As I was watching Badiou, the biographical documentary of French philosopher Alain Badiou, I was struck by his understanding of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Badiou’s reading, the exiting of the cave is the possibility of politics, the possibility of communism, in his view. The cave itself is essentially false consciousness, the process of generating meaning behind the symbols we find produced in capitalism: its stories, its images, its ideologies. How do we know there is an exit to the cave, Badiou asks us. The existence of events such as the ‘68 revolts is proof to him, the possibility of exiting the cave is in the necessity of truth, and of communism.
Certainly, Plato’s logic is not alien to Badiou’s. The necessity of an exit is the necessity of truth, and the failure of our ability to intuitively grasp it. This truth is the truth of philosophy for Plato, the ability to learn the great fields of knowledge. And yet, the metaphor of the cave is an odd way to go about this. The slaves held in the cave are held in place by their fellow man, not by their natural poverty or ignorance. This is, of course, because the point of the tale is not to show that there exists ignorance and truth, that is taken as a given. The point is to show the violence and pain inherent in revealing the truth to others.
Slavoj Zizek perhaps best encapsulates the theoretical description of this pain and violence in the opening exposition of his film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology where the main character of the film They Live is forced to result to brutal street fighting to get his best friend to put on the truth-revealing glasses. To see the truth is a painful thing, which is naturally resisted, as the truth necessarily smashes our existing, naive, symbolic world.
The point of the allegory of the cave is to show how those slaves that return to liberate their compatriots would be fought tooth and nail by the ones they are trying to save. But let’s step back again, as Badiou does, and ask, as the slave is first forcing themselves into the light, why they proceed. How are they to know that there is a truth beyond the blinding light and the shadows?
For Badiou, it is the necessity of the realm of freedom that motivates the slave. The life of the slave as the generator of meanings in the shadows is no life at all, as Plato says himself (though only as a subject enlightened by the truth). But Plato also provides a second reason: the role of the sun. The cave, after all, is not a self sustaining space. The sun, by giving off the energy for the plants and the animals is what ultimately facilitates life in the cave. The existence of a surface, of the sun, of a real realm of production that allows for frivolous things such as brainwashing is the logical necessity of the existence of the cave. There must be something beyond it, the full preconditions for life are not accounted for within it.
But then, why does this quirk of the narrative come to be? Which is just to ask, why is the cave a cave? Why does the problem of social illusion take place outside of the real world and its vitalistic productive processes? The answer is obvious once we considered Plato’s stance on actual social illusion inside the vitalistic productive processes; here such social illusions are deemed necessary in his telling of the noble lie.
This should come as no surprise, after all Plato was a wealthy individual in ancient Greek society. He did not have to work; all his time was free. He existed as a critic outside of the mode of production, the kind of critic that Marcuse waxed poetic about in his One Dimensional Man. To the critic outside of production, who is defined by their outsideness, the realm of objective knowledge exists independently from its material creation and reproduction. Social illusion is a problem for pedagogy, to such an idealist thinker, who takes themselves to be not just outside of production but outside of ideology itself.
Badiou is not necessarily such an idealist as Marcuse or Plato. To Badiou, the outside, much like the inside of the cave, is a part of the subject, and in particular the historical subject which must grapple with action. The idea of communism, the idea of political truth beyond the social illusion of the state, is therefore just as transhistorical as ideology itself. This infinite transhistorical idea becomes expressed historically, particularly with the individuals and forms which actively seek freedom and escape from the social illusion.
The site of social illusion is not separated from the site of production in Badiou, or in any proper materialist thinker’s view. The noble lie is not distinguishable from the cave. Social illusion is a part of us as subjects, that is the inescapable necessity of ideology. But so is exiting the cave a part of us as subjects, the necessity of the possibility of escape. Perhaps it is impossible for us to overcome ideology as such, but surely it is possible for us to overcome capitalist ideology, and whatever comes after it, and after that and so on. The possibility of overcoming is always with us. It is in this sense that the proof of the exit is in the proof of the possibility of freedom.
This is not to turn such possibility into the kind of empty concept as simple friendship, or cooperation, or any particular policy reform. It is the kind of horizon of possibility revealed in the ideology of action of a given usurping historical subject. The inherent violence of exiting the cave, to Badiou, is the violence of revolution, of the likes of Robspierre, Banqui, Lenin and Mao. It is evident, not in our discourses, but in our actions - though the weight of the possibility of this action should weigh on our discourses. It is the fear of this possibility that Badiou says that will allow us out of the funk of post-history. Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis, where he makes this prediction,was after all written in 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis. 13 years later, we see he was very much correct.
We are no longer in “capitalist realism”, and yet we remain in the cave. What exiting the cave looks like, in our time and place, has yet to be seen.