The constitution of the state and the state's constitution of its objects

The state-in-itself (beyond the specific forms it has assumed historically), “is an objectivity without norm. It is the principle of sovereignty, or coercion, functioning separately, essential for the collective as such” (Badiou 2005:83). The idea of separation is of a central importance to understand the way in which the state works. The state is separated to the extent that it does not entail a direct relation with or a correspondence to the situation, i.e.

with the infinite elements that compose it. Instead there is a principle of mediation between every social situation and its state, consisting in a mechanism which is essentially representative. In this perspective the state is nothing but the distributive principle that regulates social life according to “communitarian predicates or predicates of subsets” (Badiou 2005:83). Indeed it is typical of the State not to admit subjectivity, but to be oriented exclusively toward ‘parts’ or ‘communities’, towards the sub-grouping of individuals in infinite subsets of which it constitutes the principle of unification. Ranciere (2006) would describe this process as “distribution of the sensible”, meaning the distribution of places and functions amongst the various elements that compose the situation. This separation gives to the state a structural effect superpower with regard to the situation, i.e. to what is simply presented. Badiou’s (2007) theory of the state is the outcome of a philosophical elaboration

37 of Cantor’s⁴ set theory. Due to the mathematical complexity of this theory I will here introduce a simplified version of it, which might be visualised in Fig.1. After a technical introduction of this theory I will give a more illustrative explanation of Badiou’s approach.

Fig 1.: the structured presentation α (Situation) and its metastructure β (the state of the situation).

According to Badiou, if every situation (set α) is presentation of itself, of the people that compose it and of the elements that belong to it – every situation is also given as State (β), that is, as the internal configuration of the parts or subsets – therefore as re-presentation. The state (β) does not recognize the single elements as independent; but it just includes them as belonging to multiple sub-groups (or sub-categories).

The authority of the State (β) over the simply presented situation (α) is based on the mathematical law that there are always more parts (subsets) than elements. This is to say that

4 Georg Cantor 1845-1918 was a German mathematician, best known as the inventor of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics.

38 the representative multiplicity of the state (β) is always of a higher power than the presentative multiplicity (α) of the situation.

So, to do an example, the elements of the Irish national set can be grouped in the same way according to the subsets of tax payers, registered voters, employed workers, teachers, unemployed, single mothers, students, HIV positive people and so on. Of course then, an individual can belong to several of these subsets: for example one can be an unemployed, Dublin 1 born, single mother. These are all predications that the State uses to categorise individuals – to hierarchically dispose them in sub-groups - to include them or to exclude them (as illegal migrants, or asylum seekers for example). However, these predications do not say anything about the substantial complexity of any individual (say any single mother) as a living, thinking person. Badiou argues that also in situations where someone is called into question as an individual by the state, whatever the circumstance, “this individual is not counted as ‘him’ or ‘herself’, he is considered as a subset. (…) Not as Antonie Domblase – the proper name of an infinite multiple [a pure becoming] – but as {Antonie Domblase}, an indifferent figure of unicity constituted by the forming-into-one” (Badiou, 2007).

Peter Hallward (2003:86) offers a useful visual illustration of how this Cantorean model works. Take a page of print: one can not say how many ‘objects’ there are on it. Unless he knows whether to count letters, words, sentences, lines, etc. The first necessary operation would be to specify the range of definitions (subsets) distinguishing letters, words, sentences and lines, before counting the elements that fall under each definition – say the number of words beginning with a, the number with e, the number with 3 letters and so on. An extensional approach would accept the validity of any sort of “combinatorial” approach to collection, no matter how arbitrary it is. In this case the page would be the operation of making one of an infinite amount of subsets. Likewise the State follows the logic of a

39

‘superpower’ which is infinitely superior to the situations as infinitely superior is the number of subsets over elements. The defining condition of the State is therefore to exert power pure and simple through this arbitrary grouping, not only over those individuals who fall under its jurisdiction (under its counting into parts), but even and especially over those outsiders who do not (for example illegal migrants).

As Hallward (2003) highlights, a set theoretic ontology of the state confirms as a fundamental law of being a central insight of the Marxist analysis of the state: the state business relates not to individuals per se (the elements) but rather to groups or classes of individuals (ibid. p96).

So the Marxist assumption that “the state is always the state of the ruling class” means that it represents or arranges the existing elements of the situation in such a way as to reinforce the position of its dominant parts; independently from the qualitative attributes of these parts (ibid. p96).

The state does not present things, nor does it merely copy their presentation but instead, through an entirely new counting operation it re-presents them in a way that groups them in relatively fixed, clearly identifiable categories (Badiou 2007). These categories constitute the criteria according to which the state recognises individuals.

It could be argued that this mechanism of distribution works as a sort of multiculturalism –

“one of the offshoots of human rights discourse today” (Neocosmos 2007:55), which was so smoothly taken over as an ideology and a form of organisation by western societies. Zizek (199:216) defines multiculturalism as a “racism with a distance” to the extent that it promotes

‘respect’ for “the Other’s identity, conceiving the other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’

community towards which the multiculturalist [state, or intellectual] maintains a distance made possible by his/her privileged universal position” (ibid. p216). Moreover, through its celebration and reproduction of cultural/communitarian authenticities and differences,

40 multiculturalism has the capacity to articulate (and thus depoliticise) any social issue as a simple matter of identitarian and symbolic (cultural, linguistic etc.) confrontation and negotiation between subgroups or communities. This is precisely what happened in Northern Ireland where universal political issues raised by the civil rights movement (issues that could concern both the catholic and protestant ‘communities’) have been articulated in terms of identitarian/ethnic conflict- where politics is overshadowed in favour of technocratic management.

In Neocosmos’ (2007:40) view, “the state systematically evacuates politics from state life in favour of technique (…) it systematically transforms a pre-existing emancipatory politics into a technical process to be run by professionals (planners, economists, lawyers, judges, administrators, etc.) under its ambit within bureaucratic structures and subjectivities”. A research hypothesis put forward by some young scholars I have been discussing with recently is that 1960s Northern Irish political movements depoliticised for they did not manage to keep a political distance in relation to the state and so they ended up reproducing the (multiculturalist) categories imposed to them by the system.

What Badiou (2007) aims to illustrate through this set –theoretical approach is that the state does not deal with individuals as subjects who are capable to think, but only as members of specific communities or subgroups which are somehow included in its count of the parts.

This means that the state is not organised on the basis of the principle of equality – according to which each individual should be counted as one. For example, in a public debate on the new migration bill recently organised in Dublin (27/10/2010) by a group of students, Luke (, a young Dublin based African activist, describing its relation with the Irish State argued that

“instead of dealing with people, it deals with categories”; meaning that the state just accepts to dialogue with him and his colleagues under the condition that they speak as members or

41 leaders of a specific subgroup or community. For being a ‘migrant’, Luke is not supposed to be speaking as an independent citizen, but just as a member, or a spoke person of the Zimbabwean or African community in Dublin. Thus he is considered from the deterministic point of view of his supposed cultural/communitarian belonging, that is to say from an element that is precedent and external to him. It is just from that identitarian point of view that Luke’s words are taken into consideration by the state.

A similar example has to do with the “Surprise Conference” which was recently organized by a group of independent NCAD⁵ students and hold as a form of protest in the garden adjacent to the Department of Education in Dublin. Their demand to be admitted into the department in order to talk with the minister was declined by her arguing that she would just negotiate with officially elected representatives of the student body, i.e. the Student Union. This, again, is an example of how the state does not recognise ‘independent subjectivities’ as its interlocutors; it does not deal with people’s thought, but it just deals with representatives of recognised categories or subgroups (students in this case). It is in this sense that unions (no matter how ‘radical’ they are) might be considered as being apparatuses of the state. They depoliticise workers’ (students’) politics by taking it away from their control and translating it in partial claims to be articulated and managed within the terrain of representation, i.e. of the state.

Genuine politics is the opposite. It exists only in the claims and actions of those who have no

‘place’, no justification. Thus according to Neocosmos (2009:284) “emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to any specific interest, it is 'for all' never 'for some'”. It is in this sense that for Badiou emancipatory politics does not ‘represent’ anybody: “Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims (...) but to be faithful to those events during which

5 The National College of Art and Design is located in Dublin. I was present at the event, that took place the 1/12/2011. Some might be found at the following link http://wsm.ie/c/students-occupy-department-education-surprise-conference

42 victims politically assert themselves (...) Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation (...) it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence” (Badiou, quot. by Neocosmos 2007:64).

It is essential to repeat and clarify that by talking of the state and the (anti)politics it establishes, we include ‘civil society’ which, even in the apparently oppositional roles it might assumes, is part of what is counted. Discussions with grassroots activists (and what CD activist have to say about this matter is particularly significant) help us to understand how civil society organisations often end up playing a key role in depoliticising conflicts by jumping in with ‘capacity building’ and ‘education’ interventions that are designed not primarily to strengthen the oppressed in their own struggles but to bring them into order and to play according the rules and expectations of the dominant order by teaching them to be better 'stakeholders' (Butler & Ntseng 2008). A community activist (quot. by Butler & Ntseng 2008) from the Eastern Cape NGO Coalition argues: “having observed social formations and their politics, I have this question to ask: Why is it that every time the Poor come together, NGOs and Leftists jump in and take over? In their conventional praxis they provide capacity building. Whereas my observation is that capacity building demobilises people, it takes them away from their original agenda”.

At the end of the day NGOs and civil society in general “are not only funded by government, but operate on the basis of the same subjectivity and technicism, and in fact precisely undertake state functions (Neocosmos 2009: 270). They defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance...It’s almost as

43 though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs” (Roy quot. by Neocosmos 2009:273).

As a last example of this idea, think about how all over the world the ethnic/communitarian notion of ‘immigrant’ “has in fact served, in a consensual manner, first to conceal and then to drive out the [universal] word ‘worker’ from the space of political representations” (Badiou 2005:121). This brought to a further fragmentation in labour (which made it more manageable) and frequently to ‘ethnic conflicts’ between workers, such as those that in 2009 took place in Britain where workers strike in protest at the use of migrant (Italian in that case) labour. Protests caught by surprise up to 17 refineries and power plants all over the country.

Many placards directed their fury at Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who at the Labour party conference in September 2007 had promised: “This is our vision: Britain leading the global economy . . . drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers”. The saying ‘to govern is to divide’ certainly seemed pertinent as in this case.

Politics, when it exists, presents itself as a rupture with representative/ distributive procedures. It does not consist in the plurality of the opinions and (communitarian/cultural) points of view, but in the prescription of the possibility of a rupture with what there is, i.e. the hierarchical and communitarian distribution of places and functions. “The fiction of political representation, in pretending to advance the interests of others, must therefore be swept aside in order to make way for the reality of political processes, for it is only then that a singular political sequence can begin to take shape. Political unbinding is therefore the creative act whereby subjects, in renouncing any outside interest (…), break with routine and begin to empower themselves as collectives. (Badiou 2005:xxiii)”

In other words, ontologically, if the state-in-itself is nothing else than the distributive principle that regulates social life according to “communitarian predicates or predicates of

44 subsets”, as I will illustrate below, unlike and against the state, egalitarian politics is what interrupts this distribution in terms of deterministic categories, hierarchy, social status and so on. Notions such as “‘Immigrant’, ‘French’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ cannot be political words lest there be disastrous consequences. For these words, and many others, necessarily relate politics to the State, and the State itself to its lowest and most essential of functions: the non-egalitarian inventory [décompte] of human beings” (Badiou 2005:94).

Now, does CD means to build or to reinforce communities in the sense of subsets of the state?

As I will illustrate in the historical section (Chapter 3) of this thesis, although most of literature analyses CD from the point of view of the state, as if it was part and parcel of state processes, this is just a partial truth. Today community development definitely refers to something nebulous, state-dependent and fairly depoliticised; something that is fragmented, specialised, professionalized and bureaucratised. However things have not always been like that, or at least not for everybody. For now, based on the theoretical perspective outlined in this chapter, we can advance the idea that the ambiguity in which CD is currently prisoner is nothing less than a lack of separation in its praxis and thought between politics and the state.

This lack is depoliticising. However, it is not possible to resolve this ambiguity with a (Hegelian) dialectical synthesis, for the fact that politics and the state are not two faces of the same coin. The hypothesis that I will advance in this thesis is that to overcome this impasse a sort of recommencement is necessary.