The atonal world

      Why does potlatch appear so mysterious or meaningless to us? The basic feature of our “postmodern” world is that it tries to dispense with the agency of the Master-Signifier: the “complexity” of the world should be asserted unconditionally, every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it should be “deconstructed,” dispersed, “disseminated”: “The modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world [. . .] is really nothing but a generalized desire for atonality.”²³ Badiou’s perspicuous example of such an “atonal” world is the politically correct vision of sexuality, as promoted by gender studies, with its obsessive rejection of “binary logic”: this world is a nuanced, ramified world of multiple sexual practices which tolerates no decision, no instance of the Two, no evaluation (in the strong Nietzschean sense). This suspension of the Master-Signifier leaves as the only agency of ideological interpellation the “unnameable” abyss of jouissance: the ultimate injunction that regulates our lives in “postmodernity” is “Enjoy!”—realize your potential, enjoy in all manner of ways, from intense sexual pleasures through social success to spiritual self-fulfilment.

      However, far from liberating us from the pressure of guilt, such dispensing with the Master-Signifier comes at a price, the price signaled by Lacan’s qualification of the superego command: “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!”²⁴ In short, the decline of the Master-Signifier exposes the subject to all the traps and double-talk of the superego: the very injunction to enjoy, in other words, the (often imperceptible) shift from the permission to enjoy to the injunction (obligation) to enjoy sabotages enjoyment, so that, paradoxically, the more one obeys the superego command, the more one feels guilty. This same ambiguity affects the very basis of a “permissive” and “tolerant” society: “we see from day to day how this tolerance is nothing else than a fanaticism, since it tolerates only its own vacuity.”²⁵ And, effectively, every decision, every determinate engagement, is potentially “intolerant” towards all others.

      In his Logiques des mondes, Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds (monde atone),²⁶ worlds lacking a “point,” in Lacanese: the “quilting point” (point de capiton), the intervention of a Master-Signifier that imposes a principle of “ordering” into the world, the point of a simple decision (“yes or no”) in which the confused multiplicity is violently reduced to a “minimal difference.” None other than John F. Kennedy provided a concise description of this point: “The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself.” This gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master—or, as G.K. Chesterton put it in his inimitable manner: “The purpose of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it upon something solid.”

      If the fight against a world proceeds by way of undermining its “point,” the feature that sutures it into a stable totality, how are we to proceed when (as is the case today) we dwell in an atonal world, a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality? The answer is: one has to oppose it in such a way that one compels it to “tonalize” itself, to openly admit the secret tone that sustains its atonality. For example, when one confronts a world which presents itself as tolerant and pluralist, disseminated, with no center, one has to attack the underlying structuring principle which sustains this atonality—say, the secret qualifications of “tolerance” which excludes as “intolerant” certain critical questions, or the secret qualifications which exclude as a “threat to freedom” questions about the limits of the existing freedoms.

      The paradox, the sign of hidden complicity between today’s religious fundamentalisms and the “postmodern” universe they reject so ferociously, is that fundamentalism also belongs to the “atonal world”—which is why a fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly. To put it in another way, both liberal-skeptical cynicism and fundamentalism thus share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while skeptical cynics mock them. What is unthinkable for them is the “absurd” act of a decision which establishes every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of “reasons,” in positive knowledge: the “sincere hypocrisy” of somebody like Anne Frank who, in the face of the terrifying depravity of the Nazis, in a true act of credo qua absurdum asserted her belief in the fundamental goodness of all humans. No wonder then that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. (In this sense, the status of “universal human rights” is also that of a pure belief: they cannot be grounded in our knowledge of human nature, they are an axiom posited by our decision.) The occurrence of the term “science” in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. The case of the Turin shroud is here symptomal: its authenticity would be awful for every true believer (the first thing to do then would be to analyze the DNA of the blood stains and thus solve empirically the question of who Jesus’ father was . . .), while a true fundamentalist would rejoice in this opportunity.

      We find the same phenomenon in some forms of contemporary Islam: hundreds of books by scientists “demonstrate” how the latest scientific advances confirm the insights and injunctions of the Koran—the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, and so on and so forth. (Some even go so far as to claim that what the Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing the Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what has acquired its appropriate formulation in contemporary science.)²⁷ The same goes also for Buddhism, where many scientists vary the motif of the “Tao of modern physics,” that is, of how the contemporary scientific vision of reality as a desubstantialized flux of oscillating events finally confirmed the old Buddhist ontology . . .²⁸ One is thus compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion: in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge—in short, the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.

      What we should bear in mind here is how the opposition of knowledge and faith echoes the one between the constative and the performative: faith (or, rather, trust) is the basic ingredient of speech as the medium of social bond, of the subject’s engaged participation in this bond, while science—exemplarily in its formalization—reduces language to neutral registration. Let us not forget that science has, for Lacan, the status of the “knowledge in the real”: the language of science is not the language of subjective engagement, but the language deprived of its performative dimension, desubjectivized language. The predominance of scientific discourse thus entails the retreat, the potential suspension, of the very symbolic function as the metaphor constitutive of human subjectivity. Paternal authority is irreducibly based on faith, on trust as to the identity of the father: we have fathers (as symbolic functions, as the Name-of-the-Father, the paternal metaphor), because we do not directly know who our father is, we have to take him at his word and trust him. To put it pointedly, the moment I know with scientific certainty who my father is, fatherhood ceases to be the function which grounds social-symbolic Trust. In the scientific universe, there is no need for such faith, truth can be established through DNA analysis . . . The hegemony of the scientific discourse thus potentially suspends the entire network of symbolic tradition that sustains the subject’s identifications. Politically, the shift is from Power grounded in the traditional symbolic authority to biopolitics.