Certain theoretical figures have emerged that are situated halfway between structuralism and post-structuralism. One could call them « demi-post-structuralists ». Badiou is a good example, with his scientism intact. Still stuck in the problematic of the conceptual space opened up by the Althusser-Lacan conjuncture, they privilege Lacan as an alternative way out of structuralism yet they try to « rationalise » their problematic by appeals to notions of scientificity based on methodological rigour.

The problem with the primacy of method is that it is not content neutral. A formal method has substantive assumptions about its domain coded into it. The opponents of « method » are not crazy spontaneity-addicted narcissists but people like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein who claimed that explicit scientific method was a bottom up, post hoc clarification, not an a priori top-down imperative. The stakes are not blindly insisting on the priority of creation but maintaining a place open for the possibility of novelty and creation versus closing off in advance some possible developments, often without even noticing.

The status of mathematics, is a totally different affair, and the question of the research heuristics of mathematics is not well discussed. For it is heuristics we must look at when we talk about maths, not « eternal » content. Cantor had some very strange ideas fueling his research. That such philosophies are not always detachable from the technical aspects can be seen in that intuitionist maths is not the same as formalist maths.

Lacan would consign most ideas about method and methodological rigour to the binaries (or dualisms) of the imaginary, the domain of constitution of the narcissistic ego. So it is amusing to hear the imaginary « anti-methodists » being called narcissistic, when they are a spectre constructed precisely to comfort the narcissism of the methodological rigorists.

It is only by concentrating on the end-product, i.e. scientific results, that one can have the impression that methods are somehow detachable from the concrete processes they are embedded in, in some absolute way. It is no use trying to retreat to a detached context of justification or to a separate « space of implications ». Such a separate methodical space is just as bad in the formal mode as OOO’s retreat to a separate space of objects is in the material mode.