Proust on cars

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a work of self through memory. The search is conducted through memory with the aid and hindrance of phenomena and habit, but done for the authentically expressing self. Or at least so I read it from my vantage point, a few hundred pages into The Captive.

One of the more interesting moves Proust makes in this great search of recollection is that time is not neutral: the wager of the search is that time can be lost and regained. In the course of his search the author comes face to face with the different natures of time, and how each of these differently impacts our self, world, and memory.

Part of the reason for this is that Proust is figuring out how to be an authentic self in a world in which time (and our entire being) has been so uprooted from the natural and tradition-based rhythms in the world around us. In a similar vein as Heidegger, Proust observes that modern technology confronts our world in “the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging forth.” And because this setting upon “expedites in that it unlocks and exposes…driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense,” our time and the world’s time changes, taking on different modes depending on which techniques of revealing and bringing forth are at work.

Heidegger speaks

The appearing of Heidegger’s beings in Badiou’s set theory.

Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself and the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-scientific objectifivation of nature, but this mastery nevertheless remains an impotence of will. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is essentially undisclosable, that which is shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up.

[Die Farbe leuchtet auf und will nur leuchten. Wenn wir sei verständig messend in Schwingungszahlen zerlegen, ist sie fort. Sie zeigt sich nur, wenn sie neentborgen und unerklärt bleibt. Die Erde läßt so jedes Eindringen in sie an ihr selbst zerschellen. Sie läßt jede nur rechnerische Zudringlichkeit in eine Zerstörung umschlage. Mag diese den Schein einer Herrschaft und des Fortschritts vor sich hertragen in der Gestalt der technischwissenschaftlichen Vergegenständlichen der Natur, diese Herrschaft bleibt doch eine Ohnmacht des wollens. Offen gelichtet als sie selbst erscheint die erde nur, wo sie die wesenhaft Unerschließbare gewahrt und bewahrt wird, die vor jeder Erschließung zurürckweicht und d. h. ständig sich verschlossen halt.]

Here we see Heidegger making a statement about how the earth truly reveals itself. It reveals itself only when it is presented as undisclosed and uncalculated. When a painting or waterfall is reduced to wavelengths, it ceases to work upon one’s everyday experience of beings. It becomes one set of wavelengths among many, and no wavelength more important than the other, except as it pertains to the domination of nature. If all things are reduced to objective particles, then they cease to work upon our experience as they should, that is, as beings revealed. Beings revealed are those that work upon our view of things and give things their shine, like a Greek temple which reveals beings as they are and how they relate to us and to the temple, and vice versa. In contrast, the kind of calculation that he is talking about is one that seeks to dominate nature. It seeks to bend things to the human’s will to power. “Do I want this? Yes, then I will do it since all things are, are a bunch of particles and have no importance beyond that.Thus, I see all things as particles, as resources, waiting to be gotten by me.” — instead of beings that shine.

Let’s turn to Badiou. Badiou recognizes, and he thinks most agree with him, that Heidegger is the last recognized philosopher. Furthermore, Badiou is constantly in dialogue with him and grapples with his thought almost at every turn. Badiou also incorporates mathematics (the most rigorous form of making distinctions/calculations) into his own ontology (Being and Event) – something that has never been done before. at least with such rigor, that is. The result is often one that is less than inspiring. Often, when one reads Badiou, one gets an overwhelming sense of a cold calculative disposition towards the world (see Clayton Crockett’s critique — a rather superficial one, I think). But this is a gross misreading of Badiou. It misses Badiou’s constant praise of the poetic and the phenomenal. It would not be too brutal a statement, or proposal, to say that Badiou is a staunch Heideggerarian who has been able to incorporate a productive understanding of calculation.

I propose that Heidegger is misusing the term “calculation.” Or rather, he is giving it a bad name. What Heidegger is talking about is not really so much calculation as such. He is attacking a particular way of viewing beings. A particular kind of calculation. No doubt painters can be said to be calculating as they paint, or composers as they compose, or writers as they write. Each of them must focus in on certain aspects of composition at certain times of importance. They can organize material according to large structures, or small ones depending on how they are calculating, or in set theory/Badiou language: “how they are counting.”

Set theory does not calculate beings in the pejorative sense that Heidegger is addressing, but, in fact, it simply organizes them. It never presumes to reduce anything to a number. Things (or sets) gain their existence by being in a relationship with other things. In other words, set theory functions according to axioms and not according to defining, at bottom, what a being is. Set theory is a system of relations. It is not ‘out to dominate nature.’

So, is Badiou’s use of set theory too calculative, too nature-dominating? I propose that it is not. I propose that it merely organizes beings in terms of importance. And, is this not what art is? Is this not what Heidegger demands of the artist – to organize beings according to what is important?