Crisis, or Event?

Alain Badiou's lesson for our post-Covid lives

From the global COVID-19 pandemic to generative AI stealing our jobs, renewable energy blowing the doors off the fossil fuel industry, the escalating impacts of climate change, and the rise of fascism from its grave—it seems like crises are coming at us from all sides. I’m going to suggest a way to reframe this situation, which seems to be inspiring such despair in an entire generation, and show you some tools you can use to do the same.

The currently fashionable term for our situation is "polycrisis." But is it best, or even appropriate, to view all these massive changes as crises? They’re strange attractors for our anxieties, sure, but with some (though not all), we can’t tell whether the outcome will be positive or negative. Maybe those options don’t even apply.

Most importantly, to label something a crisis is to declare that it is a situation outside the norm, at the very least, and likely is something we need to fight. Crises need to be put down, like insurrections. When we view the near future through that lens it looks like little fires everywhere or an endless game of whack-a-mole. This perspective may seriously distort our understanding of what’s happening, leading to blind spots, groupthink, rash decision-making, and resistance to beneficial changes.

If we’re not calling them crises, we need another language that better captures the idea of absolute uncertainty. With AI, for example, the magnitude of the risk isn’t known at all—or even if there is a risk. Instead of risk, we face opacity: a blank page instead of a prediction.

It’s easy, but often wrong, to blame that opacity on a lack of information. We have tons of data about many of the changes we face—climate change being one example, and the slope of change in the deployment of renewables being another. Predicting the climatological impact of a 1.5 degree increase in global temperature is hard but doable. Extrapolating from that to what human societies will look like in the year 2100 is an entirely different problem.

Prior to 2019, I’d read a lot of foresight studies that included global pandemic scenarios. None of those prepared me for what life under lockdown was like. Before Covid, I had a mental vocabulary for describing a pandemic. When one actually happened, it turned out that vocabulary was inadequate to describe it. I’m pretty sure that all the vastly uncertain changes we are about to step into have that character to one degree or another. —And this is unusual; while I was growing up, nearly everything that happened could be talked about within the frames of Cold War logic or criminal corruption. The world was describable.

Elsewhere I’ve talked about how science fiction predicted Artificial Intelligence, which threatened factory workers in the form of robotics, and government in the form of the Matrix; yet SF utterly failed to predict the LLM and generative AI, which threaten creatives and the middle tier of the workforce. We’ve been caught with our pants down. In a very real sense, we lack the language to describe what’s happening.

Maybe such a language can’t be created prior to such an event; it has to be put together during or afterwards, almost certainly in hindsight. But is it possible to talk in general about such radically uncertain situations?

Badiou's Event

French philosopher Alain Badiou has this thing he calls an event. He takes inspiration for it from set theory and the principle of mathematical incompleteness. Note that he takes inspiration from them, but the event is not a mathematical formula.

It works like this: individually and collectively, we have a grammar, as I said above, to describe the world. When something occurs, we have readymade categories we can fit it in: “celebrity scandal,” or “terrorist attack.” We have readymade language to talk about things in these categories. Now let’s introduce an idea similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that our language constrains what we’re able to think about; and throw in a dash of Russel’s Paradox, which says that there can be no universal set x that contains itself as a member—and therefore, for any set no matter how complete, there always exists something outside it. As Nietzsche puts, it, “you cannot look around your own corner.” Roll these all up in a neat package and you get the idea that 99% of the time, we humans get by just fine by slotting what happens around us into a comfortable set of conceptual categories. We have the words to describe things. We have a universal set x of possibilities that we can think with.

Then one day something appears or occurs outside x. This is what Badiou calls an event—an indescribable reality that demands our attention. We have to deal with it but don’t have the language to describe it or even think about it; at least, not yet.

This is similar in some ways to Heidegger’s idea of “tool consciousness:” you never recognize the particular hammer in your hand as its own unique thing until one day it breaks. Suddenly it’s no longer just “a hammer,” but is its own thing, and for a moment you stare dumbly at it in your hands, seeing it for the first time.

COVID-19 Was An Event

It’s not like COVID-19 didn’t follow the predicted playbook of how a global pandemic would transpire; it did. It threw into stark relief the fragility of our public health systems, reinforced the importance of global cooperation, and we all saw the deep interconnectedness of our world when products we’d always taken for granted suddenly vanished off store shelves. It compelled individuals and governments to adopt new behaviors and policies, some of which will have long-lasting impacts.

In these respects, COVID-19 was obviously a crisis.

Yet for most of us, the pandemic experience was unlike anything we’d lived through. Lockdowns, Animal Crossing, Zoom, social distancing, and the astonishing ease with which the economy retooled for remote work; they’re all indelibly stamped in our memories. They necessitated but also created a space for new ways of thinking and being and many of us took advantage of that—hence, “quiet quitting” and a general realization that the rat race wasn’t leading most of us anywhere but down.

Covid’s not over yet, and only over decades will we begin to perceive what just happened. By the time we do, this event will have permanently changed us in ways we could not have imagined beforehand.

Generative AI as an Event

The rapid development of Generative image generators and Large Language Models could be an event in more than one way. As I pointed out, LLMs weren’t anticipated by science fiction; the normal narratives around AI don’t apply to them. But also, LLMs like ChatGPT aren’t conscious entities like we are. The fact that they exist in a new space between blind number-crunching and the synthetic consciousnesses we’re used to thinking about forces us to consider a shocking and uncomfortable idea: that entirely mechanical systems can develop emergent behaviour that looks like reasoning, without there being a mind behind it. Apparently, no ghost in the machine is needed for a thing to behave as if there is one.

Badiou would say that we should retain fidelity to the unfolding event, rather than chopping it up to fit some pre-existing conceptual Procrustean Bed. In this case, there’s an implication that I see people squirming away from:

If generative AI reasons perfectly well without a mind, how much of your and my thinking operates the same way?

To what extent are human beings just “stochastic parrots” like ChatGPT? Fidelity to the truth of the situation demands that we ask and explore that idea.

Recognizing an Event

I’m butchering Badiou’s ideas, I know; I haven’t talked about his critically important, complementary idea, that of the subject. One can only be a subject in the course of experiencing an event. Or rather, there’s a chance you can become a subject if you can recognize that what’s happening does not fit into received categories (as when “celebrity scandal” turns into the me-too movement). Poetry exists to cause this kind of recognition. It butchers language to get past it, as in Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro:”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Dealing with Current Events

Over the past nine months, I’ve presented a toolkit for recognizing events. You can do this; here’s an example of how:

1. Ask yourself: what if occurrence-or-thing x actually has no historical precedent? What if there is something new here under the sun? Or, what if all the doomscrolling details we’re obsessing over are the magician’s distraction, and the real action is happening somewhere else?

2. It’s useful to do this thinking in the context of a project. I don’t recommend revolutionary plotting or conspiracy theories, they’re just sooo 20th century. For Unapocalyptic, I’ve chosen imagining a 21st-century science fiction and earning optimism in the Anthropocene.

3. Apply a “strange-making” procedure to x (where x could be anything from a new product to a social movement or political event). Over the past few months, I’ve described some such procedures, ranging from the paratactic list substitution exercise to diffractive reading, treating apparent limitations as design constraints, and reframing x as something else.

4. If necessary, invent a new language to describe what you’re thinking about. When I wrote Ventus, I found I needed a new word to describe an AI that does not derive any of its cognitive habits, theories, or prior experiences from humanity, but is the nonhuman given a voice. I called these systems thalient rather than sentient. For Stealing Worlds, I similarly needed a word to describe an AI that thinks it is some natural system, such as a forest or a watershed. By naming such things deodands, I could then think and write about them.

5. Design something using your transformed x. The reason for doing this is to give yourself (and maybe others) a doorway to step through. On the other side is a world where the new x can be seen in full flower. For example, having reimagined the idea of an interstellar empire by inventing the lockstep method, I wrote an epic adventure novel about it. Currently, I am working on a novel that accepts the worst prognoses about climate change, and attempts to describe a path through that hell to a much better future than we seem to be designing right now.

Unlike crises, which must be fought, events invite exploration and design. This is my invitation: that we reframe where we can the things that are happening to us and around us, from foes to be conquered to opportunities to be explored. Badiou’s idea of the event can help us do that.

Hope in the Event

In A Whole New Way to End Our Civilization I suggested that there was another possible End Time visible behind the apocalyptic facade of anthropogenic climate extinction. It would be utterly unprecedented: the first conscious retirement of one civilization to make way for another, its ‘child’ better suited to thrive on Earth than humanistic industrialism has been. Two fascinating ideas came out of this exercise: one, the question of what ‘raising a new civilization’ would be like (note—an entirely different notion than ‘civilizing the savages’ which was just an attempt to turn other people into ourselves); and two, what relationship might develop between parent and its ‘grown-up’ offspring. There’s enough material here for a whole series of novels.

This thought experiment suggested that while humanity faces the possibility of extinction in the Anthropocene, our global culture has another option, unknown to us because we lack the language to think about it: that of a graceful retirement. Many people, it seems, equate sustainability with austerity and retreat; degrowth is demonized as a kind of genocidal belt-tightening, the permanent end of experiment and growth. It could be if performed as just some Luddite reaction to Progress. But that’s not what I was proposing; the whole point is that maybe what’s happening to the globalized world is not what we expect—that we’ll give birth to neither a Mad Max wasteland nor a sanctimonious Solarpunk utopia, but rather something else. Something new.

If so, then the world as a whole is not experiencing a crisis. It is passing through an event. Our task, then, is not to fight, but to discern new possibilities.

And then to design what comes next.

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