Skribent: Katherine Everitt
I dette essayet legg filosof og New Yorkar Katherine Everitt fram ein historiefilosofi inspirert av kvantefysikk, Georg W.F. Hegel og Alain Badiou. Ho argumenterer for at historia er ontologisk knytt til naturen gjennom eit brot, eit inngrep i likesæla til naturen. Objektiviteten til historia vert konstituert gjennom subjektivitet, hevdar Everitt. Ho trekkjer fram det å namngje som eit døme på dette; å gje namn åt rom, gjere det til ein stad, er ei fundamental handling som skaper eit politisk-historisk potensiale. Samanvevinga av differens og indifferens, av historiske hendingar og namngjeving, er mogleg der det finst ein grunnleggjande dialektikk i veren og inkje. Slik viser ho at forståinga vår av historia alltid føreset ein ontologisk filosofi, ei fundamental oppfatning av korleis røyndomen heng saman.
Is history objective? At most, we agree that things happened. The Bastille really was
stormed in 1789. But, today, the enemy of objectivity – relativism – threatens to cloud any knowability in history, relegating events to the rubbish bin of interpretation.
Has modernity completely corroded the objective, transforming what were once palpable objects to holograms of nothingness? Or, is it precisely the nothingness at the heart of the object that solidifies it, that is woven into brute materiality in order to form things?
Even if one were to buy into such a negative materialist argument focused upon non-being, surely we cannot apply such a theory of materialism to history itself. Or, is this exactly how we can render history objective? I argue that we can, in fact, ontologize history through a theory of historical non-being and, thus, through a spatialized interpretation of history itself.
The Indifference of Space
To think the ontology of history – that is, the being and non-being of history – I propose we examine the grounding paradox implicit in being itself: space. It was Democritus who wrote that space is somewhere between being and non-being. 1
Indeed, one can imagine space as a nothingness, as a non-being, as the negative externality of some determined being. But, at the same time, one can imagine naming space and, therefore, bringing it into existence. Space, as that which straddles being and non-being, will hold the key to thinking an ontology of history.
For Hegel, it is space which is the ground of nature. His Philosophy of Nature opens with space, which he describes as an “indifference” and as “continuous.” 2 Nature is grounded in space in this way: both are continuous and indifferent. Nature is continuous, in that it goes on and on. So does space; it goes on and on. Nature is indifferent – in both senses of the word: it doesn’t care if you live or die, and its differences remain undistinguished without the intervention of interpretation. Space is also indifferent in that it lacks any implicit differences – this space here is the same as that space there, containing no differences at all within it.
Space, therefore, has a special relationship with differences. It is indifferent in contrast to difference, and thus one might ask if it is the indifference of space that foregrounds the emergence of difference. Differences are, of course, spatialized. Without space, all would be at one point, everything atop of itself and indistinguishable.
How does Hegel exit the indifference of natural space in the Philosophy of Nature? It is through the point, “a negation which is posited in space.” 3 The point, we can understand, is difference-as-such: meaning, on its own, the point is a totally abstract negation without content. The point, of course, is not natural, but is instead a logical determination. This means that Hegel’s Nature progresses from space to the point, and subsequently to time, not naturally, but through the insertion of logic. This, I argue, is a quilting of logic into nature that allows for difference to disrupt the indifference of nature.
The emergence of time follows the point, precisely because time is a series of points in relation to themselves. Time is also an indifferent continuity like space, Hegel writes, but when “posited for itself,” it is a determinate time, i.e. a time that has been logically organized by spirited beings. 4
Nature, therefore, subsists as an indifferent continuity in terms of time and space, and it is only with the insertion of the logical point that differences can be quilted in to form determinate beings. This distinction between indifference and difference, between the indeterminate and the determinate, will help us in our task to ontologize history.
The Point of the Event
The indeterminacy of nature may lead one to ask: what is nature if nature-in-itself is indeterminate? This question presents a paradox: how can we determine the indeterminable? Can we describe nature without quilting logic into it? Can we think nature without the subject?
Badiou writes that “nature does not exist” in his seminal text, Being and Event. 5 It is a striking claim. Put simply, for Badiou, nature has no history. It is completely smooth, stable, and without gaps, whereas history requires instability to produce the rupture of events. Reading Badiou with Hegel, it could be said that nature is a smooth, indifferent, undetermined continuity outside logical intervention.
History, on the other hand, is marked by events. For Badiou, events disrupt the everyday with that which is impossible, or mathematically speaking, forbidden within a given equation. 6 These unnameable happenings are called “interventions.” 7 Interventions rip into the static, dull fabric of the quotidian – there is no reconciling them with the day-to-day.
It is by naming the unnameable that the intervention-turned-event opens up a new world and, thus, a new orientation of logic. 8 Naming is critical throughout the work of Badiou, precisely because naming weaves a difference into indifference. Foundational to Badiou’s ontology, in fact, is that we name the void – this, he says, is the “proper name of being.” 9 It is by naming the void that we can begin to count, that we derive the cardinal numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc. Naming the void inculcates ontology for Badiou, since for him, ontology is mathematics.
Likewise, naming the event opens up a new world. Again, we have a certain paradox: how do we name the unnameable? What was previously impossible is given a name: “I love you” in the case of the love event, “the Paris Commune” in the case of the political 1871 event, etc. And while we have named the eruption of the impossible, transforming it from an intervention into an event, a trace of the unnameable remains. This name, therefore, is split between possible and impossible. What was pointed out by the name harbors within itself a contradiction.
Badiou writes: ”There is actually no other recourse against this circle than that of splitting the point at which it rejoins itself. It is certain that the event alone, aleatory figure of non-being, founds the possibility of intervention.” 10 The event is that which is nameable, but carries a trace of the unnameable rupture of the intervention. Hence, the impossible intervention and the named event would collapse into one if they were not split at a point, with this split maintaining that the name is itself naming the impossible and is thus a placeholder for the impossible.
Events mark all the possibilities of a moment that have collapsed at one point. They
reorient their subjects around a new, empty name, one that becomes a receptacle for meaning. The point of the event emerges as a negation of the day-to-day, as an impossibility against the delimited background of the possible. An event is tied to a particular site, precisely because it is a point drawn out against an indifferent backdrop. It is placed physically and logically as a nexus. This point, nonetheless, is not a unified one, but a splitting of a name that maintains impossibility while opening up what is newly possible. There is both a precision and an imprecision contained in the split point of the event, a particular site that opens up a whole new
realm of possibilities replete in a world. 11
The Blank Space of History
In this section, I want to consider Gaston Bachelard’s The Dialectic of Duration. In
response to Bergson’s emphasis on temporal continuity, Bachelard paints the picture of a dialectic between action and repose [reposer]. 12 To be in repose is to be at rest, to be lazily zoning out, to be doing nothing rather than something. Bachelard writes: "... it will be seen that there is nothing more normal or more necessary than going to the limit and establishing the relaxation of function, the repose of function, the non functioning of function, since function must obviously often stop functioning. It is at this point that we shall see the interest of taking the principle of negation back to its source in temporal reality itself. We shall see that there is a fundamental heterogeneity at the very heart of lived, active, creative duration, and that in order to know or use time well, we must activate the rhythm... of work and repose. Only idleness is homogeneous; we retain only what we reconquer; we maintain only what we resume. Moreover, simply from the methodological point of view, it will always be in our interests to establish a connection between the dialectic of different entities and the fundamental dialectic of being and non-being." 13
Bachelard here develops a dialectic between action and repose, between that which occupies us, and the moments we simply relax. He points out that this dialectic is one of being and non-being, in specifically temporal terms. The moments of repose are “homogenous” in their nothingness, as a blank space between the inflections of action. Here, I propose borrowing from Bachelard, to develop a spatiality of historical repose. 14
This answers our question – what is the historical space between events. How can we characterize the day-to-day? This, I call historical repose. Historical repose I liken to “blank space,” which we can also call the void. It is the indifference between events. It is the potentiality for there to be a new event, the potentiality that all space holds. Historical repose is necessarily formless, indeterminate, and indifferent.
Historical events are the ruptures that disrupt the blank, indeterminate space of the void. I liken these to points. Historical events, like points, are differences that are in themselves empty. We imbue events with meaning, just as we orient points to create a meaningfully delimited space. Events, as rupturing points, are integrated into a new world, or mathematically, into a new equation, as empty names. 15
Historical repose is the space between events, the non-being that shapes being. It is the indifferent void that is named as a one, from the standpoint of the evental site. It is the epoch between events. And just as the void and the one are in a radical non-relation, per Badiou as well as Hegel, historical repose and the historical event are unrelated, because the event is the impossibility that becomes possible and transforms one time – one epoch of repose – into an entirely new one. 16
Events, like points, are necessarily reorienting. They emerge out of the blank void,
specifically after we have “drawn a name from the void,” as Badiou writes. 17 They are the insertion of a new logic – the quilting of a point – into the blank space of historical repose. This is the quilting of crisis, as historical ruptures are woven against the repose of the historically quotidian. This is the weaving of a point into blank space. In Hegelian terms, this is the negation of negation. 18
The Artificiality of Humanity
Now that we have developed a basic theory that spatializes history between events and repose, let us begin the steps necessary to ontologize history. It is here that I ask: does history exist?
In Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history, Hegel argues that history is
humanity’s self-awareness. 19 History is an extension of our self-consciousness, and it is an extension of our division from nature. To Badiou, history is necessarily artificial. It is something we have named. As articulated before, historic events must be named before they can take hold.
It is the naming of the void that fundamentally ruptures humans with nature. We name non-being, introducing the most basic paradox: that the nothing is. And it is not that Parmenides is wrong on this account, the nothing also certainly is not. 20 This is the paradox: that we can somehow name the nothing. And this is why we must think of space: space is the named nothing. It is somewhere between being and non-being. It is in thinking the named nothingness, in thinking the void, in thinking space, that ontology as the study of what is can emerge.
According to Hegel, in Science of Logic, determinate being [bestimmt sein] is the unity of “being with a non-being.” 21 We determine things based on what they are and what they are not. It follows that what we determine is necessarily artificial due to our linguistic imposition. Just as naming space makes something from nothing, disentangling an entangled natural world via language artificially carves out what is there. And hence, history as named events, is likewise artificial in its determinacy. We carve out events as something against the indifference of historical repose.
Thus, history as an extension of naming events, as an extension of human
self-consciousness, is itself something artificial, something that distinguishes us from nature. Broadly, Hegel tells us that spirit is that which denaturalizes. 22 By naming a historic event, by naming something empty and imbuing it with meaning, spirited beings distinguish themselves from nature. History is drawn out in direct contrast with what is natural and indifferent.
This is why freedom is not natural. In his book Indifference and Repetition, Frank Ruda argues that rather than seeing freedom as a natural capacity, freedom is instead a radical rupture, a break that introduces a difference into a situation of indifference. 23 To be indifferent is to be naturalized, to go on doing the same ol’ thing. To be free is to introduce a new term into the situation, to seize on an impossible intervention and affirm it as an event.
Nature is Just Space
We sink back into nature when we become indifferent. When our routines are normalized, when we do the same thing over and over, when we admit that some tendency is just “natural,” we are not acting freely. We are acting indifferently.
Thus, when we occupy the blank space of history, when we find ourselves in historical repose, we can call this spirit naturalized. A spirit naturalized is not acting with its capacity for freedom. It is just going about its daily routine. Business as usual. If we find ourselves at the end of history, in a repetition of mindless capitalist consumption, in a series of crises without any real events, this is because we have naturalized our state of affairs. “There is no alternative.” “Humans are naturally greedy.” These are the hallmarks of oppression, that we have accepted and naturalized in an attempt to close the gates that spirit must pry open to be free.
This is not objective. This is the indifference of history. The wash of perspectives, that everyone has some valid interpretation, that truth is illusory – this is the indifferent naturalization of subjectivity without objectivity, one that is fundamentally unfree.
In his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève says, “Without man, nature would be space, and only space.” 24 He’s not wrong. Without the quilting of the logical point into the blank space of nature by spirited beings, there is only the continuous indifference of nature. Without the quilting of crisis into repose, without the seizing of this crisis to create a new timeline, all is just an indifferent, naturalized ongoing, without any real history.
The artificiality of humanity, that we are at a distance from nature, does not mean that we cannot know things, that we are forever barred in knowing things-in-themselves. Rather, in precisely the opposite way, we know things because we have woven difference into indifference, because we have quilted the void into the indifferent substance of nature, because we have quilted an empty point into historical repose and called this history. This is negation of negation: that we have named emptiness, situated an empty point against emptiness and called it something: an event.
Threading History and Nature
Once we suture points into the indifference of space, we thread logic into nature. It is in this way that we make into objects what was previously just indifferent continuity. It is then that we delimit and determine. This likewise means that determinate being necessitates the weaving of the void, i.e. non-being, into being.
Slavoj Žižek has written extensively on quantum physics over the last three decades. And it may seem like a strange connection to make here, but it is actually a critical one. 25 What quantum physics teaches us is that the observer is entangled with the observed. 26 For example, when we observe an elementary particle, we force it to determine its spin – either clockwise or counterclockwise.
As we measure nature, as we determine nature, we affect its actual ontological makeup. In pointing nature out, categorizing it, and conceptualizing it, we change the facts of nature itself. The collapse of the wave function – from a scope of possibilities to a point – is caused by subjective observation, a subjective intervention that renders the objective.
Thus, some quantum physicists like Carlo Rovelli are tempted to conclude that nature is evental. 27 I argue here that this is not quite the right formulation, but they are not far off. It is the application of the observer’s measurement that imposes events onto nature. It is this act of naming, this application of difference onto that which is otherwise indifferent, that imposes events onto nature, thus transforming nature.
In terms of history, this means transforming naturalized spirit into denaturalized spirit. When we name an event, we determine it. We weave a point into the blank space of historical repose. We transform the historical repose, the empty space of possibility, into actuality. Our subjective determinations produce the object of the historical event.
Thus, Badiou is not wrong that “nature does not exist,” if we employ this framework.
Nature as pure space is that which lies outside of naming. Historical repose is likewise outside of named events. But I recommend we view this in the less striated sense of “that which exists” and “that which does not exist.” I instead recommend we be more specific and call this dialectic that of potentiality and event.
Specifically, I call for a dialectic between determinacy and indeterminacy. The indeterminate nonetheless exists – the electron before it is observed, the day-to-day of historic repose – their existence is simply indifferent and indeterminate. Their transformation into the determinate perhaps is a “stronger” form of existence, but determination does not create something out of nothing, because both indeterminate nature and historical repose exist prior to their being pointed out. Naming the void, giving the impossible historic event a name, that makes it into something. Weaving the logical void into nature and naturalistic historical repose transforms their ontological characters into determined nature and a spirited history.
What we see here is that there is, in a stronger sense than saying “this exists” and “that does not,” that there is an entanglement between subject and object. The subject’s observation fundamentally changes the ontological nature of its object. The storming of the Bastille is ontologically transformed when we name it, just like the electron’s spin.
Thus, there is subject and object, but in a truly Hegelian sense, “not just as substance but just as much as subject,” we must recognize that subject and substance are fundamentally, ontologically entangled. 28
From Subject to Object
I have answered the question posed at the start: is history objective? My thesis is that it is necessarily through subjectivity that history’s objectivity is constituted. Historical events are the interruptions in the potential, empty space of historical repose. It is the introduction of a difference into indifference. It is the mapping of a point onto an otherwise indeterminate space. It is the introduction of a one into the void.
In the same way the potentiality of the atom’s spin is transformed into actuality when we measure it – i.e., when we name it – historical repose is transformed into historical events when we name these events. Naming, in this sense, is a unification of being and non-being, i.e. a determination in the Hegelian register.
So, is history objective? It is objective only through subjective entanglement. Otherwise,it is simply potentiality. In other words, it is simply open space. History is as “real” as self-consciousness. It is the mediation of ourselves. Thus, I conclude that history’s objectivity is necessarily a result of subjectivity, an empty point woven against an empty backdrop, that in this way opens itself up to a new world of meaning.
1 As reported by Simplicius in (c. 550) Aristotle’s Physics. Translated by Stephen Menn. Republished by Bloomsbury in 2022. 28.15.
2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1830) Philosophy of Nature. Translated by A. V. Miller. Republished in 1970 by Clarendon Press. p. 28.
3 Ibid. p. 29.
4 Ibid. p. 34-35.
5 Badiou, Alain (1988) Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. Republished in 2013 by Bloomsbury. p. 140.
6 Ibid. p. 201.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. p. 203.
9 Ibid. p. 59.
10 Ibid. p. 209.
11 For Badiou, the theory of the point is much broader than just the split point of the event. Events are built out by fidelitous affirmations of the event. He calls these “points,” in which there are only two choices present: to affirm or to deny fidelity to an event. These points weld together subjective interventions with the objectivity of the world that a truth procedure creates. See “Book VI: Theory of Points” in Badiou, Alain (2006) Being and Event, 2: Logic of Worlds. Republished in 2009 by Continuum. Translated by Alberto Toscano. P. 399-449.
12 Gaston, Bachelard (1950) The Dialectic of Duration. Translated by Mary McAllester Jones. Republished by Rowman and Littlefield in 2000. p. 20-21.
13 Ibid.
14 One may also look at Walter Benjamin’s concept of “homogenous, empty time,” a time that is not differentiated and thus not cited. From “On the Concept of History” (1940) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Translate by Harry Zohn. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Republished by Harvard University Press in 2006. p. 395.
15 For Lacanians, we would call this creating a new S1.
16 See: Badiou, Alain (1982) Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. Republished in 2009 by Continuum. p. 57; and Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1812) The Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by George di Giovanni. Republished in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. p. 132.
17 Being and Event. p. 167. Specifically, the drawing of the name from the void is the nomination of a new infinity, and thus, a new truth. It is a break in repetition, i.e. a break in the historical day-to-day.
18 See Hegel’s Science of Logic: ”The conversion of nothing into an affirmative by virtue of its determinateness... appears to a consciousness bound to the abstraction of the understanding as the greatest paradox. Simple as it is, or rather because of its very simplicity, the insight that the negation of negation is something positive appears a trivial matter to which the haughty understanding need pay no heed, even though its correctness is undeniable – and not just its correctness, but also, on account of the uni- versality of the determinations involved, its infinite extension and universal applicability, so that it would indeed be well to pay heed to it.” p. 78.
19 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1822) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History - Introduction: Reason in History. Republished by Cambridge University Press in 1975. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. p. 53
20 Parmenides (c. 475 BC) “The Poem.” First Philosophers. Republished by Oxford University Press in 2000. p. 60.
21 The Science of Logic. p. 84.
22 See the progression from Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy of Spirit in the Encyclopedia, and the myriad ways in which spirit distinguishes itself from nature. For example, spirited beings organize nature into different arrangements, disrupting what is indifferently natural into that which is differentiated.
23 Ruda, Frank (2024) Indifference and Repetition. Fordham University Press.
24 Kojève, Alexandre (1947) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit.’ Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. Republished in 1969 by Cornell University Press. p. 133.
25 See for example: Žižek, Slavoj (2023) “From Quantum Mechanics to Quantum Reality.” Filozofia. Vol 78: 6. p. 409-428.
26 See for example: Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
27.
28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1807) The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Republished in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. p. 12.
コメント