what is revolution rx nathancoombs

8/4/2019 What is Revolution Rx Nathancoombs

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What is revolution? [Rx ]

By Nathan Coombs[1]

The following is an adapted section of my PhD thesis. Since it is unlikely to make it into

the final draft, and as there have recently been a series of online debates as to according

to what criteria we can term the uprisings in North Africa as revolutions, I release it now

in the hope that it will serve to advance theoretical clarity on the issue or at least

provoke further reflection.

What is revolution? Such a simple question, but one that unleashes a manifold of

entangled theoretical considerations. It is not adequate to seek to determine the nature

of this nomination solely through its invariant characteristics like masses on the

streets, governments falling, and new leaders rising to power. All these are ultimately

too ambiguous to serve as anything more than the loosest schematic, which then falls

apart when active subjectivity enters the theoretical scene. For a Marxist if the

bourgeoisie remain in power this negates any procedural semblance of a revolution. For

a liberal democrat, the survival of cliques from the old nomenclature deflates the

democratic revolution. Whichever way it is examined, on closer inspection there is not

single set of characteristics that will serve to unite all around a common conception.

On the other hand, neither is it satisfying to sophistically divide up revolution to fit

individual preferences a you have your revolution, and Ill have mine approach.

What is rather needed is an investigation into the conditions for nominating a political

event as a revolution; resources for which I believe can be found in Alain Badious

philosophy with his introduction of the term event into the theoretical toolbox. The

following discussion thus considers the relationship between event and revolution

within Badious philosophy, and further extrapolates upon this theme in order that, byway of a theoretical parabola, the question of the meaning of revolution today might be

brought into sharper focus.

Alain Badiou and exUCFML comrade, Sylvain Lazarus, consider revolution an

exhausted term in the context of the contemporary political impasse. Yet since Badiou

has marked a number of revolutions as key examples of events (the French revolution,

the Chinese cultural revolution, etc.), this has led to a conflation of revolution with

event in some readings of his philosophy. Most seriously, this confusion resulted in

Toula Nicolapoulos and George Vassilacopolous charging Badiou with infidelity to the


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retreat of the political event[2] by which they mean Badiou romanticises the event in

bad faith, knowing full well the implications of the end of the global, revolutionary

movement in the late 1970s. To untangle this claim one needs to be attentive to the fact

that as tempting as it might be to draw a onetoone correspondence between the term

revolution and event, even if what is and is not a revolution is defined according to

criteria in line with Badious idea of the event they still do not match precisely. It is

therefore worth clarifying this relationship in more depth.

We firstly have to differentiate our concept of revolution from its use in the

academic typologies produced by the likes of Samuel Huntington and Theka

Skocpol.[3] Revolution cannot be defined in a manner consistent with positivist, social

science. The notion is contradictory; we would have to accept the idea of a static social

world that can be measured, tested and predictions made; whereas, our first axiom

regarding revolutions is that they cannot be fully predicted: they introduce novelty that

reconfigures the sense of what is possible. Like in Badious discussion of the event,

despite all the associations we might have with revolution say in the French case the

storming of the Bastille, the Terror, and so on these terms cannot define revolution

in its entirety, for if they were to occur again (with no new element added) they would

not compose revolution, but just repetition (or a sanitised historical recreation). But at

the same time, we need to insist on keeping event and revolution as separate terms,despite the similar way in which they are conceived. The term event operates as an

idea, whereas a revolution, on the other hand, is the name given to a concrete set of

factual occurrences. In the case of the Russian revolution, for instance, the rupture of

the revolution arguably spans from February 1917 to the end of the Civil War in 1921.

One should not consider this period itself as a single event, though, even if we could

consider it as one revolution. Different subjectivities have always named events at

different sites in this sequence: the February revolution (which all can affirm, except

the extreme reactive figure of the recalcitrant monarchist), the Bolshevik October

seizure of power (the political Fall according to liberals), the dissolution of the Soviets

(for leftcommunists the Bolsheviks first counter revolutionary action), or the

extinguishing of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 (for anarchists the moment

demonstrating the necessity of resistance to the idea of the dictatorship of the

proletariat and transitional socialism). The splits issuing from the events within the

revolution led to the events promulgation through the loyalties of sects to the opening

up and closing down of possibilities within the revolution.


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Thus, in rendering the possibility for splits like these into formal language, we

want to make the distinction that a revolution has to be both a revolution (a term of

itself, much the same as how Badiou constructs the matheme of the event) and also

must contain at least one event thought separately from the revolution itself. We can

propose an extremely simple matheme for revolution along these lines:

Rx = {Rx, ex}

ex = {x X, ex}

Here an invariant R (revolution thought as a loosely determined ahistorical

invariant) is coupled with an event, ex, in turn composed by Badious matheme shown

underneath. But what determines this invariant R? There is no other recourse than to

conjecture that the invariant of revolution is only an iteration of other revolutions: the

sequence that gives sense to its terms. So the invariant R of the Russian revolution is

determined insofar as it repeats certain traits of earlier revolutions such as, for instance,

the French revolution, which in turn repeats historical revolutions preceding it.

For subjects within the event horizon of the 20th centurys revolutionary

sequence a revolution, Rx, however, has to be both a revolution andcontain an event

our first axiom, should you choose to adopt it. In contrast, for nonsubjects viz. this

horizon, revolution contains only the evental site, X, and the term revolution simply

describes this historical repetition of the accumulated traits observed in revolutions

past. Consequently, in this conception of revolution we have no novelty, signified by e x,

to be affirmed by a subject. Whereas revolution for subjects within the event horizon of

the 20th centurys revolutionary sequence is denoted as Rx to emphasise the novelty

introduced through the event (using the symbolism of derived sets impressionistically),for nonsubjects (positivist social scientists, say) Rx denotes that revolution only need

couple the invariant of revolution with a specific site:

Rx = { ( Ry, Rz ), X }

Or to render into plain English: for a nonsubject, a specific revolution, Rx, is solely the

sum of what is known of revolutions past framed alongside the evental site X. This

expresses particularly well nonsubjects inability to perceive anything more than


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contingent spatial and temporal variants in each revolution, and also the positivist,

social science methodology, which conceives revolution by cumulatively adding the

features of each past revolution to just modify the definition and concept. It gives no

indication of what classes a revolution as a revolution other than it bearing similarities

to past revolutions, resulting in an everwider array of definitions by which revolutions

may fit the criteria of equivalence. Theka Skocpol faced this problem in the late 1970s,

when she was forced to invent new categories to divide the term (political vs. social

revolutions) in order to police its growing ubiquitousness. It never occurred to her that

it could be her subject position as expressed through social science discourse that

necessitated splitting the set as it grew ever larger. And still, by trying to neutralise

revolution within the sociological framework, the proliferation Skocpol sought to

curtail continued unabated as researchers sought to apply the structural theory of

revolution to an increasingly diverse set of cases, with the result that: Two recent

surveys of revolution list literally hundreds of events as revolutionary in

character.[4]And adding an ideological twist to boot: whereas the great revolutions

had all led fairly directly to populist dictatorship and civil wars, a number of the more

recent revolutions including that of the Philippines, the revolutionary struggle in

South Africa, and several of the anticommunist revolutions of the Soviet Union and

Eastern Europe seemed to offer a new model in which the revolutionary collapse ofthe old regime was coupled with a relatively nonviolent transition to democracy.[5]

That is, of course, because all the abovementioned revolutions were not revolutions

(Rx) from the perspective of a subject to the 20th centurys revolutionary sequence.

What does this theoretical detour on revolution reveal? It demonstrates that if

revolution is perceived to have reached an end, we need to take that not literally to

mean that there are no longer any revolutions, as in the invariant phenomena of a

popular uprising that topples a government. It is rather that once revolutions no longer

take place within the sequence of Marxism, or in the context of any new sequence, the

term collapses to its nonsubjective definien. As Lazarus concludes: Revolution

belongs as a category to the historicism that is fuelled by both defunct socialism and

parliamentarianism, because, historicism keeps a place for the word revolution in

postsocialist parliamentarianism following the fall of the Berlin Wall.[6] We are now

in a position to understand the relation of Marxism to revolution to event. If

Marxism is the sequence which creates an event horizon dividing subjects and non

subjects across the 20th century, it is only from inside that event horizon that we can


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talk of a last revolution as Badiou, a Maoist, considers the Cultural revolution. No

matter how much his ontology might be in contradiction to Marxist dialectics, it

remains the case that only as part of the Marxist sequence can he declare the end of

revolution; and, indeed, only as part of that sequence does his theory of the event make

any sense. Take away revolution, and all your are left with is the Idea of the event: Rx =

{R, ex} Thus we have to repudiate Nicolapoulos and Vassilacopolous charge of Badious

infidelity to the retreat of the revolutionary event; on the contrary, on the event

horizon of the Marxist sequence, Badious theory of the event can only make sense

within the context of the retreat of that revolutionary sequence. Only with the

continuation of the invariant R in the absence of the creative ruptures of events does

the event idea become subtracted from revolution to an extent that it can be seen as

theoretically discreet. As Badiou describes revolution: the word itself lies at the heart

of the saturation.[7] His response to the recent uprisings across North Africa provides

further confirmation of this. Badiou considers them symptoms of the present

intervallic period: succeeding the period where revolutionary logic and an idea for

transformation were united (in 20th century Marxism presumably). [A]n intervallic

period [is] where the revolutionary idea has not been passed on to anyone, and in

which it hasnt yet been taken up, a new alternative disposition has not yet been built

discontent exists but it has no structures, it can only draw power from a shared idea.Its power is essentially negative (make it go away). This is why the form of mass

collective action in an intervallic period is the riot. [8] Riot, note, not revolution.

Two notions of revolution have therefore been identified: a nonsubjective,

positivist idea (Rx), and a subjective idea (Rx). Whether we are to consider revolutions

according to this theoretic typology depends upon the extent to which we subjectivate

ourselves to affirming the conditions of a revolutionary event as it was taken in the 20 th

century one that demanded not simply repetition of the form of the invariant R, but

the experimentation and drive for novelty in reordering society indicative of those great

politicophilisophicoaesthetico ruptures of the last century.

[1] Nathan Coombs is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and InternationalRelations, University of London. His research project is provisionally entitled The Event:

a speculative genealogy. He is coeditor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies.

His first book, The British Ideology, is forthcoming 2011.


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[2] Toula Nicolapoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Philosophy and Revolution:Badious Infidelity to the Event, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and SocialPhilosophy Vol. 2, No. 2 (2006)

[3] For a comprehensive study of mainstream social science revolutionary theory see

Jack A. Goldstone, Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,AnnualReview of Political Science 4, (2001), 139187.

[4] ibid., 142

[5] ibid., 141

[6] Sylvain Lazarus, Lenin and the Party in Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics ofTruth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2007), 262263.

[7] Alain Badiou, The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Positions 13:3 (DukeUniversity Press, 2005), 483.

[8] Alain Badiou, Alain Badiou on Tunisia, riots & revolution, wrong+arithmetic (2Feb 2011) http://wrongarithmetic.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/alainbadiouontunisiariotsrevolution/ (Accessed 3 Feb 2011)

what is revolution rx nathancoombs

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