Part of a Series on the Philosophy of Radical Change
Hamm: What’s happening
Clov: Something is taking its course.
—Samuel Beckett, Endgame.
“Real change imposes an effective discontinuity on the world where it takes place.”
—Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds.
The False Comfort of Modification
What passes for change today is, in truth, a tranquil comfort: rebranding, reshuffling, reconfiguring—but never rupturing. Leadership, under the spell of continuity, often mistakes motion for movement. Yet to genuinely lead is to act in fidelity to something that breaks the rules of the game—not just plays it better.
French philosopher Alain Badiou offers us a stark alternative: what most call “change” is only modification. Modification is the internal variation a system allows itself—authorized, governed, and, in the end, contained. It is the world tweaking its wardrobe while keeping its skeleton intact. In fact the stability of the system is based on its ability to promote and contain modifications, to present a narrative of constant innovation which, in truth, is just business as usual.
But real change, evental change, is a tear in the fabric. It is that which was once impossible, suddenly appearing. It is not cleared for existence by the world’s rules, yet appears anyway. It defies explanation. It defies permission. It just happens.
The Event and the Courage to Disrupt
Real change is not just new—it is discontinuous. It produces a cut. It forces a rethinking of what can exist, what can appear, what can count. It does not merely operate within a transcendental order (the background structure of what a world allows); it alters that transcendental. And this is what terrifies institutions—and many leaders.
An event, say, the 1871 Paris Commune, is not a well-behaved emergence. It is a scandal. It should offend certain sensibilities. Technically, it is a site, a self-referential emergence that arrives without permission and indexes itself. At first, it seems absurd or impossible. But it acts. It inspires. In a sense it infects. It creates and collects new objects, new relations, new meanings.
Such is the subversion of appearing and rupture of being: the intrusion of a self-justifying force, a moment that momentarily violates the laws of what “can be,” and yet, in doing so, founds a new possible.
Leadership as Fidelity to the Event
To lead in a Badiouian sense is not to manage change. It is to declare an event and remain faithful to its consequences, even in the face of ridicule, collapse, or defeat. Indeed, for him, for all of us, real change is unmanageable. It is the fact that we cannot manage the event that defines it as impossible, and therefore, a real, radical, singular change.
One must ask:
- Does this “change” appear under the terms of the existing world, or does it bring with it a new logic?
- Are its consequences maximally intense, difficult to absorb, and resistant to compromise?
- Does it force new relations, new rules, new categories?
- Does it say or demand something impossible, and then alter the world so that this becomes possible?
A true leader is the subject who maintains the unbroken chain of consequences that follow from the event. A leader is tasked with always saying yes to what the event demands, even when those demands are beyond reasonable, impossible in practice, infinite in scope.
This is not about relevance. This is about rupture. It is about preserving the site of change long enough and intensely enough for a new world to begin. Make a space for the impossible, say yes to the impossible, recruit others to the impossible, until the impossible world is large enough to eclipse the possible.
This is how the impossible becomes real—how ruptures in the ordinary give rise to new worlds.
Catalysts of the Current: Four Ruptures That Made the Now
Take William Purser, a 17th-century Bristol mariner, one of the first to modify the emerging mathematics of compound interest and present value to commerce. Purser’s tools were rejected and scorned, but with them the future could be optionalised, quantified, priced, and traded. For the first time, long-term investment became calculable. Time itself became a financial asset, abstract, liquid, and central to the birth of modern capitalism.
Or Richard Arkwright, who mechanized cotton spinning with the water frame and pioneered the factory system. By re-housing and centralizing labour, imposing strict schedules, and efficiently harnessing waterpower, he turned cotton into a cheap global commodity, originated a village, and restructured production into a relentless industrial rhythm. More than just efficiency, Arkwright’s inventions were social reprogramming.
Then consider the quietly subversive temping industry. It normalized contingent labour, stripped away obligations like benefits and job security, and gave firms surgical flexibility. The result was a new labour ontology—modular, disposable, and optimized for volatility—thus enabling the neoliberal corporate world.
And finally, Ilya Sutskever. In 2017, upon encountering the academic AI paper “Attention Is All You Need”, he declared: “That is the thing.” With the Transformer model came GPT, a machine that doesn’t just repeat language, but generates it. Fluently. Persuasively. The impossible threshold, scalable artificial intelligence, was crossed. Commerce, creativity, and cognition changed.
Each of these ruptures made something newly thinkable, newly operable. Whether any of them qualify as real change, in Badiou’s sense, is question worth asking.
The Typology of Consequences
The current systems in place thrive on the idea that they are innovative, nimble, and future-orientated. They have cornered the market in the language of change such that it is hard to see through that to actual, radical change. Helpfully, Badiou offers us a four-part typology to measure these different kinds of apparent change:
- Modifications an infinite series of changes that do not change the world. Product extensions, new markets for existing offerings, process adjustments. Capitalism’s own logic is one of modifications: changes that do not change. Think Instagram’s addition of Stories in 2016, following Snapchat. They introduced a new feature, not a new logic. It stayed entirely within the social media monetization framework—absorbed easily by users and advertisers alike. It changed the tempo, not the structure.
- Facts: Appearances of new possibilities that flare but are then diluted, de-fanged and re-absorbed into the world, which co-opts them. Think Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn in 2016. A notable event in business history, yes, but totally thinkable within the logics of SaaS, professional networking, and big tech expansion. It confirmed the trajectory of “owning the workplace stack” rather than disrupting any transcendental logic.
- Weak Singularities: Brief flare-ups that fail to sustain consequences. Think of Clubhouse that briefly appeared as a new mode of digital presence (ephemeral, audio-first) in 2020-2021. It hinted at a new social logic, but failed to maintain intensity or fidelity. It was not absorbed as a fact (too unstable), nor did it rupture the logic of platform capitalism. It faded without imprinting a new category of being. Or an investment house inviting utilities to spell out what investment they “really need” to renovate the water system … and then falling back when no radical plans came forward.
- Strong Singularities or Events: Intense ruptures that generate a new trajectory. Singularities with staying power—that trigger sustained sequences of action, decisive point-by-point— and reconfigure the logic of a world.
The difference is not in what appears, but in what persists, in what consequences it forces. Intensity matters. The truth of the event, its burning intensity, must be re-presenced constantly—like the doomed but unforgettable slave uprising by Spartacus. It failed strategically, but succeeded ontologically—it made something possible that had not been thinkable before.
Let’s revisit the earlier examples using this lens:
- Purser’s invention of compound interest was a foundational shift that made the future tradable and created a new logic of value. A strong singularity.
- Arkwright’s factory system redefined labour, time, and production. Again, a strong singularity that helped construct industrial capitalism.
- The temping industry adapted capitalism to neoliberal conditions, but didn’t rupture anything. It belongs to the category of modifications or facts—important, but structurally conservative.
- GPT and the Transformer model sit in ambiguity. If they reshape creativity and cognition, they could become a real event beyond capitalism or they could wind up extending and entrenching its logic. It depends on what subjects and consequences emerge from them.
In Badiou’s terms, only an event breaks the rules of a situation to reveal a truth. Whether GPT and the Transformer model ultimately constitutes such an event depends not just on the technology, but on what fidelity emerges around it—what new subjects, truths, and worlds are built in its wake.
The Existence of the Inexistent
True change makes the inexistent exist. I know, sounds almost mystical, but bear with us, in fact it is a practical as can be.
This is not metaphor. Nor is it philosophers lost in their own headspace. It is the transformation of what was previously uncounted, illegible, or unspeakable into what structures the new world. A worker’s proclamation, a radical declaration, a whispered truth in an authoritarian state—these are not expressions of existing realities. They are acts that collect disparate others and bring into being a new plane of visibility.
To lead is to declare: This is real. Even when the world says, It cannot be.
Conclusion: Lead as if the World Can Change
This is a time for leaders who are not afraid of events—for those who can sustain their consequences, who can recognize the intensity of singularities, and who are willing to be faithful to the appearance of what has not yet been cleared for existence.
Do not manage change.
Be faithful to rupture.
Say yes to the impossible, over and over.
Cultivate and collect others to the cause.
Let the inexistent exist.
Lead, not in the name of what is, but in fidelity to what could become real—against all odds.
Real change is rare. But its rarity is not an argument against it. It is an argument for courage.