Ontology,belief and the politics of sanction: An application of Badiou’s Theory of the Event

Introduction

Conspicuously absent from the recent anthropological debates on ontology has been any discussion of the philosopher Alain Badiou, whose work is particularly notable for his attempt to establish a systematic ontology based on mathematical set theory (Badiou, 2005 [1988]). In this article, I propose to demonstrate the ethnographic use of several basic concepts from Badiou’s ontology. ¹ While the complexities of Badiou’s system, and indeed its peculiar relationship to set theory, make anything like a comprehensive exposition of his ideas difficult, there remains much that can be said even by appealing to a small handful of basic terms. ² In the course of this effort, I will be attempting to address several of the problems of belief and action set out both by the proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ (see Blaser, 2016; Descola, 2013; Holbraad, 2012; Viveiros de Castro, 2014) as well as by several of their critics (such as Apter, 2017; Graeber, 2015).

My primary ethnographic focus will involve Renate, a Berlin activist opposed to the German government’s sanctioning policy (Sanktionspolitik), under which the benefits of claimants who have been deemed uncooperative by their jobs counselors can be docked.

Ethnographic background

In 2003, the German government successfully enacted a series of welfare reforms known colloquially as the ‘Hartz Laws’. Under these reforms, benefits for the long-term unemployed (i.e., those unemployed for more than six months) were reduced to a new ‘existential minimum’ (Existenzminimum). Because most unemployed people had, prior to this time, received benefits calibrated to their former wages, this constituted a substantial reduction in income for many. Early protests against the Hartz Laws focused largely on the resulting reduction of ordinary unemployed people to the ‘social welfare level’ (Sozialhilfeniveau), which had previously been the standard benefit associated with those who have no work history. With this move, the Hartz Laws marked a major erosion of the corporatist bargain between labor and capital established in West Germany after WWII (and which had been transplanted, at least notionally, to the former East Germany after 1989). Crowds measuring in the thousands marched in protest against the new policies. Much as it has across western Europe, German neoliberalism arrived in the form of an ‘activationist labor market policy’ (aktivierende Arbeitsmarktpolitik)—i.e., a set of policies designed to compel unemployed people to seek new forms of low-wage employment, even while maintaining some basic benefit.

Over the years, mass protests against the Hartz Laws gradually fizzled. While social scientists continue to warn of the creation of an underclass of long-term unemployed people and low-wage workers trapped in poverty (see Butterwegge, 2015, for a recent example), neoliberalism has been established as Germany’s new normal. In recent years, the primary umbrella organization opposed to the Hartz Laws (the union-sponsored Aufrecht Bestehen! [Stand Up!]) has tended to draw crowds in the dozens. ³

Around 2011, however, a new form of protest began to emerge. More idiosyncratic and personal, and less concerned with mass organizing, these new efforts focused on the government’s sanctioning policies rather than the overall level of benefits available to the unemployed. Activists began to consider the very experience of being sanctioned, rather than their collective economic interests in any simple sense, as the primary impetus for resistance against the government’s labor market policies. In Berlin, the first notable effort in this regard was referred to as a ‘rose action’ (Rosenaktion). Activists delivered roses to jobs counselors at their local Jobcenter in a gesture of solidarity, reasoning that client-level bureaucrats largely deliver sanctions out of fear for their own job. Beginning in 2013, a key leader in this effort would go on to gain national attention for several prolonged bouts of Sanktionshunger (‘sanction starving’—i.e., going without food during a period of 100% sanction, a course of action that he explicitly contrasts with a more volitional hunger strike). Alongside these efforts, more creative forms of protest began to emerge, with a new activist community springing up in their wake. Unemployed activists encouraged their fellow benefit recipients to bring witnesses to their Jobcenter appointments, as well as to share their official sanction notifications (Sanktionsbescheide) with the public online.

Arriving in Berlin in 2014, after an absence of several years, I found these protest efforts in full swing. Recent ‘actions’ had included a mock graveyard for those who had died in connection with sanctions, and a rally during which an activist shaved off her hair and mailed it to her jobs counselor (McGill, 2017). A number of activist informants were seeking redress from sanctions and other related benefit decisions through the courts, and the gallery for such efforts would frequently include, much to the surprise of low-level magistrates, several dozen enthusiastic supporters. All of these efforts have had a kind of sporadic and spontaneous quality. For me, the best analogy has been to a series of wild-cat strikes, as opposed to a more concerted and union-organized work stoppage. In each case, however, activist efforts have seemed to point most specifically to the perfidiousness of sanctions, often focusing on discomfiting efforts to compel unemployed people, both through sanctions and through shame, to take up low-wage jobs whose remuneration is basically comparable to the ‘existential minimum’ they are already receiving. ⁴

Jobs counselors in Germany are empowered to place sanctions on their unemployed clients in specific amounts (10, 30 or 60 percent) for a specific number of months (one, three or six). Although the most common sanction involves 10 percent of benefits for three months, multiple sanctions can be imposed both simultaneously and consecutively. Thus, it is possible to be vollsanktioniert (completely sanctioned) for years on end. ⁵ Activists who forthrightly challenge their jobs counselors’ insistence on low-wage employment are particularly vulnerable to this outcome.

The government’s sanctioning policy notably pits the apparently idiosyncratic perspectives of individual benefits claimants against a highly organized welfare state apparatus. In turn, anti-sanction activists offer a critique of state policy that hinges on their face-to-face encounters with jobs counselors. What is curious about my fieldwork, then, is the way that the isolating encounter with the state serves not just as a form of domination (see Nikos Poulantzas’s famous ‘isolation effect’ [Poulantzas, 2000: 69ff]), but as a source of strength. With the construction of sanctions as a central pillar of German labor market policy, unemployed people are provided a clear image of state power in the form of a sanctioning jobs counselor. To be sure, the anti-sanction activists in Berlin with whom I have spent time depend on one another for support and encouragement. They were also clearly affirmative of the value of solidarity—in a much quoted phrase, one informant described accompanying other unemployed people to their appointments with jobs counselors as ‘the first commandment of Jobcenter activism’. Despite this, however, there is a strong sense in which anti-sanction activism is built up on what remains a fundamentally individual encounter with state power in the form of sanctions.

In a context where neoliberalism is more emerged than emergent, this is particularly interesting. What it suggests, of course, is a kind of dialectic in which new forms of isolation give way to new forms of solidarity and activism. While the articulation of an ‘existential minimum’ by the authors of the Hartz Reforms was originally intended to insure that unemployed benefit recipients would be treated sternly as individual labor market participants, it has been taken by anti-sanction activists as the positive basis for a fight against sanctions and in favor of a basic income. Activists ask why, if the ‘existential minimum’ truly is that amount of income necessary to maintain a basic existence, the government’s sanctioning policy should allow benefits to be driven below this level. Anti-sanction activists’ tendency to inhabit this question has been remarkable, allowing them to focus more on finding the contradictions within the neoliberal present than on finding their way back to a vanquished corporatist past.

The abolition of sanctions would provide a uniform basic income for all residents of Germany for the first time. While this was hardly a widespread goal on the political left even 10 years ago, it is increasingly so today. For many, a sanction-free basic income is taken as the cornerstone of a post-neoliberal arrangement in which benefit entitlements are not directly linked to work. Although benefit recipients would still be required to collect their benefit at a ‘Jobcenter’ and would still have a ‘jobs counselor’ (Arbeitsvermittler) as a case manager, the fact that these counselors were not empowered to sanction would leave unemployed people a clear option to choose a guaranteed basic benefit over employment in a categorical way.

In this sense, what anti-sanction activists have done is to identify the uneven power dynamic that exists between themselves (as the targets of possible sanction) and their jobs counselors (as sanction-empowered bureaucrats) as that which separates them from a post-neoliberal future. Crucially, this future imagines a basic income for all that in no way references one’s work history or present willingness to work. The proponents of an unconditional basic income (bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen, or BGE) argue that a basic income paid to all residents of Germany regardless of their income would further help to separate benefits and employment. In this case, rich and poor alike would receive a single benefit, which would serve as the basis for a new kind of sociality. Several informants have described the desired result as a social regime within which cooperation would precede, although not necessarily preclude, competition in every instance.

Although BGE has attracted adherents from across the political spectrum in Germany, its proponents are concentrated on the left. ⁶ There are many on the left, however, who suggest that an unconditional basic income would do little except to allow a greater exploitation of labor, since employers would be able to more easily recruit workers willing to work for a minimal increment above their basic income (see Roth, 2006). While such critics uniformly support the abolition of sanctions, they tend to misunderstand how pro-BGE activism and anti-sanction activism present as synonyms for one another. As one informant told me (in an attempt to cut across these sorts of economistic debates), ‘some days we are against sanctions, some days we are for BGE, it doesn’t really matter’. Whether a basic income is provided to all or merely to those who are officially unemployed, activists are largely responding to a situation in which the state concurrently articulates an ‘existential minimum’ and insists on the right to violate that minimum. As one anti-BGE informant recently stressed to me over email, her pro-BGE comrades should be lauded for doing the crucial work of ‘decreasing the panic that grips people if they imagine that the lower class is not forced to work’.

To provide a glimpse of the theoretical categories which I will deploy below, anti-sanction activism frames the end of this panic as an event on the order described below. The activists with whom I worked see a future in which the state’s interest in low-wage labor is severely curtailed, and social-state-ness (Sozialstaatlichkeit) serves as a deeply legitimate guarantee for all of a secure and dignified existence regardless of their participation in the labor market. This remains a future which is both obscure and deeply needed, one that is difficult to imagine in its replete differences from the present, but which nonetheless remains deeply desired. So, while the end of sanctions is not something that can be easily construed within the current political context, it is something whose conditions of existence are sometimes dramatically recognizable in certain very concrete experiences (in particular, the experience of being sanctioned). It is this gap—between an ineffable event and its concrete conditions of existence—that Badiou’s ontology most successfully highlights.

Introducing Badiou

As we will see, the sorts of questions that one might have about an event and its conditions of existence are crucial to my analysis, and will ultimately be built up around the particularities of Renate’s case. For the moment, however, it is necessary to introduce some basic concepts from Badiou’s ontology.

For Badiou, being is fundamentally multiple. There is, in a sense, always more than one thing to consider. It is thus possible to consider a ‘regime of presentation’ (Badiou, 2005: 24) as a sheer multiplicity of beings we are faced with within the horizon of any situation. By contrast, any unity we might encounter should be considered as the ‘operational result’ achieved specifically within a situation—i.e., as a unification of fundamentally multiple beings conceived specifically as an achieved unity. Such an achieved unity has a kind of secondary status with respect to the multiplicity of being as such. Any coherent experience or form of knowledge, any law of nature, any relay from sign to signified, any intention, and even the most elementary mathematical equation—all of these can be thought about as the result of a procedure that gives them their conceptual unity or coherence.

To say that something is a matter of ontological concern is therefore to say that we are aware that this thing is situated, at the end of the day, within a completely open multiplicity, and only takes on its distinct form through some sort of procedure that can be considered as a kind of departure from multiplicity. In the words of the philosopher Simon Critchley (2007: 45), Badiou’s ontology deals with ‘a plurality of stuff (facts, states of affairs, etc.) that cannot be reduced to any single organizing principle’. This does not mean that organizing principles do not exist, but simply that these are to be studied against the background of multiple being, rather than simply taken as involving the properties of a series of self-sufficient entities.

From an ethnographic perspective, of course, these are all rather philosophical matters. However, I would point to these four further lines of Badiou’s thinking as important to my own ethnographic materials as they are presented further below:

A description of something in ontological terms will necessarily isolate it from the various material and ideological networks within which it might be located. Badiou refers to the underlying condition of being as the ‘déliaison essentielle de l’être-multiple’ (the essential un-boundness of multiple being—Badiou, 2002: 10; see also Badiou, 1989: 35). Connections between things are important, but reality does not have the fundamental nature of being interconnected or continuous. It simply has the nature of being multiple. For ethnographic purposes, what is particularly important is that to think of something in ontological terms is to think of it as unbound from its context. Anything that is meaningful in the broadly ethnographic sense is meaningful as a kind of superimposition upon un-bounded multiplicity.

Renate’s situation

So, what of Renate, the informant through whose case I believe the relevance of Badiou’s ontology can be demonstrated, and specifically his category of the event? My specific goal here is to show how Renate does not simply have local knowledge about her situation, but indeed participates in an event that cannot be localized in any strictly coherent way. Clearly, the introduction of BGE in Germany would be an event of historical note. My larger point, however, is not that the introduction of BGE may be someday written in the history books. (As of this writing, prognosis for the success of BGE remains grim.) Rather, I am concerned with the way that activists take the introduction of BGE to be an emergent feature of the present, one whose precise character cannot be entirely localized. Activists like Renate contend with historical emergence in the sense that they contend with something like the categorical obscurity bound up in Badiou’s theory of the event.

Grappling with an event is therefore not a conventional process, something that I hope is highlighted by the fact that Renate is very much not a conventional actor. In protest against the imposition of sanctions and in support of the creation of an unconditional basic income, Renate has refused unemployment benefits for a number of years, thereby embracing a life of homelessness and extreme poverty. This refusal is recognized among Renate’s fellow activists as an act of radical will. By no means a protest leader, Renate is nevertheless treated by many with reverence and respect. As an ethnographer, my experience has been that voicing genuine respect for Renate and awe at her commitment could sometimes prove to be a bonding experience with my other informants, who could easily admit to sharing these feelings. I suspect that this is also true amongst activists themselves, and that Renate should therefore be reckoned as an important kind of moral leader—an activist’s activist.

Renate first became unemployed following the collapse of the East German economy. Having spent many years in a small workshop that served the small-engine and machine repair needs of nearby firms, she is still able to ‘fix anything’. In Berlin these days, unfortunately, there is very little industrial equipment that needs fixing. Following the enactment of the Hartz Laws in 2003, local Jobcenters across Germany instituted a requirement that benefit recipients sign an ‘integration agreement’ (Eingliederungsvereinbarung) with their job counselor. Although policy dictates that sanctions can only be enforced against benefit recipients who sign this document, it also stipulates that jobs counselors should do so on behalf of clients who refuse. Renate found this usurpation of her powers of consent to be intolerable. She took to the practice of delivering monthly to her jobs counselor a document that offered an alternative arrangement, one that would provide an ‘unconditional monthly payment’ in support of her attempts to achieve ‘maximum efficiency in the application for or realization of independent employment as a freelancer, dependent employment as a salaried employee, or volunteer work in a social field’.

Somewhat predictably, employees of Renate’s local Jobcenter have refused even to recognize the existence of this document. ¹⁰ Having made the gesture of proposing an alternative to the government’s ostensibly contractual sanctioning practice, Renate began to refuse payments and prepared to embrace a life of homelessness and poverty. Informing her jobs counselor of this decision touched off a process that led to a 10-week-long forcible confinement in a psychiatric clinic. During this time, her apartment and personal belongings were ‘dissolved’ (aufgelöst) under the supervision of Jobcenter employees. This decision was particularly convenient for her case workers, since apartment dissolutions (Wohnungsauflösungen) by Jobcenter employees in Berlin have previously led to substantial public protests and even to violent confrontations between activists, case workers and police. ¹¹

Renate describes her confinement as a harrowing experience, and she has entered a legal petition that would force a court review of any repeated attempt by Jobcenter employees to have her confined. It is nevertheless with some sense of vindication that she holds up this experience as corroboration of the dictatorial will that she perceives beneath the ostensibly liberal German welfare state. This dimension of her understanding of the state became clear to me one day when I asked her if she saw the ordinary practices of her jobs counselors as a ‘form of discipline’. This was not an idle question, because numerous informants over the years have made claims to that effect. ¹² Renate, however, was extremely quick to dismiss this sort of characterization. Her experience at the Jobcenter has not been one of carefully calibrated discipline (Disziplin), but rather of unrelenting and unchecked dictatorship (Diktatur). For her, the Jobcenter is a space that has been specifically designed to violate personal integrity. Jobs counselors do not seek to discipline their clients in the name of market efficiency so much as they seek, in the name of raw power, to supplant those clients’ intentions with their own. The naked appropriation of unemployed people’s very powers of consent surrounding the signing of integration agreements provides Renate with crucial evidence for this interpretation.

Having refused benefit payments and rather insistently dug in against the most forceful elements of the welfare state, Renate lives in a homeless shelter not far from the city center. She subsists on the trickle of funds organized by a fellow activist and supported by various sympathizers. Among her fellow travelers, she is greatly admired for her quiet resolve and her fierce personal commitment. Whereas other activists have endured sanctions for years on end, and at least two others have become homeless by virtue of their activism, Renate is the only one that I know of who has simply refused benefits altogether.

Local relations: Entering the labyrinth

Renate believes that human needs can be organized into a hierarchy of the type first described by Abraham Maslow. Given the basic nature of the needs positioned at the bottom of this hierarchy, the state is particularly responsible for their provision through a benefit adequate to pay for housing, food, basic medical necessities and consumer goods, etc. Renate is quick to point out, however, that this basic income would also serve as the foundation for higher order needs. For example, a person participating in politics while assured of their basic livelihood would have better access to the higher order needs of self-esteem and self-actualization than would someone participating in politics without this assurance. Calling herself a communist, Renate explicitly rejects the economistic framework of Marxism-Leninism taught to her in school, saying that she ‘doesn’t go in much for Marx’ (nichts am Hut mit Marx hat) but that she ‘really does directly follow Maslow’.

It is fair to say that I voiced some skepticism about the existence of basic needs—doubts that the reader may also share. In the way of ethnographic interviews, however, our discussion of the character of these needs often turned on the question of what basic needs would be like if they were indeed to exist. Also, in the way of ethnographic interviews, this kind of discussion has inevitably led to my own consideration of basic needs as things that do indeed exist, at least as a form of local experience. This has not been the kind of epochal encounter described by Philippe Descola, in which the doubts sown by an informant are such that an ethnographer’s ‘entire energy is then devoted to analyzing them in a systematic fashion’ (Descola, 2013: 4). Rather it has been marked by a play of Renate’s ambivalences (‘perhaps I can phrase this better’) and my own (‘something like this must be the case’).

Nonetheless, there does seem to be, even here, some of the ontological quality pointed to by Descola and others as characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork. The most potent lesson that jumps out at me from this fieldwork is a sense that beliefs are not simply about something, but rather they also are something. Renate clearly does hold certain beliefs in the ordinary sense of that word (about Maslow’s hierarchy, for example). However, what is unavoidably apparent from our discussions is that she also encounters these beliefs in the course of organizing her agency around the abolition of sanctions. Viveiros de Castro’s concerns about ‘all the damage anthropology does by conceiving indigenous people’s relation to their discourse in terms of belief’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 194–195) seems to have a strong echo here—it would undermine Renate’s activist efforts to claim that she relates to her own discourse simply as the materialization of a fully internal belief. Renate examines her own beliefs in the course of considering something more generic—i.e., the end of sanctions as a transformative event for the German welfare state.

The fact that Renate might consider her beliefs as conditions for the end of sanctions does not mean that she thinks about these beliefs in some kind of purely cynical—or perhaps heroically detached—way. Renate is not examining her belief about Maslow’s hierarchy for its strategic value in her various arguments against sanctions. Indeed, such a suggestion would merely imply that she harbors further levels of belief that inspire such a strategic engagement. Renate is no more the ‘autonomous, individualistic, Western actor’ (Ortner, 2006: 130) of neoclassical fantasy than Viveiros de Castro’s informants are ‘a priori’ Others (see Apter, 2017: 298) mired in unchanging and unchangeable concepts. Beliefs are present for Renate not because she is able to manipulate them, but rather because she must engage them as part of the very situation in which their realization might have an effect.

To adhere somewhat more closely to Badiou’s terminology, Renate is compelled to consider Maslow’s hierarchy as a condition for the end of sanctions in a particularly subtle way. It would, of course, be difficult to think about the existence of this hierarchy as in some way an efficient cause. We would not want to pose Maslow’s hierarchy as an explanation for why sanctions might be abolished. However, Renate clearly believes that this particular psychological construct does provide a good justification for this abolition. As some analytical philosophers have argued, however, the distinction between explanations and justifications is not a neat one (Dancy, 2000; Smith, 1994). We live in a ‘practical reality’ (Dancy, 2000) where events cannot be ultimately disambiguated according to the strictly explanatory reasons why something occurs and any justifying reasons in favor of it occurring. ¹³

The result of this is that, in strict terms, the exploration of a belief can concurrently serve as an exploration into why an event is justified and how that event might occur. If the existence of Maslowian basic needs is an important justification for the existence of a sanction-free basic income, then it is also to be considered, even if in some highly attenuated sense, as a rational explanation for why such an income might be institutionalized. As many ethnographers will hopefully recognize, this is the complex ground which is present whenever beliefs are actually discussed, rather than merely attributed to ideal actors. Around the question of belief, then, Badiou’s concern with the conditions for an event is particularly important: It is only by considering things in terms of events, and not simply in terms of liaisons locales, that we provide a secure ground for the discussion of belief. Even when it is quite clear that a justification cannot cause an event to occur, that same justification must be inquired into seriously as a condition of an event’s occurrence. This is, at any rate, the nexus within which a sympathetic ethnography of activism must exist. One must examine how beliefs about things—about Maslow’s hierarchy, or about the fact that the current welfare state has the form of a dictatorship—can be used both to justify the goals of activism and to explain activism’s progress. For a committed activist, there is no strict prioritization between motivating belief and instrumental strategy. Beliefs and strategic concerns are equal conditions of an event’s existence.

This was true in the case of Renate’s beliefs about Maslow’s hierarchy, but it was also true of many other beliefs encountered in my fieldwork with multiple informants. Talk of the nature of consumer taxes and of childhood trauma, of the division of labor and of the nature of reciprocity: all of these things were talked about with some vigor as matters of belief, and all of these things became, in one way or another, entangled in the effort to abolish sanctions. In terms of my own ethnographic process, it was highly notable for me that the fieldwork that I did in 2014 was quite different from previous fieldwork that I had done on the German welfare state (2009, 2013). Where I had almost always encountered unemployed people and state bureaucrats who were reluctant to talk about their everyday practices, here was a group of people who were eager to talk to me about anything and everything that might bear on their activism. Indeed, I often had a sense that my interviews were an important part of various activists’ own process—that they self-consciously welcomed their time with me as a chance to explore their situation, rather than to simply represent it. At the same time, the fact that each informant seemed to be thinking in a different direction (or in multiple different directions) did not seem to impinge on the vital sense of community that they had with one another. Even disagreements or personal animosities could sometimes seem indicative of a restless and relentless energy to explore the many conditions of an event whose immanent existence was largely agreed upon.

Important to remember here is Badiou’s insistence that an event cannot be simply read off of its conditions. The conditions for an event are inexhaustible. It is not the case, for example, that one can simply bring together all the numerous preoccupations of individual activists that might bear on the abolition of sanctions, and thereby discover anything essential about that event. One of Badiou’s commentators has described the relationship that it is possible to have toward an event as a ‘stacked[-]up series of wagers’ (Bosteels, 2006: 128). In this sense, the inquiry into a condition for an event might be considered a wager on that event’s ineffable existence. Renate wagers, for example, that Maslow’s hierarchy and the dictatorial nature of Jobcenter counseling are conditions for the abolition of sanctions. The fact that others make their own wagers does not detract from their ability to talk about the same event. In this vein, Badiou (2001: 42ff) describes the relationship that a subject can have toward an event as fidelity—i.e., the tendency to remain true to the notion of an event’s existence, even when the conditions surrounding that event might remain frustratingly diverse. ¹⁴ Although no wager will ever institute an event, Badiou points to the sustained nature of an inquiry into an event’s multiple conditions as what is most crucial for its existence. The subject which sustains this inquiry need not be an individual person. Given the difficulties involved, it indeed seems more likely that this sort of fidelity would be sustained by a community of activists as a collective subject rather than by any one person.

Grief and conditionality

Renate’s unemployment and the unification of the two Germanies corresponded with the dissolution of her marriage. Without a job or a romantic commitment, and with newly open borders beckoning, she and her two daughters relocated, moving first to Spain and then to the United States. Before she left Germany, she asked a doctor to examine a mysterious lump on her younger daughter’s neck. He explained that it was benign, but he was wrong. The young woman died in Phoenix, Arizona. Renate and her surviving daughter returned to Germany shortly thereafter.

Although her daughter’s death is not something that she often mentions in her public writings or speeches, Renate insisted during our conversations that is ‘in the memory of/in memorial to’ (im Gedanken an) her daughter that she refuses unemployment benefits. She describes her commitment to a life without ‘lazy compromises’ (faule Kompromisse) and the courage to follow her conscience as the ‘bequest’ (Vermächtnis) left to her from her departed daughter.

On the most immediate level, there is a clear tension between Renate’s insistence on the centrality of her daughter’s death and the scant discussion that this topic receives. Although we have spent many hours discussing the nature of needs, rights and political action, our discussions of her daughter have remained quite brief. This pattern is evident elsewhere. A few months after my first encounter with her, one of Renate’s fellow activists recorded a 45-min interview with her in which her daughter’s death is mentioned once in passing:

I am really against every form of compulsion [Zwang]. Since my earliest childhood, I have been raised in this milieu of compulsion. It has always been hard for me to put up with any form of compulsion. I know in a very exact way that when one fails to see thinking and doing [Denken und Handeln] as a unity, and when one takes money for happiness, then you get sick. It is injurious of…you can’t pay for health in money, and you can’t put a monetary value on human rights. This was really for me a consequence of the death of my daughter, that human rights really have to be lived, and not just lied about with money…

The particularly subjective nature of this representation—its about-me-ness, as it were—is especially evident in Renate’s relationship with her surviving daughter, who curses her mother’s ‘damn communism’ and is especially angered by her recalcitrant homelessness. Renate readily admits that her departed daughter would also not have wanted her to be homeless, and is extremely reluctant to imagine any sort of necessary relationship between her loss and her recusancy. Although it is hardly a point that I pressed her on, a certain misgiving would sometimes invade the silence surrounding our discussions of her daughter—she tells me that considering her treatment of this death as a source of strength in her political struggle might be a flaw, but it is one that she ‘does not want to correct’. Such dark moments give way, more often than not, to hopeful ones. She tells me, after a pause in the same discussion, that ‘ich hänge an diese Idealen’ (I adhere to or ‘hang on’ to these ideals).

What is at stake here, at least in part, is the tension between Renate’s desire to mourn her daughter’s death and the possibility that this tragedy—like so many other innumerable and tenuously connected things—might nonetheless constitute a condition for the abolition of sanctions and the institution of an unconditional basic income. In her discussion of mourning and politics (Butler, 2006), Judith Butler has identified a certain failure to mourn (and she describes mourning very much in the psychoanalytic sense of a loss of interpersonal attachment) as a political failure to realize one’s own contingent nature. For Butler, a failure to mourn might be described as an attempt to ‘transcend the matrix of relations that gives rise to the subject’ (Butler, 2015: 8). The problem with this account is the way that it institutes mourning as a crucial element of political subjectivity, and the failure to mourn as a failure of political conscience. Renate is highly vulnerable to an accusation of unsuccessful mourning—an accusation that would effectively undermine her political agency in precisely the opposite direction theorized by Butler.

I should be clear that Renate seems to have no difficulty with the notion that her psychologically meaningful sense of selfhood is built up relationally, and that only mourning her daughter will allow her to retain that self. The politics involved here, however, is not one of mourning, but rather of memorialization. Death is turned to an altogether different use, one that is indeed outside of the matrix of relationality insofar as that death is considered as a condition for a larger and inchoate event. Renate’s vulnerability to an accusation of failing to mourn (by her surviving daughter, for example) is precisely a measure of her commitment to this event.

We are, of course, still left with the question of how the death of a teenage girl in Arizona might relate to the abolition of sanctions in Germany. The answer to this question cannot help but be obscure. What is crucial, however, is that Renate insists that this linkage be explored, even if it must be described as ‘merely’ a matter of her own will. Sozialstaatlichkeit without sanction remains generic for Renate—which is to say that it is a little bit present in everything, including her daughter’s death.

It is precisely the ability to capture an obscure future through its most dramatic conditions that makes Renate compelling for her fellow activists. No one thinks that sanctions will be abolished because Renate believes that her daughter’s death bears on this abolition. Her fellow activists, however, can recognize in Renate’s willingness to plumb even the experiences that might be most distantly and painfully connected to the end of sanctions as analogous to their own compulsion to restlessly explore the conditions for this event strewn across their own experience. Likewise, no one would argue that Renate should remain homeless in order to memorialize her daughter’s existence. And yet the subjective entanglement in the abolition of sanctions that this memorialization allows is clearly iconic for the struggles of the community as a whole.

Conclusion

In his studied refutation of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno insisted that ‘no being can be thought without the existent’ (Adorno, 2003: 115). Adorno’s opposition to Heidegger is famous, but his stringency with himself is also clear: to describe oneself as capable of describing being without first describing practical existence is to ascribe to oneself a massive and unwarranted privilege. Ethnographers quite obviously tend to share this position—we are concerned with an examination of things as they appear in the world, and not as they ostensibly are in and of themselves. Does this mean that ontology itself is precluded? In his enigmatic way, Adorno refused to make this question clear. He refused to justify ontology, but also refused to renounce it. At the end of the day, it was not ontology but the ‘ontological need’—i.e. a deep desire for contact with something primeval and profound—that Adorno accused Heidegger of exploiting.

Is anthropology today in the position of being lured into a position of essentialism by this same ontological need? Can we enter into ontology without being corrupted by our own essentialisms? In at least some important ways, I see Badiou’s theory of the event as offering a way out of this sort of conundrum. An event allows us insight into the ‘essential unboundness of multiple being’. An event genuinely does partake in being, albeit in a way which we can only indirectly understand. Its unbound conditions, undisguised in their being, are the only parts of an event we can understand. Thus, the study of events through their conditions, which I indeed do take as a certain kind of ontological endeavor, allows us access to being in a way that is decidedly not essentialist.

This means, among other things, that the study of events goes together with a certain uncertainness about the future. Will unemployment benefit sanctions be abolished or BGE introduced in Germany? I cannot say for sure, nor indeed could any of my activist informants. However, the point here is that their position as activists is predicated precisely on their willingness to maintain a fidelity to this event through a relentless and multi-faceted examination of its conditions. This fidelity is not an attribute of their psychology, nor of any form of sedimented local knowledge, but rather remains an attribute of the event itself. ¹⁵ Let me put the point in yet another way: an event exists without being constructible, and it is in the fidelity to its unconstructible being that one’s actions might be said to be a matter of particularly ontological concern.

With respect to what I have already referred to as a ‘post-neoliberal’ future, what this effort suggests is that this future should be sought less in any objective or quasi-objective examination of the present, and more in the constant and enduring preoccupations of those who have begun to imagine a life after the present. One thing that I was consistently struck by during this research was the way that activists managed to call at once for a change in policy and for a change in popular consciousness, so that sanctions might be outlawed at the same time that the moral panic surrounding the unemployed might abate. A tendency to stress the unity of these conditions seemed to help activists such as Renate to avoid a defeated sense that positive transformation must inevitably be blocked either by society or by the state.

With respect to the larger ‘ontological turn’ in the discipline, there is perhaps one key concluding remark that should be made here. I described earlier how Badiou’s ontology describes an event as that which cannot be captured by any veridical regime, and thus must be outside any settled account or the world of experience. It seems to me that the radical futurity implied by this point is precisely what is missing from the existing scholarship of the ontological turn, which has tended to focus on divergent cultural contexts as a source of alterity. In a context where concerns about ‘insidious Eurocentrism’ (Blaser, 2009: 881) can be imputed from every side, it seems to me that the crucial question for the approach used here is whether or not the category of ‘event’ and its connotations of historical information might be used, even tacitly, to reinscribe a difference between those who, like Renate, have history and those who, at least ostensibly (Wolf, 1982), do not. Badiou’s category of the generic offers some response to this concern, insofar as it locates the alterity of the future in the complex manifold of the present. In this sense, I have sought out Renate’s actions as examples of precisely this sort of generic capacity. At the end of the day, it seems to me that the proponents of the ontological turn might be attempting to do something similar among Achuar hunters (Descola, 2013) or Afro-Cuban diviners (Holbraad, 2012)—that is to say, I take the best versions of their arguments to constitute examinations of Amazonian animism or Ifá spiritual beliefs as several of those many parts of our complex present that might point toward a genuinely different future.

In somewhat more immediate terms, then, it seems to me that we need the category of the event in order to rescue ourselves from the emergency of the present—i.e., a situation that contains all manner of exclusion, oppression and improper privilege. However, in a context where matters of ontology have been repeatedly framed as a matter of the otherness—and especially the non-Europeanness—of fieldwork informants, I am hesitant to offer the rescue of a European present as a strictly ontological endeavor.

At the end of the day, however, it is difficult to deny that Badiou does offer, on a systematic ontological basis, a very significant and powerful formalization of the notion of the event. Despite the fact that bigger things might seem to be at stake, what is perhaps most important to remember is the way that this framework allows us to think about informants’ beliefs such as they actually exist in and of themselves, rather than as they can be said to be quintessentially about something else. Renate’s belief in the hierarchy of needs, her belief in the dictatorial nature of the contemporary German welfare state, and indeed her belief that her daughter’s death has provided her the strength to follow her principles—if there is a lesson about being that can be gathered after an encounter with ontology, it is that these are things to be contemplated in and of themselves.