletariat emerges as a positive newness” (Theory 11). The examples he gives are May ’68 in France (“timidly”), and January 1967 in China (“with great uproar”) at the outset of the Cultural Revolution (Theory 11). Badiou says that this newness —that part of the proletariat which resists reduction to the structure — suggests another sort of determination: “[t]he interiority proper to A thus comes to determine the determination… This is a process of torsion, by which force reapplies itself to that from which it conflictually emerges” (Theory 11) [emphasis in original]. The meaning of “torsion” will be explained further in Chapter Two, but for now should be understood as referring to the process through which the proletariat works back upon the structure to change it. As with the previous determination, there are two results. The first is “a simple reaffirmation of the pure identity of A… that is, a pure emergence of itself, against (but outside of) determination, and this in a strict parallelism to the relapse into P” (Theory 11). It is a “strict parallelism” because it forgets the scission internal to A: just as the relapse to P discussed above denies the new inherent in the old, this tendency denies the old inherent in the new. It works off/from the supposition of an “original and intact purity” of those who struggle without seeing that much of the struggle is the work of the “purification” discussed above. This is why Badiou characterizes it as a “revolt without a future” (Theory 11); any future it could have would have to be one based upon this purification. It may be useful to recognize that the structuralist tendency errs in the direction of what Marx called “our objective historians” and what Freire criticized as “seeing subjectivity as reflex of objectivity” (18th Brumaire 144; Daring 23), while the other tendency errs in the opposite

!73 direction by making subjectivity the absolute opposite of objectivity and thereby ”lending to subjectivity or to consciousness the role of maker of the world” (Freire, Daring 23).

The revolt with a future is the one which takes up “the effective process of the limitation of determination….” (Theory 12). This means that rather than denying any sort of newness —this is understanding things only with respect to the structure, only P — or seeing only newness — this is understanding things only with respect to the excess, only A — there must be instead a continued recognition of the internal splitting. Badiou’s

(somewhat arcane) formulation for this is: “Everything that is of a place comes back to that part of itself that is determined by it in order to displace the place, to determine the determination, and to cross the limit” (Theory 12). Badiou says that “limit” is what Hegel calls this “counter-process, which must be understood in the sense of the ‘limitation of bourgeois right’— nothing less, for example, than the reduction of the gaps between intellectual and manual labour, city and countryside, agriculture and industry28“ (Theory 12).

Freire uses this exact same word — “limit” — in order to communicate the same idea, although the word takes on the opposite meaning. First I will remind the reader that a major part of Badiou’s algorithm is the need for the proletariat to distinguish itself from the structure, which is both an external process (the recognition of the distinct class) and an internal process (the existence of bourgeois inﬂuence within the class). For Freire the

28 Badiou is almost certainly referencing the following famous passage from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth ﬂow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (347).

!74 situation is the same; consider the following passage:

Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world— because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world, which they objectify, as they separate themselves from their own activity, as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the ‘limit-situations’ (Oppressed 99).

Humans must “separate themselves” from both the world “which they objectify” — which they see as structural, external — and from their own activity — internal — they come to recognize their limitations. Here “limit” means precisely that which Badiou wants to “limit” via that “counter-process”: the determination of the oppressed by the structure. But Freire soon adds that this perception of limit-situations can lead to the performance of “‘limit-acts’: those acts directed at negating and overcoming, rather than passively accepting, the ‘given’ “ (Oppressed 99). It is clear that “limit-acts” correspond with what Badiou calls “limitation”.

I believe that this separation between what Badiou calls strict determination — where the proletariat determines itself against its own tendency to acclimate to the structure — and limitation — where the proletariat determines the determination of the structure — helps us to locate the place of education in this process. Freire puts it neatly: “Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it” (Oppressed 51). The separation of these two stages — emergence and turning upon — should be seen as parallel to “strict determination” and “limitation”. Freire relates this speciﬁcally to subjectivity in the following passage:

!75 It would indeed be idealistic to afﬁrm that, by merely reﬂecting on oppressive reality and discovering their status as objects, persons have thereby already become Subjects. But while this perception in and of itself does not mean that thinkers have become Subjects, it does mean … that they are ‘Subjects in expectancy’—an expectancy which leads them to seek to solidify their new status (Oppressed 131-132) [emphasis in original]

So education helps (or indeed consists of) “reﬂection” and “discovering”, and this is a necessary part of the overall process, but it would be “idealistic” to end the process there. With this we would only have the recognition of exclusion, or at best the passage from “weakness” to “transforming force” without the application of this force. And as the next section shows without this application one gets something other than the desired transformation.

The Problem of Circularity and the Primacy of Practice

After describing the algorithm, Badiou raises a question which is important for this work. Every part of the working-out of the algorithmic process seems to follow from what comes before, and it is not necessarily clear how we can speak of “novelty” under these circumstances:

This is one of the great problems of our dialectical fragment. How does it continue? Where are we going? After all, the limit is not, and cannot be, only the result-concept of scission. The proletariat, subjectively constituted, is not the accomplishment of the internal concept of the bourgeoise (Theory 18).

If the algorithm merely proceeds on the basis of the initial splitting, then the encounter with the limit-situation and the limitation of determination is accomplishing what is implied already in the structure itself. We are therefore once again in the presence of Hegel, and Badiou proposes that we distinguish two approaches to handling the process: “we will oppose (materialist) periodization to (idealist) circularity” (Theory 18) [emphasis in original]. We have seen the critique of “circularity” already, for instance from Freire when he criticizes the “circles of certainty” associated with the use of a

!76 “domesticated dialectic” (Oppressed 38).

“Periodization” is much more obscure than “circularity”. This is understandable, given the importance of the concept of the Real which we have already established as being so important for our task, which has been to suggest how ”subjectivity, in a dialectic- contradictory relationship with objectivity, takes on the role of subject” (Daring 23). Badiou suggests that it is here that Hegel “vacillates, namely, in the vicinity of this rock that we Marxists call the ‘primacy of practice’, and Lacan the real” (Theory 19). “At issue”, says Badiou, “is the irreducibility of action” (Theory 19). It is this irreducibility which allows one to avoid “the theological circularity which, presupposing the absolute in the seeds of the beginning, leads back to this very beginning” in favour of the “pure passage from one sequence to the other, in an irreconcilable, unsuturable lag” (Theory 19).

Things become clearer if we counterpose “the irreducibility of action” to the “reducibility of thought”. Badiou does not use this expression, but it is helpful to introduce it because of how it lets us better understand Hegel’s “vacillation”. Badiou explains that though for Hegel action is a sort of exteriorization of thought, this “local exteriorization is never anything but the effectuation of a global interiorization” (Theory 119). The destiny of any action is to be folded back into thought, “reduced” to the latter. Indeed for Hegel (says Badiou) the “interior [thought] produces its own exteriority [action]” and that for Hegel it is necessary to “program from very far the transgressive opening as return-to-itself” (Theory 119). Anything that happens is then a consequence of what comes before, and in this sense every new advance is also a return, and hence the circularity. But Badiou is quick to point out that “[n]obody ever encounter such circles” and “nothing in the real corresponds to this machinery” (Theory 21); this is why Badiou’s use of “vacillates” makes sense, because he sees evidence that Hegel’s idealist

!77 convictions wavered somewhat when confronted with this irreducibility29.

Badiou says that “[i]n the periodizing (or spiralled)30 view, we are allowed to say that the second sequence sets in when the conditions for the theoretical assessment of the first are accumulated. However, we must add that the very existence of this assessment is purely practical” (Theory 20). That this is a “practical assessment” is crucial, because it distinguishes Badiou’s position from Hegel’s. Earlier in this chapter I (via Ilyenkov) mentioned Hegel’s treatment of the French Revolution as the realization of the ideas of Rousseau. This is Hegel’s “theoretical assessment”, which is (importantly) not practical, for two related reasons: 1) The “irreducibility of action” is reduced to the working-out of the Idea, so the “assessment” does not take practice to be primary and 2) Hegel is not performing his “assessment” in order to guide action in his own time, and so it does not have a practical end. In the first case the excessive nature of action (and therefore change) is “rationalized” (or “domesticated”, to borrow a word from Freire [Theory 38]) and in the second case (and this follows from the first) the idea that the example of the French Revolution proves that contemporary action can lead to change is not suggested. Excess is denied in both cases, and Badiou says that “[i]ndeed, circularity is nothing other than the fact of this annulment —the outplace finds a space in the place” (Theory 20).

29 In The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic Badiou gives an example of this vacillation. The vacillation in question in this part of Rational Kernel has to do with Hegel saying that “all true thinking is a thinking of necessity” and “the rational is real”, and how he also says in the Shorter Logic that “the apparently contingent is necessary” (75-76). If “the apparently contingent is necessary” then the contingent would “at the same stroke… be real” (76). For Badiou this “is a typical contradiction in the Hegelian oeuvre, between the local and the whole, the explicit (what he says here about contingency) and the implicit (the general place of the struggle against deviations in the movement of the new), between theory and practice” (76).

30 I will return to the metaphor of “spiralling” in the next chapter.

!78 Badiou’s insistence on the need for a practical assessment in contrast with Hegel is illuminated somewhat by a discussion in his The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic (78). The section begins with a quotation of the following passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “Scientiﬁc cognition… demands surrender to the life of the object, or, what amounts to the same thing, confronting and expressing its inner necessity” (Phenomenology 32). Badiou makes two points about this passage. The ﬁrst is on “confronting and expressing its inner necessity”, where he says “the materialist dialectician plainly recognizes the premise of internal cause” (Rational Kernel 78). This is a premise perfectly acceptable to Marxists31. The second point deals with “surrender to the life of object”, and Badiou says: “No one doubts that Hegel’s phrase drives toward something of the sort: it is necessary for knowledge to pass through things themselves: correct ideas arise from practice… yes, but a practice drawn from which moment?” (Rational Kernel 78).

The upshot is that Hegel does engage in a practice as a necessary moment of the process of knowledge, but it is an opposite practice to that of Marxism; for Hegel “[k]nowledge presupposes the practical moment of surrender” (Rational Kernel 79). The contrast with Marxism is clear; Badiou cites the Maoist dictum, “It is right to rebel” (to which we will return in the next chapter), although one could also cite Marx’s famous thesis, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Concerning Feuerbach 423). To make use of our standard terms, this Hegelian “surrender” means the renunciation of subjective subjectivity. This does not mean that there is no action, just that the action that happens is drawn from the structure itself, it is only objective action. Once again: the Hegelian point is not that Robespierre’s actions were insigniﬁcant during the French Revolution because there was an objective process

31 To prove this Badiou cites the following passage from Mao’s On Contradiction: “The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing” (88).

!79 operating in the background, but rather that Robespierre’s actions were “objective actions”, actualizations of Spirit, objective subjectivity. When Badiou talks about the “irreducibility of action” we must read it in our usual way, ie. as containing a division. Action is not irreducible as a whole; only subjective action is irreducible, and it is this kind of action — action which is excessive and uncertain — which is necessary for breaking out of ”theological circularity” and into “periodization” (Theory 19-20).

This debate over circularity, knowledge, and practice appears almost entirely within the preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, speciﬁcally in the section on those “sectarians” who think in terms of a “domesticated dialectic” (38-39). Freire explains that

[t]he rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that (he or she hopes) the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter consider the future pre- established — a kind of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny. For the rightist sectarian, ‘today’, linked to the past, is something given and immutable; for the leftist sectarian, ‘tomorrow’ is decreed beforehand, is inexorably preordained (Oppressed 38).

Hopefully it is clear that both of these indulge in (at least an analogue of) what Badiou calls “theological circularity” which “[presupposes] the absolute in the seeds of the beginning” (Theory 19). The difference lies mostly in emphasis (Freire says that they “are both reactionary” [Oppressed 38]), and it is arguable that the rightist sectarian has more clarity about the implications of their thought. In any case, Freire says that both kinds of sectarians “[close] themselves into ‘circles of certainty’” (Oppressed 38), and it is important to notice that he does not say that they “are closed” into such circles, but that they “[close] themselves”. In the latter case they are active, but it is an activity which mirrors Hegel’s “surrender to the life of the object” where we understand “surrender” in the pejorative sense. As Freire says, that these sectarians think according to a “domesticated dialectic” and from within a “circle of certainty”

!80 does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spectators (the former expecting that the present will continue, the latter waiting for the already ‘known’ future to come to pass). On the contrary… these individuals ‘make’ their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction (Oppressed 38).

This completes the recapitulation of Badiou’s point about Hegel: the sectarians “close themselves into circles of certainty,” an action equivalent to “surrender[ing] to the life of the object” which provides a guarantee of the correctness of one’s actions because one is merely expressing or acting out the necessity which springs from the objective conditions: objective subjectivity. Just as in Hegel, this produces a truth, but it is not the “truth of men and women who struggle… running the risks involved in this very construction”, it is not the truth of rebellion, not the Marxist truth, which for Badiou results from the “irreducibility of action”, that part of action which is irreducible (to the structure), subjective subjectivity. This irreducibility is precisely why the struggle involves “running risks”.

This discussion allows us to detect a subtle but crucial point contained within the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and to explain a formulation which otherwise risks ambiguity or even incorrectness. Here is the passage: “This pedagogy [of the oppressed] makes oppression and its causes the objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation” (Oppressed 48). We must immediately ward off a reading which understands “will come their necessary engagement in the struggle” as referring to a struggle which is a mechanistic product of reflection, a sort of “if reflection, then struggle”. The issue here is not only that it is a mechanical if/then statement. If we consider that Freire is not talking about “common sensical” reflection, but critical (radical, Marxist…) reflection, then we can see that this first reading would suggest that struggle is a consequence of ideas, and not a consequence of the objective contradictions in society which pit classes against one another; it would be an idealist perspective. We can then proceed to a more

!81 plausible reading, which is that struggle itself is necessary for liberation. As Freire says on the next page: “…perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action” (Oppressed 49). This makes sense, but is in a way “put in its place” by the argument which I used to dispel the first reading: the theoretical perspective which says “struggle is necessary for liberation” comes after (chronologically) the existence of struggle (which has always taken place in different forms and in different societies). The statement of this necessity cannot therefore be the cause of struggle. What this theoretical perspective can do, however, is help us to identify a third reading of this statement, which comes from understanding that Freire is not talking about just any struggle, but the necessary struggle, the one which is liberating. He is clear that ”almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to be come oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors’“ (Oppressed 45). This is because ”[t]he very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation in which they were shaped” (Oppressed 45); this is objective subjectivity at work. The pedagogy of the oppressed makes“oppression and its causes the objects of reflection” and therefore assists the oppressed to “objectivize” the oppressor and to “locate him outside” themselves (Oppressed 45). In doing so they can begin to distinguish objective subjectivity from subjective subjectivity, and thereby engage in that necessary struggle — that aspect of action which is “irreducible” — which breaks out of “theological circularity”.

A perceptive reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed reveals that Freire does not give any particular details about this “necessary struggle”. This is only a weakness of the text if one does not understand the previous discussion. Badiou notes this when he interrupts himself at one point to say that “we are faced with a severe expository problem” when discussing this problem of change, because “[e]very schema distributes a series of places and leads us back to structures” (Theory 31). We can also see that this would be

!82 yet another example of that annulment characteristic of circularity, whereby ”the outplace finds a space in the place” (Theory 20). If Freire does not say anything specific about the particular form that “necessary struggle” will take, then I think that this should be taken as an example of the “severe expository problem” as well as an example of Freire’s respect for the fact that the “necessary struggle” is (by definition) in excess of the structure, and therefore one cannot (or should not) speak about its specifics. As Badiou says, “the word ‘struggle’ remits [this process of change] to its practicality” and this process “depends upon an indirect investigation and on a concept without any representable assignation” (Theory 31). The specific content of “necessary struggle” can only be established in a concrete situation, and on the basis of a concrete investigation of that situation.

Pedagogy Against Stalinism

At several points in this chapter I have referred to Stalin as an example of a kind of “determinist” or “objectivist” Marxist whose principal interest is in the development of objective conditions. These references focused upon some passages from Stalin’s writings which suggest a mechanical view of how the “educational” process — the process whereby the oppressed gain more “progressive” ideas — takes place. The upshot was that he conceived of this process as resulting from the development of economic production, as a consequence of changes in the “material life of society” (Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism 117). In this section I will expand upon this point and suggest that the framework that I have developed in this chapter is capable of reducing the risk of the kinds of abuses for which Stalin is infamous. It is important to stress that it is impossible to produce an ideological vaccination which can guarantee against the repetition of these abuses, or at least it is impossible to do so while maintaining a commitment to the non-deterministic Marxism that I have put forward in this chapter (one could pursue another ideology with its own problems). Cultivating vigilance requires that Stalinism be taken as an ever-present danger. In this

!83 work my interest is in discussing Stalinism from a theoretical perspective, and in limiting this discussion to a small section of work which is focused on other topics. In doing so I necessarily pass over a historical analysis of the phenomenon as well as a many-sided theoretical analysis. Here I limit my interest to 1) trying to specify the problem of Stalinism as it relates to the matters of subjective/objective that I have discussed in this chapter and 2) trying to show that the formulations that I have put forward are a deterrent to this speciﬁc instance of the problem of Stalinism.

Clearly my attempt to specify “Stalinism” should do so in such a way as to avoid categorizing Freire or Badiou as “Stalinists”. At the outset it is clear that “willingness to use political violence to achieve, deepen, and defend societal transformation” cannot specifically define Stalinism, and not only because the use of violence for political aims is common to every form of modern politics, whether communist, fascist, or liberal. The other reason is that this would immediately turn Freire into a Stalinist; consider his statement that “[c]onsciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love” (Oppressed 56). “Stalinism” also cannot be identified with a belief in the necessity of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, because as Lenin famously said “[o]nly he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (State and Revolution 334). If one wants to maintain a distinction between the politics of Lenin and Stalin (as I do) then clearly the distinction cannot rest on this point about “dictatorship”. In any case Freire agrees with the necessity of repressive measures in a post-revolutionary situation and he does not believe that this contradicts his own aims: ”Once a popular revolution has come to power, the fact that the new power has the ethical duty to repress any attempt to restore the old oppressive power by no means signifies that the revolution is contradicting its dialogical character” (Oppressed 139).

It is worth pausing here to make an important aside: we should always remember that

!84 authoritarian politics come in many varieties and strong commitments on the part of leftists to parliamentary or otherwise “peaceful” means provide absolutely no guarantee against authoritarianism, as the examples of Indonesia 1965 and Chile 1973 make very clear (and there are many more examples). The British Marxist Ralph Miliband (who was certainly no Leninist) speaks to this problem at the end of his classic analysis in The Coup in Chile:

Saint Just’s famous remark, which has often been quoted since the coup, that “he who makes a revolution by half digs his own grave” is closer to the mark – but it can easily be misused. There are people on the Left for whom it simply means the ruthless use of terror, and who tell one yet again, as if they had just invented the idea, that “you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs”. But as the French writer Claude Roy observed some years ago, “you can break an awful lot of eggs without making a decent omelette”. Terror may become part of a revolutionary struggle. But the essential question is the degree to which those who are responsible for the direction of that struggle are able and willing to engender and encourage the effective, meaning the organized, mobilization of popular forces. If there is any deﬁnite “lesson” to be learnt from the Chilean tragedy, this seems to be it; and parties and movements which do not learn it, and apply what they have learnt, may well be preparing new Chiles for themselves (473) [emphasis added].

I quote this passage here simply to emphasize that the “essential question” when it comes to opposing authoritarianism of any form — including Stalinism — is that of popular mobilization and participation. A corollary is that it is not essentially about condemning such authoritarianism; to repeat a passage from Badiou already quoted in the introduction: “The denunciation of the repressive and bloody character of a mode of politics does not amount to a real criticism of this politics, nor does it ever enable one to be done with it” (Theory 294) [emphasis in original]. In the rest of the section I try to show how Stalinism works against such a process of popular participation, and how the formulations described in this chapter promote this process.

In this chapter I have suggested that Stalin can be faulted with holding a too-mechanical or “objectivist” view of the development of both society and the development of

!85 political consciousness. Slavoj Žižek makes several relevant points which connect to the arguments in this chapter in the following passage from his For They Know Not What They Do:

The Other of Stalinism, the ‘inevitable necessity of laws of historical development’ for which the Stalinist executor practices his act, could then be conceived as a new version of the ‘Supreme Being of Evilness’… It is this radical objectivization-instrumentalization of his own subject position which confers upon the Stalinist, beyond the deceptive appearance of a cynical detachment, his unshakeable conviction of only being the instrument of historical necessity. By making himself the transparent instrument of the Other’s (History’s) Will, the Stalinist avoids his constitutive division… (234-235).

The first important point is the idea that ‘inevitable necessity of laws of historical development’ is the “Other” of Stalinism. “Other” is a Lacanian reference, and Bruce Fink explains that “[t]he Other corresponds here to what goes by the name of structure in the movement known as structuralism” (11). Žižek is essentially stating the points I have made about Stalin’s “objectivism” or “idealism” in Lacanian terms. His point about the “radical objectivation-instrumentalization” of the Stalinist’s subject position is comparable to the arguments I have made about “surrendering to the life of the object” and “circles of certainty”. As Freire says, to say that someone has confined themselves to a circle of certainty “does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spectators” (Oppressed 38), and here Žižek suggests that it is precisely this “confinement” that paves the way for the most severe and brutal acts. Finally, by occupying the place of the executor of the laws of history (placing themself in the position of the object rather than the subject) the Stalinist “avoids the division constitutive of the subject and transposes [their] division upon [their] other” (For They Know Not 234), which in this case could be the “hysterical split petty-bourgeois ‘traitor’ who did not want to give up his subjectivity completely” (234). To rigorously maintain that the subject is split, then, is to ward off this particular problem.

!86 A related issue is that of the nature of socialist society, in particular whether it is correct to say that socialism continues to be plagued by contradictions between classes. In his introduction to Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism Žižek makes the point that the new Soviet constitution in 1936 marked a crucial turning point in the way that the USSR made use of political violence. He explains that “[i]t is with regard to political terror that one can locate the gap which separates Lenin’s era from Stalinism: in Lenin’s times, terror was openly admitted… while in Stalin’s times, the symbolic status of terror totally changed — terror turned into the publicly non-acknowledged obscene shadowy supplement of public ofﬁcial discourse” (xiv). He notes that the 1936 constitution proclaimed that “the Soviet Union was no longer a class society” and that, rather than marking the end of political terror (which was justiﬁed earlier on the basis of the necessity of crushing the opposition of the recently-overthrown capitalist class) this constitution had

the possibility of terror inscribed into its very core: since the class war was now proclaimed as over and the Soviet Union was conceived of as the classless country of the People, those who still opposed (or who were presumed to oppose) the regime were no longer mere class enemies in a conﬂict that tears apart the social body, but enemies of the People, insects, worthless scum to be excluded from humanity itself (xxv).

It is easy to see that this shift is another example of the denial of the logic of splitting that I have discussed in this chapter. The declaration of the end of class divisions implies that the contradiction interior to the oppressed no longer exists. The entire dialectical process which I have described depended upon this splitting in order to work, and therefore it is no longer possible to conceive of revolutionary change (this lines up with “objectivist” thesis of mechanical evolution via development of the economy that I discussed above). After this, there is only the People, from whom any adversary is totally (rather than only partially) excluded. Because (essentially by deﬁnition) these non-People cannot change, the only “solution” is physically elimination, whether by

!87 exile, confinement, or execution. One can easily note an analogy between this logic and that of the fascist concentration camp, the principle difference being that the logic of the concentration camp posits an integral community from the outset (the pure racial community) and sets this community against a radically-external enemy (Jews) who corrupt the society by infiltration and subversion. I briefly return to the relationship between the logics I develop here and that of the Nazis in the third chapter of this work.

With this we can see the enormous import of the following claim from Freire: “… because the revolution undeniably has an educational nature, in the sense that unless it liberates it is not revolution, the taking of power is only one moment—no matter how decisive —in the revolutionary process” (Oppressed 136) [emphasis added]. He explicitly denies that the process ends with the seizure of power, and clearly believes that it continues apace after this seizure is performed. This is the point of contact with the above reference to Ralph Miliband: power itself is not liberating and its acquisition is not the end of the process of transformation. To see why, recall that in this chapter I have identiﬁed the educational process as conceived of by Freire as a process of concentration, which depends on the constitutive splitting which Badiou borrows from Lacan. If this splitting is declared to be over and done with — as Žižek suggests happened after the 1936 constitution in the USSR — then there is no role for education of this kind ; ie. education oriented towards expanding the political (and more broadly the creative) capacities of those who are oppressed. There would also be no basis for this kind of education, because it depends upon that constitutive splitting. There would only be technical education of various kinds, administered by a bureaucracy which has no interest in seeing its position of power upended.

These reﬂections provide only a cursory treatment of the problem of Stalinism, a problem which requires extremely serious and vigilant consideration. Despite this I hope that my point is clear: the best way to avoid the particular danger of Stalinism is to rigorously insist upon the basic point that there is no perfect objective law from which

!88 the necessity of any action can be drawn, and that everyone who is a part of the structure is necessarily divided by it and so it is never correct to imagine that one is “pure”. Paradoxical though it may seem (to some), it is precisely through a more vigorous Marxism that we ward off the dangers of Stalinism.

Conclusion: What Kind of Subject?

The reﬂections upon which I have spent so much time in this chapter have in various ways all contributed to both clarifying and specifying the problem of what “subject” could even mean in the Marxist tradition. This has required an overview of this tradition and its engagement with the problems of political change, and this engagement has often circled the problem of the relationship between objective, structural conditions — the distribution of control of productive technology, patterns in the ownership of capital, institutions of ideological reproduction— and subjective activity. It is fairly easy to denounce a purely “mechanistic” approach which says that change happens on its own by the development of History, but there is a much subtler “mechanicism” which lurks beyond this denunciation. This other “mechanicism” is one in which the anti-systemic ideas are themselves precisely the ideas that the system itself generates. There is a need to go beyond these immediate conceptions via a process which is able to distinguish amongst the ambiguous manifold conceptions which are always present in a society in order to discover the truly radical ones. To act upon these conceptions is what produces a subject. As Badiou puts it: one “must conceive of the subject… as the result of a puriﬁcation of force in the tension to resolve the algorithm” (Theory 255). By way of conclusion to this chapter I will recapitulate the main points of the above analysis, with an initial focus on clarifying what is not meant by “subject”, in order to make more clear what it is.

First, it is easy to see that this chapter’s reﬂections leave no room for an understanding of subjectivity which makes the latter foundational. As Badiou puts it: “I exclude all

!89 attempts to put the subject back into the saddle as simple centre, as point of origin, as constitutive of experience” (Theory 180). By “subject” I also do not mean the Althusserian notion of the ideological subject of interpellation (Reproduction 190-191), although the is could be easily shown to be a form of “objective subjectivity”. Nor do I intend “subject” to mean that there is some empirical group which need only become the bearer of a consciousness appropriate to its historical task in order to execute the latter, becoming the “Subject of History” via this execution. Indeed I have argued that any conception of subjectivity which sees its principal goal as being the achievement or expression of some historical purpose is a conception which ultimately replaces subjectivity with its opposite.

To treat this problem I have followed Badiou’s dependence on Lacan; whatever the subject is, it is bound up with the problem of the structure’s incompleteness. I have also suggested that this debt to Lacan does not mean that the solution ultimately relies on wedding Marxism (taken as theory of classes and the state) to psychology or psychoanalysis (as theory of [un]consciousness). To repeat a passage quoted earlier: “It has never led to anything, nor will it ever lead to anything, to imagine that there is some lack to ﬁll in Marxism, some regional discipline to which its powers ought to be extended…” (Theory 179). For Badiou, Lacan’s work on the subject presents a host of lessons but the importance of constitutive splitting is one of the most important:

Concentrating the dialecticity of the real, the subject-process essentially touches upon scission. The subject does not overcome itself in any reconciliation of itself either with the real or with itself. Lacan is our current teacher with regard to this major precaution (Theory 180-181).

Even though I have written about concentration as a sort of puriﬁcation, this “major precaution” is about warning us that “purity” is not the goal.

There are two points of tension between Freire and Badiou that I want to discuss here. The ﬁrst concerns whether the Subject is ultimately an individual or a sort of collective.

!90 Freire suggests the former when he discusses people “[entering] the historical process as responsible Subjects” (Oppressed 36); here he is referring to a group of Subjects working together. In Theory of the Subject Badiou says “[c]ommunists… are, in the movement of history, the political subject” (183) [emphasis added]; here the subject is composed of individuals in some sense, but none of those individuals can be said to be “subjects” in the sense that Badiou intends. I do not think that this is an enormous point of difference however, because Freire also does not think that people can become Subjects by themselves: “ The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity…” (Oppressed 85).

The second (and much more profound) difference is on the question of humanism. When Freire opens the ﬁrst chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem” (Oppressed 43), I worry that this actually has the potential to undermine his project. Why? Because of this “central problem”, which threatens to become the motor of change: “Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so” (Oppressed 44). Struggle is not caused by (say) impoverished conditions, but by “lack of humanity”. Here we risk an understanding where struggle appears to be done by humans, but really it is Humanity (as Idea) which has exteriorized itself into struggle, and the oppressed are merely instruments by which the Idea takes action before “[coming] back to itself as an achieved concept” (Theory 4), to put it in “circular” terms. One can take this further by noting that dehumanization is a necessary stage of humanization, because the latter makes no sense without the former. Real humans are dehumanized so that (the Idea of) Humanity can proceed with its project of humanization, and so dehumanization is a necessary (and therefore justiﬁed) aspect of the “ontological vocation”. The resonances with Ilyenkov’s critique of idealism should be clear.

!91 The idea that people’s humanity has been “distorted” does not match up with Badiou’s approach. Indeed, in one of his only explicit references to education in Theory of the Subject (I discuss some of the others in the next chapter), he says that political education is necessarily antihumanist:

Political re-education, or revolutionarization, entirely deserves the humanist charge made against it of ‘wanting to change people’, ‘brain-washing, ‘destroying individuality’, or, as Mao says, of wanting to ‘change man in his innermost being’. This is the avowed goal of the cultural revolution; it presupposes the conviction that the old man can or may die (143).

This passage is not merely making the standard antihumanist claim that what is called “Man” or “Humanity” is a socio-historical construct which has a (relatively recent) beginning and will have an end. Badiou goes further in saying that one must actually take responsibility for the destruction of what exists and for the creation of what will come after. I believe that this is a much more serious and ethical position than what is implied by the notion that people’s humanity is “distorted” (Oppressed 44), which can imply that the only necessary task is the removal of the plaque of oppression in order to reveal the pearly-white Humanity which that oppression has “distorted”. This means that the goal — at least in abstract, philosophical terms — is ultimately only destructive: destroy what confines Humanity, and Humanity will express itself on its own. Slavoj Žiźek discusses this problem in his introduction to a collection of writings by the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre. Reflecting on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, he says that the latter’s argument in defence of Stalinist repression is essentially that “the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that emerges from it proves to be truly human” (Robespiere xiii). If we see Humanity as something which will just “express” itself, then we are authorized in destroying whatever is in the way. It is easy to see how this can justify quite a lot of destruction, and this reading of the problem makes Freire’s suggestion that rebellion is an “gesture of love” towards the oppressor seem quite sinister (Oppressed 56). Taken together with his insistence that

!92 “[o]nce a popular revolution has come to power… the new power has the ethical duty to repress any attempt to restore the old oppressive power” (Oppressed 139), we can wonder whether someone committed to this “Humanity” would perceive any limit to the actions (the destruction) necessary to “unveil” the oppressor’s humanity.

This discussion has certainly caricatured Freire’s position, but I hope that it reveals that “humanism” is not necessarily what it appears to be. In any case it is also inessential. The discussions about the Real and divided subjectivity in this chapter have been an attempt to explain the reason for the continued re-emergence of resistance by the oppressed in a way which does not reference their “vocation” of humanization. I also think that Freire speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this issue to a degree, as can be seen at the beginning of the ﬁrst chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he says that “[w]hile the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern” (Oppressed 43). He also says that dehumanization is both an “ontological possibility” and a “historical reality” (Oppressed 43). On the one hand, then, these are “ontological” and “axiological” problems, and on the other they are present (“now takes on…”) concerns about “historical reality”. If we can discuss these things as part of a contemporary, concrete situation, why do we need an appeal to an external principle which can guarantee that, ultimately, we are acting in accordance with some “ontological vocation”? On this point I side ﬁrmly with Badiou, who says (in what I believe is a supremely ethical statement): “We [communists] do not promise anything, hence there is no reason to follow us” (Theory 328). Given the lengths to which I have gone in describing a non-deterministic Marxism, on what basis could we promise anything? Why would this even be desirable? In any case, I hope that my lack of reference to “humanity” in this argument — which I believe to be nevertheless authentically Freirean — shows that we do not need the concept of “Man” because we can (and must!) rely only on ourselves.

!93 Chapter 2: Spiralling Education Introduction

In the previous chapter I placed the ideas of Badiou and Freire in the context of the Marxist tradition which preceded them, trying to point out some of the basic problems that have arisen within this tradition’s struggles around the articulation of subjectivity and objectivity. Ultimately I have tried to show that Badiou’s work building upon Lacan’s idea of the divided subject has a resonance with Paulo Freire’s reﬂections on subjectivity. I have suggested that for both Freire and Badiou a crucial part of the process which produces subjectivity is “concentration”, which involves a conscious “emergence” from the structured position. But I have said essentially nothing in particular about the education process, and have not cited anything from Badiou which suggests that he identiﬁes concentration with education.

In this chapter I begin by discussing a few of Badiou’s statements on education in Theory of the Subject in order to show that Freire’s approach does not contradict the (decidedly negative) references to “pedagogy” in that text. This will take us into a digression on paralleling the previous chapter’s discussion of “circularity”; in this chapter I discuss “linearity” with a focus on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, one of Badiou’s contemporaries in French philosophy. The resulting discussion of “spiralness” brings us naturally into the Maoist concept of the “mass line”, which Freire says ”contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education” (Oppressed 93). I use Freire’s own example of the problem of demands for higher wages to demonstrate how the mass line can work in practice, and also to discuss the importance of “problematization”. It will become clear that this concept depends upon a radical shift in what is meant by “knowledge”, because it is founded upon an inherent “rightness” in the ideas of oppressed people. It will then be necessary to explain what is meant by “right”, which I do at some length. Next I will zoom into

!94 the process of “thematic investigation” which Freire discusses in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, showing that it ﬁts with the ideas elaborated earlier, particularly the importance of “concentration”. Finally, I return to the problem of “circularity” described in the previous chapter in order to demonstrate how the education process described earlier will not produce change unless accompanied by action, in keeping with Freire’s own afﬁrmations.

Badiou's Pedagogy and The Mass Line

Education is only mentioned a few times in Theory of the Subject. We will deal with part of its most lengthy treatment now and part of it in the next chapter. The main thrust of Badiou’s longest discussion of education in this text is focused upon a delimitation of its political role via the comparison of “taught mathematics” and “invented mathematics”; only the latter is truly representative of “what mathematics is as a subjective and historical process” (39):

What is taught is not mathematics but only its locus. Pedagogy delimits a splace, it is up to you to be out of place with respect to it, that is, to produce were it only one decisive theorem, one that provokes a thorough reshufﬂing —which is the only title that can be claimed for the mathematician, who is not to be confused, as Lacan would say, with the university professor of mathematics. In short, what is not transmitted is precisely the process of qualitative concentration of this bizarre force by which all placed mathematics becomes shot through with holes (Theory 39) [emphasis added].

Badiou presents pedagogy as that which reveals the structure, and also insists that revelation should not be confused with change. Pedagogy can give one the tools to ﬁnd the problems in mathematics which indicate the possibility and need for radical change, but it is not invested in explicitly communicating either the possibility or the need. Indeed the pedagogy Badiou describes is engaged in the re-presentation of what exists in order to preserve this existence. It will marginalize or deny the symptoms (if it even notices them). This kind of re-presentation of what exists cannot possibly contain an

!95 explication of the process whereby what exists “becomes shot through with holes” (Theory 39), and this is why “it is up to you” to be in excess.

To understand why this pedagogy is of only a particular and limited use it will help to investigate Badiou’s reference to Lacan and the “university professors of mathematics”. This reference makes it clear where his understanding of “pedagogy” originates: in Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, and particularly the discourse of the university. Here “university discourse” does not refer to academic habits of speech nor to conversations about the academy, but to a certain kind of social bond. As Mark Bracher explains:

In his schemata of the four discourses, Lacan demonstrates how differently structured discourses mobilize, order, repress, and produce four key psychological factors - knowledge, values and identiﬁcations, self-division/ alienation, and jouissance/enjoyment - in ways that produce the four fundamental social affects of educating/indoctrinating, governing/ brainwashing, desiring/protesting, and analysing/ transforming/ revolutionizing. The differing effects produced by these discourses result from the differing roles or positions occupied by the four psychological functions (33).

The “discourse of the university” is not at all limited to institutions of higher education, but instead refers to a certain arrangement of those “four key psychological factors” and the consequences of this arrangement. However the discourse of the university is typical of these institutions, as well as of parent-child relationships and any form of bureaucracy:

Bureaucracy is perhaps the purest form of the discourse of the University; it is nothing but knowledge- i.e., pure impersonal system: The System, and nothing else. No provision is made for individual subjects and their desires and idiosyncrasies. Individuals are to act, think, and desire only in ways that function to enact, reproduce, or extend The System (Bracher 39).

It should come as no surprise then that when confronted during a seminar by a young communist angry at the purported political uselessness of his teachings, Lacan said:

!96 The conﬁguration of workers-peasants has nevertheless led to a form of society in which it is precisely the university that occupies the driving seat. For what reigns in what is commonly called the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics is the university (The Other Side 206).

Badiou’s reference to “the university professor of mathematics” is then a veiled reference to the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. It is clear that the concept of the university discourse resembles what Freire calls “banking education”, in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, ﬁling, and storing” the information communicated to them (Oppressed 72). He even recalls a time when he spoke to some educators from former East Germany, one of whom (to his horror) said

I recently read the German edition of your book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I was very glad you criticized students’ absence from discussions of programmatic content. In bourgeois societies…you have to talk about this, and ﬁre the students up about it. Not here. We know what the students should know (Hope 106).

In response to this Freire says: “It was hard to sleep, thinking of the supercertitude with which those “modern” educators wove their discourse, their declaration of unshakable faith: ‘Not here. We know what the students should know’” (Hope 106). This “supercertitude” about the proper knowledge is typical of the university discourse, and the discomfort that Freire feels towards it shows that him and Badiou share a concern about this kind of pedagogical approach.

But having established this point of agreement I think that it is important to note what might be something of a dodge on Badiou’s part. While recognizing the implicit political content of Badiou’s reference to the discourse of the university (as a veiled reference to the USSR), I believe that his use of the examples of “taught” and “invented” mathematics may be too ambiguous. These references to math are used to illuminate the following point:

!97 Struggle of the old and new. The puriﬁcation of force amounts to a concentration of its newness. Those ‘right ideas’ of the masses, which the Marxist party must ‘concentrate’, are necessarily new ideas. It is quite a step into the dialectic to understand, in a non-trivial sense, that every rightness and every justice are, in principle, novelties; and that everything that repeats itself is invariably unjust and inexact (Theory 39).

The connection here is between the “right ideas” of the masses and that “one decisive theorem… that provokes a thorough reshufﬂing” of the established knowledge of mathematics (Theory 39); in both cases these are in excess of the system and are “new” in the sense that they do not exist as part of the structure’s normal functioning but are generated as “symptoms” of its inherent incompleteness. There is a serious difference between these, however. Badiou makes clear that the development of mathematics is a process which is not purely individual: he names Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, and

Mersenne as some great 17th century mathematicians who wrote to one another about their new ideas (Theory 40). But the private correspondence of mathematicians is different in that it concerns the circulation of concepts among “intellectuals”, and not (to once again quote the end of his preface) “an unheard type of vicinity” between intellectuals and the masses (Theory xlii). The structural difference between intellectuals and workers is not illuminated by the analogy with mathematics. Perhaps this was a conscious choice, in which my earlier use of “dodge” would not be fair. But the problem of this “unheard of type of vicinity” remains.

Badiou’s references to the “struggle of the old and new” are clear references to the Maoist concept of the “mass line”, which is precisely about the relationship between intellectuals (and the political party) and the masses. “Line” in this context means “party line”, and it is a “mass line” because it is formulated via the input of the masses (the people, the oppressed…) in a given area as opposed to something that is merely imposed upon those people by that area’s political authorities. The following passage from Freire is a fair representation of the concept:

!98 For the dialogical, problem-posing teacher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition— bits of information to be deposited in the students—but rather the organized, systematized, and developed "representation" to individuals of the things about which they want to know more (Oppressed 93).

Freire cites Mao in a footnote to this passage: "You know I’ve proclaimed for a long time: we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly” (qtd. in Oppressed, 93), and Freire comments that “[t]his afﬁrmation contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education, which cannot be elaborated according to what the educator thinks best for the students” [emphasis in original] (Oppressed 93). Therefore when Badiou invokes the mass line when he talks about “[t]hose ‘right ideas’ of the masses, which the Marxist party must ‘concentrate’” but then switches to a conversation about mathematics (Theory 39), he misses (or risks misleading his readers about) this “entire dialogical theory” which (I believe) is a theory of the necessary process of concentration.

It is useful to read Mao’s own words on the concept of the mass line. The ﬁrst of these is a denial of any notion that the political organizers are absolutely superior to those that they organize. If anything, he suggests the opposite in his Preface To Rural Surveys: “It has to be understood that the masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge” (196). This is a strange but crucial point, and it forces us to consider in what sense “we ourselves are often childish and ignorant” should be taken, and how “we” can possibly be teachers given this childishness and ignorance. Clearly Mao’s “we” will have been on average more well-read than the people they are trying to organize and educate; they will have known more about history, culture, science, politics, economics, and so on. If they are nevertheless “ignorant”, we should understand this ignorance in the echo of “everything that repeats itself is invariably unjust and inexact” (Theory 39). The point is that this knowledge of the society is

!99 knowledge of the structure, whereas novelty can be found with the oppressed, and this is why they are “the real heroes”. To put it in Badiou’s terms: the political organizers that Mao describes will in general be more knowledge about P, or Ap: the conditions of oppression, the ideologies and apparatuses which accompany this oppression and so on. But to know A, they must be in close and reciprocal contact with the oppressed.

This idea of the mass line as “close and reciprocal contact” is schematized in the following passage from Mao’s Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership:

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge” (290).

Readers familiar with Pedagogy of the Oppressed will likely see clearly why Freire was enamoured with this approach. There is a clear focus on the ideas of the oppressed: this slogan which orients “all correct leadership” does not mention the leaders at all. In addition Mao (unsurprisingly) emphasizes the need for action on the part of the masses from which the ideas originate. This is in clear agreement with Freire’s point about the oppressed and their ”necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation” (Oppressed 48). Freire also says that “in the struggle this pedagogy [of the oppressed] will be made and remade” (Oppressed 48), and this aligns with Mao’s afﬁrmation that the process he describes goes on “over and over again in an endless spiral” (Some Questions 290). I will return to the metaphor of the spiral below.

Freire’s preference for Mao (over “Leninist” or “Stalinist” thought) can be seen in a

!100 correction (or modiﬁcation) he makes to a quotation from a text on the thought of Lenin by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (Oppressed 52-53). The quotation is taken from a French edition of Lukács’ text; here is the passage from an English translation:

In Marx’s words, [the revolutionary party] must explain their own actions to the masses, so as not only to preserve the continuity of the proletariat’s revolutionary experiences, but also consciously and actively to contribute to their further development (Lenin 36).

Freire takes this passage to be “unquestionably posing the problem of critical intervention” (Oppressed 52-53), and in this sense he approves. He has a reservation, however: “For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather dialoguing with the people about their actions” (Oppressed 53). It is easy to see that Freire is uncomfortable about the potentially unidirectional implication of “[explaining] their own actions to the masses” (Lukács, Lenin 36), but one should not make the (easy) mistake of assuming that Lukács is entirely committed to this unidirectionality. Earlier on the same page from which the above quote was taken, Lukács says “[i]n no sense is it the party’s role to impose any kind of abstract, cleverly devised tactics upon the masses. On the contrary, it must continuously learn from their struggle and their conduct of it (Lenin 36) [emphasis in original]. I believe that Freire’s precise point of contention here is not limited to a concern about unidirectionality (party—>proletariat) — it seems necessary that there should be at least some back-and- forth taking place in order for any “[explaining] to the masses their own actions” to take place (otherwise those actions would be unknown to those meant to be doing the explaining). The more subtle and important point is about the nature of this back-and- forth. Lukács formulation leaves room for us to understand that the way in which the party learns from the people is based upon a program of study by the party on the people; in this way Lukács is not necessarily recognizing that “risk of shifting the focus of the investigation from the meaningful themes to the people themselves, thereby treating the people as objects of the investigation” (Oppressed 107). Freire does not

!101 belabour this point, saying simply that “the duty which Lukács ascribes to the revolutionary party of ‘explaining to the masses their own action’ coincides with our afﬁrmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through the praxis” (Oppressed 53). But his insistence on “dialoguing with” rather than “explaining to” shows that this coincidence is not exact, and the distance between the two formulations is precisely about the extent to which one afﬁrms that the masses must “[take] on the role of subject rather than simply object[s] of world transformations” (Freire, Daring 23). Insofar as Lukács is ambiguous on this point, he risks exposure to that sin of the ‘banking model’ where “the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects” (Oppressed 73).

I think that the analysis contained in the previous paragraph makes it clear that we are negotiating a fraught terrain. Small shifts in emphasis can indicate signiﬁcant theoretical divergences. It would be easy to think of this terrain in very broad terms: Lukács is a Leninist and therefore has a tendency to de-emphasize the reciprocal relationship between Party and class, whereas Freire is more of a Maoist, and therefore stresses the importance of this reciprocity. However I believe that this is too neat an explanation, and it misleads more than it explains. Firstly, one can easily quote passages from Lukács text which seem to align with Badiou and Freire completely. Consider the following, which adds more context to a line that I have already quoted:

For it is the essence of history always to create the new, which cannot be forecast by any infallible theory. It is through struggle that the new element must be recognized and consciously brought to light from its ﬁrst embryonic appearance. In no sense is it the party’s role to impose any kind of abstract, cleverly devised tactics upon the masses. On the contrary, it must continuously learn from their struggle and their conduct of it (Lenin 35-36).

The second reason is that framing things in terms of these ideological categories can lead one to believe that the important thing is (just) to have the right ideas. If one is a “Leninist”, then you will make mistakes about the relationship between Party and class.

!102 If one is a “Maoist” (or pick another word!), then one is safe. Hopefully it is clear that this is an idealist perspective for how it locates the source of the error in the type of theoretical perspective adopted by the person who errs. This is true to a point, but shifts into idealism if it shifts all blame in this direction. What is missed by this idealism is what Freire calls the “ambiguity” of the oppressed (Oppressed 64); ie. the splitting that is introduced by the existence of oppression. If Lukács (and Freire, and Lenin, and myself...) retain theoretical ambiguities about this question of the relationship between teacher and student, party and class, intellectual and worker… then it is because this ambiguity is inherent in the problem. For instance, if Lukács can be said to have made a “mistake”, then this should not be seen only as an individual error (of carelessness, stupidity, or similar) but as representing a “slip” in the direction of a partial view of the entire problem of ambiguity. Here Lukács would be erring in the direction of only seeing the “objective” (structural) side of this ambiguity. In other words, the fact that A= (AAp) means that it is always easy to view A one-sidedly — A=A or A=Ap — and come to an incorrect (because partial) conclusion about what to do (once again, I will return to this theme in chapter 3). Indeed this is an ever-present risk, and I believe that it is useful to read Freire’s repeated insistence on the need for the oppressed to be “Subjects, not objects” as betraying an anxiety about the need to guard against this risk.

Circles, Lines, and Spirals

What is at work in this passage from Mao (and in Freire) is a radical redefinition of knowledge, or rather the putting-of-knowledge into its proper place. When Freire says “They [the oppressed] call themselves ignorant and say the ‘professor’ is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen” and “[t]he criteria of knowledge imposed upon them are the conventional ones” (Oppressed 63), it is clear that we have a need to define what our “unconventional criteria” can be, insofar as such a definition is possible. On this point it would be easy to read Mao’s assertion that “the masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant” in the spirit of a

!103 romantic (and patronizing) self-effacement: “we are cooped up in ivory towers, we read many books but this is all worthless, the oppressed have the real knowledge because of their experience of oppression”, etc. This would be going too far in the other direction, and to understand this “other direction” it is useful to further explore Mao’s metaphor of the “spiral”, which Badiou also adopts.

In the previous chapter I spent some time trying to explain the metaphor of “circularity”. The aim was to show how it is the geometric metaphor commonly used by those criticizing an “objectivist”, “mechanistic”, “structuralist” etc. approach; ie. all of those which are idealist in the sense that they understand change as stemming only from the churning of objective processes, regardless of whether these processes are themselves thought to be ideal (ie. Absolute Spirit) or material (development of the forces of production). For instance, Freire warns of sectarians who get trapped in “circles of certainty” (Oppressed 38), Evald Ilyenkov warned about “fruitless spinning around in the enchanted circle of canonical categories” (3), and Badiou mentions “Stalin’s loops” as well as Hegel’s “theological circularity” (Theory 91,19). The operation of “circularity”, says Badiou, is that of “annulment” where “the outplace ﬁnds a space in the place” (Theory 20). When Hegel makes Robespierre into an extension of the ideas of Rousseau which are themselves a stage of Spirit, and de-emphasizes the role of popular struggle in the transformation induced by the French Revolution, he performs such an annulment. Clearly “circularity” is to be avoided.

But spirals are not not-circular, but of course rely on circles while also moving beyond the plane in which circularity-proper is conﬁned. This is a geometric representation of Badiou’s twofold claim that “every rightness and every justice are, in principle, novelties” and “yet, it is pointless to try to live without repetition” (Theory 39). The spiral is an unhinged circle, a circle plus a leap, plus a break; the break comes with the “rightness and justice” and the circle with repetition. But this is not the whole story, because 1) the break from circularity does not itself capture “it is pointless to try to live

!104 without repetition”; it is not clear how this break nevertheless maintains a connection to repetition and 2) a spiral is not only a departure from a circle, but a “discontinuous circle” (this is really a geometrical representation of point 1).

To orient ourselves with respect to this problem it is useful to note that if the spiral can be inferred by “combining the notion of the circle and that of the leap” (Theory 123), then we can suggest that the two wrong approaches would see only one of these two parts: circle or leap. I have discussed the circle at some length, and the upshot of this discussion was that it comes from an understanding of subjectivity which sees the latter as being an effect of the structure. In this view A is not equal to (AAp); instead A=Ap. It is purely a structural effect. Based on this it seems reasonable to suggest that the line would represent the opposite view and would be based upon the metaphor of the line: A=A. In Freire’s language from Daring to Dream this would be one of those “naiveties that made that importance [of subjectivity] absolute and that resulted in lending to subjectivity or to consciousness the role of maker of the world” (Daring 23). It is an undetermined subjectivity, a free agent, which in this view stands in external opposition to the structure, A vs. P.

Around the time that Theory of the Subject was written one of Badiou’s chief philosophical enemies was Gilles Deleuze, and for Badiou it was Deleuze who was a proponent of the A vs. P approach. In a review of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Badiou cites a list that his two opponents present in order to demonstrate “two poles of of social libidinal investment” (Flux and the Party 178, Anti-Oedipus 366). The are the “the paranoia, reactionary, and fascizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole” (Anti- Oedipus 366), and

!105 the two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty; the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power….The one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images that come to fill the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this aggregate, the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialize flows, inventing their own nonfigurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiring-production. And to summarize all the preceding determinations: the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups (Anti-Oedipus 366-367) [emphasis in original].

Badiou has a lot of venom for this passage, and his principal accusation is that the “desire” which is so important in this work from Deleuze and Guattari is a sort of cloak for “the unconditional: a subjective impulse that invisibly escapes the whole sensible order of ends, the whole rational fabric of causes” which is “pure, unbound, generic energy: energy as such” (Flux and the Party 179). He calls this “[t]he old freedom of autonomy” and even “the Freedom of Kantian critique” (Flux and the Party 179). Hopefully it is clear that the “one the one hand, on the other” style of presentation present different formulations of A vs. P, and furthermore that the “lines of escape32” in the above-quoted passage can serve as the line in our line+circle=spiral formulation.

It is beyond this text’s scope to fully enter into the French philosophical and political debates which inspired Badiou’s wrath, but I can motivate a suspicion of Deleuze (or of at least this particular tendency within his work) by suggesting that the one-and-the-

32 In a footnote which briefly discusses “profound meditation” Freire suggests that the former’s authenticity is dependent upon the thinker being “ ‘bathed’ in reality” (Oppressed 88). He contrasts this with the kind of thought which “signifies contempt for the world and flight from it, in a type of ‘historical schizophrenia’ “ (Oppressed 88). Of course Pedagogy of the Oppressed appeared before Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, but it is striking that Freire aligns “flight” and “schizophrenia” in a way which almost seems to anticipate this later work (and provides a very germinal critique of it).

!106 other manner of thinking excludes any sort of concentration, which I have suggested is at the heart of Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Insofar as it inhibits a thinking of the oppressor as internal to the oppressed, then it stops us from thinking the difference between objective subjectivity and subjective subjectivity (or objective force and subjective force). In a book-length discussion of Deleuze produced some years after the above-cited polemic, Badiou actually goes further: it is not only that this Deleuzian approach is unable to assist with the project of concentration, but it actually sides with objective subjectivity. Reproducing even a sketch of the argument would take us far outside this thesis’ purview, and here it will be enough to cite only Badiou’s assertion that

… this conception [of Deleuzian desiring-machines] strictly precludes any idea of ourselves as being, at any time, the source of what we think or do. Everything always stems from afar—indeed, everything is always "already-there," in the inﬁnite and inhuman resource of the One (Badiou, Clamor 11-12).

That Deleuze is really — against received wisdom — a philosopher of Oneness (albeit in a strange way) is argued by Badiou in his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. And this “already-thereness” means that there is no need for conscious and purposeful education, because there is nothing really to be taught (or this education would be an imposition upon the process of undetermined Becoming).

A related problem is that of “weakness” and “strength”, upon which I spent some time in the previous chapter. In another polemical review of a text by Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou accuses them of producing a philosophy “with which the organic weaknesses of [a] situation could be changed into so many apparent strengths” (Fascism of the Potato 192). I think that we should read this in terms of Freire’s call to “change their weakness into a transforming force” (Oppressed 145). Badiou’s accusation is essentially that with Deleuze the weakness should not be changed, but should be immediately identiﬁed with strength. The point here is that by asserting the purity of revolt, what is afﬁrmed

!107 is whatever happens: “you cannot think and exalt the pure multiple (the rhizome) without throwing yourself not the flattest of conservatisms, the surest ratification of everything that exists” (Fascism of the Potato 196). This would imply, for instance, that if the oppressed’s first impulse is to become an oppressor themselves then this is essentially a correct impulse. A whole-sale affirmation of the revolt cannot fail to affirm the context which produced this revolt (I give an example of this in the next section).

The problem is that if one conceives the relationship between A and P as external, then this means that A’s existence is dependent upon P’s existence and indeed must refer to the latter, in that A is seen to be the “pure” excess of the structure. A — despite an apparent lack of determination — is nevertheless chained to this P; insofar as A is what “slips through the cracks” of P, it is determined by P precisely by being “what slips through”. Badiou has some (faint) praise for Deleuze and Guattari on this point, because he notes that they are correct to say that “the division of the people is not inherent to the people but is organized by the bourgeois state” (Fascism of the Potato 200). One should be careful with this statement, however. It does not refer to the internal scission which I introduced in the previous chapter. Badiou describes this “division” (and particularly the Deleuzian valourization of it) in terms of three characteristics typical of the rhizome. The ﬁrst is that there are only individuals, the second is that politics is a federalist endeavour (dealing only with the convergence of essentially separate political aims), and thirdly that “everything communicates with everything” and so “there is no irreducible antagonism” (ie. between classes) (Fascism of the Potato 197).

This is a perfectly legitimate description of how things are; consider the following from Freire:

!108 As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the uniﬁcation of the people… Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method (including violence) any action which in even incipient fashion could awake the oppressed to the need for unity. Concepts such as unity, organization and struggle are immediately labelled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous — to the oppressors — for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation (Oppressed 141).

To say that people are individuals, to say that different political struggles are unconnected, and to say that there is no fundamental antagonism which organizes society would be to effectively describe that society’s current appearance. But with Freire and Badiou I can say that this existing organization must be overcome. Badiou’s problem with Deleuze (or one of his problems) is that the latter approves of this division of the people:

From the fact that the bourgeois One causes the division of the people, they infer the excellence of the division conceived of as an indifference to the One, as non- antagonism. The State is the One of our multiple weakness? Let us be even more divided, let us …afﬁrm our division, and we ourselves will be plentiful. Which we? In truth, the we prescribed by the One” (Fascism of the Potato 201) [emphasis in original]

This is a different way of putting my earlier statement that “a whole-sale affirmation of the revolt cannot fail to affirm the context which produced this revolt”. This Deleuzian philosophy (which here is only included as an example of the A vs. P approach more broadly) “comes up short, because it denies at bottom any active autonomy, any real independence… to what rises up in the guise of the enraged rebel of good faith…[it] leads no further than to a placed reactive” (Theory 32). Against this Badiou says that “[w]e must come to understand that what raises me up reactively against the active of the Other must also be the active of a force in which the Other is no longer represented” (Theory 32). This means a reduction of the influence of placed (structural) elements within the practices, thoughts, and politics of the oppressed; ie. a process of

!109 concentration. The point can never be to afﬁrm the existing practices without reservation.

Finally, with this brief discussion I think that it is possible to suggest a Deleuzian equivalent to Hegel’s use of “surrender” that I discussed in the previous chapter. Whereas Hegel advocates “surrender to the life of the object” (Phenomenology 32), I think that we can say that this Deleuzian view is more about “ﬂight from the life of the object”. I think that it is easy to see that for Badiou (and Freire) the correct posture is neither surrender or ﬂight, but confrontation. In the next section I explore one of Freire’s examples of confrontation — the demand for higher wages — and follow Freire in suggesting that one must not only confront, but must confront the confrontation, ie. problematize the forms of confrontation which exist already. As Freire says: “It is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this tradition of struggle, of resistance, and ‘work it’” (Hope 99).

The Mass Line and Problematizing Demands

In the previous section I discussed the line+circle=spiral formulation, and brieﬂy discussed the view of the “line” as represented by the work of Gilles Deleuze. At bottom this view can be understood as a wrong (because partial) understanding of the nature of oppression. While it admits that the oppressed are other than the structure which oppresses them (and in this way avoids a ‘circular’ understanding, which derives subjectivity only from the structure of oppression), it makes this otherness a total otherness, and so the oppressed/oppressor opposition becomes a wholly external opposition, A vs. P. A major problem of this is that the structure “sneaks in the back door”, so to speak, because by being unable to think the oppressor (and the structure of oppression) as internal to the oppressed, there is no way of moving beyond the initial impulse to revolt, an impulse which— we cannot forget — is initially solicited by the structure itself. Despite initial appearances, this becomes an approach which is also very

!110 “objective” or “structural” in its inclinations because it it is a “placed reactive” which is “the ﬂat shadow cast by the horrors of the State” (Theory 32), and not an approach which works to get beyond this “placed reactive”. In keeping with the focus of this project I have suggested that the failure of this approach should be understood is due to its inability to think “concentration” properly. Given that the previous section was rather abstract I feel as though it may be useful to investigate one of Freire’s examples in order to see these principles in action.

The example that I will investigate is one that Freire takes from Lenin, and the focus will be on the consequences of an incorrect reading of the A=(AAp) formula. An incorrect reading of this formula could lead one to come to the conclusion that within each actual oppressed person, there are good (progressive, new) and bad (regressive, structural) ideas. This view is correct insofar as it sees that people thinking in contradictory terms, but it is incorrect in that it conceives of these ideas as contradicting one another in an external way. A=(AAp) means that every thing has contradiction within it. As Badiou puts it a eulogistic lecture on Jean-Paul Sartre: “…we have to conclude that, at any given moment, popular ideas and practices are divisible and contradictory” (Sartre 33). To say that they are “divisible and contradictory” means that they are internally divisible. When communicating with and trying to understand the oppressed educators must see new and old within everything they hear, and must communicate this necessity to the oppressed themselves, who must then also begin to interrogate their own understanding in these terms.

Freire afﬁrms this when he cites an example taken from Lenin in the latter’s political pamphlet What is to be Done? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed’s last pages, Freire gives an example of what he calls “cultural synthesis”:

!111 To be concrete: if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching — but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention. In the ﬁrst case, the revolutionary leaders follow a line of adaptation to the people’s demands. In the second case, by disrespecting the aspirations of the people, they fall into cultural invasion. The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a deﬁnitive solution (Oppressed 182-183).

The “two errors” can be easily explained by reference to the incorrect reading described above: in the case of the “line of adaptation” it is clear the error comes from the perception that the demand for higher salaries is essentially good and correct; in the case of “cultural invasion” it is clear that the error comes from the perception that the demand is essentially bad and wrong. The “solution” is to accept the demand’s partial correctness while exposing its limitations. For instance, one might say that the demand is correct insofar as it reﬂects an implicit awareness of the fact of labour exploitation33: a higher salary would mean that the workers are keeping more of the surplus which they themselves generate. But it is also incorrect, insofar as a demand for a higher salary preserves the salary itself because it does not undermine the wage relation, that relation which comes about by the possession of the means of production by a small group of people; ie. the essence of capitalism as a system. Freire makes exactly this point when he

33 “Exploitation” is of course not being used in a normative or moral sense, but instead refers to a fundamental process of accumulation described by Marx. As Michael Heinrich explains: “The term exploitation is not meant to allude to especially low wages or especially bad working conditions. Exploitation refers solely and exclusively to the fact that the producer only receives a portion of the newly produced value that he or she creates —regardless of whether wages are high or low or working conditions good or bad” (96).

!112 says that “[t]he essence of this solution can be found in the previously cited statement by bishops of the Third World that ‘if the workers do not somehow come to be owners of their own labor, all structural reforms will be ineffective” (Oppressed 183). This incorrect approach could therefore result from an application of A=(AAp) which does not take it far enough, ie. it sees the consciousness as whole as being contradictory, but only in the sense that the ideas stand in external contradiction.

With some careful reading it is clear that the “two errors” parallel the two philosophical errors that we would predict: viewing the oppressed in terms of 1) A=A; they stand in external opposition to the structure, or 2) A=Ap; they are simply the result of determination of the structure. If one sees the oppressed as internally pure, then there is nothing to offer but support for whatever demand is presented. In the previous section I suggested that “[a] whole-sale affirmation of the revolt cannot fail to affirm the context which produced this revolt”, and here this general statement applies to the case of demands for higher salary which do not challenge the concept of “salary” itself. If the initial impulse to revolt along this particular axis is turned into an approach for revolt in general, then the picture of success and justice which results will necessarily depend upon the existence of a salary, ie. of capitalism. In the case of “cultural invasion”, the view of the oppressed as being entirely determined by the structure inevitably leads one to adopt the view that their proposals must be rejected in favour of the good ones suggested by the politically educated. The difference between this kind of error and the kind in the previous paragraph is subtle, and in a particular instance they can produce the same results. In the first case the problem results from the failure of reasoning which tries to be dialectical, while in the second case the problem is a consciously non- dialectical approach. I will return to this distinction in the next chapter.

Freire’s recommendation predictably takes neither of this paths but a “synthesis” which “[poses] the meaning of that very demand as a problem” (Oppressed 183). That this demand can be a problem points is a natural result of its impurity. That this demand can

!113 be a problem is crucial, because it points out that it need not be a problem. There is no structural necessity which compels anyone to interrogate the nature of the demand. To reference a point of Badiou’s discussed in the previous chapter: the working-class is always the contradictory-unity of itself as (re)producer of capitalist society and destroyer of capitalist society. If the demand for higher salaries remains the only demand, then these workers are merely negotiating for a different place within the structure of oppression and not attempting to abolish it. The demand must be made into a problem, it must be problematized. And as Badiou says: “…it does not depend on man, insofar as the animal named ‘man’ exists, that a problem befalls him qua problem. Problematization is how the real makes a hole for the truth” (Theory 198-199).

To pose-as-problem that which need not be a problem is to move towards subjective subjectivity because it implies that one is departing from the structure’s own necessities by creating a different kind of necessity (the necessity of problematization). In the case of the demand, this means that one is consciously moving away from received ideas by regarding these with suspicion: “…an individual only arrives at his or her singular force within the given circumstances by entering into conﬂict with the network of inert habits to which these circumstances previously conﬁned him or her” (Theory 35). Of course Freire calls his method “problem-posing” and the essence of this method is the consideration of: “[p]roblem-posing education…epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’ —consciousness as consciousness of consciousness” (Oppressed 79).

In this section I have expanded upon one of Freire’s examples in order to show how the basic logics that I have been developing can neatly explain his approach while also explaining where the wrong approaches come from. The fundamental point has been that one must problematize in order to concentrate the “right” or “correct” ideas. The obvious and enormous whole in the presentation to this point is that both “right” and

!114 “correct” have not been deﬁned or discussed. In the next section I try to provide some clarity.

In What Sense Are The Ideas Right?

In the previous section I suggested that one should understand that the contradiction introduced by the structure into the oppressed is not visible only via the external opposition between oppressor and oppressed, nor by a version of internal opposition which sees good ideas on the one hand and bad ideas on the other (an internal opposition in terms of total consciousness, but an external opposition with regard to individual ideas), but via an understanding that each idea is internally split. The example of the demand for higher salaries showed that the rebellion of the oppressed is not necessarily transformational in-itself, but if problematized it can become the basis for such a transformation. This is the sense in which it is affected by both the splace and the outplace, to use Badiou’s terminology. Even earlier in this chapter I suggested that we need “unconventional criteria” for knowledge in response to Freire’s point that “[t]he criteria of knowledge imposed upon [the oppressed] are the conventional ones” (Oppressed 63). Clearly if we are interested in performing the kind of evaluation that Freire does of the demands for higher salaries, then we will require at least a sense of what these “unconventional criteria” might be.

This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the many bases upon which philosophers have attempted to establish the correctness of a proposition or idea. This is the case for two reasons: 1) this is not a thesis engaged with analytic philosophy, but philosophy as it serves to clarify Marxist theories and 2) because “correctness” does not capture the whole of what we will discuss. Given these reasons, I will turn immediately to a statement of the Marxist materialist theory of knowledge from Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientiﬁc:

!115 Before there was argumentation, there was action… From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we ﬁnd that the object does agree with our idea of it… then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves (14) [emphasis in original].

The important features for our purposes are 1) the theory of knowledge has two aspects: “action” and then “argumentation” or “perception”, 2) between these two aspects it is

“action” that comes first and then 3) the process has a certain retroactive character, in that the wrongness or rightness of a perception is decided after the object in question has been “turned to one’s own use”. This argument will be familiar to anyone who knows the basics of the scientific method: scientists may produce theories or hypotheses, and then these can be confirmed or disqualified with the appropriate experiments. It may seem strange, however, to apply this criterion to things outside the “hard sciences” where distinct “objects” cannot be so neatly defined, and whose properties are not stable like those of (for instance) an atom or molecule. Mao alludes to this in his Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?, where he says that the above argument from Engels is “especially true of man’s struggle with nature”, but “[i]n social struggle” things are less clear cut, because the “forces representing the advanced class” may have the correct ideas while nevertheless failing to achieve their immediate goals (503). His explanation for this is simply that the “balance of forces” in a particular moment may not be favourable enough for success to be forthcoming (503).

Clearly it is important to stress that that scientific and political problems are not identical, and it is also clear that this non-equivalence is not only based upon the issue of the “balance of forces”. There is another important aspect of difference that has not been clarified. Scientific “correctness” or “rightness” , in the sense described by Engels above, is about confirming the properties of processes, objects, substances, elements, etc.

!116 This is quite different from political “correctness” or “rightness”, which is very often concerned with ethical evaluation rather than fact. This is a serious problem, because when we consider “[t]hose ‘right ideas’ of the masses, which the Marxist party must ‘concentrate’” (Theory 39), one can imagine different senses of “right”. Are the ideas “right” because they correctly reﬂect the actually-existing conditions (more “scientiﬁc”)? Or are they “right” in that they are good normative evaluations (more “ethical”)? Here we should recall that when speaking of these “right” ideas Badiou says that “every rightness and every justice, are, in principle, novelties” (Theory 39). Two senses of “right” are at work when discussing novelty: “rightness” and “justice”.

Badiou deals with this issue in an article about a famous slogan from Mao: “It is right to rebel against reactionaries” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis). Badiou actually cites a longer and more perplexing version: ”Marxism comprises many principles, but in the ﬁnal analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel against the reactionaries (Essential Philosophical Thesis 679). Badiou’s argument opens with questions which mirror the ones I posed in the previous paragraph, and he also provides an answer:

…how is it conceivable that Marx’s enormous theoretical enterprise, with its ceaselessly and scrupulously reworked and recast analyses, can be concentrated in a single maxim: “It is right to rebel against the reactionaries”? And what is this maxim? Are we dealing with an observation, summarizing the Marxist analysis of objective contradictions, the ineluctable confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution? Is it a directive oriented toward the subjective mobilization of revolutionary forces? Is Marxist truth the following: one rebels, one is right? Or is it rather: one must rebel? The two, perhaps, and even more the spiralling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force) (Essential Philosophical Thesis 669). [emphasis in original]

The dilemma of right-as-fact versus right-as-justice has turned out to be false, and this falseness led us to another spiral! The point is ultimately that: ”every Marxist statement

!117 is—in a single, dividing movement—observation and directive” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 670). The meaning of “observation” here should be taken in the scientific and non-normative sense described above. That there is (and has always been) rebellion is a fact: “Rebellion does not wait for its reason, rebellion is what is always already there, for any possible reason whatever” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 673). That “rebellion does not wait for its reason” is a strong materialist statement, because it is recognizing that rebellion is not induced by logical or (“argumentative”, to use Engels’ term [Socialism 14]) reasons, but by society’s structure and the contradictions within it which pit oppressor and oppressed against one another. This is a recognition of the existence of objective force. A corollary is that “directive” cannot be a “directive to rebel”, because this rebellion precedes the (Marxist) viewpoint which might provide that directive. But it can be a directive which distinguishes between different kinds of rebellions by approaching as problem the character of the rebellions which are happening. This is the sense in which we get a ”spiralling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force)” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 669). By saying all of this I am merely recapitulating an argument I included towards the end of the first chapter on the meaning of “necessary struggle”: the pedagogy of the oppressed does not produce struggle by the reflection that it includes, but it can try to distinguish between those struggles which are heading towards liberation (“necessary struggle”) and those which are not, and then between those aspects of a given struggle which are more out-of-place from those which are placed. It may be useful to note that the discussion of the wage demands earlier in this chapter can be recast in these terms. The approach to these demands which simply tries to replace them with more politically-refined goals is pure directive (“we know what they should do so we will tell them”), whereas the other approach which consists of acclimating to these demands is pure observation (“we must do what they are doing”).

!118 With this I think that we are better positioned to comment on the question of “In what sense are the ideas of the oppressed right?” In the first place we can say that their correctness is due to their correspondence with their own conditions: insofar as the local situation has a “tradition of struggle” (Freire, Hope 99), then this tradition is (in a sense) part of that situation and so a correct observation of that situation must account for this tradition. That these (rebellious) ideas exist is what sustains the entire enterprise of Marxism, insofar as the latter is directed towards radical societal transformation (which is not true for all things which are called “Marxist”). Their existence makes the application of the other “directive” sense of “right” irrelevant at at this stage: they exist whether one believes that they should or not. But whether they will be successful in the goal of transformation is not at all decided, and this is role for the “directive” sense of “right”. As I have repeatedly stressed, it is necessary to concentrate these ideas. If the process of concentration which develops subjective force out of objective force is successful in whatever situation is at hand, then we are able to speak of a new and more complete sense of “rightness” which confirms both the objective sense of “right” (we were successful because we had the correct objective analysis) and the subjective sense of “right” (we can call what happened “success” because it works toward the larger goals). In order to do this, however, one must begin with Badiou’s idea that “at any given moment, popular ideas and practices are divisible and contradictory” and that “[w]e can trust the masses precisely because their ideas… have to do with processes that shift their ground and assert something new…” (Jean-Paul Sartre 33). Freire gets close to this dual sense of “right” when he says (speaking of the ideas of the oppressed):” ... to underestimate the wisdom that necessarily results from sociocultural experience, is at one and the same time a scientific error, and the unequivocal expression of the presence of an elitist ideology” (Hope 75) [emphasis added]. Correctly approaching this “wisdom” is therefore both a scientific and political task “at one and the same time”; ie. both a question of observation and of directive.

!119 My reference to “larger goals” in the previous paragraph raises the problem of the normative claims of this Marxist line of reasoning, and so it is worth a small digression to explain what I mean. First of all these “larger goals” are not very speciﬁc. Badiou refers to the “great millenarian structural invariants, these three ‘great differences’ — city and countryside, industry and agriculture, intellectual and manual— whose abolishment is the very aim of communism” (Theory 184). This reference shows that these “larger goals” are vague, but also that they are not about laying out a plan for the future but about negating existing conditions. In this respect Badiou is consistent with the famous line on this topic from Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence (162) [emphasis in original].

Saying that one is correct in the directive sense of “right” would then mean that one’s actions have contributed to the reduction of the “great differences” to which Badiou refers. One could easily add differences along other lines as well — such as race and gender — and would be right to do so.

This discussion allows me to explain an otherwise very mysterious passage which opens the third chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is a passage in which Freire says that “the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible” but has “constitutive elements”: “[w]ithin the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action” (Oppressed 87). This is a strange point, because presumably the “reflection” aspect itself contains words, and so “words” appear twice in the formulation. The confusion is compounded by Freire’s statement that “[t]here is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis” and “[t]hus, to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Oppressed 87). In what sense can a “word” be a “praxis”? And isn’t Freire flirting with extreme idealism when he suggests that a “word” can transform the world?

!120 I believe that these questions and concerns can be unpacked and answered using our above discussion of Badiou. The ﬁrst thing to note is that Freire is not talking about words but true words; this is emphatically not what Freire calls “idle chatter” and “alienated and alienating ‘blah’“ (Oppressed 87). Up to this point our discussion of “right” has involved trying to establish that the sense of “right” that is useful for us is one which incorporates both scientiﬁc correctness and political directive. I believe that in Freire’s formulation of “word” both of these are active. Indeed, this very page is both describing the word and insisting on an action: “the word is more than just an instrument… accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements” (Oppressed 87) [emphasis added]. There is both an observational statement on existence (“is) and a directive (“we must”). Freire’s “accordingly” shows that he takes them to be closely linked, but of course the “we” in Freire’s “we must” does not contain everyone. The “we” is composed of all of those committed to problematization, to the radicalism of the pedagogy of the oppressed, and to creating fundamental changes in society. This “we” is constituted by the kind of problematization that Freire is performing when dissects the “constitutive elements” of the word (Oppressed 87). The speaking of a “true word” (which requires an understanding of these “constitutive elements”) produces a transformation, and this clearly means that Freire’s (and Badiou’s) sense of truth will not appear as truth to everyone, because this transformation will be about changing the character of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed in favour of oppressed. As Badiou puts it: “Marxist truth is not a conciliatory truth” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 670).

This gives us a key for understanding Freire’s phrase: if “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Oppressed 87), this is because 1) the truth of the word (its analytical, scientiﬁc correctness as “reﬂection” of the world) is established retroactively, via the practice which achieves the transformation and 2) because the truth — being

!121 “not conciliatory”34 — can only be achieved by “transformation”, which in this context is necessarily a transformation of the relations between oppressor and oppressed in favour of the oppressed. Therefore I do not believe that one should read Freire as suggesting that one should seek out the “true word” because the utterance of a word will produce transformation, but instead that truth is a process which contains both words and actions. The point is not to speak the single true word, but to attempt many words (reﬂections + actions) until one arrives at the true, transformative one.

Mao makes this point in Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?: “Often, correct knowledge can only be arrived at after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice” (503). In this statement from Mao the word “knowledge” appears twice, both in itself (“correct knowledge”) and as internal to itself in opposition to practice. This is similar to Freire’s point that the “word” contains both reﬂection and action, where the former clearly involves the use of words. Badiou uses this quote from Mao to suggest that in ”[i]n all Marxist texts we encounter this scission, this double occurrence of the word ‘knowledge,’ designating either theory in its dialectical correlation to practice or the overall process of this dialectic, that is, the contradictory movement of these two terms, theory and practice” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 671)[emphasis in original]. With an understanding of this double occurrence of “knowledge” it is possible to parse out the strange equations that Freire makes between “words” and “work” in this section.

Importantly, the completion of this process is not ﬁnal: “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming” (Oppressed 88) [emphasis in original]. This

34 Freire himself is quite clear that this process is “not conciliatory”. He insists in a footnote that “this dialogical encounter cannot take place between antagonists” (Oppressed 129); ie. between oppressor and oppressed.

!122 gets at the point that transformation leaves you with a changed structure to reconsider and transform again. Clearly this process actually never reaches a final conclusion, and we therefore are justified in suggesting another spiral. To prove this I will first note that Badiou emphasizes the fact that in addition to having “knowledge” appear twice (once as theory and once as overall process), Mao has “practice” appear twice: ”…leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice…” (Badiou, Essential Philosophical Thesis 671). In Theory of the Subject it is actually this example which Badiou uses to explain the spiral in some more detail, as well as the concept of “torsion”:

Torsion, even if the word does not belong to the common parlance of Marxism, can be inferred from it by combining the notion of the circle and that of the leap. The torsion of the true designates a circularity without a uniﬁed plane, a discontinuous curve. See Mao: there is a circle, since the point of departure of truth is practice, which is its point of arrival as well, and theory is the mediation by way of a curve from p1 to p2. There is torsion by the double unhinging that, as an integral part of truth as trajectory, grounds the practical novelty, the local index of p as the division into p1 and p2, which is not a temporal division but a cognitive one: the law of placement (123).

That there is a “double unhinging” is what “guarantee[s] the circularity, even if it is a broken one” (Theory 123). There are two “leaps”: the first “from sensible to perceptual knowledge” and the second “from rational to revolutionary knowledge” (Theory 123). The first should be understood in the scientific sense established above, as the “is” in “the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible” (Oppressed 87). The second is the directive sense, the “must”. Badiou’s reference for these two “leaps” is from Mao’s On Practice (Theory 123), and here is the original statement:

The active function of knowledge manifests itself not only in the active leap from perceptual to rational knowledge, but — and this is more important — it must manifest itself in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice (On Practice 76).

If one recognizes that “sensible” or “perceptual” knowledge necessarily comes from real

!123 experience with things — from practice — then the discontinuous circularity becomes clear. This “perceptual” knowledge is what is immediately given by experience. “Rational” knowledge is the systematization of this experience, which allows one to approach the task of concentration. The task itself is “the leap whereby p [practice] divides itself” (Theory 123), where the old ways of acting (of struggling) are distinguished from the new ways. If the new way turns out to work, then one is justiﬁed in claiming the rightness (in both senses) of one’s prior work. But then process begins again, and the practices and knowledges which have been formed in order to change the structure into its current (changed) state become of this new conﬁguration, and therefore repeating them as if they were appropriate to changing things would depend upon outdated observations (not looking into how things have changed) as well as obsolete directives (the circumstances towards which they were aimed have already changed). This is how we should take Badiou’s statement that “everything that repeats itself is invariably unjust and inexact” (Theory 39). It does not only refer to the various inertial habits which tend to form in daily life which the radical would seek to disrupt but also to those very disruptions, which can themselves become inert without proper attention to changing circumstances.

With this discussion I hope to have shown that the question of “rightness” is quite complex, and involves yet another application of the A=(AAp) formula, where here “right” is split into scientiﬁc observation about the structure (Ap) and directives which point towards an ability to both exceed and change this structure (A). This approach obviously contrasts with the plans of those who Badiou says “embroider their dispiriting niceties around a ‘Marxism’ reduced to the morose virtue of a ‘science of history’“ (Theory 44). This does not deny the usefulness of the broad historical accounts often produced by Marxists. But a global survey of this kind “has no efﬁcacy other than to map the types of processes whose local overlapping places a situation with regard to that which surrounds it” (Theory 217) [emphasis in original]. This understanding of the

!124 place (the structure) must be accompanied by the directive to go beyond the latter, and this directive can only be issued at the local level despite its universal emancipatory aims. This dual sense of “right” is also opposed to attempts to establish any stable system of morals, whether complex or austere. Attempts to create universal or eternal ethical systems arise from circumstances which are neither universal nor eternal, and are therefore doomed at the outset to be made irrelevant by change35. “Right” directives are only those which are aimed at reducing oppression and empowering the oppressed in speciﬁc circumstances, and therefore one cannot get very far with abstract statements.

A Sketch of the Process

In the previous section I gave an account of how we should interpret Badiou’s use of “right” in the following statement on pedagogy and concentration :”The puriﬁcation of force amounts to the concentration of its newness. Those ‘right ideas’ of the masses, which the Marxist party must ‘concentrate’, are necessarily new ideas” (Theory 39). The upshot was that “right” has a dual meaning, referring to both (scientiﬁc) “correctness” and (political) “justice”. That these “right ideas” are “necessarily new” forces us to see that all rightness is provisional. Considering the fact that we are interested in understanding how things change this provisionality should be encouraging and not demoralizing. Another important point was that this approach to “rightness” requires a process of local investigation which is both detailed and ongoing in order to both provide the necessary analyses/directives as well as to keep these from becoming

35 This point is essentially a restatement of an argument made by Engels in his Anti- Dühring. It is not an argument that morals do not exist; clearly they do exist in the minds of people and are constantly implied by their actions. Engels’ argument is that moral systems are the product of class relations, and can either justify or oppose oppression and exploitation depending on the circumstances (114). There is such a thing as “proletarian morality”, he says (114), but this is also provisional, and will at some point disappear with the class relations which found it. The basic problem is that any universal or eternal ethical system necessarily projects (consciously or unconsciously) the circumstances of its production into the future, and is therefore plagued by a sort of conservatism.

!125 stagnant. If we note that this process is about a ”spiralling movement” involving “real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force)” (Essential Philosophical Thesis 669), then it is clear that this approach to rightness is important for the pedagogy of concentration. Based upon this it would be very useful to have a better sense of what this local investigation might actually look like. Helpfully, Freire provides an outline of his method of “thematic investigation” in the third chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this section I go through this method and explore how it ﬁts in with the arguments developed to this point.

To begin with I will simply reafﬁrm that Freire’s method is related to the Maoist concept of the mass line:

For the dialogical, problem-posing teacher-student, the program concept of education is neither a gift nor an imposition —bits of information to be deposited in the students — but rather the organized, systematized, and developed ‘representation’ to individuals of the things about which they want to know more (Oppressed 93).

Based on this it is clear that the investigative process must attend both to the “things” and to the “wants”; ie. the circumstances of the oppressed and their thoughts about these circumstances. Freire makes this point more explicitly when he says that “revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation’, but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation” (Oppressed 95) [emphasis in original]. This point may seem banal, but its importance will become evident.

Freire’s description of the investigative process makes it clear that the emphasis lies ﬁrst on understanding the objective conditions of any area. The ﬁrst thing to do after choosing an area within which to work is to “[acquire] a preliminary acquaintance with the area through secondary sources” (Oppressed 110), the investigators must 1) call a

!126 meeting of community members in which the investigators explain their goals and ask for permission to work in the area and 2) ask attendees if they would like to be volunteers who “will gather a series of necessary data about the life of the area” (Oppressed 110). Freire stresses that “[o]f even greater importance [than the gathering of this data]… is the active presence of these volunteers in the investigation” (Oppressed 110). Then the investigators (alongside the volunteers) “set their critical ‘aim’ on the area under study” and “[t]hey register everything in their notebooks, including apparently unimportant items” (Oppressed 112). After each visit the investigators each prepare a report and then present this report to the team during “evaluation meetings” (Oppressed 112). Then

[a]s each person, in his decoding essay, relates how he perceived or felt a certain occurrence or situation, his exposition challenges all the other decoders by representing to them the same reality upon which they have themselves been intent. At this moment they ‘re-consider’, through the ‘considerations’ of others, their own previous ‘consideration’. Thus the analysis of reality made by each individual decoder sends them all back, dialogically, to the disjoined whole which one more becomes a totality evoking a new analysis by the investigators, following which a new evaluative and critical meeting will be held (Oppressed 112).

This is only a description of the very first stage of the investigative process, and yet we see the entire process in miniature. Freire affirms the value of “book learning” when he says that investigators should acquaint themselves with secondary literature, but the focus is clearly upon learning via a direct experience of the area under study. He affirms that “it is normal for investigators to come to the area with values which influence their perceptions (Oppressed 110-111), and I believe that this is why one must take note of even the “apparently unimportant items” (Oppressed 111); otherwise an investigator’s elitism may easily lead to them overlooking crucial facts which appear to be unimportant. During the evaluation meetings undiagnosed elitism can be brought to the surface when people “ ‘re-consider’, through the ‘considerations’ of others, their

!127 own previous ‘consideration’” (Oppressed 112). This bears a clear resemblance to that aspect of problem-posing education which the latter “epitomizes”: “the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness” (Oppressed 112) [emphasis in original]. Because their “considerations” are naturally both based upon the reality under study and refracted through their consciousness, these will often both contain both good estimations of the objective conditions and inaccuracies (or holes) caused by their contradictory minds. For instance: an investigator from a comfortable background may take Freire’s advice on the need to note down every detail —however apparently insignificant— and then find during the evaluative meaning that one of these details is actually of huge significance. In discovering this significance they would both gain a more complete understanding of the area under study and get an opportunity to see how their elitist preconceptions clouded their perceptions in such a way that this important detail at first appeared to be trivial36.

Of course this process does not only apply to the “elite” investigators but also to the volunteers, who “participate in all activities as members of the investigating team” (Oppressed 112). One can equally imagine that a local volunteer may not recognize the importance of this or that aspect of their community because it is just a part of their day-to-day life. These evaluative meetings would give them the chance to reﬂect upon habits or commonplaces which appear benign, but which upon further consideration reveal themselves to be the causes and/or effects of the oppression which the investigators as a whole wish to understand. The volunteers’ lack of recognition of this habit or commonplace would then signal that their consciousness has been shaped in

36 Freire makes the necessity of this process evident when he says of those oppressors that move to the side of the oppressed that“…they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of conﬁdence in the peoples ability to think, to want, and to know” (Oppressed 60).

!128 such a way as to hide certain sites or circumstances of oppression from casual perception. If we recall that for Badiou the dialectical moment of “determination proper” is the moment where “the proletariat unmasks… the part of itself that is engaged in revisionism”(Theory 9-10), and recall that “revisionism” here refers to “the specific and homogenous form, adapted to the working class, of the general bourgeois and imperialist space” (Theory 9), then we can see that in both cases the effect of this “re- consideration” of one’s previous “considerations” is precisely a form of “unmasking” (Oppressed 112). This discovery and rejection of bourgeois/oppressor forms of consciousness is not engaged (only) with explicit appearances of these forms, but also (and principally) with the identification of implicit and/or unconscious appearances of them. From the very beginning there is a need to begin rooting out these more subtle forms, regardless of the what they are in particular. What these look like in particular will depend upon the circumstances, precisely because they are the form of oppressor consciousness “adapted” to these circumstances. Finally, this first investigation and first meeting do not produce a final end but rather “[send] them all back… to the disjoined whole, which becomes a new totality” (Oppressed 112), which they confront with new knowledge gained from the previous round (both of the area’s conditions and of our their own consciousnesses).

The stage of the process described in the previous paragraph focuses mainly on understanding the structure of the area — P, in Badiou’s formalism37— “the nuclei of the

37 That this was not an exclusive focus and instead required the development of the consciousness of the investigators is not surprising because the entire enterprise of Pedagogy of the Oppressed is based upon understanding “subjectivity and objectivity in constant dialectical relationship” (Oppressed 50).

!129 principal and secondary contradictions38 which involve the inhabitants of the area” (Oppressed 112). Freire suggests that the investigators may even be able to organize their program content at this stage and even ventures that “one can safely afﬁrm that action based on these observations would be much more likely to succeed than that based on ‘decisions from the top’” (Oppressed 112). Here is where we encounter a crucial warning: “The investigators should not, however, be tempted by this possibility. The basic thing, starting from the initial perception of these nuclei of contradictions… is to study the inhabitants’ level of awareness of these contradictions” (Oppressed 112-113).

The reason for this necessity is related to the “limit-situations” discussed in chapter one. Freire points out that although these limit-situations are objective (ie. material) (Oppressed 113), “[i]f individuals are caught up in and are unable to separate themselves from these limit-situations, their theme in reference to these situations is fatalism, and the task implied by the theme is the lack of a task” (Oppressed 113)[emphasis in original]. Badiou diagnoses a similar problem in Theory of the Subject:

In the factories, the fatalistic discourse is very well implanted. ‘Workers will be workers’, ‘We will always be fucked over’, ‘Here nobody wants to do anything”, and so on. Defeatism is the spontaneous philosophy of proletarians. Although the coarseness and stupidity of this discourse are dis-couraging, for those who are enlightened by the theory of the subject it is nevertheless a divisible and precarious historical production. An organized micro-conﬁdence (a communist workers’ group) locally disrupts its rule (328).

38 The concepts of “principal” and “secondary” contradictions are formulated in Mao’s inﬂuential text On Contradiction. In this text he explains that while “[t]here are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing” nevertheless “one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determines… the existence and development of the other contradictions” (110). He explains that in a capitalist society there is certainly the principal bourgeoise/proletariat contradiction, but there are also secondary contradictions between other classes (peasants/bourgeoisie, proletariat/petty bourgeoise, etc). The principal contradiction can change, and the classic example is that of imperialist invasion when the principal contradiction becomes between the country itself and imperialism (110).

!130 Both “courage” and “conﬁdence” have technical meanings in Theory of the Subject. I discuss “conﬁdence” in chapter three and leave “courage” aside because a discussion of it would exceed the boundaries of this work39. For the moment it is enough to say that the existence of fatalism is not an insurmountable problem; indeed the thing to do is to pose this fatalism as a problem. This is what happens during the process of decoding: “the participants externalize their thematics… as they do this, they begin to see how they themselves acted while actually experiencing the situation they are now analyzing, and thus reach a ‘perception of their previous perception’” (Oppressed 115). Once again, we see that the goal is “being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian ‘split’—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness” (Oppressed 112). And once again, “[b]y stimulating ‘perception of the previous perception’ and ‘knowledge of the previous knowledge’, decoding stimulates the appearance of a new perception and the development of new

39 It may be of some interest to explain why “courage” exceeds the bounds of this thesis, but I can only provide a cursory overview here. In Chapter One I suggest that the education process has a place within Badiou’s algorithm: it is about learning to separate from the structure, what he calls “concentration”. The actual attempts to go beyond this structure are beyond the process of education, and “courage” is a concept which Badiou develops to treat this “beyond”. He builds it by reference to Lacan’s notion of “anxiety”, which is concept used to designate a negative reaction to the “too-muchness” of the Real. Awareness of reality’s incompleteness can provoke this anxiety, and this anxiety itself brings on calls to the superego which is the authority that is meant to re-establish the incomplete law. This is perhaps more easily understood in political terms: in Chapter One I identiﬁed the effect of the Real as ﬁssuring reality and creating “symptoms”; ie. rebellions. Oftentimes in reality these are met with the force of the (in this case juridical) law itself, which behaves in a way which approaches a sort of non-law (the excesses of American riot police attest to this). Badiou’s point is that this principle is also active for Marxist politics; Marxists themselves must confront anxiety. Otherwise they will tend in the direction of superegoeic appeal; see Stalin’s paranoid-neurotic system of persecution. Against anxiety one must posit “courage”, which is a confrontation with the Real which does not call for its submersion (as with anxiety) but instead for a changing of the law itself (what Badiou calls “Justice” in contrast to “superego”). Badiou is insistent that these should not be taken as phenomenological descriptions but as concepts proper to the subject as such (ie. anxiety —> superego describes a process and not a feeling). Because “courage” involves this encounter with the Real and my focus is on the educational processes which precede this encounter, “courage” exceeds the bounds of this thesis.

!131 knowledge” (Oppressed 115). Importantly, just as the “evaluation meetings” convened by the investigators “challenge” each investigator in a way which makes them reﬂect on their consciousness (Oppressed 112), the co-ordinator of the decoding process “must not only listen to the individuals but must challenge them, posing as problems both the codiﬁed existential situation and their own answers” (Oppressed 118). It must be stressed that although in both cases this “challenging” is clearly educational, the processes discussed to this point are part of the thematic investigation stage of the process as a whole. I point this out in order to stress two things: 1) that the title “investigators” is (in this context) a particular way of saying “learner” and so the fact that the investigators are learning is no surprise, and 2) the nature of the oppressive reality and the ideas and actions which can effectively confront it can only be discovered by the process of separation which divides the existing ideas and actions from within by distinguishing the liberatory from the oppressive (this is one reason that Badiou calls fatalism “divisible”); it would be impossible to know how to structure a liberatory education if one did not undergo this process of “challenging”, where “challenging” is clearly a way of describing the process of concentration.

After this process of decoding in which the investigators attempt to understand the ways in which the people in the area under study perceive their reality the investigators “undertake a systemic interdisciplinary study of their findings” (Oppressed 119), which entails both the classification of findings into disciplinary categories (which are not understood to be absolutely distinct) and another round of group discussion “where each specialist present to the interdisciplinary team a project for the ‘breakdown’ of his theme” (Oppressed 120). It is easy to see that this discussion serves as another opportunity for each of them to ”‘re-consider’, through the ‘considerations’ of others, their own previous ‘consideration’” (Oppressed 112). On the basis of these reports and breakdowns it is possible to create the educational materials which will themselves become the basis for the educational materials which allow the educational program to

!132 be expanded (Oppressed 121). And only then once this “didactic material” is prepared can it be said that “the team of educators is ready to represent to the people their own thematics in systematized and amplified form” (Oppressed 123). Note the similarity between “amplified” and “concentrated”. Hopefully it is clear that the process discussed above is the fulfillment of the process whereby the investigators “come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation — the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist” (Oppressed 95) [emphasis in original]. It is clear that the investigation process therefore involves studying P ( “objective situation”) and A=(AAp) (the necessarily-divided “awareness” of the oppressed).

Although he does not say too much about the education process proper in this section, I think that we are safe in supposing that the process is very similar to the previous moments of the process: it will involve discussions where participants externalize and reﬂect upon their existing consciousness and are challenged by others. During this process they both learn about the structure in which they exist and learn to see how this structure is also within them, and begin to separate themselves from this structure. To return to Badiou, it is via this process that their subjectivity appears:

It is by realizing its interior unity, by purifying itself of its determination (of its division) by the bourgeoisie, that the working class projects itself expansively in the destructive battle against the imperialist splace. ‘Solicited’ by bourgeois oppression, it only acts as force, and only enters into a combative correlation with the adversary, by determining itself against itself, against the internal form of its former impotence (Theory 35) [emphasis in original].

I will now summarize the process and then provide a diagram to illustrate it. The problem-posing approach to education has two branches: thematic investigation and education. The goal of the process as a whole is for the oppressed to “[determine] itself against itself, against the internal form of its former impotence” (Theory 35); ie. to externalize the oppressor within. To do this it is necessary for them to learn to see both

!133 the structure clearly, as well as for them to understand that their own thinking is split because of their inclusion within this structure. In order for this to happen it is necessary for the investigators to also have this knowledge, and so the thematic investigation is split into two moments. The first is about investigating the conditions of the area, which in Badiou’s formalism is an investigation of P. The second moment involves investigating the awareness of the oppressed in a way which highlights its dividedness: A=(AAp). The act of “challenging” them is what affirms that the investigator is paying attention to this division; merely nodding along means that one is acting as though the entirety of every idea is acceptable and good, whereas outright dismissal means that one believes that every idea is worthless. The second branch — education — again has two moments. Here we can again say that one moment is about P, and this is the moment in which the oppressed learn to see the structure clearly. The other moment is about them learning to reflect upon their own consciousness qua split; A=(AAp). We then have two branches of the process, each split into two moments — which are conceptual and dialectical and not necessarily temporal moments — which refer to learning about either the structure or the divided consciousness. I have represented this in the following diagram:

Problem-Posing Model of Education

!134 That the different moments are labelled with “P” or “A=(AAp)” should not be taken to mean that these moments only deal with those labels. On the contrary we saw that the process of investigating the structure involves a period of reﬂection where the investigators “consider their considerations” (Oppressed 112); one can even see that this period of reﬂection is an example of the education branch being embedded in a moment of the investigation branch. The point of the labels is just to show the primary aspect of the different moments, all the while understanding that this is only a relative and not an absolute priority. It is easy to see that the education branch provides many opportunities for the investigators to expand their knowledge about the structure or the ideas of the oppressed, and indeed Freire himself suggests that the educators should ask the participants “directly” for other themes which should be “noted down” and “immediately proposed to the group as a problem” (Oppressed 123-124). It is clear that the moments of the process are not so distinct as the diagram suggests, and I note this interpenetration 1) because it happens and 2) because it wards off readings which would interpret the diagram as describing a linear process as opposed to a conceptual rendering of a process which in practice resists easy schematization. There is no room for approaches which break it into distinct stages, as Freire makes clear:

The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher- student: she is not “cognitive” at one point and “narrative” at another. She is always “cognitive”, whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students — no longer docile listeners — are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own” (Oppressed 80-81).

In this section I have tried to show that Freire’s investigation process contains the logical-dialectical elements of splitting — A=(AAp) — and concentration that I have

!135 emphasized to this point. It is easy to see that this process is invested from the outset in diminishing the influence of oppressive ideas and practices, of diminishing the influence of oppressive aspects of ideas and practices which are oriented towards liberation. At every stage there is a focus on learning, whether this is done by the investigators (who learn while investigating), by the students (who learn from the teachers), or the teachers (who learn from the students). The success of this process is dependent upon everyone involved coming to see how they have been shaped and held in place by the structure of oppression. Once again, I have argued that this is the stage of the process that Badiou calls “determination proper”, where the proletariat (or the oppressed) come to define themselves not (only) against the bourgeoisie (or oppressor) but against their own internal adversary. But again this is not the whole story, because we have not encountered the practical action which changes the situation. I turn to this, and to the problem of “circular education”, in the next section.

The Problem of Circular Education

In the previous section I presented a conceptual breakdown of the problem-posing model of education. I tried to show that it involves moments which attend to both the revelation of the structure (what we might more typically call “education”) as well as the revelation of consciousness as divided and the intentional exteriorization of “structural” aspects of consciousness. In keeping with my discussion in the first chapter, I have called this latter part “concentration”, which requires the first two parts in order to make the necessary distinctions involved in this concentration. But the reference to the first chapter may remind the reader of a problem: circularity. In my exposition of Badiou’s dialectical algorithm I suggested that the education process was focused mostly on “determination proper” (Theory 10); it is a process in which the oppressed (and their educators and leaders!) begin “expansively tearing [themselves] away from that which nonetheless persists in fixing [their] site” (Theory 38); ie., the structure. But this was not the entirety of the process, but rather preceded another stage which was

!136 focused on the limitation of determination and the breaking of circularity via practice. How does this problem arise with respect to the education process discussed above?

To illustrate this, consider the following: We decide upon an area in which we would like to begin our educational projects, and take on Freire’s afﬁrmation on the need to begin with the “situation” of the oppressed “which determines their perception of it” (Oppressed 85). This motivates us to begin the investigation stage as sketched above. Our team (which consists of outside investigators and local volunteers) perform a careful study of the local conditions as well as of the perceptions of locals. This process helps the investigators to discover unnoticed reservations about the capacities of the oppressed, internalized stereotypes, elitist ideas, and other forms of thought which are likely to inhibit their solidarity with the oppressed. In addition, by studying these conditions alongside the perceptions of those conditions we can begin to see the ways in which those perceptions “align” with those conditions in that they maintain or reproduce them. Based upon this study, we prepare educational materials which will pose both the structural conditions and the perceptions of the oppressed as problems which encourage students to reﬂect more critically upon both, in concert with other students. If the process is successful, all involved will gain a more thorough and multifaceted understanding of the local conditions, a more radical way of thinking, and stronger bonds both between community members and those who have come from outside to help them (us).

We know that this process does not have an obvious ending point, so now consider that we have developed educational materials and facilitated a number of educational circles which we have deemed to be a success. To say that they were successful is not to say that they were perfect, and so we decide to revise our approach and renew our collaboration with the community members. We look once again at the objective situation, and once again at the ideas that people in the community have. We ﬁnd that really the situation has not changed so much, and so we focus on reﬁning our analysis

!137 to arrive to a more complete and nuanced understanding upon which to base the educational programs. Because it is unlikely that we have reached everyone in the community with our educational programs, many members of the community continue to think in the same way as before. As Freire says, the situation in which the oppressed are embedded “determines their perception of it” (Oppressed 85), and because the situation is the same those perceptions are mostly the same. Even those people that we have reached with our educational programs still live in that same situation, a situation which by hardship, humiliation, and mystification constantly testifies against the reality and legitimacy of their newfound consciousness. So on the whole we can expect that things on the investigation side will not change so much, and one can easily see that this leads us to an education process which is based on retreading the old ground, both to bring new people in and to firm up the gains already won. But once again, this leads us back to the beginning of the paragraph, back to the same situation and to similar perceptions.

It is clear that the previous paragraph depicts a circle. Freire was well aware of this problem, even if he did not formulate it in identical terms: We can locate a solution to the problem in Freire’s distinction between “emergence” and “intervention”:

“Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. Intervention in reality —historical awareness itself — thus represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientizaçāo of the situation. Conscientizaçāo is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence” (Oppressed 109) [emphasis in original]

The education process that I have described to this point is about conscientizaçāo. What he means by “emergence” can be deduced from the following passage on the oppressor tactic of “manipulation”: “Prior to the emergence of the people there is no manipulation (precisely speaking), but rather total suppression. When the oppressed are almost completely submerged in reality, it is unnecessary to manipulate them” (Oppressed 148).

!138 “Emergence” is therefore the first step beyond acclimation and accommodation. It is the first whisper of properly subjective (rather than merely objective) activity. But it is not yet “intervention” because there is an intermediary process of “deepening of awareness”, without which there is the risk of manipulation wherein “the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives” (Oppressed 147), and the success of this endeavour will depend upon “ the political immaturity of [the] people” (Oppressed 147). Manipulation is achieved “by means of pacts between the dominant and the dominated classes” (Oppressed 147), by “myths” including the myth of ”the model of itself which the bourgeoisie presents to the people as the possibility for their own ascent” (Oppressed 147), by the creation of “an unauthentic type of ‘organization’” in place of ” the true organization of the emerged and emerging people” (Oppressed 148), and so on. The point is that in all cases there is a goal shared among the oppressors to channel the embryonic desire for change toward non-threatening forms of action. These are all examples of “revisionism” in the sense that Badiou uses it in Theory of the Subject: “the specific and homogenous form, adapted to the working class, of the general bourgeois and imperialist space” (Theory 9), and (once again) the moment of “determination proper” consists in “unmasking” these revisionist tendencies for what they are: “an integral part of the external antagonistic term” (Theory 9). For Badiou at the time of writing this means the French Communist Party and the unions (Theory 9), ie. “unauthentic types of ‘organization’“ (Oppressed 148). Conscientizaçāo is the deepening of the initial awareness (of the antagonism between oppressor and oppressed, of the need for change, etc). This “antidote to manipulation lies in a critically conscious revolutionary organization, which will pose to the people as problems their position in the historical process, the national reality, and manipulation itself” (Oppressed 148-149). I have already shown that the “problem-posing” approach can be thought of in terms of concentration, and the idea of conscientizaçāo as a “deepening” is further evidence for this.

!139 But this is only the beginning (as I have already suggested), because we still need “intervention”, ie. a form of practice which is capable of changing the situation and breaking the circle in “circular education”. “Intervention” is then somewhat more speciﬁc than “practice”, because the former grounds itself in critical understanding and reﬂection, whereas the latter can encompass any old form of action. It is more akin to “revolutionary practice” as in the following from Mao’s On Practice:

Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world (81).

“Emergence” then corresponds to a sort of immediate awareness of the situation of oppression (“perceptual knowledge”), and conscientizaçāo then corresponds to the passage from perceptual to rational knowledge. And then there is the necessary passage to “revolutionary practice”, without which (Freire says) one only gets “Subjects in expectancy”:

[i]t would indeed be idealistic to afﬁrm that, by merely reﬂecting on oppressive reality and discovering their status as objects, persons have thereby already become Subjects. But while this perception in and of itself does not mean that thinkers have become Subjects, it does mean…that they are "Subjects in expectancy”—an expectancy which leads them to seek to solidify their new status (Oppressed 130-131).

What is this “status”? It is the understanding that by the oppressed and their comrades that they can change their situation. This “status” is precarious and remains hypothetical, however well-nurtured the hypothesis by the process of education. This hypothesis is conﬁrmed when they actually undertake a successful “intervention”, which conﬁrms their previous knowledge both of the situation (otherwise their intervention would miss the mark) and of themselves (or else they would not have executed it properly). We should therefore understand Freire’s assertion that intervention is “historical awareness itself” in a double-edged way (Oppressed 109). The success of the

!140 action proves the legitimacy of their awareness of history and the structure — historical awareness — as well the advanced status of their consciousness — historical awareness; awareness-become-historical via transforming action. It is easy to see that these two correspond to the two senses of right (scientiﬁc and political) discussed earlier in this chapter.

Conclusion

In this chapter I launched into the problem of education itself after spending much of the ﬁrst chapter trying to motivate the necessity of education while clarifying the latter and specifying its particular role in the process of transformation. This process does not begin or end with the sort of education that Freire describes, but this education is how the existing tendencies to resist are recognized and developed so that situations of oppression can be transformed. My discussions of Freire’s approach must be distinguished from what Badiou calls “pedagogy”, which is more in line with what Freire calls “the banking model” because it consists of communicating information about the structure in such a way as to preserve it: ”what is not transmitted is precisely the process of qualitative concentration of this bizarre force” (Theory 39).

During this chapter I have tried to show that the basic logic of splitting developed in Chapter One can be used to understand a number of educational issues, whether this means a more thorough understanding of the correct approach or a better sense of how one can get things wrong. The discussion of the concept of the “mass line” helped to introduce the importance of “spirals”, and the example of wage demands that I used to illustrate this concept introduced the importance of “problematization”. All of this led us down the brambled path of what is meant by “right” when approaching the problem of Marxist education. The upshot was that “right” has a twofold meaning, referring to both “just” and (scientiﬁcally) “correct”.

In order to show more speciﬁcally how Freire approaches concentration I zoomed in on

!141 his discussion of the process of thematic investigation, showing how the different stages can be thought of in terms of the logic of splitting that I have been using. Based on this analysis I produced a diagram of the educational process as whole, labelling its arms in accordance with parts of this logic of splitting depending on which is most important for that part of the process. Finally, I returned to the problem of circularity, and suggested how this educational process leads to a circle without action to transform the structure of oppression.

Despite the twists and turns of the argument everything to this point follows in some respect from the basic statement that A=(AAp). While this should be taken as a formalization of Freire’s basic point that ”[t]he oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being” (Oppressed 48), one should take it further: individuals are split, but so is society, and so are everyone’s ideas. By taking this seriously we can equip ourselves with an educational logic which is both simple (because it can be easily stated) and powerful (because it applies to many situations), and which is aware of its own necessity (the necessity of problematization and concentration) and its own limits (beyond education there is a need for transforming action).But after arming ourselves with this approach we have to be careful to not assume that it can shield us from mistakes, or what I will call in the next chapter “deviations”. Much of the next chapter engages with trying to understand how things can go wrong, and in trying to see in yet more detail how these wrongs can emerge.

!142 Chapter 3: Problems of Spiralling Education

Introduction

In the ﬁrst two chapters I have used some of Badiou’s arguments in Theory of the Subject (and some of his other texts published around the same time) in order to produce a reading of Freire’s approach to education which I think can begin to answer his call for a renewed focus on the problem of subjectivity (Daring 23). I have used Badiou’s logic of splitting to provide some scaffolding for Freire’s argument which I believe allows some of its more obscure elements to be made clear, and which recasts his project of political education in a way which places it ﬁrmly in a Marxist problematic, even if Freire himself occasionally (and correctly) sees tensions with this problematic.

Although I have applied (or excavated) this logic in Freire’s writings, we are not quite done. A few tasks remain. The ﬁrst of these involves the problem of what are often called “deviations”, which in this thesis will refer to departures from the A=(AAp) approach. We have encountered some of these before, but in this chapter I provide some more conceptual background, and then use the concept to show how the schematic diagram that I suggested in Chapter Two can be “simpliﬁed” (Freire’s word) in order to produce the two archetypical incorrect approaches to education (Oppressed 135). One of these is the classic “banking model”, and the other I have called “spontaneous” in keeping with some of Freire’s own language. I then return to Freire’s example of wage demands that I discussed in Chapter Two, but this time I cite Lenin’s What is to be Done? (Freire’s source for that example) directly and in more detail. This discussion will make clear the symmetric nature of incorrect approaches to education, as well as showing that Freire’s reference to Lenin is apt because the latter is focused on effectively the same problem of concentration as is Freire.

!143 After these discussions of what not to do, I give examples of what “concentration” might actually mean. This is difﬁcult because the process can only really exist concretely. This being said, I do suggest that the position of the intellectual (teacher, leader…) is a universalizing position, in that the intellectual’s task is to bring to light the universal dimension of ideas, practices, struggles, or problems which appear to be only particular or local.

Finally, I turn to what is probably the most difficult part of this work’s argument. The question is simple: if we abandon all guarantees which some take from the structure, upon what can we base our decision to begin any of these processes of struggle, investigation, education, or concentration? To answer this I note that both Freire and Badiou have recourse to a concept like “faith”, and I try to show that this is a faith which our non-deterministic line of argument requires. This is not just any faith, however, but is one which is specified in certain ways. I then suggest that this faith’s form will also change during the implementation of the processes of education and concentration that I have sketched in this work, as the relationship between teachers and learners produces a new form of proximity between them, about which nothing too specific can be said.

Deviations, Enemies, and the "Compact Group"

In the previous chapter I tried to show that Freire’s educational approach can be schematized using the basic dialectical logics developed in the previous chapter, and that this approach can fit into Badiou’s “dialectical algorithm” that I introduced in the first chapter. An important result of the previous chapter is that what is called “Subject” is not identifiable with the passive position that Freire calls “submersion” (Oppressed 148) , nor is it identifiable with the beginnings of activity that he calls “emergence” (Oppressed 148), nor is it identifiable with the process of conscientizaçāo (this leads to the “Subject in expectancy”). One can only speak of “subject” during the

!144 process of what Freire calls “intervention”, when (switching now to Badiouian terms) “force reapplies itself to that from which it conﬂictual emerges” (Theory 11), ie. the structure of oppression. To return to the moments of the dialectical algorithm, this corresponds to the stage of “limitation of determination” about which I wrote in the ﬁrst chapter.

This notion of subjectivity is obviously different from many classical formulations (Cartesian, for instance), and Badiou draws a line of demarcation between himself and these other formulations by pointing out that in these latter one sees the subject as the point of departure (eg. as the site of experience), whereas for him (and for Marx and Freud) the subject is something at which one arrives (Theory 279); “A subject is nowhere given… It must be found” (Theory 278). I think that we can take this “found” in two senses. The first is that by being excluded, oppressed, and marginalized the oppressed do not in any way appear at first sight to be either a subject (in a perhaps more classic sense of “having agency”) or the basis for a subjectivity (they are too “beaten down” to become a potent political force). In his Pedagogy of Hope Freire suggests that ”…it is precisely by obeying in order to stay alive that the slave eventually discovers that ‘obeying’, in this case, is a form of struggle” and that slaves are “[f]ull of rebellion, amidst apparent accommodation40” (98). Here he recognizes that one must first “find the rebellion”, ie. discover that struggle is already happening. In other terms: one must begin by recognizing the existence of objective subjectivity, ie. the existing practices,

40 Badiou discusses this point from another angle in Theory of the Subject when he remarks upon those “ex-colonialists who were haunted by the regulated calmness of their servant… They could not stop — and rightly so — being convinced that, at the ﬁrst signal… this affable man, this excellent cook, this child-lover, would unload right on their chest the scrap metal of an old gun usually reserved for Mister’s morning hunt” (Theory 260). In this way the colonialist is also quite aware of the rebellion “amidst apparent accommodation” (Hope 98). But as a I explain in the rest of the paragraph, “[a]ll this still gives you only the causal location” (Theory 260); ie. to recognize that the structure is “haunted” by rebellion is only the ﬁrst step. Badiou explains: “The subject exists only insofar as that which perturbs comes to put its own order on another place” (Theory 260); ie. subjectivity coincides with the act of “working back upon” the structure.

!145 thoughts, and beliefs of the oppressed people in a given area. This covers the ﬁrst sense of “found”. The second sense is to look within this struggle and attempt to distinguish the subjective (force, subjectivity) from the objective (force, subjectivity), insofar as one can (it is not possible to do it completely). This is the thrust of Freire’s assertion that ”it is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this tradition of struggle, of resistance, and ‘work it’” (Hope 99). Articulating these two senses of “ﬁnd” — where one is about recognizing the existence of objective subjectivity and the other is about separating the radical aspects of this existing struggle from its accommodationist aspects — is central to the project of concentration.

The arguments that I have developed in order to explain and justify “concentration” have depended upon accepting as fact that inclusion in the structure of oppression induces a splitting into whatever is included, where this splitting is between a placedness and out-of-placedness which reﬂects the inability of the structure to ultimately assimilate, domesticate, include, pacify (etc.) the entirety of what it includes. This is what is meant by A=(AAp). This is a fundamental point and no part of this thesis would function without it. But if the correct approach follows from this basic statement (a statement about the objective existence/condition of the oppressed), then it is also plausible to suggest that incorrect approaches should be understandable from this same basis. These incorrect approaches are called “deviations”, a term which I explain below.

Combatting “deviations” is a subtle and difficult task, and this subtlety and difficulty of this process is suggested by the following quote from Lenin, from a work to which we will return later in the chapter: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire” (What Is To Be Done? 15). One gets the impression that this dialectical balancing act takes place upon a knife’s edge. And it consists both of maintaining (and

!146 strengthening) the “compact group” and of defending against “enemies”. This tells us that the task of this chapter should explain how both the actions of the “compact group” and those of the “enemies” are both derived from the same underlying (materialist) dialectic.

I will make a brief aside on the use of “enemy” in order to console anyone who might bristle at my use of that term. I think it is uncontroversial to say that those who consciously oppose the pedagogy of the oppressed are “enemies” in Freire’s view, but this does not exhaust the matter. Consistent materialism demands that we consider also those who unconsciously oppose it. In doing so we do not depart an inch from Freire, who says that

[w]hat distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures. If they act in the same way, the objectives become identical. It is as self-contradictory for the dominant elites to pose human- world relations as problems to the people as it is for the revolutionary leaders not to do so (Oppressed 167) [emphasis added].

So it is possible to have the best of intentions but nevertheless become objectively oppressive, “for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize” (Oppressed 75). By pointing this out I do not intend to suggest that the conscious oppressor is equivalent to the unconscious oppressor41. On the contrary the “unconscious oppressor” is exactly the kind of person that I would hope to persuade with this work. The distinction is crucial because the

41 Here one can note another difference between Lenin and Stalin. In his Defence of Lost Causes Slavoj Žižek argues that while both Lenin and Stalin believed that the “objective meaning” of someone’s actions can contradict their intentions (ie. one can believe that one is one the side of the oppressors while nonetheless acting against their interests), Stalin took a “fateful further step” beyond Lenin and “re-subjectivized this objective meaning” (230). Žižek explains that “[i]n the Stalinist universe there are… ultimately no dupes, everyone knows the ‘objective meaning’ of their acts, so that, instead of illusory consciousness, we get direct hypocrisy and deceit” (230). It is easy to see that this is another example of the Stalinist tendency to immediately identify subjectivity and objectivity that I have discussed elsewhere in this thesis.

!147 “unconscious enemy” is the kind of “enemy” who is most likely to change their approach (and thereby cease to be an “enemy”). I point this out in order to suggest that when analyzing “enemies” this should not be limited to those who are most open and obvious about their antipathy towards the oppressed, but to those who hold a non- dialectical view while nonetheless championing the cause of the oppressed. These are objectively “enemies”, even if they are not so subjectively (ie. in their consciousness).

That these “objective enemies” fail to be dialectical does not mean that they fail to reference the dialectic while formulating their views. It is important to be clear about the meaning of “objective” in the preceding sentence: on the one hand it refers to the outcomes of incorrect courses of action which are here distinguished from intentions, and on the other hand it refers to the (objective) basis for these incorrect courses of action. If certain “revolutionary leaders” do “act in the same way” as the oppressors (Oppressed 167), then we should be able to explain this fact using the same formulations as have been established in the preceding chapters; ie. based upon the fundamental premise of A=(AAp) and the manifold consequences which we have elaborated based upon it. We will call these deviations, in that they depart (“deviate”) from the dialectical view. As Badiou explains: ”To think of them as deviations presupposes seeing them as forces of repetition internal to contradiction, each one tends to re-invoke one of the terms of the initial contradiction” where one “only repeats the dominant term42” and the other “[argues] for a state of original purity preceding all determination” (Rational Kernel 75). The former refers to A=Ap, and the latter to A=A.

42 When Badiou calls the structural term “dominant” one should not understand this to be a sign of pessimism. It is true (almost by deﬁnition) that the structural term will win out in normal times, and that the in the class struggle it is typically true that the capitalist class is dominant (or else we would not be discussing capitalism). Badiou’s logic of contradiction depends upon this asymmetry between the aspects of a contradiction, but this asymmetry is reversible (Theory 25). The idea that the terms in a contradiction are asymmetrical and that the primacy of one term over the other can be reversed is laid out in Mao’s On Contradiction during a discussion on “the principal aspect of a contradiction” (109).

!148 In attending to the problem of deviations we are staying close to materialism. Badiou explains that “Hegel’s idealism …manifests in the absence of any positive theory of deviation” and “[i]n an idealist conception of the dialectic, deviations do not and cannot exist” (Rational Kernel 75). This is essentially because the objective development of Spirit does not admit contingency: if people are acting they are necessarily acting in accordance with Spirit (“all true thinking is a thinking of necessity” (Hegel’s Logic 278). To admit the existence of deviations is therefore to depart from the idea that everything which happens is happening in accordance with the necessities of spirit. Indeed,

… Dialectical Materialism presents deviation as ineluctable, the existence of the false and the past at every stage of the process like a necessary law. There is no succession of the new from the past without a continual struggle between the two” (Rational Kernel 76).

So we cannot say in advance that any particular action or idea is deviant, because this would require a predictive power which we do not possess (because correctness is established through practice). What we can say is that deviations will exist, and it is therefore always necessary to watch out for them and criticize them. This is how I believe we should explain Freire’s afﬁrmation that “[t]hose who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” (Oppressed 60).

It may seem strange to suggest that these are “deviations” from a dialectical view when one can easily see that most people involved in politics have no interest in dialectics and therefore would not be “deviating” with respect to a dialectical method. Here it is useful

!149 to reafﬁrm that (in my view43) Marxism holds that the world itself is dialectical and therefore one must cultivate a dialectical perspective which can effectively grasp the contradictory nature of reality. This statement does not preclude the possibility of a partial-yet-relatively-correct description which would result from emphasizing certain aspects to the exclusion of others. For our purposes this would amount to perspectives which think in terms of A=Ap or A=A, and not A=(AAp). These have the potential to effectively describe the things upon which they focus, but are limited by their non- dialecticity. These are the deviations proper to “enemies”. The deviations proper to the

“compact group” are those which result from the failure to hold onto a dialectical perspective while attempting to do so. The abstraction of this presentation could perhaps be confusing, and so in the next section I will deal more concretely with the “enemies” kind of deviation, drawing on the diagram that I presented in the previous chapter.

Banking and Spontaneity

In this previous chapter I introduced a diagram which attempts to schematize Freire’s problem-posing model of education in the terms Badiou introduces in Theory of the Subject, ie. that every thing (A) is necessarily in a structure (P) and is internally split by this inclusion (A=AAp). The diagram suggests that both of the constitutive moments of this process (thematic investigation and education) can themselves be divided according to whether their principle focus is investigation/reﬂection upon the structure

43 The view that the world is itself dialectical (and therefore requires a dialectical perspective) stands in contrast with the view that dialectics is a theoretical approach or method which only describes a world which itself cannot be said to contain “contradictions”. The Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov explains that this comes from the assumption that only statements can contradict each other (34). One should note that the statement “the world is itself dialectical” is not inherently idealist or materialist; in his contribution to the The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy Stephen Houlgate disagrees with “non-metaphysical” interpretations of Hegel’s logic and argues that “Hegel’s logic, by his own admission, is both a logic and a metaphysics or an ontology” (Houlgate 118).

!150 or dialogue with the oppressed which is intended to both reveal their divided consciousness and to concentrate this division in favour of radicalism and against docility or accommodation. In the previous section I introduced “deviations”, and suggested (following Badiou) that one expects these deviations to either “only [repeat] the dominant term” (A=Ap) or “[argue] for a state of original purity preceding all determination” (A=A) (Rational Kernel 75). This would suggest that educational deviations could be understand by taking only half of the diagram to be the whole. This approach is supported by Freire in the following footnote:

…dialogue is the essence of revolutionary action. In the theory of this action, the actors intersubjectively direct their action upon on an object (reality, which mediates them) with the humanization of men (to be achieved by transforming that reality) as their objective. In the theory of oppressor action, antidialogical in essence, the above scheme is simpliﬁed. The actors have as simultaneous objects of their action both reality and the oppressed, and the preservation of oppression (through the preservation of oppressive reality) as their objective (Oppressed 72). [emphasis in original]

In addition to summarizing the basic thrust of the dialogical approach, Freire makes the key point that the anti-dialogical approach is not wholly other to the former, but is a simpliﬁed version of it. This suggests that the problem with this other approach is not so much that it is wrong as that it is incomplete or partial. It should not come as a surprise that when separated from their full context the parts of the “simpliﬁed” process do not appear in exactly the same form.

To begin with I will consider the “simplification” which results from seeing the oppressed as totally determined by the structure of oppression, a “simplification” which amounts to saying that A=Ap. Keeping in mind our discussions in the first chapter, we can see that this is also a position which holds that there is no “excess” to be found within the oppressed. They “fit” well into the structure, whether this is conceived as being wholly static or in the objective-dialectical terms that we discussed with reference

!151 to Hegel and Stalin (where the actions and ideas of people are thought of in terms of the development of Spirit or the “material life of society” respectively (Stalin 117). This then authorizes an approach to constructing the content of education via a study of the circumstances, and it authorizes an approach to education which is engaged merely in the re-presentation of these circumstances. It would then look like this:

Banking Model of Education

It is clear that I am describing something akin to what Freire calls the “banking-model” of education. Consider the following passage: “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (Oppressed 72). The sin of this approach is that it “[projects] an absolute ignorance onto others” and thereby “negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (Oppressed 72). One can easily see how this “only [repeats] the dominant term” (Rational Kernel 75): everything is drawn from the structure (which in general is certainly ‘dominant’), the oppressed are taken to be without capacity or agency, and the existing ways of investigating and educating are taken to be correct (there is not the process of “re-considering one’s considerations” that I discussed in chapter two). I say “something akin to” the banking model because Freire himself emphasizes that in this model “[t]he teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized…” (Oppressed 71), and I am suggesting that

!152 education can still be “banking” even if none of those three adjectives apply; ie. one can see the world as dialectical while not appreciated the role of the oppressed in changing the world. See Freire’s discussion of the “domesticated dialectic” on this point (Oppressed 38-39), as well as my discussions of Hegel and Stalin in Chapter One44.

The ability to discuss the banking-model in terms of a “simplified” diagram is interesting in itself but it does not exhaust things. The other “simplification” is actually not discussed much in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but both Badiou in Theory of the Subject and Freire in Pedagogy of Hope make reference to it. Before referencing these, I will sketch what this other simplification might look like:

Spontaneous Model of Education

44 It may also be useful to stress once again that the generality of my approach — which here lumps together Stalin, Hegel, and many school teachers across the world — is not intended to replace a more particular analysis. It is clearly impossible to operationalize this approach if this lack of distinction is maintained in practice. But insofar as we can —following Engels — accuse Hegel of allowing his revolutionary side to be “smothered” and to lead to a conservatism (Ludwig Feuerbach 13), insofar as we can —following Mao — suggest that Stalin did not emphasize the subjective side of politics enough (Critique of Stalin 117-118), and insofar as we can —following Althusser — suggest that school teachers are on the front lines of the ideological reproduction which sustains many societies (Reproduction 75), then we are justiﬁed in suggesting that all of these have a conservative bent to them, even if the character of this conservatism (in the sense of conservation, continuity, order….) may not be the same.

!153 Here the investigation stage involves speaking to some of those who live in the area of interest, and the education stage involves further discussion, involving educators who have been equipped with some knowledge about what those in the community think. It is clear that the investigators and educators have no basis upon which to judge the correctness of what they have heard, because they have not investigated the conditions in the area but only the local perception of these conditions. Recalling Badiou’s point that the second sort of deviation “[argues] for a state of original purity preceding all determination” (Rational Kernel 75), we can see that this approach sees the oppressed as essentially “pure”, and in possession of essentially (completely) correct ideas. The problem would just be an inability — due to external oppression — to articulate these correct ideas (they are “voiceless” in some sense). In total contrast to the banking model where we have “the [projection] of absolute ignorance onto others” which “negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” here we have the projection of absolute knowledge which also “negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (Oppressed 72). If people’s knowledge is already correct, then what is there to inquire about beyond more examples of this correct knowledge? On this point Badiou suggests that the structure “propagates itself” both through “coercion, contempt, and coldness (as is common practice among the whipping priest-pedagogues of old England)” and “by zeal, confidence, and love (as ‘modern’ pedagogues are wont to say)” (Theory 40). If one only has “zeal, confidence, and love” (all unqualified) for oppressed people and their ideas then naturally this involves the affirmation of all those aspects of their practices and ideas which are oppressive. And the pure affirmation of experience makes it hard to suggest courses of action. As Freire puts it: “If individuals are caught up in and are unable to separate themselves from these limit-situations, their theme in reference to these situations is fatalism, and the task implied by the theme is the lack of a task” (Oppressed 113) [emphasis in original]. The “separation” is not possible in this approach, because the approach conceives the separation as having already taken place; A=A implies that political confrontation can only take an external form (A vs. P).

!154 The oppressed (in this view) are already separated from the oppressor by the fact of oppression.

In his reﬂections upon Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Pedagogy of Hope Freire insists on a “middle road” between these two extremes; consider the following on the subject of criticizing the negative aspects of a given culture:

Basically, this has to do with the passage of knowledge from the level of the ‘knowledge of living experience’, of common sense, to the knowledge emerging from more rigorous procedures of approach to knowable objects. And to make this shift belongs to the popular classes by right. Hence, in the name of respect for the culture of the peasants, for example, not to enable them to go beyond their beliefs regarding self-in-the-world and self-with-the-world betrays a profoundly elitist ideology. It is as if revealing the raison d’être, the why, of things, and to have a complete knowledge of things, were or ought to be the privilege of the elite. Sufﬁce it for the popular classes to be able to say, “I think it’s . . .” about the world. What is impermissible—I repeat myself, now—is disrespect for the knowledge of common sense. What is impermissible is the attempt to transcend it without starting with it and proceeding by way of it (74).

So both absolute denial and absolute afﬁrmation are forms of elitism, because at bottom they both deny that the “normal people” should learn. In both cases the choice of what is worth knowing is made by those from outside; “[d]emocracy is betrayed when contradicted by authoritarian attitudes and practices, as well as by spontaneous, irresponsibly permissive attitudes and practices” (Freire, Hope 97). This ﬁxes our terminology: the “banking” model is authoritarian, because it imagines a one-way relationship from teacher to student; the “spontaneous” model is permissive, because it imagines a one-way relationship from student to teacher. In neither case is the reality in which people lived posed as a problem, and in neither case is the relationship between participants changed. How could it change? In the case of the baking model, the educational program’s legitimacy can only be derived from an effective study of the objective conditions. Actions which change these conditions would disqualify the

!155 program. Similarly, the legitimacy of the spontaneist approach comes from the (supposed) authenticity of the existing norms, habits, ideas (etc.) of the oppressed and so any intervention into these (from insider or outsider) can only be conceived as a contamination. Damning for both is the fact that these legitimacies are drawn from precisely the structure that any progressive (however loosely one takes this word) would like to change45. These reﬂections are very broad and abstract, and necessarily caricature positions and practices which in reality will always be much more nuanced than I have suggested and not so clearly positioned in the camps that I have sketched.

The point of presenting a very general typology is to provide a heuristic that one can bring to concrete situations. As Badiou says of these sorts of typologies: “Sometimes we must know how to simplify the world. What memory obscured by innumerable singularities would afﬂict us if we were forbidden to enumerate the poison ﬂasks?” (Theory 116).

Following Badiou we will call the banking and spontaneist “ﬂasks” righty and lefty deviations respectively (Theory 37), as opposed to “rightist” and “leftist”. The former two refer to approaches which have been worked out on the basis of a partial perspective, whereas the latter two refer more to mistakes made when confronted with a (usually new) concrete situation (more on these latter two below). The terms “rightist”

45 It is worth stressing that when I say that Freire takes a “middle-road” I do not intend to suggest that he advocates any sort of centrism which “splits the difference” between the two sides. The point is to conceive of the contradiction between the two positions in dialectical terms, as I believe that Freire does. In addition to this dialectical point, we can add that any “splitting of the difference” would point in the direction of idealism. The dialectical argument that I am presenting depends upon the assertion that the splitting in the oppressed is an actually-existing (material) contradiction, and the dialectical study of this contradiction is the only way to treat the latter properly. If we “split the difference” then the conversation becomes one of ﬁnding a “happy middle” between different ideas about what should be done. It is a complete shift in emphasis and understanding.

!156 and “leftist” are a historical inheritance and are not always illuminating46. In a related context Badiou prefers the terms “dogmatists” and “empiricists”, although one should be careful not to read into these words47. Mirroring Freire he calls the former “mechanicists" because they “posit the adequation without remainder” (Theory 208); for us this means positing an equality of the subject (an “adequation without remainder”) with their conditions, A=Ap. He calls the latter “dynamicists” who instead “posit the ubiquitous remainder, the multiplicity of variable intensities” (Theory 208); for us this means that they (“dynamicists”) suggest that subjects are what they are, A=A. Despite afﬁrming that these are not correct paths, Badiou insists on the usefulness of each: the dogmatists insist on the “placeness" or “structuralness” of things against anyone who would insist otherwise; symmetrically the empiricists insist on the excess inside of all things against anyone who would suggest that things are wholly determined by their place in the structure48.

Taking the middle (dialectical) road means in part rebuking the attacks from both sides. Here we rejoin Lenin: “We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their ﬁre” (What Is To Be Done? 15). With this discussion it becomes clear that Lenin’s metaphor has quite a lot of conceptual value: dialecticians are always “surrounded” by those who only see a portion of the problem, and who launch attacks which are based upon mistaking the part for the whole. It is

46 See Bruno Bosteels’ discussion of the development of “left” and “right” deviations in Badiou’s thought (Badiou and Politics 128-140).

47 The issue with these words is not that he intends them to mean something very unusual, but more that the argument into which they are inserted is quite particular and elaborate. It concerns a redeﬁnition of the concept of materialism which I will leave unexplored in this thesis. While I use them only to refer to certain attitudes toward the problem of the subject, he intends them much more generally. The reader is encouraged to consult his discussion in Theory of the Subject (201-214).

48 Freire gets at a similar point when he says that ”both basism and elitism, so sectarian in themselves, when taken at and in their truth become capable of transcending themselves” (Hope 75).

!157 easy to anticipate the nature of these attacks: the banking model users will say that not enough attention is paid to the objective conditions and too much faith is put in the oppressed and their existing understanding; the spontaneous model users will say that other methods are too authoritarian and that too much outside knowledge is being imposed. In his Pedagogy of Hope Freire himself says that he has been attacked in both of these ways: ”I cannot resist expressing my regret over a certain type of criticism in which I am pointed to as an ‘elitist’. Or, at the opposite pole, where I am sketched as a ‘populist’” (37). On this basis it may be possible to suggest that if one is being attacked in both of these ways then one is on the right path!

Example: Lenin and What is to be Done?

In the previous chapter I briefly discussed Freire’s reference to Lenin in the last few pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire used the example of demands for wage increases in order to demonstrate how one should approach the ideas of the oppressed: recognize the progressive (the sense of the injustice of the wage system) while marginalizing the retrograde (the tendency of the demand to reify the wage system). In this section I will go further into the text from Lenin which Freire is referencing here: the famous 1902 pamphlet What is to be Done?, a text which has come to be known as the blueprint of the Communist parties which would spring up around the world in the first half of the twentieth century. There are a few reasons for doing this: 1) some readers may find Freire’s reference to Lenin confusing given the latter’s authoritarian reputation49 and this discussion will help to explain the reference (and contradict this reputation) 2) the logic which I have attempted to sketch is operative to some extent in

49 When I suggest that Lenin is not “authoritarian”, I mean this in the sense that I have established (following Freire) in this chapter, ie. not using the banking model. If one calls Lenin an “authoritarian” for other reasons such his use of political violence or his defense of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, then he would certainly be “authoritarian”. But by these deﬁnitions Freire is also “authoritarian” (see my discussion of Stalinism in Chapter One).

!158 this work from Lenin; its polemical argument is (in my view) structured along lines similar to those that I have discussed so far in this chapter and 3) it gives us the opportunity to see this logic “in action”.

It is typical for Lenin to present his own positions in the form of a polemical refutation of positions which he deems to be incorrect. In What is to be Done? the principal targets are those individuals, groups, and publications which he deems to be representatives of two trends within Russian Marxism ( then called “Social Democracy”) at the time: Economism and terrorism. The Economist trend was composed more or less of those who prioritized direct struggle by Russia’s nascent industrial working class against the factory bosses. Lenin does not deny the importance of this work, but suggests that “this, taken by itself, is in essence still not Social-Democratic work, but merely trade union work” (35) [emphasis in original]. These struggles never produce the coalescence of the class as a whole, but only the workers on a particular shop ﬂoor or in a particular industry (What Is To Be Done? 35). He insists that the Social-Democratic movement is not only oriented towards better terms for the sale of labour-power, “but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich” (What Is To Be Done? 35). The terrorists have a very different approach (or rather they appear to, as we shall see): rather than conﬁning their activity to the forms of struggle which already exist in the factories, they believe that acts of terroristic violence (assassinations, bombings, and similar) are means of “‘exciting’ the working-class movement and giving it a ‘strong impetus’” (What Is To Be Done? 48). The idea is that if the workers see attacks upon the government then they will be spurred into action.

Clearly these are two sets of practices which are very different from one another, and this is why it is so surprising that when Lenin gestures towards a point of agreement between these two trends, and it is even more surprising that “there is not an accidental, but a necessary, inherent connection between the two… and which must be mentioned here in connection with the question of education for revolutionary activity” (What Is To Be

!159 Done? 46) [emphasis added]. Not only is there a connection but it is precisely a connection centred on the question of education. Lenin suggests that they are really two sides of the same coin:

The Economists and the terrorists merely bow to different poles of spontaneity; the Economists bow to the spontaneity of ‘the labour movement pure and simple’, while the terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole….Let the workers wage their [economic struggle]… and let the intellectuals conduct the political struggle by their own efforts —with the aid of terror, of course! (What Is To Be Done? 47)

These two trends ﬁt together perfectly despite their tactical differences, because in effect the Economists say that workers should prioritize the economic struggle, while the terrorists say the intellectuals should prioritize the political struggle. In this way each stays in the place which they spontaneously occupy: the workers continue to be workers; the intellectuals continue to be intellectuals. The problem of the relation between them is not posed: “…the calls for terror and calls to lend the economic struggle itself a political character [ie. Economism] are merely two different forms of evading the most pressing duty now resting upon Russian revolutionaries, namely, the organization of comprehensive political agitation” (What Is To Be Done? 48-49) [emphasis in original]. He explains that the understanding that this is the “most pressing duty” is arrived at “on the grounds of the pressing needs of the working class for political knowledge and political training” (What Is To Be Done? 49).

Upon reﬂection it is easy to see that these two trends can be understood through the educational schema that I have suggested above. The Economists take the view that the struggles which exist are good and that they must engage themselves entirely in these struggles, and in some cases suggest that those who go beyond this are imposing foreign concepts; Lenin raises the example of a piece of commentary where an

!160 Economist contrasts (preferring the former) the “forward march of the drab everyday struggle” with the “propaganda of brilliant and completed ideas” (What Is To Be Done? 51). I cited Freire for the term “spontaneity” when suggesting the “spontaneous model” of education, and the term is associated most often with Lenin in precisely this context: he says that “the spontaneous development of the working-class movements leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology” (What Is To Be Done? 29). What this is saying is that insofar as the working-class movement is produced in opposition to hardship, exploitation, oppression… it tends to arise on the terms of the bourgeoisie; ie. it tends to limit itself to small-scale struggles at the level of the factory which never threaten the system as a whole (the workers struggle in exactly their place in the structure, and nowhere else). What appears to stand in external contradiction with capitalism (the workers) really hosts an internal contradiction (the workers “contaminated” by bourgeois ideology); not A vs. P but A=(AAp). When the Economists afﬁrm and support the already-existing revolts in the factories they instead imply A=A, and with this one can only cheer on whatever actions take place, and these actions will tend to be actions which are entirely of the place (the structure50). The connection to the spontaneous model of education is clear. On the other hand the terrorists are not impressed with whatever factory-level struggles already exist and believe that the workers are not interested in politics. They instead believe that the correct attitudes (and the desire for action) must be imposed by an external impulse, ie. terroristic violence. Clearly this a very cynical perspective which thinks little of the autonomous capacities of the workers, and so we are justiﬁed in hazarding that this is an approach which thinks in terms of A=Ap, ie. the workers are only workers and must be compelled to act in a more

50 It is difﬁcult to know precisely which passage from What is to be Done? to cite on this point, because one could choose so many. Consider the following, however: “… all worship of the role of the spontaneity of the working-class movement, all belittling of the role of the ‘conscious element’… means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the inﬂuence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers…” (27) [emphasis in original].

!161 sophisticated (ie. political) way. One can clearly see the correspondence between this approach and that of the banking model.

But this presentation still remains partial, and to see why I will return to the paragraph from Freire’s Daring to Dream which began this thesis’ inquiry. In that paragraph he distinguished between two errors on the question of subjectivity: 1) approaching it as “a mere reflex of objectivity” and 2) “lending to subjectivity or to consciousness the role of maker of the world” (Daring 23). I argued earlier that these correspond to asserting A=Ap and A=A respectively. With the concrete example from Lenin we can see that these views can easily coexist. In the case of the terrorists, the workers are mere workers, and so they must be compelled by an external mover who knows the way things must be. The workers are equal to their objective place within the structure (A=Ap), whereas the intellectuals are able to introduce the correct course of action and thereby become “makers of the world” with the workers (and terroristic violence) as their instruments; any sense that their own approach is contaminated by their place in the structure is not recognized (A=A). In the case of the Economists the spontaneous activity of the workers is affirmed without recognition of the possibility that this activity has (to use Lenin’s phrase) developed “along the line of least resistance” ie. factory-confined trade unionism (What Is To Be Done? 29). This amounts (as I have said) to asserting the subjective purity of these workers; A=A. But at the same time Lenin points out that these Economists “imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’” (What Is To Be Done? 27). This hints that this time it is the intellectuals who are thought to be irrevocably plagued by their non-working-class origins, because any pretense at leadership would only inhibit the production of an ‘independent’ ideology by those who are working class; A=Ap. The two cases differ in terms of their emphasis but are united in their logical (dialectical) errors: they absolutize differences (in consciousness, for instance) which are only relative; they freeze in place

!162 relationships (between intellectuals and workers or teachers and students) which are dynamic; and they imagine that these relationships can only operate unidirectionally rather than reciprocally, with those involved occupying different roles at different stages. Unsurprisingly in many parts of What is to be Done? Lenin emphasizes both the need for the education of the workers while vociferously condemning what he calls the “primitivism” of the intellectuals (What is to Be Done? 60). Clearly in Lenin’s view everyone needs education because neither the workers nor the intellectuals occupy a pure position of subjectivity or objectivity. This recognition coincides with Freire’s point about the necessity of “co-intentional education”:

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge (Oppressed 69).

It is also worth noting that Badiou himself had experience with this sort of thing: his small Maoist group published a critique of a rival Maoist group called Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), and this critique ran along lines similar to those that I have sketched above with regards to the co-existence of apparently opposite views:

When the emphasis was put on the masses, the ex-GP’s thinking was purely democratic, and pretended to dissolve itself in spontaneous movement…But when the ex-GP put the emphasis on organization, it was the complete opposite: the armed, clandestine, and purely putschist nucleus, subtracted from all political control by the people (Badiou and Politics 130).

In the previous chapter I tried to sketch Freire’s educational process, hoping to demonstrate that it involves a profound, serious, and dialectical commitment to precisely the dialogical encounters which are foreclosed by the Economists and terrorists and their ideological descendants. Given Lenin’s persistent and detailed criticism of these tendencies it is no big surprise that one of Freire’s refutations of these sorts of tendencies includes a reference to Lenin:

!163 …the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character. Thus the road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust. And, as Lenin pointed out, the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression (Oppressed 138) [emphasis in original]

Note the directionality of his language. One must be “open” and not “impervious”; one must let the people in. One must have communion with them, and not be mistrusting; one must go to them. Both out-to-in and in-to-out. Freire ties this reciprocal relationship directly to Lenin.

Predictably Lenin advocates a middle (dialectical) position which actually shifts the discussion. The focus is no longer on the (in)capacities of the workers, but on the ill- preparedness of the intellectuals:

The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent. That this can be accomplished is irrefutably proved by the enormous growth of the working class movement and the eagerness… with which the workers clamour for political literature” (What Is To Be Done? 48) [emphasis in original]

Against the terrorists Lenin points out that prevailing circumstances are quite enough to inspire rebellion51 (there is no need for ‘excitative terror’), but against the Economists he insists on the need to develop this rebellion beyond its ﬁrst immediate tendencies. Hopefully it is clear that (once again) his metaphor has signiﬁcant conceptual value: he is describing the process of concentration in addition to simply using the word. In order

51 The idea that rebellion precedes the involvement of intellectuals/leaders/teachers has come up a number of times in this thesis, and has appeared in every chapter. The point is that resistance is always happening already and so there is never a need to provide an impulse (or directive) to begin it.

!164 to avoid mistaking the word for the concept, I will spell it out. Lenin recognizes that the “working masses” have more “resentment” than him and his comrades tend to realize (“to a larger extent than we imagine…”), and this constitutes a sort of awareness among these masses that exceeds the immediate apprehension of the intellectuals. The latter’s job is not to compel the rebellion, because the rebellion already exists. Their job is instead to enrich this rebellion with direction. This involves both “gathering” disparate actions/actors (“drops and streamlets”) and “concentrating” them into a “gigantic torrent”. “Gathering” points to a quantitive addition, which does not immediately produce qualitative change (see the discussion in the ﬁrst chapter on quantity and quality); many drops of water does not a “torrent” make52. One must also bring about the qualitative change by “concentration”. And ﬁnally the possibility of this is not suggested by the craftiness or wisdom of the intellectuals, but by the vigour with which the workers demand education. With this it is clear that Lenin is advocating concentration qua concept under the guise of concentration qua metaphor. All the parts are there for a more general theory of concentration, of subjective subjectivity, and of subjective force. It is therefore no surprise that Badiou suggests that “[c]oncentrating force is the very essence of Leninist work” and that “What is to be Done? Is a theory of the subjective aspect of force” (Theory 46).

With this discussion of Lenin I have hoped to prove a few points. The ﬁrst of these is that Freire’s references to Lenin are not as strange as they may seem: Lenin’s What is to be Done? contains arguments which ﬁt very nicely with Freire. By doing this I hope to push back against commentators such as Stanley Aronowitz who suggest that Freire’s references to Lenin are incidental or idiosyncratic, or that Lenin can be meaningfully

52 Badiou makes this point with reference to what he calls “the makeshift philosophy of the advocates of the ‘convergence of struggles’” about which he says “[t]his geometric conception remains entirely within the objective assignation of force” and “[y]ou may ‘coordinate’ them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject” (Theory 44).

!165 described as a “populist” in the pejorative sense developed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Aronowitz 170). The second point that I have tried to communicate is to do with the generality of the arguments that I have developed in this thesis. The fact that these schemas apply to Lenin’s famous text is not surprising given the latter’s influence upon the tradition from which I draw, but it is still useful to see that they are relevant to Lenin’s early twentieth century Russian context. By making this relevance explicit I hope to reassure skeptical readers who wonder whether these ideas or methods are only useful in a certain time or place. The symmetry of the two deviations — banking and spontaneity — is the final and most important point. By “symmetry” I mean that they make the same error of seeing either teachers or students (intellectuals or oppressed) as the relevant agent in achieving political change. I have argued (following Freire, Badiou, and now Lenin) that the crucial thing is to articulate the relationship between them in such a way as to preserve the knowledge that all involved are “split” in the ways described earlier in the text. Only this recognition lays the groundwork for the process of concentration. Given the emphasis I place upon concentration the reader may find it strange that I have not said very much about what it means beyond a usually-vague reference to “separation from the structure”. In order to provide a partial remedy to this and to explain my vagueness, I ask in the next section: “of what does concentration consist?”

Of What Does Concentration Consist?

Throughout this thesis I have referred to “concentration” as a necessary process which consists of the development of already-existing practices of rebellion. Once again, as Freire puts it: “It is our task as progressive educators to take advantage of this tradition of struggle, of resistance, and ‘work it’” (Oppressed 99). I have not said much about what this means, however, and there are a few reasons for this. The ﬁrst is that Badiou himself is not very speciﬁc; we are told about the movement “in which force concentrates (or not) its qualitative identity, thus expansively tearing itself away from

!166 that which nonetheless persists in ﬁxing its site”(Theory 38); ie. the structure. We are also told that the (communist) political party exists for the purpose of concentration:

Invested in no operation other than that of splitting the fore of the working class from its subjected ﬁgure, ‘concentrating the correct ideas’ (Mao), keeping itself maximally out of place, and destroying in itself all that is not the destruction of the splace [the structure], the party is puriﬁcation (Theory 38) [emphasis in original].

And he hastily adds that this does not mean that it is or ever could be pure, and denies that this purification should be identified with a process of physical elimination: “On this bloody path, Stalin arrived at nothing but disaster” (Theory 38). These two qualifications — that actual purity is impossible and that purification is not identifiable with physical elimination — are crucial and are necessary for making the distinction between this logic of purification (based upon rejecting any politics of conciliation or adapting to the structure, and of ejecting the influence of the oppressive society) and that of the racial purification practised by the Nazis, among others. The logic of purification developed in this thesis is based upon universalizing what is marginalized via a transformation of the structure, whereas the Nazi logic is based upon affirming the structure via the radical exclusion and destruction of what is marginalized. Badiou treats the Nazi comparison in his Ethics, where he suggests that Nazism is a “simulacrum” of the process which he advocates (Ethics 72). Nazism shares “all the formal traits” of the revolutionary process, including “a simulacrum of the subject” (Ethics 72). But again, the logic still undergoes a reversal. For Badiou the physical person of the adversary does not matter, “[s]o we may fight against the judgements and opinions he exchanges with others… but not against his person — which, under the circumstances, is insignificant…” (Ethics 76) [emphasis in original]. By contrast, a simulacrum such as Nazism “presumes nothing more about those they designate as the enemy than their strictly particular existence as human animals” (Ethics 76). If terms like “concentration” and “purity” bring to mind “concentration camp” or

!167 “racial purity” then this is a good thing because the proximity forces one to establish the difference with precision, and then serves as a constant reminder to be vigilant.

With respect to Lenin’s formulation of concentration in What is to be Done? Badiou suggests that Lenin takes “a four-fold lesson from the crushing of the [Paris] Commune” and explains that “[f]or Lenin, the party is nothing but the operator of concentration of these four requirements” (Theory 46). The speciﬁcs of these “requirements” do not interest us here. It is enough to say that the process of this concentration is still not so clear.

One reason for this can be deduced from the following:

A deﬁnition: we will call subjective those processes relative to the qualitative concentration of force. Let me emphasize that these are practices, real phenomena. The party is something subjective, taken in its historical emergence, the network of its actions, the novelty it concentrates. The institution is nothing but a husk (Theory 41).

If “the party is puriﬁcation” (concentration) (Theory 38), and if it is composed of “practices” and “real phenomena” (Theory 41), then this would authorize a silence on the particulars of what is involved in concentration. How one does this will necessarily depend on the circumstances, because the character of the determination by the structure is not uniform but varies substantially across space and time. This is arguably an enormous source of strength for Badiou’s presentation, because the schema A=(AAp) gives one quite a lot with which to elaborate an abstract logic, but gives one very little that is immediately actionable. The vagueness forces one to look into the problem concretely; the theory implies a directive by its vagueness. I believe that Freire’s use of the generic term “oppressed” has a similar effect.

Concentration can (and must) therefore take a variety of forms. For instance with Lenin it involves a conscious departure from the twin ideologies of terrorism and Economism,

!168 and a reduction of the influence of “bourgeois ideology” in the workers’ movement. In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail Martin Luther King lays out the “four basic steps” of a non-violent campaign: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action” (King) [emphasis added]. He says that he “[stands] in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community” where “[o]ne is a force of complacency” which has “adjusted to segregation” and another force which “is one of bitterness and hatred” and which comes “perilously close to advocating violence” (King). With this assessment of the two-sided nature of the conflict he suggests a process of “self-purification” which is based on producing (through education and self-reflection) a type of radicalism which is not identified with violence53:

Mindful of the difﬁculties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self puriﬁcation. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change (King).

Note the similarity to the process that I have described: there is an educational process which focuses on separating the politics of the oppressed from those of the oppressor (“accept blows without retaliating”) as well as a study of where and when to apply pressure in order to maximize effectiveness.

In her As We Have Always Done the Nishnaabeg theorist and activist Leanne

53 He gladly accepts the label of “extremist”, and suggests that the important point is what kind of extremist: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? …Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists” (King).

!169 Betasamosake Simpson says that colonialism “tries very hard to get me to resist in a particular way” (44), and says that “[w]e cannot allow our processes, our emotions, or our intelligence to be co-opted and processed into the structure that is at the root of all of our problems, even if at the outset these processes appear to be kinder and gentler than those we have experienced in the past” (47) [emphasis in original]. She notes that in the wake of the ascent of the Liberal Trudeau administration and the latter crafted more subtle ways of “demobilizing movements of all sorts and pulling indigenous movements and pulling Indigenous peoples into state-controlled processes to a greater degree” (47). She says that “[l]anguage, cultural expression, and even spirituality don’t (necessarily) pose an unmanageable threat to settler colonialism, because cultural resurgence can rather effortlessly be co-opted by liberal recognition54” (50). Further, “I am not interested in inclusion”, and the real solution must begin with “unapologetic placed-based nationhoods using Indigenous practices and operating in an ethical and principled way from an intact land base” (50). She emphasizes a need for separation from the practices which are “given” by the Canadian state: “resurgent practice is a disruptive and deliberate act of turning away from the colonial state” (198). For a concrete example one can consider an exercise that Simpson leads in some classes which

54 The distinction between “resurgence” and “recognition” is explored at length in Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks. In this text Coulthard borrows heavily from the anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and suggests (among other things) that “Fanon was attuned to ways in which the individual and collective revaluation of black culture and identity could serve as a source of pride and empowerment, and if approached critically and directed appropriately, could help jolt the colonized into an ‘actional’ existence, as opposed to a ‘reactional’ one characterized by ressentiment” (43-44). Given the resonance this has with Freire and given Freire’s explicit citation of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Oppressed 62), it is worth explaining Fanon’s absence from my thesis. The principal reason is that I have preferred to keep my focus narrow in order to explore my main texts more deeply. Exploring Fanon’s thought in relation to the questions raised in this thesis would require another thesis on its own, and I believe that the insight to be gained from such an endeavour is worth deferring it to another time when these insights can be properly treated. The interested reader should turn particularly to the chapters on spontaneity, national consciousness, and national culture in The Wretched of the Earth, where they will ﬁnd many formulations which are relevant to this thesis’ argument.

!170 asks indigenous students to list off stereotypes. She explains: “After the ﬁrst three or four stereotypes are on the list, they come fast, and the energy starts to shift from shame and hurt to an expulsion of those same things. Heads are held up high, as we name and then cast off and cast out the internalized racism and patriarchy of the colonizer” (84). It is easy to see the resemblance between this and the “cathartic force” that Freire says is nurtured by his methodology (Oppressed 118).

By citing King and Simpson and highlighting points which emphasize a resonance with arguments (from Freire, Badiou, and others) which I have called “Marxist”, I do not intend to suggest that King or Simpson are really Marxists. On the contrary, if anything I would prefer that these citations be taken as evidence that, regardless of the labels we use, the structures that we encounter remain similar and require similar approaches. But these are only abstract similarities, and the variations on the speciﬁc practices (a sit-in in Birmingham, a classroom exercise) emphasize the point that the process of concentration whereby one tears oneself away from the structure by internal puriﬁcation can only be elaborated in general by rough schematization. The practical process can only take place if there is a strong and dynamic understanding of the situation at hand.

Having said this I think it is possible to suggest a general role for intellectuals. Badiou does this in the following passage:

Sartre has many times over asserted that the relation of the intellectual to the revolution lies in his or her universalizing function. He is right about this. The excess…induces a primacy of the universal over that which… produced whatever was distinguishable in the old world. Political force, once it is let loose, no longer distinguishes as before. Therein lies its communitarian virtue — its generic virtue (Theory 272) [emphasis in original].

Badiou’s example of immigrant workers in France gives us a sense of what he means by “universality”. He says that “[o]ur society — imperialist society — is deﬁned as a

!171 whole by the declaration that immigrant workers are not of this society, that it is impossible that they ever be” (Theory 263). “France” (and of course not only “France”) and “French” require for their conceptual stability examples of internal exclusion: by the precarity and foreignness of these immigrants the stability and familiarity of France itself and every French person is maintained (Theory 263). When these immigrant workers demand “equal rights” this is a threat to the unity of “France”, and even more signiﬁcantly it destabilizes the “Frenchness” of the French workers who support the immigrants:

Those who undergo the most important modiﬁcation are not so much the immigrant workers themselves, even if they snatch up the right to vote, so much as the French: the French workers for whom the subversion of their national identity, provided they are swept up in the process, subjectivizes another vision and another practice of politics (Theory 265-266).

So the consequential universality does not consist in the extension of “French” to include the immigrant workers; in this way a more general category would stretch itself to cover a new particularity, and change would be conﬁned to this particular site. Instead of this, the calls emanating from a particular site have the effect of sundering the general category of “French”.

One can see this universalizing function in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels clarify that the speciﬁc characteristics which distinguish them from other working-class organizations are

1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front of the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality 2) In the various stages of the development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie haste pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movements as whole (483-484).

!172 For another example we could return to What is to be Done?, where Lenin suggests an explanation for why the Russian workers are not expressing outrage at the abuses inﬂicted upon other oppressed groups in Russian society:

We must blame ourselves, our lagging behind the mass movement, for still being unable to organize sufﬁciently wide, striking, and rapid exposures of all the shameful outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and the religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be ﬁlled with an irresistible desire to react… As yet we have done very little, almost nothing, to bring before the working masses prompt exposures on all possible issues. Many of us as yet do not recognize this as our bounden duty…” (What Is To Be Done? 43) [emphasis in original]

We can also return to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson when she afﬁrms that “[r]esurgent organizing takes place within grounded normatively and is necessarily place-based and local, but it is also necessarily networked and global” (178). Or to Martin Luther King, who in Letter from a Birmingham Jail opposes a universalizing vision to charges that his actions in Birmingham are those of an “outside agitator”:

…basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here… Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds (King).

Finally we can look to a number of passages in Pedagogy of the Oppressed; for instance when Freire says that “[t]he [thematic] investigation will be most educational when it is most critical, and most critical when it avoids the narrow outlines of partial or ‘focalized’ views of reality, and sticks to the comprehension of total reality” (Oppressed

!173 108). Or where he suggests that the oppressors ” react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another” (Oppressed 73). The implication is of course that a non-partial view is radical and therefore offensive to the oppressor. These two quotes point to the importance of universality itself, but Freire assigns the duty of universalization to intellectuals specifically when he raises the idea of “hinged themes”, themes which “facilitate the connection between two themes” or which “illustrate the relations between the general program content and the view of the world held by the people” (Oppressed 120). He suggests this concept alongside the affirmation that “[i]f educational programming is dialogical, the teacher-students also have the right to participate by including themes not previously suggested [by the people or by the students]” (Oppressed 120). But their contribution is not just any contribution, but rather these “hinged themes” (universalizing themes). This is a final bit of evidence for the notion that the specific function of intellectuals is to promote universalization.

Hope as The Problem Of The "Compact Group"

Earlier in this chapter I schematized some wrong orientations towards education based on the dialectical approach that I have tried to develop throughout this work. I called these “banking” and “spontaneous”, partially following Freire. Taking some terminological inspiration from Lenin I called these “enemies”, and I adopted this only because he counterposes “enemies” to the “compact group” of which he himself was a part. Or at least he said that he was a part of it; how is it possible that he could know that he was following the correct dialectical line that authorized his inclusion in this group? As Jacques Lacan puts it in the context of psychoanalysis: “Has that which our praxis engenders the right to map for itself necessities, even contradictory ones, from the standpoint of truth? This question may be transposed in the esoteric formula: how can we be sure that we are not impostors?” (Four Fundamental Concepts 263) [emphasis in

!174 original]. If reality is confusing and contradictory, and its wholeness never appears as such but rather confronts us as a host of fragments whose connections are — barring investigation and study — obscure, how can one be certain that one is following the correct path?

The remarks that I made on the question of “rightness” in Chapter Two suggest that one cannot be certain. Of course with this statement we remain entirely with Freire, who criticized those who become trapped in “circles of certainty” (Oppressed 38). I have discussed these “circles” at some length, and have tried to show that departing from

“circularity” requires a departure from guarantees. I have tried to use Badiou’s arguments to show that being properly dialectical requires that one goes beyond established structures and knowledges via practical action which attempts to change both these structures and knowledges. Because any certainty will be drawn from these structures, it is necessary that one does without certainty. I have also argued that this lack of certainty does not imply a freedom from constraint: in a detour about the reasoning associated with the metaphor of the line one arrives at an equally inadequate result as with the circle. The spiral — the articulation of the circle and the line together — is what results from taking practical action which roots itself in the constraints that exist without submitting oneself to them (whether consciously by overestimating the power of oppression, or unconsciously by denying it).

As Badiou puts it: “Without giving in anything at all to indeterminacy, we posit that the subject-process is resolved in the undecidable” (Theory 286). He says that “since Gödel’s

!175 famous theorem55” it has been known that “‘there is some undecidable’ can be the result of a demonstration” (Theory 286). A serious understanding of the objective world leads one to the understanding that this objectivity cannot authorize the acts which would take you beyond it. The “risk” of which Freire speaks when he references “the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction” can therefore be understand as a speciﬁc concept (Oppressed 38). If one is not risking, then one is not engaging with undecidability, then one is not engaging in the process of subjectivity (or truth), then one is not building a subjective subjectivity. This suggests that if we are uncertain after doing a lot of research, then this should be taken as a good sign!

We then require a decision to begin this process, and in this we are in Freire’s company when he discusses the need to “attempt to afﬁrm human beings as the Subjects of decision” (Oppressed 43). And furthermore this must be a decision which cannot found itself on completely solid ground. There is therefore a need for something beyond logical calculation, even if we have established that this need exists on the basis of such

55 In his book on set theory and Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event Burhanuddin Baki explains that one of the goals of mathematicians in the early 20th century was the “realization of the great mathematician David Hilbert’s dream during the 1920s of systematically formalizing all of mathematics, of clarifying the foundations of mathematics” (62). Kurt Gödel’s famous “incompleteness theorems” suggest the impossibility of this task. Essentially they suggest that set theory based upon certain standard axioms can either be consistent or complete but not both (63). If it is consistent, this means that none of its axioms nor the consequences which can be deduced from these contradict one another (55). If it is complete this means that every statement that can be created in its language is either true or false (55). Furthermore, Gödel also proved that the standard axioms (often abbreviated as “ZFC”) cannot ever prove the statement “ZFC is consistent” (63). As Charles Pinter puts it in a textbook on set theory: “There is no one unique truth concerning the properties of sets: Rather, the reality of what a set is bifurcates into several alternative realities, all equally plausible and equally true… it has been shown that we will never have absolute certainty that set theory — or mathematics generally — is free from contradictions. It is not merely a question of that state of current knowledge: Rather, what has been shown is that it is fundamentally impossible ever to prove the consistency of mathematics” (234) [emphasis in original].

!176 calculations. I will use the word “hope” in order to treat this problem, taking Freire’s lead in the following afﬁrmation: “Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle” (Hope 3). Immediately I want to qualify this with Freire’s own words, which I quote at length out of necessity:

I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute to this hope of mine the power to transform reality all by itself, so that I set out for the fray without taking account of concrete, material data, declaring, “my hope is enough!” No, my hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a ﬁsh needs unpolluted water. The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naïveté, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientiﬁc approach, is a frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle, is tantamount to denying that struggle is one of its mainstays. The essential thing… is this: hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness (Hope 2).

We are not just dealing with any old “hope”, but a speciﬁc kind of hope which “takes account of concrete, material data”, which is “critical”, which is closely tied to the question of ethics, which is not a matter of fancy but something whose necessity is implied by the objectivity itself (“ontological need”), and it must be something which grounds itself in practice. Badiou ends his Theory of the Subject with a section on ethics, and he says that “Ethics amounts to the maxim: ‘Decide consequently from the point of the undecidable’” (Theory 287). I think we can say that “consequently” both means that one decides in from this point of undecidability because one must do so, and one also decides in such a way as to produce consequences, ie. one acts and therefore produces consequences on the basis of a decision. Furthermore, this undecidability is not due to lack of understanding but to a large amount of it. As Badiou will put it a few years after Theory of the Subject in Can Politics Be Thought?: deciding from the point of

!177 undecidability “does not exclude, but rather requires a large degree of calculation” (37). And yet of course this calculation is not enough, and Badiou says that “[t]he fundamental concept of the ethics of Marxism is confidence” (Theory 311). With this we therefore have an ethics which exceeds calculation (via confidence) without absconding from it. I do not intend to suggest a complete identity between Freire and Badiou on this question of “hope” so much as suggest that both this concept of “hope” for Freire and “confidence” for Badiou are both strongly qualified concepts which are not naïve.

“Naïve” is a word that Freire uses in his discussion of the “dialogical man” (Oppressed

90-91). Echoing the aforementioned necessity of hope, he says:

Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue; the "dialogical man" believes in others even before he meets them face to face. His faith, however, is not naïve. The "dialogical man" is critical and knows that although it is within the power of humans to create and transform, in a concrete situation of alienation individuals may be impaired in the use of that power. Far from destroying his faith in the people, however, this possibility strikes him as a challenge to which he must respond. He is convinced that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn (Oppressed 90-91).

“Not naïve” is an important qualiﬁcation. Firstly it is “not naïve” to believe in people before you meet them. This implies a certain generality or universality to faith, which does not require proof of worthiness. This is not so strange: because we are dealing with the need to go beyond what is given by the structure, and because any a priori proof of worthiness would necessarily be drawn from what is given in the situation at hand, the faith cannot be discriminate because any criteria by which one could discriminate would

!178 be drawn from circumstances that one wants to change56. It is naïve to confuse this general faith with a general faith in whatever exists already. The only thing that is general is the fact of oppression and the tendency for resistance against this oppression to spring up; this is what authorizes the “dialogical man” being “convinced” that in a “concrete situation… individuals may be impaired” in their powers but that these powers “tend to be reborn” (Oppressed 91). Furthermore

… that rebirth can occur—not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation—in the supersedence of slave labor by emancipated labor which gives zest to life. Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation (Oppressed 91).

So the rebirth is not given and does not just happen (“not gratuitously”) but through struggle. And what one needs is not “faith” but “this faith”, because without “this faith” one can get “paternalistic manipulation” (Oppressed 91). It appears as though we need two concepts in order to handle “faith” properly: one which can handle “this faith” and one which handles the other kind(s) of “faith”.

In the previous chapter I cited Badiou’s comments on “the fatalistic discourse”. I did not, however, include his point that the existence of this discourse is not a reason for despair, indeed “[i]t is necessary to fight against it, targeting its weak point: the oscillation between belief and confidence” (Theory 328). Although “[d]efeatism is the spontaneous philosophy of proletarians” “an organized micro-confidence… locally disrupts its rule” (Theory 328). So confidence is good; “[t]he question that we must be

56 These “circumstances” are not only those of the oppressed people of interest in a situation but also those of the educator. If one approaches the task of education as an outside with criteria by which to judge certain people worthy and unworthy of attention, one is imposing these external standards in a way which ﬁrmly rates one’s own knowledge as being above that of the people in the area of interest. It is easy to see how this would tend to both spring from and conﬁrm whatever biases the educator brings.

!179 able to anticipate concerns rather the sudden temptation of belief” (Theory 328). “Conﬁdence” and “belief” are the two concepts with which I will treat “faith”.

Understanding these two concepts will require some care. First we have to see that Badiou suggests that there are four kinds of ethics which exhaust the combinations of place/outplace optimism/pessimism (Theory 319-320). Here I will only discuss two, the “ethics of praise” and the “Promethean ethics” (the others are “resignation” and “discordance”). The “ethics of praise” is one “where one has a place of one’s own within a world open to evaluation” (Theory 319), while the “Promethean ethics” is one “where one posits that the place is yet to come in a work open to re-evaluation, which the fire of just excess recomposes” (Theory 320). Both are optimistic: “the ethics of praise is optimistic (according to being), as is the Promethean (according to the process)” (Theory 320). “Confidence” and “belief” are derived from these: “Belief is the discourse of the ethics of praise; confidence, that of Prometheans” (Theory 322) [emphasis in original]. Based on this we can see that “belief” argues from the basis of what exists in the structure, and confidence from the excess. This is why it is necessary to disrupt defeatism with “confidence”, because confidence is the discourse which centres itself upon the excess. This excess should be thought of in similar terms to that “subversive side” in the passage from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy which I quoted in the introduction to this work: “… they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society” (117). In this case, however, the passage would refer to the workers themselves and not (only) to the theorists who think about them.

But it is not a matter of conﬁdence or belief, as the following passage suggests:

!180 Does one always have to believe in order to have confidence? As far as I am concerned, I have confidence in the people and in the working class in direct proportion to my lack of belief in them. Insofar as I always believe in them, which always induces the expectation of a sizeable popular moment, my confidence begins to vacillate. I nevertheless do not cease to believe in them, knowing full well that to vacillate defines the structure of the subject (Theory 322-323) [emphasis in original].

This “expectation” is obviously of an “objectivist” or “mechanical” kind, in that hopes that the movement will just appear from the workings of the structure. Here we should look to Freire: although he says that the “contradictions [in what they are taught via the banking model] may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality…the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize” and “[f]rom the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization” (Oppressed 75). Here I think that one can actually detect the vacillation: “they may turn against their domestication, but we cannot wait (cannot expect) for it happen”.

Badiou shows that this tension between belief and conﬁdence can be located between “two extremities of Marxism” (Theory 324), and he illustrates the two poles via a quote from Marx and a quote from Mao. The Marx quote is the following: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” ( qtd. in Theory 324). And the Mao quote, which we discussed already in Chapter Two: “Marxism implies a manifold principles, but, in the ﬁnal analysis, they can all be reduced to a single sentence: ‘It is right to revolt against the reactionaries’” ( qtd. in Theory 324). The quote from Marx “may sustain you in the belief that communist consciousness will necessarily emerge” because the development of the forces of production will abolish scarcity and otherwise produce whatever conditions are necessary for the end of exploitation and hierarchy (Theory 324-325).

!181 Furthermore this “certainty is all the more acceptable when one considers that an entire scientiﬁc apparatus confers upon it the dignity of a modern belief” (Theory 325); both the extraordinary precision and generality which the Marxist tradition of political economy has produced — exempliﬁed by Capital — can easily convince you that the future will elaborate itself on the basis of these revealed laws. The society as it exists is an obstacle for us, but for itself it is the source of motion and therefore becomes a sort of non-obstacle (indeed, perhaps we should get out of the way!)

It is precisely here that Badiou says one distinguishes between the two discourses:

“[t]he relation to the obstacle is the criterion of delimitation between confidence and belief” (Theory 326). “Belief denies the obstacles precisely because it believes in it” (Theory 326); this is the point which ends the previous paragraph. Badiou’s point of reference here is a fable often told by Mao of an old man who decides to remove a mountain by attacking its base with a pickaxe57 (Theory 326). The version of the text in the first volume of Mao’s selected works is somewhat different — exchange God for genies, hoes for pickaxes — but the essence is the same. In this version of the story the Foolish Old Man and his sons begin their task with hoes and are criticized by the Wise Old Man, who says that it is surely impossible that they will be able to dig up the mountains. The Foolish Old Man says that when he dies his sons will continue to dig, and then their sons will, and their sons will, and so on. Having responded to the Wise Old Man, they continue to dig. God is moved by their dedication, and sends angels to remove the mountains. Badiou insists that this should not be understood as “Heaven helps those who help themselves” but rather as referring to what confidence can accomplish: “the genie is what everyone will do, thousands of men armed with pickaxes” (Theory 326). It is precisely the impossibility of this task which makes it a good fable. Recall our discussion in Chapter One about the impossibility of the Real and of revolution as the impossibility proper to Marxism, and then consider: “The important

57 See The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountains (320-323).

!182 thing is to touch upon the real… You will simply have destroyed the belief in the obstacle, you will have displaced the place of the impossible” (Theory 326). Belief is different: “…if the good genie does not remove the mountain, it is because there is a reason for the mountain to be where it is” (Theory 326). The distinction between belief and conﬁdence (the two modes of “faith”) revolves around this attitude towards impossibility.

Badiou finally suggests that confidence is divided. The citation here is once again to Mao: “We must have confidence in the masses and we must have confidence in the

Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing58” (Theory 330; On the Question 395). So the question of “conﬁdence” (and “faith”) boils down to a dual relationship of conﬁdences. It is fairly easy to see why; consider the case of the workers and Badiou’s warning about “the sudden temptation of belief” (Theory 328). We can see the problem: the appearance of theorists and intellectuals can produce a different source of fatalism whose theme is no longer (as Badiou suggests) “we will always be fucked over” but rather “we will be saved by these smart people”. Freire points out a similar situation when he talks about populist leaders: “Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective” (Oppressed 78). Badiou says that this is unacceptable:

The party, that which is called the party, cannot rest content with the fact it is believed in. We do not promise anything, hence there is no reason to follow us. We demand and organize the partitioning of a conﬁdence (Theory 328).

58 The quote comes from a 1955 text called On the Question of Agricultural Co- operation. In a translator’s endnote to Badiou’s use of this quotation Bruno Bosteels explains that the quote has been “modified to render Badiou’s insistence on ‘confidence’” (Theory 358). The standard translation uses “faith” rather than “confidence” (On the Question 395).

!183 This only speaks to one side of the problem however. Badiou is quick to argue that the use of God or genies in the fable should not be interpreted in a theological fashion, but elsewhere when discussing the question of the political subject Badiou says that Mao “flirts with theology” (ie. belief) when he writes “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of world history” ( qtd. in Theory 180; Mao Quotations 65). Indeed in the fable itself Mao says “[w]e must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people (The Foolish Old Man 321). That this use of “God” is metaphorical does not necessarily provide protection from the risk of theology, where here “theology” does not refer to belief in God as such but to any form of “salvation” from outside. This is a constant problem when dealing with confidence and belief as Badiou says on exactly this topic: “ I nevertheless do not cease to believe in [the workers], knowing full well that to vacillate defines the structure of the subject” (Theory 323).

It is therefore important to ﬁnd a way to combat these tendencies, which in a way point in the direction of a slippage between “people” and “the People”. On this point Freire can be our guide. He actually sees the abandonment of belief as a prerequisite for solidarity:

The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love (Oppressed 49-50) [emphasis added].

Solidarity requires that one see people and not the People, it requires one to do away with one’s piety, and it requires a risk; the necessity of risk resonates with Badiou’s point that “[w]e do not promise anything” (Theory 328). But all of this is easier said than done, and to treat the problem I will suggest another division of faith, this time along other lines. In the above-quoted passages Freire implicitly suggests two distinct roles for

!184 hope which correspond to two different parts of the process. On one hand he says “[w]ithout a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle” (Hope 3), and one the other hand he says that “without [hope], my struggle will be weak and wobbly” (Hope 2). One of these pertains to what allows for the struggle to begin and the other deals with its persistence. One can find echoes of these two statements in Badiou as well: “Confidence is this prepolitical arrangement, this remainder of calculable action, without which Marxism has never begun or rebegun” (Theory 322), and “In matters of Marxist politics and the subject of class, there is only one way of giving in, which is by losing confidence” (Theory 322). Confidence is both the “remainder” of calculation which compels one to “decide consequently from the point of the undecidable” (Theory 287), and it is what sustains those who decide during the consequences of this decision. What changes between these two moments of the process, if anything?

To answer this I will try to treat the biggest wrench that Badiou throws into the problem of belief and confidence. First, recall the simplicity with which I stated that “[b]elief is the discourse of the ethics of praise; confidence, that of the outplace” (Theory 322). Badiou immediately follows this up with: “But the affair becomes more complicated when any idiot can realize that belief means confidence in the splace, whereas confidence means belief in the outplace (Theory 322). “Confidence in the splace” means that one relies upon the structure to self-generate the “fire of just excess” that Badiou says is characteristic of Promethean ethics (Theory 322). “Belief in the outplace” means that one praises the excess from “a place of one’s own” (Theory 319), ie. from a site within the structure which is not excessive; the place of the teacher, leader, etc. What this implies is that these leaders must come to occupy that site of excess, and not only occupy it but become of it with the aim of exceeding it. To speak to this will require a lengthy quotation from Che Guevara that Freire includes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed

!185 As a result of daily contact with these people and their problems we became ﬁrmly convinced of the need for a complete change in the life of our people. The idea of an agrarian reform became crystal-clear. Communion with the people ceased to be a mere theory, to become an integral part of ourselves. Guerrillas and peasants began to merge into a solid mass. No one can say exactly when, in this long process, the ideas became reality and we became a part of the peasantry. As far as I am concerned, the contact with my patients in the Sierra turned a spontaneous and somewhat lyrical decision into a more serene force, one of an entirely different value. Those poor, suffering, loyal inhabitants of the Sierra cannot even imagine what a great contribution they made to the forging of our revolutionary ideology (qtd. in Oppressed 170) [Freire’s emphasis].

With this we can suggest that the initial decision to act in solidarity with the oppressed is probably always “spontaneous and somewhat lyrical”, and therefore tends in the direction of a belief, but this is transformed into a “force” of greater quality than what came with that initial decision. This transformation in the quality of force is clearly an example of concentration. The transformation takes place because the theoretical arguments “cease to be mere theory”, via “daily contact” they were “ﬁrmly convinced” in a way that their theory could never equal. And ﬁnally the theory itself is transformed by the contact.

It seems to me as though this transformation authorizes the suggestion that the decision to begin communion with the oppressed always depends on a certain romanticization which, however necessary the impulse that it provides, must also be fought against. Insofar as this decision to begin is made on the basis of a romanticization, or on the basis of some removed theoretical perspective, this decision could be said to be supported by belief. Belief — which creates an expectation that others will act elsewhere — can lead one to give in on one’s own action. What is needed is the aforementioned split confidence: confidence in the party (the educators, the leaders), confidence in the masses (the oppressed). This dual confidence makes it impossible to pick whether in the last analysis it should be leaders (or teachers) or the oppressed (or students) that “win out”, and indeed “it declares explicitly that [this] old debate is undecidable” (Theory

!186 286). But, says Badiou, it is exactly this undecidability that “puts into work the theory of the subject” (Theory 286).

Conclusion

In this chapter I have elaborated upon arguments made in the previous chapters in order to suggest that the ways in which one can get the education process wrong are not arbitrary, but can be understood abstractly as “simpliﬁcations” of the full dialectical/ dialogical process that Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This serves two purposes: 1) it allows dialecticians interested in these pedagogical questions to “diagnose” opposing views and to understand the material basis of these views with the aim of convincing those who hold them to change their mind and 2) it helps to sensitize those same dialecticians to errors that they might make in their own thinking and practice. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this schema I applied it to the classic example of “terrorism” and “Economism” in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, where I also suggested that the two types of anti-dialectical errors are symmetrical in terms of their fundamental mistake: they treat either the oppressed or the intellectuals as the subject of the educational/political process by ignoring the split that I introduced in the ﬁrst chapter. I opposed this mistake to the proper view which treats neither intellectuals nor the oppressed as only “objects”.

After establishing the meaning and importance of “concentration”, the process in which it occurs, and how to get it wrong in previous sections in this thesis, I then attempted to provide more clarity about what concentration actually is. Given the fact that the logic elaborated in this thesis is purposefully abstract and “oppression” was never specifically defined, I suggested that one can only talk about the specifics of concentration when dealing with a specific situation. Despite this, I advanced the claim that the particular role of intellectuals in this process is that of universalization.

Finally, I turned to what I consider to be the unique problem faced by those who

!187 maintain the sort of non-deterministic dialectical perspective that I have tried to present and cultivate in this work: that of “hope” and “faith”. Abandoning any sort of determinism requires that one abandon all guarantees of success, and it becomes impossible to fully justify any course of action on the basis of objective calculation. There is a need to take a “leap” which can only be based on a sort of “faith”, and I drew from both Badiou and Freire in order to make the case that there is a specific concept of “faith” that we need, and not faith-in-general. It is not a religious faith, insofar as “religious” refers to the expectation that “salvation” will arrive from outside (in this sense, a Stalinist could be considered “religious” despite their lack of belief in any particular religion; the objective laws of economy and history replace God). Making the distinction between “good” and “bad” faith required investigating Badiou’s concepts of “belief” and “confidence”, where the former was a faith in the structure (the splace) while the latter was a faith in the excess (the outplace). Ultimately, however, making the distinction between “belief” and “confidence” (where we would prefer the latter) does not allow one to avoid vacillating between them, because “to vacillate defines the structure of the subject” (Theory 323). I also identified two different roles for “faith” in both Freire and Badiou: one which was about starting the struggle and another about persisting in that struggle. Using a quote from Che Guevara which Freire included in Pedagogy of the Oppressed I suggested that the first “faith” probably always has a certain romanticism about it, a certain belief in the oppressed. But this belief will, over time, be replaced by a confidence which nourishes itself on the close contact between intellectuals and the oppressed which the struggle requires. I ended this discussion by asserting (following Badiou) that the state of “undecidability” produced by the necessity of having a dual confidence in both the party (intellectuals, teachers) and the people (the oppressed) is what assures you that you are dealing properly with the theory of the subject.

!188 Conclusion

On July 19th 2019, around the time that I began serious work on this thesis, I wrote the following poem in my journal:

Old-inked morality, still fresh

For never having seen the sun, until one day

Cast onto the cobblestones by riot,

Trampled on by a calculated righteousness

Which reveals the real of every right.

Page after page exposed to a quick wind

And every subtle pen-stroke bleached because

Inadequate to justice, and then gripped for

Kindling, to start the ﬁre by whose light

An evening vigil will convene to decide

Tomorrow’s order.

I do not include this poem here because I am particularly proud of it. If I recall correctly it was written quickly and without much consideration. Reﬂecting upon my eager use of enjambment makes it clear that I was pining for a haste, or at least some movement. I know myself well enough to say that whatever surety one can take from this poem was an attempt at self-deception. I do not compose anything like this when I feel conﬁdent.

In hindsight I felt strange writing a thesis which was based on the idea that things change via the movement of what is sometimes vaguely called “the people” or “the

!189 masses”. We all accept this in a certain sense, I think; everyone can visualize the crowds saluting Hitler, the thunderous assemblies cheering Mao, the countless civil rights supporters marching on Washington. But it is harder, I think, to see the “the masses make history” as an active and still-relevant principle. Even for those like me whose thinking takes this as an axiom. As Freire says of the “dialogical man”: “He is convinced that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn” (Oppressed 91). For a long time my “convinced” was supported only by abstractions, to which the many pages of dialectical rumination testify. I can only gesture at practices and suggest that they should exist.

The pandemic of 2020 was an ironic assault on this principle: economies ravaged, international trade relationships upset, First World countries laid low by plague while poorer ones kept steady. It really felt as though History was happening despite the extent to which the possibility of “the masses” was foreclosed by quarantine measures which kept us isolated. And the changes which appeared to be coming were not good. Local acts of kindness and solidarity were overshadowed by the threat of a profound and evil lesson: we would learn to accept the death as a necessary consequence of the revitalization and protection of capital’s churning. It is a commonplace to say that people die for accumulation, but to make this an accepted fact of life seemed a too- horrible escalation of this awareness. I feel as though those few months were a sort of plague interregnum where many of us did our best to occupy our attention with things other than the ever-rising numbers which popped up on every screen. An anxious state, where unprecedented change accompanied unprecedented powerlessness.

And then both from nowhere and from a hundred million origins the riots of Minneapolis dissolved all inertia. I rediscovered my poem shortly after these began, and I admit it feels strange to have written a poem on the metaphorical burning of the Law in favour of Justice and then to see the literal burning of a police precinct less than a year later in protest of a murder done by police! I am not raising this to suggest any sort

!190 of foresight; in fact the poem feels trite. It is a pleasure to have one’s idle speculation superseded by events! I also feel as though I have been provided a sort of vindication for what has always been the thesis of this work, which is that people can think and act with justice. Perhaps it is not so philosophical to gesture at the news instead of providing a perfect argument for my claims, but that is materialism! And as Badiou says, “Materialism most often disgusts the subtle mind” (Theory 186) [emphasis in original]. What has changed, however, is the character of that “conﬁdence” that Freire says is typical of the “dialogical man”. I can only say that it feels more present and visceral than before.

The initial upsurge and its climax in the burning of that precinct are an obvious example of a refusal to act on the terms of the oppressive society. The idea that the justice system could provide any sort of justice was clearly challenged in that moment. As the protests spread around the country and around the world this focus has not been maintained. Debates rage in the streets and elsewhere over the meaning of “justice”: does it require the abolition of systems of policing and incarceration? Or does justice require that the offending ofﬁcers be imprisoned themselves? Clearly the former is a general challenge while the former is a particular challenge which afﬁrms the system by asking it for justice. Hopefully the connections to my arguments in the body of the text are clear: different hypotheses exist within the actions and demands that we are seeing. Some lead back to the structure which has produced the oppression and others lead away from it. It is likely that the vast majority do not fall so neatly in either camp.

But that first eruption which shocked the world at the end of May has lost some of its heft. At the time of writing (late Summer 2020) there are still marches which often claim the streets in some cities in the United States, and which anticipate tense standoffs with officers suited up for a fight. And a trace of those explosive initial moments can be seen across the internet, where the question of racial justice seems to be posed more often than before, and with a renewed and expanded vigour. But to appropriate another

!191 quote from Marx’s 18th Brumaire, President Trump “has to keep the eyes of the public

ﬁxed on himself… by performing a coup d’état in miniature every day” (18th Brumaire 248), and though the mainstream media’s gaze was for a moment wrenched away from their dull coverage of Trump’s vulgar theatrics they have, at the time of writing, returned to this coverage. They are hardly in total control of public attention, but their relative control allows them to grasp and direct the energies expelled in those initial moments and channel them into the sterile morass of high-level electoral politics. It seems to me that the lesson of concentration’s necessity is most crucial in moments such as these. If one takes the recent upsurge as representative of the height of emancipatory politics — an implicit rejection of concentration — then the ambiguity and dispersion which has followed this upsurge is likely to turn you into a cynic and a defeatist. With concentration, we have work to do. Badiou makes this point by way of commentary on the upsurge in May 1968:

To tell the truth, there was nothing but a minor crack in the imperialist splace… Those who, like we did, saw in the ﬁrst place a lack (the subjective and political precariousness, the absence of a party) and not a fullness (revolt, the masses in the streets, the liberation of speech) had something on which to nourish their conﬁdence, while the others had nothing left but the possibility of betraying their belief (Theory 327).

It seems to me that the necessary path forward is to appreciate the upsurge without denying the lack and then to begin to investigate what exactly has happened (and what continues to happen). Our “central problem” is more or less the same as that of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be "hosts" of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible (Oppressed 48) [emphasis in original].

!192 Throughout this work I have emphasized that it is precisely because the oppressed are “divided, unauthentic beings” that one can conceive of a pedagogy of the oppressed, insofar as this latter is understood to be closely linked to the idea of “concentration”, as I have argued. The conviction and righteousness of the outrage which has gripped the United States should be celebrated, but this celebration should not become a substitute for the development of a pedagogy — really many pedagogies, suited to the conditions in each place — which is capable of developing the radicalism of this outrage while diminishing the inﬂuence of conservatism and accommodationism.

I believe that a fruitful place to begin is precisely on that ambiguity of “justice” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that I discussed above. The distinction I have made between the “general” and “particular” bears a strong (and clearly not incidental) resemblance to Marx’s answer in his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to the question of “where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?”:

This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and ﬁnally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from — and thereby emancipating — all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat (256) [emphasis in original].

I cite the passage here merely to show that in some sense his problems are also ours, even if what we might call “proletariat” looks different now than it did back then.

!193 Very shortly after the above-quoted passage Marx ties this “proletariat” to philosophy in a way which makes the importance of education to his project clear:

Just as philosophy ﬁnds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat ﬁnds its intellectual weapons in philosophy; and once the lightning of thought has struck deeply into this virgin soil of the people, emancipation will transform the Germans into men (256) [emphasis in original].

The education of the people was always crucial, but Marx does not say how it should take place. Indeed if anything the metaphor of “lightning” is misleading and obscure at best, and dangerous at worst. We have seen (or I, following many others, have argued) that there is nothing spontaneous about the kind of education that is necessary. It does not simply “strike” anyone, and if it appears to do so then this should be greeted warily.

These passages give us quite a strong statement of what is needed, even if the path to get there is not clear (then, or now). Given the directness and ﬁrmness of these passage from the Critique it is important to temper them with another passage from Marx — written less than a year after these other ones — which helps us to ﬁx the role of those who use words like “proletariat” in the time of historical upheaval when the people make themselves known. This one comes from Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’ and comments on the uprising of Silesian weavers in 1844. In this text Marx sharply criticizes another writer for their dismissal of this weavers’ revolt; the dismissal is based upon the accusation that the revolt has not articulated itself through demands directed at the state (Critical Notes 416). Marx’s criticisms are varied and I will only highlight one point which I believe to be of particular relevance:

!194 Confronted with the initial outbreak of the Silesian revolt no man who thinks and who loves the truth could regard the duty to play schoolmaster to the event as his primary task. On the contrary, his duty would rather be to study it and to discover its speciﬁc character. Of course, this requires scientiﬁc understanding and a certain love of mankind, while the other procedure needs only a ready- made phraseology saturated in an overweening love of oneself (Critical Notes 416) [emphasis in original].

By citing this passage I mean to emphasize that despite the many advances that Marxists have made on the question of education it is necessary ﬁrst and foremost to be pupils. Badiou himself made this same point after the outbreak of the Arab Spring:

“…we must be the pupils of these movements, not their stupid teachers. For in the peculiar genius of their inventions they are reviving some principles of politics that people have long sought to persuade us were obsolete… when it comes to liberty, equality and emancipation, we owe everything to popular riots” (Rebirth 107).

Whatever has been accumulated in terms of wisdom or doctrine was precarious long before the world was shaken once again by these most recent movements. It is incumbent on the “we” of Marxism to understand our inheritance to be as tenuous as it is. As Badiou put it in Theory of the Subject:

Yes, let us admit it without detours: Marxism is in crisis; Marxism is atomized… what we inherit in times of crisis and the imminent threat of war is a narrow and fragmentary assemblage of thought and action, caught in a labyrinth of ruins and survivals…. To defend Marxism today means to defend a weakness. We must practise Marxism (Theory 182). [emphasis in original]

While remarking in Pedagogy of Hope upon the many (mis)interpretations of his own work Freire brings up Marx, saying:

!195 Without claiming, by a long shot, to compare myself to Marx (not because now, from time to time, it is said that he is a “has-been,” but on the contrary, precisely because, to me, he continues to be, needing only to be reseen), I ﬁnd myself inclined to quote one of his letters—the one in which, irritated by inconsistent French “marxists,” he said: “Well, then, all I know is that I’m no Marxist” (79) [emphasis added].

For the Badiou of Theory of the Subject Marxism was weak, and it was from this weakness that a renewed Marxism should created. It seems to me that Freire agrees. None of us should be “Marxists” if that requires a strict maintenance of the old ways. But this afﬁrmation does not free us from the duty to consider what the old ways were, even if this duty is carried out only in order to keep ourselves from walking well- trodden paths to nowhere (or worse, disaster). I hope that by avoiding these well- trodden paths we can begin to achieve that “unheard type of vicinity” and that “previously unthinkable political topology” between the oppressed and intellectuals that Badiou has advocated, and I hope that what I have presented here represents a useful contribution to this effort.

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