Radical Innovation as ‘Event’.
Or, why we can only be pioneers.
There are many examples of the appropriation of ‘progressive’ philosophical ideas to advance more conservative interests in the military, business and politics. I still remember the surprise and indignation I felt, for example, when I read the account by architect Eyal Weizman of how the Israel Defense Forces used the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, among other philosophers and critical theorists, for military operations research. So, what I’m going to attempt here is something that myself 10 years ago — a PhD student in Cultural Studies — would’ve absolutely hated. That is, I will apply a somewhat simplistic and superficial interpretation of the ideas of a French philosopher to a topic that is far removed from (or maybe even, opposed to) his theoretical, moral and political interests. In this case, it is Alain Badiou and business innovation. I literally cringed when I wrote that. But hey, the guy developed a whole theory about the irruption of novelty. As his profile at the European Graduate School explains,
his philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
So, why not? His philosophy may point towards a universal or abstract theory of radical innovation that may be useful for thinking not only revolutions in politics, art or science — his main interests — but also in the domains of technology and business.
Over the last few years I’ve been engaged with the topic of innovation, both in academic and professional roles, and from a variety of perspectives: creative technology, design thinking, business model design, organizational design and, most recently, foresight and design futures. A strange outcome is that I’ve developed a somewhat cynical or, perhaps, skeptic — maybe even ‘nihilist’ — attitude towards the topic. More precisely, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the huge gap that exists between the kind of very radical, discontinuous, game-changing innovations that companies (and society at large) are obsessed with and the actual transformations that can be purposefully accomplished through the endless theories, frameworks, methods and inspirational talks that flood the field. I’m drawn to the idea that the most radical innovations are difficult to be replicated or even explained — they are events, as Badiou calls these radical ruptures.
Badiou is the former chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris: philosopher, political theorist, ethicist, dramaturgist and political activist with Leninist and Maoist positions. Thus the apparent absurdity of bringing his thought to bear on a subject such as business innovation. His magnum opus, Being and Event, proposes two big ideas.
First of all, Badiou argues that mathematics is ontology. Ontology, in the Continental European tradition, consists of the study of being a such. This means, roughly speaking, that mathematics is the most general or universal way of studying the structure of the world (or, perhaps more precisely, of studying structure itself). Makes sense, right? To develop this perspective, Badiou relies on set theory in a way that is at least somewhat controversial from the point of view of the Anglo-American, analytical philosophy tradition. Conveniently, I will steer away from this part of his theory.
The second idea, and the most relevant for the topic at hand, is that, according to Badiou, true novelty only comes in the form of an event: a rupture, a radical discontinuous change. As the title of the work suggest, an event is fundamentally distinct from being, which is the most general name he uses to refer to the structure of things at any moment. An event is incompatible with said state of things, it irrupts in the situation as if it was coming from another “dimension” — a bit like the sphere that irrupts in the two-dimensional world of Flatland.
Oliver Feltham, Badiou’s English translator, clearly summarizes the idea:
Events happen in certain times and places which, unlike the minor contingencies of everyday life, rupture with the established order of things. If they are recognized as harboring implications for that order, then a transformation of the situation in which they occur may be initiated. For Badiou, there is no ground to these events: they have no assignable cause, nor do they emerge from any other situation … This is how Badiou places the absolute contingency of events. (Being and Event, p. xxvi)
Thus, Badiou’s concept of event includes two main propositions.
First, the event is essentially contingent and cannot be predicted in any way. There are no general laws or mechanisms over and above the specific facts of its occurrence. It may have happened elsewhere at another time or not happen at all. As such, the event can hardly be explained by looking at the situation in which it emerges except perhaps in a merely trivial sense and only retrospectively. Events, in this sense, are flukes. Badiou himself writes,
The event in general is that which is purely hazardous, and which cannot be inferred from the situation. (Being and Event, p. 193)
Second, events are fundamentally incompatible with the given order of things or, as Badiou appropriately calls it, the State of the situation. As such, they may bring about a radical transformation if and only if, as Feltham explains in the quote above, they are recognized as harboring implications for the state of the situation. This recognition involves a specific procedure that I will discuss below.
For Badiou, there are four domains in which events can erupt: science, politics, art and love. In science, events take the form of epistemological breaks (G. Bachelard) or paradigm shifts (T. Kuhn), e.g. Georg Cantor’s formalization of set theory (seminal to Badiou’s own work), Darwin’s formulation of natural selection and the shift from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s relativity. In politics, quite obviously, events refer to actual revolutions such as France in 1789, Rusia in 1917 or the United States between 1765–1783, but also important upheavals such as 1968 around the world. In art, one example could be the radical breaks associated with Modernist avant-garde movements. Finally, for Badiou, falling in love is an event in the domain of personal life.
What’s interesting is that despite its ontological and conceptual importance, an event is not as historically important as what follows in its wake. History is full of important transformations in the domains mentioned above that can only be traced to underwhelming and accidental facts: specific dates, people and circumstances that only retrospectively are shaped as narratives charged with an aura of necessity. Roughly speaking, this is what Badiou calls a truth procedure. A process by which someone “calls” the event, so to speak. That is, someone recognizes the important implications of the event for the current situation, decides to pursue them to its ultimate consequences and, in the process, draws the generic features of the event thereby making it universally accesible. These people are, in vulgar terms, the innovators or, at least, the early adopters of the event.
The capitalist system is, for Badiou, coextensive if not synonymous with the state of the situation. As such, his concept of the event is essentially anti-capitalist. And yet, it’s hard to think of capitalism as a monolithic and static system. Therefore, it becomes necessary to ask: Are there capitalist events, i.e. events within the capitalist system? Or, more specifically: are there events in the domains of technology and the economy?
Of course, the history of capitalism — as the history of science, politics and art — is a chain of radical ruptures. Perhaps the clearest articulation of this can be found in Venezuelan scholar Carlota Perez’s theory of techno-economic paradigms. The basis of her theory rests on the concept of technological revolution which, as she writes,
can be defined as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and industries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and of propelling a long-term upsurge of development. (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, p. 8)
An important difference with Badiou’s theory is that, according to Pérez, technological revolutions have a clear historical rhythm, recurring roughly every 50 years (at least for the last two centuries). They don’t have the absolute contingency that Badiou associates with events. In every other aspect, though, the structural and conceptual relationship between the capitalist system and technological revolutions is the same as Badiou’s theory of being and event.
At any point in history, the state of the situation in the capitalist system is what Pérez calls a techno-economic paradigm: a set of technologies, practices and organizational structures that conform a coherent system. A technological revolution constitutes a rupture with that paradigm harboring far reaching consequences at all levels of the techno-economic sphere.
Interestingly, Pérez recognizes a social mechanism at the heart of such transformation that strongly resembles Badiou’s idea of a truth procedure. She writes:
For society to veer strongly in the direction of a new set of technologies, a highly visible ‘attractor’ needs to appear, symbolizing the whole new potential and capable of sparking the technological and business imagination of a cluster of pioneers. … That event is defined here as the big-bang of the revolution. (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, p. 11)
According to Pérez, the most recent example of such event, triggering the birth of our current techno-economic paradigm, was the announcement of the Intel microprocessor in Santa Clara, California, in 1971.
As argued above, the event in and on itself is not as important as what follows in its wake: in order to bring about a radical process of innovation, the implications of the event for the state of the situation must be recognized by a group that will, by virtue of that recognition, jump into action. Pérez explains:
The event in question, though apparently small and relatively isolated, is experienced by the pioneers of the time as the discovery of a new territory, as a powerful announcement of what those technologies can offer far into the future and as a call for entrepreneurial action. (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, p. 12)
There may be, after all, ‘truth procedures’ in technology and business as well.
It really doesn’t matter too much if events of radical innovation are cyclical, as Pérez would have them, or absolutely contingent á la Badiou. The fact is: the chances of you being involved in one of those are next to none. As Venkatesh Rao fondly reminds us:
you’re almost certainly not on what engineers call the critical path of the many-streamed flow of history.
If you are on the critical path, your delays delay the universe. Your accelerations accelerate the universe. The order in which you say or do things matters.
If you’re not on the critical path, however, nothing particularly significant hinges on whether you show up late or early, or indeed, whether you show up at all.
But the thing is that it doesn’t really matter. The most important implication of a perspective on radical innovation as the one assembled here is that, as Badiou would say, the subject is post-evental. This means that agency mostly comes after the fact and intentionality is, to a great extent, a retrospective construct. Pérez writes: the great clusters of talent come forth after the revolution is visible and because it is visible. (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, p. 27)
After all, it may be the case that in order to do innovation in both the first and the second person, so to speak (i.e. as entrepreneur or consultant, respectively), the most important skill is to be capable of recognizing the radical implications of seemingly hazardous events and readily exploring the new territories that become henceforth available. Interestingly, this is precisely what it means to be a pioneer.
