© CERN
As you probably know, the LHC has finally been restarted, with some successful test beams (no collisions at all yet). This video (which I grabbed from YouTube but that was actually made by the CERN people, see the original here) does a great job in explaining what actually happens in the LHC (and how).
Yesterday, I attended the Middlesex University Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy workshop on Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (excerpt .pdf) and Logic of Worlds (excerpt .pdf). The whole experience was pleasant, the speakers and their talks were quite stimulating (after all, three of them are translators of Badiou) and there were a good number of people in the audience (I’d say around 80). Hopefully the recordings of the talks (I saw a recorder on the table and I think that Hallward said something about recording) will be available in the near future. To complete the nice experience, I also had the chance to meet in person Nick from Speculative Heresy/The Accursed Share. It is always interesting to meet personally online acquaintances, and Nick seemed like a very friendly and nice guy. I was short on time after the talks, but we had the chance to have a beer and a chat during the concluding reception.
I won’t comment on the single talks, but there is one main remark that I feel the need to make.
Toscano (translator of Logic of Worlds), during his talk, said something like ‘for the most abstruse mathematical passages I had to ask Badiou to email me an explanation to help me with the translation’. Moreover in his Translator’s Note he says ‘for the translations of logical and mathematical terms I’ve been lucky to be able to rely on Anindya Bhattacharyya, a fine reader of Badiou and one of the few people I know capable of engaging his work directly on the formal terrain’.
Bosteels (translator of Theory of the Subject), during the closing session said (and here I quote almost verbatim): ‘Is there a mathematician in the audience that can tell us if Badiou’s mathematics is sound and makes sense? I don’t even know what an algorithm is’.
Yesterday there was some controversy about Badiou’s employment of set and category theory, which was criticized from different directions, both by Ali Alizadeh and Kristin Ross. I don’t want to get into this debate right now. Let us assume for the time being that Badiou’s use of mathematics is philosophically useful (if not inevitable) and mathematically sound (as we can reasonably infer from Badiou’s own remarks about the long time he spent studying math, and about the importance of doing so).
What I want to say is something different. Is it ok for a translator of Badiou to not know the first thing (and knowing what an algorithm is really is Logic 101) about mathematics and to ignore whether or not his use of it is consistent? One possible answer: yes, as long as the translator was selected only for purely linguistic skills. But here we are not talking about translating a novel or a play.We are talking about someone translating a philosophical text, in which mathematical formalism plays a pivotal part in the argument, not just as an embellishment, and about someone who is generally taken as a ‘Badiou expert’. If you ask me, no, it is not ok at all.
I don’t think that I can be accused of being unfair on philosophers, as I’ve often before criticized scientists about the paucity of their philosophical knowledge. Am I then being a hypocrite? Am I accusing someone about an ignorance which I share? Yes, of course, I certainly don’t have Badiou’s knowledge and grasp of the mathematics he uses, and I do often struggle my way through the most formalized parts of his books (still, one can buy a good introduction to set theory–as I did–and just, you know, read it). Sure, I am guilty of that. But then again, I do not translate Badiou’s major books, nor I am invited to workshops on the account of my being a Badiou expert.
You might say that I am being too harsh. Fine, so let me tone down the criticism and say that, even if I was a translator of Badiou’s work and I found it unnecessary for my job to learn one thing or two about the mathematics which he uses, I would not say it in public, almost ironically, as if it is a completely legitimate thing to do.
Let me provide an example to explain my animosity.
I am a French physicist, and I am writing a physics book about the concept of time in physics (yes, the example comes loosely from Sean Carroll’s book). In a very unusual fashion for a scientist, I build my argument relying on Heidegger’s conception of temporality (I said loosely), which comes to have a structurally central part in my book and in the whole of my thesis as exposed in it. Now, my book is very successful and gets translated into English. The translator is selected on the basis of his knowledge of French, and of his familiarity with physics. At a conference, some time afterwards, the translator claims: ‘I know nothing about this Heidegger guy and about the meaning of this ‘dasein’ word and others. I’ve asked the author to help me out. Is there a philosopher in the audience that can tell me if the author interprets Heidegger correctly? I don’t even know what they mean by ‘being”.
I know, the example is too hyperbolic and quite weak, since (among other reasons) to ‘interpret Heidegger’ is not the same as ‘employ Set Theory’. But still, I wanted to exaggerate to expose once again the same question: is it fine for a philosopher to adopt an openly dismissive attitude about scientific/mathematical knowledge? (I think that Toscano said openly ‘I am an ignoramus in mathematics’). And, (and here is the real crux of my critique) is it fine when such a philosopher is called to translate the work of another philosopher who has spent his whole life trying to break out of a certain tradition of philosophy that considers mathematical formalism to be reserved for mindless positivists, and to rehabilitate such a formalism as a necessary part of philosophical discourse?
In my opinion, you can think whatever you want about Badiou’s use of mathematics as a part of a philosophical project, but as a translator and as a ‘Badiouian’ you are expected to take it seriously, and to know exactly what he is talking about.
To be fair, in this regard I have to praise Peter Hallward, who in his book on Badiou advises the reader to start from the Appendix, where he gives a short yet very qualified introduction on the development of Set Theory, furnishing the reader with the basic mathematical tools needed to understand Badiou’s argumentation.
Above the archway of Badiou’s school there is an engraving saying ‘Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter’. Shouldn’t we take it more seriously? Shouldn’t we be more humble?
From left to right: Peter Hallward, Bruno Bosteels, Kristin Ross
Concluding session. From left to right: Nina Power, Bruno Bosteels, Éric Alliez, Ali Alizadeh, Kristin Ross, Alberto Toscano.
Levi let us know about a new website gathering information, the Speculative Realism Pathfinder, part of a project of the University of Illinois. Levi defined it as:
a case study to teach what the internet is capable of intellectually and philosophically.
Now, maybe I am missing something, but when I saw it I was pretty disappointed. As I have suggested before, I do believe that SR is interestingly and inextricably linked, technologically and ideologically, to our contemporary ‘internet culture’. Unfortunately, to simply make an hyperlinked list of blogs, books and people related to SR is not representative of this. (This is something I was thinking about yesterday: wait another year and then write a critical history of the emergence and development of SR online: who is the first one who actually used the term ’speculative realism’ on a blog? I guess Harman? How would Levi’s Democracy of Objects have been had he not been a blogger and engaged in discussions with others? When looking at a temporally large picture, who else has been influenced by the erratic form of blog discussions (and how)? And how have other non-blogging ‘SRists’ like Meillassoux developed differently/in different directions?)
Now, the SR Pathfinder, is very useful for those who have no idea what SR is all about and need a one-page reference. But why not simply update and improve the Wikipedia entry of SR?
This brings me to another (quite unrelated) theme I wanted to touch on, which actually is not my original idea but something I heard when watching the podcast of Cory Doctorow’s (the guy who runs BoingBoing) talk at the Q2C festival last month (on open access, piracy and copyright). He explained how he decided that instead of having his undergraduate classes write essays which would end up forgotten in a University archive, he made it a mandatory and assessed piece of coursework for students to edit the Wikipedia pages related to his course (or perhaps the creation of new ones).
This, from where I stand, is quite simply a fantastic idea. Get your students to register with a Wikipedia account, so that you can track their activities and assign a group of them the task of improving a given Wikipedia page, say, for example, the page on Naive Realism (I think that a page on a philosophical current or position works better than one about a single philosopher).
They’d have to propose changes and go through the process of collective ‘peer-reviewing’ on the related discussion page. Advantages? Two main ones: first, a pedagogical one, since the students would get to actually discuss with each other and not simply write an essay on their own PC without any feedback in the process, hence developing the critical ability to discuss philosophical positions; second, a more public one since such a direct link between university courses and Wikipedia would dramatically increase the average quality of Wikipedia entries. If correctly organized and extended on a large scale, I believe that good students could produce ‘for free’ (of course, for their own intellectual advancement) a final product as good as (or actually better) the one offered by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (which, don’t get me wrong, is a wonderful resource).
I think that in the process of implementing this method of assessment, many more constructive ideas than I presented here could pop out (for example, assigning different groups to different, yet related, pages and see how they independently build links to each other).
The downside and the reason why it will probably not spread as fast as I would like? Simple: it would take a much longer time for the markers to assess the performance of a student, as spread over a long amount of time and disseminated in many small editings to the page. And given how much the average lecturer loves to read and mark a pile of essays (warning, sarcasm) I think this idea would not take off.
Still, it could still be present as a second assessment method, parallel to the good old essay.
EDIT - So apparently this post gave me the first scathing mention from the perverse egalitarian. In the comments section of a recent post I just read:
I think it’s great that SR is getting noticed (no references to OOP/OOO though), but notice how it is presented by these excitable attention-craving “philosophical bloggers” – Fabio basically describes this as “part of a project of the University of Illinois” and so on. It’s a collection of links I can create in a minute, it includes Zizek, for example, whom I would not count as a “speculative realist” or anything for that matter. It’s a good lesson in self-promotion though, I’m very impressed. In a week we have a new “peer-reviewed journal” and now an awesome “database/pathfinder” – what’s next? a TV appearance or another Badiou interview? Oh my…
Yay! I have finally been recognized as the excitable attention-craving pseudo-philosophy blogger that I really am! But wait, did I not write up there that i was disappointed by what I saw on that website (as compared to what I was expecting from it, see comments below)? Well probably that was just a strategy to dissimulate my (actual) excitation. I must be a quite cunning attention-craving pseudo-philosophy blogger 
Well, actually I never posted one before, but still, I was reading it yesterday, so here it is:
Fundamental ontological distinctions are easily obliterated; and if they are to be envisaged phenomenally…, this must be done explicitly, even at the risk of discussion the ‘obvious’.
(Being and Time: 81)
If you ask me that’s what philosophy does at its most basic level. To discuss the apparently obvious (which often seems to be, from the outside, the apparently useless) in order to resurrect fundamental distinctions buried in everyday practices. Whatever a philosopher might seem to theorize (modes of being, structures of power, binary oppositions, hermeneutical dynamics, processes and networks…), is what actually was there all along. Is philosophy is just the renaming of the obvious (a ‘de-obviousizing’ intellectual procedure)? It might be, and I don’t see it at all as a disparaging remark.
The news is all over the OOO media already, but hell, a blogpost is a small effort to give my support to this: the indefatigable Paul Ennis managed to set up an (open access, yay!) Object Oriented Ontology Journal, under Open Humanities Alliance. Provisional title: ‘Speculations’. Cheeky.
As a declared fan of open access with fugacious interests in objectology I cannot but be happy about this. As I said before, I see OOP and its ‘internet diffusion’ as somewhat deeply connected.
Unfortunately, there already has been some gratuitous mockery about this project (see the comments to Paul’s post). I find it absurd and extremely unfair towards someone like Paul who–in my experience of him–is all but a fight-picker, and always a self-ironic and humble person.
Seems like the two scientists who hypothesized that the LHC is sabotaged from the future were right…
The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.
Sorry what?
The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.
Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.
Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.
Just amazing. Jokes apart, this is a minor setback, but hugely bad press for the LHC people… I can imagine their faces when they found out, telling each other: ‘Holy shit, what the hell are we going to say to the press??’
And so:
A spokesman for CERN told The Times: ‘Nobody knows how it got there. The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane’
Ah, Latour would LOVE this story wouldn’t he?
To be seen in its full HD glory. More of the same here.
Fabio Cunctator