In the late afternoon today, I started reading Sam Gillespie’s “The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics“. The book starts with the simple sentence “Change is a constant of being”, followed by an attempt to make the statement evident with examples: Evolving organisms, an individual that suddenly joins a religious movement, an artist that created a significant piece of art.
One aim of philosophy is to find the conditions under which something new is produced. How to start? With worldly things; with conceptual thoughts; both?
I am looking at my quite new “pure essentials” steamer. Currently, it steams rice and mushrooms. It has a flavour booster which contains spices: Curry. The steam takes up the spices and when flowing through the ingredients of rice and mushrooms, it modifies it’s consistency and it’s original taste.
The conditions under which this change happens are:
- presence of water in the steamer
- ingredients are in the steamer containers (rice and mushrooms separately)
- the steamer has power supply to transform water into steam
- the spices are put in the flavour booster
Generally, the objects under analysis (mushroom and rice) have the ability to get influenced by something else: flavour-enriched steam. Some of the properties of the observed objects change with the help of this insistent steam. The change is not a discrete switch. The process takes it’s time. It is not always clear how long the steam needs to insist until the properties switch. If the steamer runs out of water before the change occurs, you will end up with half-cooked rice, with no taste, and with raw mushrooms.
“novelty proceeds from an event” (p.3, highlighted by A.K.)
So if you want to call something event in the above thought experiment, it can only be the moment where the property of the ingredients switches.
How is the event happening? There is at least the insistence of a process, where the object under analysis gets influenced by something other.
To recap: Something happens to the object under analysis and this results in a change in properties. The way something happens to the object is called the process. The process follows a technique. The technique is known or unknown to the observer. Sometimes (it’s not certain), the process leads to an event, which is: the switch of some properties of the object that we are observing.
However, back at Gillespie, we find a quite different approach, following Alain Badiou:
“It is from the inconsistency of the void that something new can appear within the realm of human experience” (p.3)
- ‘Human experience’ refers to the observer. Based on above thoughts, there is a difference between what is happening to the observer and what is happening with the observed object.
If we say, “something changed”, we can explicate it in two ways:
- The object has changed: the thing that we are observing changed it’s properties.
- The observer has changed: The vision, through which (s)he sees the object, has changed. Something happened, which made the observer see the object with different eyes. The thing that (s)he is observing did not change – or it’s not clear if it changed.
In the extreme case, we could say: Let’s assume that nothing changed in the object. Then how come that the observer has changed her perspective? What triggered the change in perspective? Why did she not see it that way before?
“philosophical novelty proceeds from an event” (p.3, highlighted by A.K.)
This extreme case brings to light that there is a concept of novelty which goes beyond observing a change of properties in an object. The question is then rather: How it is possible that the perspective on things changed in various ways within human history, and especially the history of philosophy.
There is a difference, at least in the beginning, between the question that could be asked in a company: “What are the conditions that a leader should create to get innovative products produced in her firm?” and the question: “What are the conditions to think about things in a novel way?”
“It is fairly well-known, if poorly understood, that Badiou views Cantorian set theory as the best means we have of formalizing the inherent inconsistency of being as such.” (Gillespie 2008, p.11)
Not differentiating beings and the discourse around being caused, I think, some confusion in the reception of Badiou’s work: His thesis “Being is mathematical” does not imply that objects in the world are mathematical, it implies that: the way we think/talk about objects can be summarized in mathematical terms to understand how we arrive at a new perspective.
It is yet to be seen if this view brings benefits for the analysis of actual situations, and to give hints about how something new can appear.
However, does novelty always come from extra-ordinary, irregular disturbance? The switch in properties during the steaming process is too ordinary for Badiou’s theory of novelty; it does not classify as an event in the sense that it can be the start of a significant shift in perspective of the observer. It’s just a regular, worldly change of states. But try the result, it might be a revelation, within it’s boundaries. 🙂
I’ll discuss an example of how looking at something produces novelty. Certain conditions for an event to take place may be discerned in this particular case. But what about general conditions and, in particular, mathematics as the appropriate language to approach this issue?
Not unlike Andreas’ flavor booster the internet permeates a given material substratum, in this case the time-honored habits of academic publishing. Its distributive force changes those givens to “lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge”. No small feat and certainly an impressive innovation. It has been triggered by joining two initially unrelated phenomena into a single view.
A couple of years later (14 years, to be precise) an opposite view emerges. The big publishing houses have, as it turns out, appropriated the term “open access” and turned it into a source of additional income. Their vision – “innovative” as it were, from their point of view – is that they get paid by the authors and funding institutions instead of journal subscribers. The previous meaning of “open access” is turned on its head, but, alas, it certainly is a decisive change of procedure.
Innovation is often associated with hope and the improvement of circumstances. Yet, disappointment can be just as new and unforseen.
“It is yet to be seen if this view brings benefits for the analysis of actual situations, and to give hints about how something new can appear.” (A.K.)
This is putting it mildly. I fail to understand how Cantorian set theory could contribute anything either to the phenomenon of the flavor booster or open access. It might be responded that we are dealing with conditions of radical change, not with its empirical circumstances. I am cautiously sympathetic to using mathematics instead of the usual metaphysical jargon to sketch the general structures involved. But I do not see how this touches on the crucial point of the asymmetry between “boosting”, “opening up”, “enlightening” etc. and their respective overturning.