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COLLAPSE I
Editorial Introduction
Robin Mackay
A new publication is obliged to justify its demands on
the attention of a reader already besieged by countless
specialist journals. This justification cannot appeal to the
orgiastic logic of the filling of market ‘niches’. With
C
OLLAPSE
we have set out to achieve quite the opposite,
aiming rather at a breadth and an openness found
wanting.
That academic philosophy courts overspecialisation
and a certain depression of the energy of thought is news
to no-one. Whilst not wishing to denigrate the necessary
and exacting work of scholarship, we wished to create a
publication which communicated the passion for thought,
and the excitement of thinking. The work we present
here is unapologetically (and not unnecessarily)
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COLLAPSE I, ed. R. Mackay (Oxford: Urbanomic, September 2007)
ISBN 978-0-9553087-0-4
http://www.urbanomic.com
COLLAPSE I
demanding: we conceived
C
OLLAPSE
as providing a
home for conceptual work in progress, with all the rough
edges this might imply.
C
OLLAPSE
is an experimental entity, in that it has no
fixed agenda, no institutional ties, no partisan position:
nevertheless it will be clear that neither the Editor nor the
contributors regard this experimental status as the
declaration of an open season for ludic enthusiasms. But
as much as we did not wish merely to collate flights of
philosophical whimsy, we also sought to avoid grounding
ourselves in the ‘application’ of overgeneralised
theoretical tropes to specific issues in pursuit of that most
dismal of goals, ‘relevance’ to the ‘contemporary’ reader.
What was clear from the start was that the way
forward lay in rigorously challenging philosophical
thought by confronting it with conceptual production
from elsewhere (and not in a presumptuous relation of
‘application’): there is no doubt that philosophy only
stays alive by maintaining porous boundaries with its out-
side—this does not detract at all from its specificity and
value as a discipline.
If part of the problem with philosophy today lies in its
professionalisation, we hope not to offend any of the
contributors to this volume by saying that we consider
every one of them to be
amateurs
in the true sense:
dedicated and enthusiastic lovers of abstract thought,
each engaged in adventures of ideas, each refusing to
contain these adventures within strict formal or
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Editorial Introduction
disciplinary boundaries. It should go without saying that,
even if the two are rarely found in pure form, we favour
de jure
mad scientists with their bubbling
conceptual cauldrons over career academics with their
meticulously cautious conference papers.
Finally, we envisage each volume of
C
OLLAPSE
as the
intersection, in a multi-dimensional space, of diverse lines
of thought; the optimum circumstance would be if each
reader picked up
C
OLLAPSE
on the strength of only one
of the articles therein, the others being involuntarily
absorbed as a kind of side-effect that would propogate the
eccentric conjuncture by stealth, and spawn yet others.
A note on form: in several of the articles collected in
C
OLLAPSE I
we have used the interview form, and hope
to do so in future. At its best it offers a medium in which
the play of concepts takes a natural course and order of
exposition, allowing the reader in turn to be swept up by
its movement, and to reconstruct its underlying
consistency at their leisure and with their own resources.
Such an interview should read lightly whilst its
spontaneous discursive complexity will be conducive to
repeated readings.
***
Although we decided early on that eclecticism was
neither to be scorned nor feared, a theme emerged,
unbidden, during the long process of clarifying the
journal’s aims and collecting and commisioning work for
this first volume. The working title was thus ‘numerical
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COLLAPSE I
materialism’: an inquiry into the extent and nature of
number’s dominion over any philosophy calling itself a
materialism; but also an inquiry into the materiality of
number and numerical practices. Such a theme describes
a realm exemplary in its liminal nature, not only
connecting mathematics and philosophy but abutting
onto every theoretical discourse with any aspiration to
formal rationality.
We are privileged to have amongst our contributors
A
LAIN
B
ADIOU
, widely recognised as one of the most
important philosophers alive today, and one who has
consistently pursued this line of thought, often against
the grain of philosophical orthodoxy. In our interview
with Badiou we seek to clarify the consequences of a
materialist thought which defines ‘nature’ through
mathematics, determining ‘history’ in terms of its
problematic ‘outside’. We also succeed in provoking
Badiou into addressing in detail some of the major
objections raised against his doctrine, and into
elaborating more precisely how he sees mathematics in its
relation to other sciences. He also speaks of the new
conceptual resources which his latest book
Logiques des
mondes
brings to his ongoing work.
Although we have made clear our aspiration for the
volume as a whole, this opening interview, together with
the contributions of G
REGORY
C
HAITIN
and M
ATTHEW
W
ATKINS
particularly demonstrate the sort of conjunc-
tion we hope to effect with
C
OLLAPSE
: it would be
difficult to find any other publication in which these
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Editorial Introduction
could be found together. Here are three thinkers whose
differences are not limited to their theoretical decisions
but extend to their styles, and their respective
conceptions of the nature of their subject. Despite this
divergence, a number of common threads means that
reading them together produces a combination that is
more than the sum of its—already considerable—parts.
To say that G
REGORY
C
HAITIN
is well-known in his
field would be to tell only half the truth: in fact Chaitin
has for many years been something of a gleeful maverick.
Whilst there can be no doubt as to his credentials as a
‘serious mathematician’ Chaitin not only enjoys
communicating his mathematical discoveries to a wide an
audience as possible, but he also never fails to draw from
them (sometimes to the chagrin of fellow mathemati-
cians) the most general speculative conclusions—just as
did Leibniz, the very figure invoked in Chaitin’s whirl-
wind review of ‘Epistemology as Information Theory’.
Our interview with M
ATTHEW
W
ATKINS
is the very
portrait of a thinker who defies categorisation.
Watkins’s singular talent at explaining complex concepts
and his fluid, resolutely non-specialist speculative
exploration of their significance makes of this interview a
kind of conceptual cinematography, and made
conducting it a genuine pleasure. As the engineer of a
virtual agency which collects and catalyses material in an
area of research which has only recently begun to
condense, Watkins exemplifies well what was intended
by the provocative subtitling of
C
OLLAPSE
as a ‘Journal
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