Nam June Paik Dies

Hat tip to $ for the heads-up on this. Paik was a pioneer in video art and video installation whose wide ranging practice also included performance and experimental music. An obit can be found at msnbc. See also here, and the artist's official website here. More on this may follow, or may follow to other spots on the net who have more on this.

New Publication Announcement

A worthwhile announcement from Urbanomic via Robin Mackay at Irrational Numbers.

Simondon

The Pinocchio Theory has a post up on Simondon and individuation. Someday, I hope, these books will become available in English.

Ranciere on "The Politics of Aesthetics"

(via Kein Theater)

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES!

Political art must be some sort of collage of opposites . Before blending Velasquez and car-keys [Rauschenberg] it has to blend alternative politics of aesthetics. It does it by setting specific forms of heterogeneity , by borrowing elements from different spheres of experience and forms of montage from different arts or techniques . If Brecht remained as a kind of archetype of political art in the XXth century , it was due not so much to his enduring communist commitment as to the way he negotiated the relation between the opposites , blending the scholastic forms of political teaching with the enjoyments of the musical or the cabaret , having allegories of Nazi power discuss in verse about matters of cauliflowers , etc. The main procedure of political or critical art consists in setting out the encounter and possibly the clash of heterogeneous elements .The clash of these heterogeneous elements is supposed to provoke a break in our perception , to disclose some secret connection of things hidden behind the everyday reality. The hidden reality may be the absolute power of dream and desire hidden by the prose of bourgeois life , as it is in the surrealist poetics . It may be the violence of capitalist power and class war hidden behind the great ideals , as it is in the militant practices of photomontage , showing us for instance the capitalist gold in Adolf Hitler's throat .

John Heartfield, Hitler Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 1932

Political art thus means creating those forms of collision or dissensus that put together not only heterogeneous elements but also two politics of sensoryness . The heterogeneous elements are put together in order to provoke a clash . Now the clash is two things at once . On the one hand it is the flash that enlightens . The connection of the heterogeneous elements speaks out of its legibility . It points to some secret of power and violence . The connection of vegetables and high rhetoric in Arturo Ui conveys a political message . But on the other hand the clash is produced insofar as the heterogeneity of the elements resists the homogeneity of meaning. Cauliflowers remain cauliflowers , juxtaposed to high rhetoric . They carry no message. They are supposed to enhance political energy out of their very opaqueness . Ultimately the mere juxtaposition of heteroclite elements is endowed with a political power . In Jean-Luc Godard's film Made in USA the hero says "I get the impression of being in a film of Walt Disney , played by Humphrey Bogart , therefore in a political film" . The mere relationship of heteroclite elements was read in a dialectical way , as a clash witnessing to a political reality of conflict . Political art is always a kind of specific negotiation not between politics and art but between the two politics of aesthetics . This third way is made possible by continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundary between art and non-art . The Brechtian identity of allegory and debunking of allegory supposes that you can play on the connection and the disconnection between art and cauliflowers , politics and cauliflowers. Such a play supposes that vegetables themselves have a double existence : one in which they bear no relationship with art and politics and another where they already bear a strong relationship with both of them.

Gabriel Orozco, Cat in the Jungle, 1993, 12 7/16" x 18 5/8", C-Print

As a matter of fact , the relationship of politics , art and vegetables existed before Brecht , not only in impressionist still life, reviving the Dutch tradition , but also in literature . One novel by Zola , Le Ventre de Paris , had notably put them as both political and artistic symbols. The novel was based on the polarity of two characters . On the one hand there is the poor old revolutionary who comes back from deportation in the new Paris of the Halles where he is overthrown and smashed by the flood of cabbages , meaning the flood of consumption .

Cabbages in Beijing

On the other hand there is the impressionist painter , singing the epics of the cabbages , the epic of Modernity, the glass and iron architecture of the Halles and the piles of vegetables that allegorized modern beauty in contrast to the old pathetic beauty symbolized by the gothic church nearby . The political allegory of the cauliflowers was possible because the connection of art , politics and vegetables , the connection of art, politics and consumption already existed as set of moving borders , enabling artists to both cross the border and make sense of the connection of the heterogeneous elements and play on the sensory power of their heterogeneity.

Arcimboldo

This means that the mixing of high art and low art or the mixing of art and commodity are not a discovery of the 1960's which would have been attributed to modern art and to its political potentials . On the contrary , political art had been made possible by that mixing , by a continuous process of border-crossings between high and low art, art and non-art, art and commodity . This process itself is an old affair . It reaches back far in the past of the aesthetic regime of art . You cannot oppose an epoch of celebration of high art to an epoch of trivialisation or parody of high art . As soon as Art was constituted as a specific sphere of existence , at the beginning of the 19th century , its products began to fall into the triviality of reproduction , commerce and commodity . But as soon as they did so, commodities themselves began to travel in the opposite sense, to enter the realm of art . They could identify directly their power with the overwhelming power and beauty of modern life , as it did in Zola's epics of cabbages. They could also fall into the realm of art by becoming obsolete , unavailable for consumption and thereby turned into objects of aesthetic - disinterested - pleasure or uncanny excitement .

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5-gallon Doubledecker, 1981-87

Haim Steinbach, ultra red #2, 1986. Wood, plastic laminates, lava lamps, enamel pots, and digital clocks, 67 x 76 x 19 inches

Surrealist poetics as well as Benjamin's theory of allegory or Brechtian epic theatre thrived on this border-crossing . And so did all the forms of critical art that played on the ambiguous relationship of art and commerce ,through to many contemporary installations. They blended heterogeneous materials borrowed from artistic tradition , political rhetoric , commodity culture , commercial ads and so on , in order to disclose the connections of high art or politics with capitalist domination . But they could do so owing to the ongoing process which had already erased the borders . Critical art thrived on this continuous border-crossing , this two-way process of prosaïsation of the poetical and of poetisation of the prosaic . If this makes sense , it may be possible to reframe , hopefully on a firmer footing , the political issues involved in the discussion about modernism and postmodernism. What is at stake in contemporary art is not the fate of the modernist paradigm. Its validity is neither weaker nor stronger as it ever was. In my view it always a very restrictive interpretation of the dialectic of the aesthetical regime of art . What is at stake is the fate of the "third politics "of aesthetics . The question is not : are we still modern , already postmodern or even afterpostmodern? The question is : what exactly happened to the dialectical clash ? What happened to the formula of critical art ?

Balibar on Badiou

As Nate and I have recently given a reading to Badiou's Saint Paul, it has created the difficult problem of attempting to understand and describe just what it is that Badiou is implying by his use of the word truth. The questions raised by his theory of truth (which should always be truth in the plural) do not come with readymade answers, and are heavily though not exclusively dependent on a basic understanding of set theory, or first-order logic ('basic understanding' is of course open to interpretation). Truth, event, and truth-event would then be the three terms under consideration. Balibar gives this brief attempt at a definition:

Badiou is attempting to use meta-mathematical means - that is, mathematics applied to mathematics itself - actually to construct a definition, theory or concept of truth. To be more accurate, he is attempting to demonstrate that that concept is 'already there', even thought it has not been there for long, and that we have only to recognize it or give it its name: 'an indiscernible generic extentsion of a situation'. (Think Again, p. 30)

It is beyond my current competence to elaborate the implications for Balibar's use of the term 'meta-mathematics', or attempt an explanation of Badiou's supposed application of 'meta-mathematics' (I don't believe Badiou describes his project as such)[update: actually, he does. Having just recieved my copy of the English translation of Being and Event, Badiou explains quite clearly that as his thesis implies the equivalence of mathematics with ontology, the whole of his book in a sense becomes a theory of discourse, and in that sense it is a metaontological discourse. The only ontological discourse would be a mathematical treatise as such]. However, because it is relevant to the reading that Nate and I were doing, and given that it is just plain interesting in and of itself, I want to reproduce the last few pages from Balibar's essay "The history of Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy", in Think Again, Continuum, 2004:

III THE LEGEND OF TRUTH

I will now outline, in no more than allusive terms, what I announced as a second movement or a reflexive presentation - I hope it is not too inaccurate, though I can see its limitations - of what I see as the meaning of Badiou's propositions about the relationship between the question of truth and that of universality. I have borrowed the expression 'the legend of truth' form a text, much of which has been lost, by the you Sartre because I wanted a change of terminology, and also to draw attention to something new: something does happen to truth now. (Even if, in its total impersonality, we can assum that the truth remains indifferent to this development, the same is presumabley not the case for its subject; or perhaps we have to assume that the subject is also present in the truth-subject doublet, or must be distinguished by name if the relationship with truth is not to be one of indifference. We are, after all, talking about militancy, and the idea of an indifferent militancy really would be a difficult paradox to sustain.) What happens to truth is that it comes to be a support for a foundation, or perhaps we should say that what happens to multiple truths is that they are the support, the non-existent and purely subjective basis for a multiplicity of foundations. And that is not exactly a minor adventure.

If we have to choose our references or textual supports here, I think we should refer not to the texts collected and collated first in Conditions, and then more recently in the Court Traite or the Abridged Metapolitics, but to Being and Event, together with Saint Paul, the little book Ethics and, in some respects, the Deleuze too. What I have to say consists of questions rather than assertions. These questions do not, ultimately, relate to the problem of the univocity of the universal. To the great scandal of many Deleuzians - which may or may not be justified - Baidou sees fit to attribute to Deleuze a 'metaphysics of the One', and contends that the thought of differences is not its opposite, but on the contrary its realization, in the form of a schema for the infinite differentiation of inteligibles. He even sees fit to describe the univocity of Being as a point of agreement or disagreement around which their respective 'Platonisms' cluster: the Platonism of differential ideas and the virtual, and the Platonism of the Multiple and the possible. I conclude that, strictly speaking, the category of univocity is not, for Badiou, applicable to the universal but to being, and that it is thanks only to the meanders of an ill-advised polemic that he appears (because he is reacting to the formula 'an equivocity of the universal') to be defending completely the opposite thesis. For Badiou, the universal is basically a category of subjectivity that escapes ontology, whereas the idea of univocity is, it seems to me, basically 'ontological'. If there is a problem here, it lies, rather, in the powerful dualism of Badiou's philosophy. In negative terms, we can, however, say that the universal or universals are necessarily non-equivocal, which is another way of saying that they essentially derive from a 'fidelity' to the unique event (but not the one event)that founds them.

If they have nothing to do with univocity, what are my questions about? Essentially, at this stage in my work, two points: first, the meaning acquired by the notion of 'fidelity' in the light of a transition from the question of truth to that of the universal, or what I call 'legend'; and, second, the strange reduplication that makes the true/false opposition connote the universal itself - we have a 'true universal' and a 'false universal', or if we prefer to use the terminology of the book on Ethics, we have Good and Simulacrum (du Bien et du Simulacre).

To conclude, let us examine each of these points. The question of fidelity becomes clearer, which is to say that its difficulty becomes more apparent, if we suggest that the difference between a 'hazardous historicity of truth' and the legend of truth, or the adventure of its transformation into a universal or its 'universalization', is a new movement of extension - a movement that I am tempted to characterize, following Canguilhem, as a presumptuous transcendence of the relationship between knowledge and truth that provided our starting point. this movement is one of extrapolation, because we have to take into consideration the fact that the subjective movement which is inseperable from the truth, since it results from the fact that truth exists only as the choice and forcing of the indiscernible, in fact begins befor the truth and takes us beyond it, and that between this 'before' and this 'beyond', we have, if not a correspondence, which it is tempting to call a correspondence 'on the edge of the void', to use an expression dear to Badiou's heart. To be very schematic, this means that being, or the being of the existent, is essentially the 'void', or in other words, and contrary to the teachings of the metaphysical tradition, that the notions of being and property are originally incompatible. Being consists of nothing other, to begin with, than belonging or membership (or indeed, originally, nothing other than the degree zero or neutral figure of belonging: non-belonging). All properties are derivatives. Similarly, at the opposite extreme, universalism as such is, for Badiou, anti-communitarianism, or in other words an in-common without a community or a membership without membership that creates no property links, no ontological or anthropological difference, but only fidelity to an Event. It is perhaps no accident that we find here formulae similar to certain of Derrida's negative expressions, which are themselves derived from Blanchot. That is why, even though it means displacing the notion's point of application, Badiou thought he could recognize himself in Saint Paul - the theologian of the Christian kenosis, and the very inventor of that category.

The fact remains that the transference of the operator of fidelity from one side of the event to the other, from the register of retroactive intervention into the field of knowledge to the register of militant anticipation within the field of history, presupposes at least - though this 'at least' is very likely to become an 'at most' - the presensce of name, or a change in the function of nomination. In one of the articles in the 'Dictionary' appended to Being and Event, Badiou writes of unicity: 'The empty set is unique {...} any unique multiple can be given a proper name, such as Allah, Yahweh, [null set] or Omega.' I am therefore tempted, with Stanislas Breton's fine article on the 'violence of tautological propositions' in mind, to add that tautology is the privileged mode of the enunciation of any name specific to unicity: the empty set is empty, God is God, the Law is the Law (or the General Will is the general will, and not particular wills, as Rousseau might have said, and Badiou does evoke Rousseau in connection with the idea of the generic part), the Revolution is the Revolution, the Worker is the Worker, and so on.

My question is therefore: at what moment, to what extent, and in accordance with what subjective modality, does generic fidelity, which has become the operator that founds the universal (or that constitutes a multiplicity-to-come that is not virtual but situationally possible, as an action - being militant - rather than an act, and which annuls differences, or which regards them as indifferent), come to be dependent on a proper name?

A second and final question: what is the meaning of the return of the true/false opposition in the theorization of the universal, after the concept of truth has been disintricated from that of veridicity (which is, apparently, the only thing to stand in a relationship of opposition to the false or the pseudos)? And what relationship exists between this return - if it does occur - and the introduction of the category of the Good into the critical discussion of the problem of ethics, or in other words into the defence of an ethics of truths against an ethics of the Other or of Justice? This is not a simple question, and we must be wary of simplifying it. It arises because Badiou is trying here to trace a double line of demarcation on two edges, and using two quite different evaluative criteria.

On the one hand, we have a demarcation between the true or veritable universal, typified by Christian or Communist militancy (or what Badiou and Balmes once called the insistence of 'communist invariants'), and the false universal typified by the laws of exchange and the market, the capitalist universal, or money. One might think that this is a pure petition principi: where is the criterion that allwos us to make this distinction? But Badiou's allusions to the problem allow us to suggest that, in his view, we are dealing with what logicians would call an analytic proposition: the universal of the market is false because - or at least this would appear to be what experience teaches us - its condition of existence is not the elimination of communitarian differences but, on the contrary, their multiplication and their systematic exploitation. Fair enough.

On the other hand, we have a more subtle demarcation between two forms of veritable universalism, and it appears when Badiou explains that Saint Paul's fidelity to Christ's revelation is indiscernible from fidelity to an evental truth in the order of knowledge, even though we are dealing, on the one hand, with - and I quote - a 'fable' or 'fiction' in which we can no longer believe (who is this 'we'? presumably the 'we' of atheists, assuming that the term does not connote a particularity), and, on the other hand, with an 'effective truth' related to investigative procedures, and not a revelation. It seems, then, that this difference is what had to be neutralized in some way in order to bring out the generic characteristics of the subjective universalization of a singularity, of the relationship between fidelity and event, as opposed to the existing opposition between the true universal and the false universal. The universal must also be based on the false, or at least the non-true or fiction, if we are to be able to understand the radical difference between it and its simulacrum or even its extreem simulacrum, that being - if I may be so bold as to say so - the 'forcing' of difference as the name of truth. I suspect or at least I wonder whether we do not have here one of the profound reasons which, conjunctural requisitions and polemics aside, lead Badiou to go one step further in his fidelity to Platonism, by reintroducing the mutual convertibility of the True and the Good into the principle of his ethics.

(This lengthy transcription has been brought to you in part by sheer boredom)

“Not…But”: some brief reflections on a recent (late) reading of Badiou’s Saint Paul

It is precisely as an intervention, before all else, that Badiou’s Saint Paul should be perceived, or read. This was, in fact, the point of departure for Eric Alliez’s short paper in Polygraph 17: it is not just a chronological sequence that would take us first from his Deleuze, and then to the Saint Pual; rather, along with his Metapolitics they form a “collection of interventions around the political”. Indeed, Badiou’s appropriation of Paul is foremost to encourage us to think him as a militant figure, the purpose of the book itself being inherently political –and even more so in that Paul’s antiphilosophical role in the philosophy of Badiou is to clarify and construct a place for truth and universality in his theory of the event. But what is at stake? As an atheist, Badiou would like to restore an “everyday currency” to the operative concepts of Pauline faith, hope, and love; then translated into the (Badiouian) language of contemporary politics we have: ‘shared egalitarian endeavors’, ‘co-workers in the becoming of a truth’, as well as the fact that Paul’s subjectivity, as ‘unwaged’, “entitles us to call it communist” (SPe 79). Christianity is beyond doubt unimaginable without Paul, but Paul’s letters are able to be so contemporary for Badiou (and he would hope, for the reader as well) in that they allow for Universality to be maintained in the labor of a subject as something completely imaginable and realizable without Christianity, allowing for the ‘universal content of his preachings to remain absolutely real’.

Paul the quasi-Mallarmean ‘poet-thinker’ is able to become such an important figure for Badiou because he adheres to an event (even if fabled) that is ‘indifferent to differences’. An importance highlighted by the fact that Paul is faithful to an event of which he was not even witness (neither the life and death of Christ nor his resurrection), so that memory and history, empirical evidence, etc., all lose their immediate power in being able to accentuate the lining of evidence that so often becomes the material register of a particularity (Greek and Jew for Paul, the Holocaust for others): “[…] “memory” cannot settle any issue. There invariably comes a moment when what matters is to declare in one’s own name that what took place took place, and to do so because what one envisages with regard to the actual possibilities of a situation requires it” (SPe 44) However, on why we can no longer accept such fables as the Resurrection as forms of the Truth-Event, Zizek had this to say:

[…]Today, any location of the Truth-Event at the level of supernatural miracles necessarily entails regression into obscurantism, since the event of Science is irreducible and cannot be undone. Today, one can accept as the Truth-Event, as the intrusion of the traumatic Real that shatters the predominant symbolic texture, only occurrences which take place in a universe compatible with scientific knowledge, even if they move at its borders and question its presuppositions – the ‘sites’ of the Event today are scientific discovery itself, the political act, artistic invention, the psychoanalytic confrontation with love… (The Ticklish Subject, p. 142)

This theme runs throughout Badiou’s Ethics, where what is at stake in the recognition of an event would be the transformation into sameness and the ‘rendering insignificant’ by a truth of so many culturally perverse particularities and differences. A subject is borne whose fidelity provides a mode of thought capable of dismantling such particularities/cultural identities through the labor of love. A labor of love because for Badiou, the subjective process of a truth is the same as the love of that truth. [An interesting excerpt from Jean-Luc Nancy on love here]. An event that is neither ‘falsifiable nor demonstrable’ and occurs at a point in the real that ‘puts language into deadlock’; an event which “for established languages, is inadmissible because it is genuinely unnamable.” (SPe 49)


Mel Bochner

Could one assume from this book and Paul’s antiphilosophical position that there is a real significance and presence within Badiou’s own work of something which is, likewise, antiphilosophical? His use of set theory alone might provide the “yes”, since for Badiou mathematics=ontology and by consequence ontology is not philosophy. This short book on the labor of the faithful militant may not mention set theory at all, but there is no way to appropriately grasp the importance of Badiou’s conception of truth and universalism without also considering the significance, albeit by consensus somewhat idiosyncratic, of his use of set theory. Which is why it is not just St. Paul, but "Paul squared" . Again, this set theoretical edifice is already insinuated whenever Badiou uses the term multiplicity, as when he considers the root of Pauline grace:

The law governs a predicative worldly multiplicity granting to each part of the whole its due. Evental grace governs a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that is indescribable, superabundant relative to itself as well as with respect to the fixed distributions of the law. (SPe 78)

Grace is for Badiou a ‘pure and simple encounter’, which could even be seen as a somewhat Deleuzian statement, if it can be recalled on this point that Deleuze – whether or not a reader of Badiou chooses to follow suit and consider him a ‘thinker of the One’ – was convinced in Difference and Repetition that it is always something in the world which forces us to think, and that something has the shape of a fundamental encounter.

Zizek, for his part, gives an excellent assessment of the Badiouian subject as ‘contingent emergence/act sustaining the universal order’ through the constellation Althusser, Laclau, Lacan in The Ticklish Subject. For this contribution it is forgivable that he misreads Badiou on his interpretation of hope, which is not, as Z assumes, the belief in an actual future occurrence announced by the event. This is precisely Badiou’s reason for attempting to restore an “everyday currency” to Pauline hope as fidelity to a fidelity and not an outcome. This ‘outcome’ should instead be thought as something which is ‘always already there’, fidelity and the subject meet to maintain this immanent fictional completion of a truth: “Faith would be the opening to the true; love, the universalizing effectiveness of its trajectory; hope, lastly, a maxim enjoining us to persevere in this trajectory [a perseverance which is moreover not just mere perseverance in being].” (SPe 93)

So it is the “not…but”, not Law but desire, that brings together the two Pauls: the desire of the militant in pursuit of the consequences to be constructed from a generic truth, the desire of the mathematician to move beyond the Law with Paul Cohen’s “generic sets” and construct ‘mathematical monsters’, and one Samuel Beckett, whose ‘writing of the generic’ as the persistent desire to exist installs within all three figures the maxim “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.

And, the brilliant polemicist that he is, I want to end this post with the last part of Eric Alliez’s “Badiou: The Grace of the Universal” from Polygraph 17:

It is thus, in the end, a matter of desire, of access to desire as a situation of life from the perspective of sin because the life of desire has been put under the condition of the transgression of the law, of the automatism of repetition which assigns the subject to the place of death…Badiou highlights this point in his comments on the famous text of Paul (Rom. 7:7-23: I had not know sin but by the law…), “Clearly, what is at issue here is nothing less than the problem of the unconscious” (SPe 79). On this point, one must concede to the Lacanizing philosopher. One does not acquiesce, however, without countering that “the problem” is nothing other than the priestly discourse of psychoanalysis that chains desire constituted as a lack in the Law [manqué a la Loi] in order to impose upon the Subject, in the guise of subjectivation, the universal grace of its letter. How could it be otherwise, if it is in the name of the unconscious that the constructivism of desire is barred, in order to substitute in its stead the void of a truth defined, index sui, as “the only power that can be in accord with that of being”?

Whence the following outcome: if the universal is the metapolitical fantasy [phantasme] of the philosopher, psychoanalysis is his symptom, when his self-imposed condition is to create the event of nothing destined for all.


Mel Bochner

According to the rules laid out by the Saint Paul, the universalism of grace and the materialism of life let us attain the political fundament that governs the conflict between two paradigms of the multiple: “the multiplicity that, exceeding itself, sustains the universality” of its letter; and the exact opposite [la tout contre], the creative function of an Outside that pushes through the middle, below and beside the signifying cuts, the living lines, the broken lines, the becomings of multiplicities - or multitudes - as “a line of flight or of variation that affects each system in preventing it from being homogenous.”